Find Resources for Your Finals

Yeah, so let’s go ahead and get started. Again, let me go back here. My name is Gina Schlesselman-Tarango. I’m a librarian at the library. This is my email address in case you have any follow up questions for me. I’m going to go ahead and put that in the chat as well. Because as I mentioned, we’re going to cover a lot really quickly. And so if there’s something that you forget or you need a little extra help with later, feel free to email me The other thing is that I have created an online guide. That’s sort of a companion guide to this workshop and we’re not going to be working off of the guy, but I do want you to know that that’s available for you as a resource.

00:43 - It contains a lot more information than what I’m going to have time to cover today. So I’m going to pull up. Let me see here. I’m going to pull up the Cal State website and I’m going to navigate to the library link right here, right now I’m showing you how to get to that guide. If you scroll to the middle of the libraries page here it says library guides. I’m going to open that up and what library guides are Essentially web pages that they’ll various librarians have put together with resources or search tips on a particular topic. So I created one just for this workshop To get to it. You will scroll down to research skills.

01:24 - Right here on sort of the bottom right, and then we will navigate down to find resources for your finals. And I’m going to go ahead and share this link in the chat. So you have this too, as I said, it contains a lot more information. Than what I will have time to cover today. This is where I’ll also put the recordings, so you can review that. And each of these tabs at the top. Has a lot of detail about the different types of sources that we’re going to talk about today. Scholarly popular books even has pictures of our lockers, which I’ll talk about today. Statistics and then how to get Research Help. So I’m not going to sort of toggle back and forth between the presentation and this guide, but I want you to know that that’s there for you. Okay, so let’s go back here. To Our presentation. So today’s goals are to identify the differences among and uses of the four different types of sources that are listed here.

02:28 - These are the four types of sources that in my experience with students are the ones that are professors typically ask us to use. So I want to make sure I hit those big four. Um. You’ll also learn how to not only locate those types of sources but also understand why they’re found in different places. I know that sometimes it’s easy to get into research habits, where you go to one place for everything. But that’s not necessarily how information is organized.

02:52 - And so hopefully by the end of today’s session will have a greater understanding and appreciation for that. And then I’m will also cover how to get Research Help. College research is really tough. It’s easy to get stuck happens to me and I’m a professional researcher. So when you get stuck, I want you all to know where where to go, because we’re always happy to help you. So there are some things. We’re not going to cover today. We’re not going to cover citation resources, citation styles don’t have time for that.

03:22 - We’re not going to talk about streaming video or checking out equipment from the library. We’re not going to talk about study spaces or tutoring services or the writing center or study skills, some of those other things you might need for finals. That’s just beyond the scope of the workshop. If you have questions about any of these things. I will hang out a little bit after the workshop when we’re done today so I can feel some of those questions.

03:47 - But like I said, this is beyond the scope of what we have time for today. So let’s go ahead and do a quick warm up together. I always like to get a feel of where everyone is at as far as what they need. Hopefully I can address most of what we need today. So the question here is what types of sources do you need for your finals and we are actually going to use a tool called Padlet, you might have used this in a class before. I’m going to put the link in the chat. There you go. When you click on that. What you will see is the screen. And on the left. Here’s that same question.

04:26 - What types of sources do you need for your finals? And to answer this, you’re simply going to click on this plus sign and then type in your answer. And hit return Or actually clicked on the screen and then we’ll all be able to see it together. This is completely anonymous so you Won’t know your name, no one else will know your name. So you don’t have to feel silly if if you’re, you know, using the right words or whatever. So go ahead and take a moment to open that link in the chat.

04:55 - You will see the screen that we’re all looking at an answer this question. What types of sources do you need for your finals? I’ll give everyone a couple minutes. Alrighty, see a couple of people here again to go ahead and answer this, you’re going to click on the plus sign to add your own comment. Alright, let’s take about another 30 seconds to wrap up our posts. Alright, so thank you for everyone who participated. So I see a couple of comments about study groups. So again, that’s not what this workshop covers. We are covering Resources. So finding resources that you might use for a paper or a speech, for example. Same with study guides, we’re not really going to talk about that. We will talk about how to find books.

07:33 - So you might be able to search the library for certain study guides that we might have, but our focus is not going to be on study guides Or study rooms. Again, if you want to hang around after the workshop I can spend a few minutes on pointing a few things out. But really the focus is doing. Research on someone so scholarly articles. So we’re definitely going to talk about that. So if you are one of the people who was interested in groups or guides And you feel like this workshop might not be what you need, totally fine to leave if you if you would rather use this time doing something else.

08:07 - I just want to be fully transparent about what this workshop is and what it, what it isn’t right. Okay, so thanks guys for that. I’m going to go back to my presentation here and we’re going to dive in with our different types of resources. So the first type that we’re going to be discussing today. Is those scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles. So, journal articles. If you’ve ever been exposed to these in a class or your professors may be asked you to read one.

08:40 - The reason is that they are written by credible researchers or scholars. Written by people with PhDs. Oftentimes, these are the same people who are our college professors working at universities. Scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles often contain a lot of description and analysis. So they can be 20-30 pages in length. They are vetted by experts, meaning the other experts. Other scholars and researchers have reviewed them and signed off on them.

09:10 - That’s what we mean by the peer review process. Say, say, a scholar submits a journal article to a journal, they’re going to find other scholars in that same discipline to review. And so that’s what we mean by peer review. Peer reviewed journal articles are preferred source and academia and college because they are written by experts. They’re vetted. They have a certain level of credibility. Of course they’re not necessarily perfect.

09:38 - Nothing is, but it’s sort of the best type of system we have right now. Because of that, they are highly valuable and they are behind a paywall. If you have ever Googled you know try to find the scholarly journal article you might have been asked to pay money that’s you hitting that paywall so For scholarly, peer reviewed journal articles you always will want to go through the Pfau Library’s website to access these. That is because we have paid as a library for subscriptions to these very various journals and places to get them. So you should never have to pay anything.

10:16 - If you take nothing else away from today’s workshop. It’s that You should not pay for anything. We will get these articles for you, even if we don’t have them. We will get them for you for free. So I’m going to pop into the library’s website and show you a couple of ways to get these peer reviewed journal articles. All right. So let’s see here I’ve got all my windows open. I’m going to go back to the library’s website at csusb.edu/library. And the first place. I’m going to look is one search up here. This is this big white search bar, OneSearch. I like to call it our mother database it searches almost every single thing that the library has in one fell swoop. So if you really want to get an idea of everything that might be available to you. Go ahead and type your search in OneSearch.

11:16 - So let’s say that I am interested in looking into indigenous history, which is really broad, but just for the purposes of today, we’ll, we’ll start with this pretty broad search. Notice that we have these options pop up. I want you to click on articles. This way, we’re getting rid of books or any other type of source that we don’t need and we have, you can see more than 870 5000 results. Remember OneSearch searches everything. So you’re really, really dipping into a dipping your bucket into an ocean, in a sense. So the first thing you want to do if you’re looking for scholarly, peer reviewed articles is pop over to the left where it says “available at CSUSB,” click peer reviewed journals.

12:06 - That’s going to ensure Everything we see here is now a peer reviewed article published in a peer reviewed journal and that’s the big step that’s kind of it after that to get the article, for example, you’ll click on the title. And there’s a lot here you’ll definitely want to explore this page, but because we’re under a time crunch. I just want to focus out or point out Where it says here “available online at” – I hope you all can see that. And then this link pops you into the database where the, where the journal article is so if I click on this. Here we go, here we have the article itself.

12:54 - Sometimes when you open this up, you’ll need to maybe click on the download a PDF. Oh, here we go. Up here. Databases sometimes look a little different but follow that link and you will be able to access it. So that was an online article that we have on occasion, as I mentioned, we might not have the article in this databases that we pay for. So this first one is an example. If I click on it. Notice here it says Pfau Library does not have a copy. So A couple of options are presented here: one says check for a free version on Google Scholar, which you can do because sometimes people will Maybe scan the article or it might be on a, you know, the author’s website or something.

13:40 - It might be freely available so always check that. If you can’t find it through Google Scholar, you will click “Get this article through interlibrary loan.” This is what I was talking about when I said if we don’t have it, we’ll get it for you for free. Libraries like to share, thankfully, so we will find it from another academic library. And you will get an email with a PDF of that article within a couple days. It’s pretty fast. Again, it’s free. It’s usually a very seamless process. So take advantage of it.

14:10 - You all are paying tuition, which means that this is a service that you should take advantage of. All right. Alright so that is OneSearch in a nutshell. The other place to get scholarly, peer reviewed articles is to go into a specific database. I’m going to go to the library’s homepage. Databases are there like OneSearch, but they’re a little more specific. So let me show you here. I’m going to go to “choose a database” this tile here. It has the library building. And we have a couple of options. If you know the name of the database. So for example, if your professor tells you to use a particular database. We have databases. A to Z, and you can go ahead and click the letter and then navigate to the one you want. The other option is to pick a database based on the subject that you’re looking at. So let’s say we have a criminal justice topic I can click on criminal justice. And I will get a list of databases.

15:14 - I don’t have time to go over more than one. So let me just quickly pop into the first one. And we have a search bar up here again the databases might look a little different, but the principles are the same. So let’s do indigenous policing. And we’re going to do our search. This time we only have 99 results. Again, that’s because OneSearch searches everything. And this is really specific. And again, on the left, you will want to navigate to where it says scholarly, peer reviewed journals.

15:50 - Sometimes it might say academic journals or just scholarly journals. It’s all the same thing. This is going to limit what you see, to those peer reviewed, academic scholarly articles. And then the process is pretty similar. You’ll click on the title. And in this database it actually provides you with a PDF over here on the left. And that’s, that’s it. You open up that PDF. Sometimes you don’t see that PDF this one for example. But what you will do instead is still still click this box that says “search for full text.

” 16:31 - And what this is going to do is going to pop us into OneSearch and provide us with those options for getting it. So in this case, yay, we have it, you would just link over to this other database if it says we don’t have it. You’ll again be presented with that option to either find it in Google Scholar or request it for free through interlibrary loan. Alright. I am going to pause here really quick for any questions because we’re going to move on to our next source types. So feel free to use the chat or if you have a microphone.

17:08 - Any questions at this point? Alright, so we’re going to go ahead and move on then. So we’re moving on to popular sources. Popular sources are the types of sources you might see in the news or the type of source, you might find online through a Google search. Popular sources are written by people with a range of expertise. That’s because popular sources include magazine articles, newspaper articles, blogs, could even include social media, there’s a really wide range of things – could be film and documentaries could also be popular sources, because these types of sources are so There’s so many different types, they are written by people with varying levels of expertise. Right, so anyone can tweet.

18:20 - But only certain, you know, people with background in journalism and the natural sciences would probably be Selected to write for National Geographic, for example. So it really depends on the source, you’re looking at. They have varying levels of description and analysis. Again a Tweet is super short but a cover story in a magazine might be, you know, Three, four or five pages long and there is less vetting compared to those scholarly sources. Usually, if you have a magazine. For example, again, I’ll go with National Geographic, there’s going to be someone you know fact checking, reading it for copy editing, there’s going to be an editor.

18:57 - Same with newspaper articles, but it’s not going to be the same level that you get with the peer review process. Popular sources are great for summaries of events, things that happened, pop culture, sometimes even our professors ask us to use popular sources to do content analysis. So, for example, our professors might say, you know, I want you to look at how a certain political figure was treated by the media or you know what they covered. So I want you to look at these news articles from the election and write about that. So there, there certainly are cases where the these are the types of sources that your professors want you to use, it really just depends on the assignment. Some popular sources are free online. Right.

19:43 - Um, I can go ahead and look up an article you know posted on CNN website. And some are behind a paywall. For example, I love to look at the LA Times, but I know I only get a certain number of free articles before they asked me to subscribe. So again, there’s really a wide range of ways to get this information. You should know, however, that the library is databases do have, some of them, excuse me, some of the libraries databases do have popular sources. Not just all scholarly content. So I’m going to go back to the library’s homepage excuse all my navigating here and we’re going to start with OneSearch.

20:27 - So let’s say we are interested in recent a recent news or magazine article about Thanksgiving. Let’s say Thanksgiving and COVID- 19, right ,that’s a relevant topic. So we’re going to stick with articles. And instead of selecting peer reviewed journals, like we did before. Under resource type we have newspaper articles, there might be some more options here. Yeah, newspaper articles is going to be good for OneSearch. So we’ll click “Apply filter.

” 21:04 - And then here we have, for example, this first one is from the Washington Post. The second one is from the New York Times. So OneSearch has a lot of newspaper content that will be good that you might not be able to get for free online. So that’s one option. Some of our other databases also have that Newspaper or or magazine box that you can click to narrow those results. The other option, of course, is to use good old Google and I always like to point this out because sometimes I’m surprised that students aren’t necessarily aware of this. So we’ll do Thanksgiving.

21:42 - And, you know, we’re going to get like millions of results because we just Googled. But what I always like to point out is you can navigate over to news at the top. And we get now only news sources through Google. The other really cool thing about this too is if we pop over to tools. And we can go to “recent.” This gives us a timeframe. So you might be like, you know, I saw there was some article was published yesterday. So you can click 24 hours, for example, and narrow it down. And of course you can also go to a news sources website or a magazine’s website and search within the website. A good Google alternative if anyone is a little nervous about Google’s privacy policy is called Duck Duck Go, and it works the same way. It’s just they don’t track you they don’t show you ads like Google does. So I was just love to point this out. Duck Duck go is my personal go-to search engine.

22:50 - But it has the exact same features up here at the top. We’ll just go over to news and then here you can select the time, “past day” for example, and get Recent news. So it’s sometimes a good idea if you are looking for news to use both Google and Duck Duck go because they’re not necessarily going to contain the same things. Alright, so that’s popular sources in a nutshell. I’m going to move to books. All right, so, books, of course, are written by people with a range of expertise, there’s books about everything under the sun. Right.

23:30 - Some books are scholarly and some are just for fun. Usually there is some level of editorial process with books right there’s usually someone who’s looking at over, but it’s not the same process as peer review necessarily. If you are looking at an academic book, it can be really good for in depth coverage of a topic. There might be a whole book about the Civil War, and each chapter is about a specific moment, for example, whereas a scholarly article is maybe going to be about something really, really specific and not provide sort of that broad overview. And just like with print books. They’re not necessarily out there for free.

24:07 - So most ebooks are behind a paywall of some sort. And so that’s another reason with with books you want to use the library because we have provided them to you for free so with print books. For example, you would be able to walk into the library, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic, as I’m sure you know our library is closed. And so I’m going to show you how to request a book be put in our locker system so you can pick that up and I’ll also show you how to find ebooks through the library’s website. So let’s go ahead And go back to the library’s homepage and for anytime you want books you’re going to use OneSearch.

24:53 - So let’s again let’s stick with indigenous history as a topic and instead of articles, we are interested in “books and media at CSUSB.” Okay, so I’m going to find one here that we have only in the library to walk you through how to request a print book through our locker system. Here we go. So this one here. Listen, and culture. If I click on it. So you can see under location information. It says Pfau library fifth floor. It does not say available online. So that tells me this book is it’s print. It’s a physical book and it’s only available in the library.

25:47 - So what I will do is sign in for more options. All right. And now I see this magical little link that says “request.” So if I click on request. What it’s going to do is prompt you to select your pickup location. So you can pick it up at the main campus Pfau library or the Palm Desert campus. So if you’re out there, we haven’t forgotten about you.

26:16 - You can provide not needed after you know a date and comment and then all you do is hit request, what will happen within Within a day is you will get an email saying that hey, we have we have your book. We’ve put it in a locker for you. This is the locker number and this is the code. And so what you will do and it will provide more information about where those lockers are at the San Bernardino campus, for example, they’re facing. the entrance of the library facing the mountains. So they’re on the north side. But all that information will be in that email for you. You will give you a certain timeframe to pick it up. You’ll enter that code. It’s completely contact-free please know that also we are quarantining our books after they are returned, just to make sure that it’s a safe process for you. So that is available. However, if we’ve got your book electronically that’s going to be easier, right, you won’t have to come to campus so let’s, let’s look at one of those this one for example Lakota America and you history of indigenous power, we’ll click on the title. And this one says “available online at,” and this is the exact same process that you would use to get an article you would click on the link, it will take you to the database where the E book lives. And then you will be able to go ahead and read it.

27:49 - And in the case of this one the database is J-Stor. You can click read online or download PDF for these particular sections. Most databases do not allow you to download the whole book, simply because that’s in violation of copyright, but usually you’ll be able to download a certain number of pages or a certain number of chapters. But yeah, ebooks are great because, of course, again, you don’t have to come to campus, you can read them. anytime. On occasion, our ebooks are limited to a certain number of simultaneous users, meaning that, for example, only four people can be reading it at the same time.

28:26 - And that’s just because of the license we were able to get. So if you ever. If you ever tried to access an E book and it says, oh, it’s not currently available. That’s very likely what’s happening - just give it an hour or so and then try try to read it later. But of course, if you have any questions about that. You can always contact me. Okay. So I’m going to go ahead and pause again before we move on to our last source, statistics.

28:54 - Do you have any questions about books or popular sources for me? Hello. Yes, yes. My name is XXXXX. Can you hear me? I can. Hi. XX Hi, um, you know, I need a specific like two chapters for my final And I wanted to just get copies of the two chapters. Is that possible. So if it’s a book, we have. We don’t have a scanning service, you would need to request the whole book. However, if it’s a book. Well, let me see. Yeah, is that the instructor gave everybody the same exact assignment book. Well, I don’t think we can all check it out. So Oh, OK. OK.

29:50 - Um hmm in normal times When we are in a pandemic. Right. What we could do is request the book. From another library, but that service is is on hold right now. So if that book’s checked out. Unfortunately, I think you’ll need to get it somewhere else. Maybe the professor would be willing to scan those chapters and put them on Blackboard. You know, it’s always worth asking. Okay, so I just need to contact the library to see.

30:17 - So this is my first time ever using the library. So what you would want to do is look up the name of the book, like I just showed you and see if we have it because it could be that we have it electronically as an E book and then you could just view those online. If it’s a print book. You can request it through that locker system if if no one else has it checked out. And like I said, it’s usually just a day or two, and that’ll be ready for you to Pick up. But we don’t have a service where we will scan particular sections.

30:46 - We just don’t have the staffing right now. Okay, so, but if there’s an E book cannot point for me. Usually with ebooks on they the way copyright works is that you can print or download a specific percentage of the book. And so when you’re in there. Usually there’s an option for download PDF for download this chapter. So if it’s just two chapters. I’m thinking, you should be okay. But again, it depends on the length of the book.

31:13 - But if you if you encounter that just shoot me an email, I’ll put my email and chat and then I can Try to see what you know what our options are. Okay, thank you. You’re welcome. All right, so let’s move on to stats and data - I want to make sure we wrap up by ten forty-five. So stats are gathered by a wide variety of bodies for various reasons, and by bodies I mean, organizations, institutions, governments. Data is really good for a snapshot of an issue. So for example, in this image I’ve got the John Hopkins University COVID tracker.

31:52 - We can see right here in the image that on this day there were more than 5800 deaths and then of course you can see trends over time. Maybe there are more deaths today or fewer. Most of the data or statistics that is funded by governments and usually nonprofits is going to be freely available for public use. That’s because in the case of the government. We’re all paying taxes and that information is paid for us, the people, and so it has been provided to us, the people.

32:24 - And that’s really going to be the type of information that we’re focused on today, there is some data and some stats that that is behind a paywall or restricted. And that’s very rare and typically not the type of thing that students are going to need for that for their finals. That’s going to be more like professional researchers or your professors and they have to work with agencies and pay for that. But again, that’s not really our concern today. So let me show you. My favorite trick for finding stats and we’re actually going to go back to go Google for that.

33:00 - Like I said, A lot of this data is going to be freely available, especially if it’s paid funded by the government or collected by the government. So it should be available to us through a general search engine like Google. Google or Duck Duck Go. So here is my fancy little trick. Let’s say we’re looking at domestic violence and we want statistics. So we’ll type in our topic: domestic violence statistics. And then this is my fancy thing if we’re going to do site:.gov, no spaces, site:.gov. I’m going to hit search.

33:43 - What I’ve done here is telling me I want domestic violence stats from only government sites from sites that have.gov in their domain which means I’m getting rid of all the other stuff that Google might pull up. And I know that everything here is from a site that is affiliated with the government somehow. So this first one, intimate partner violence is from. I can see the CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Down here I have domestic violence stats from the National Institutes of Health. Family Violence stats from Bureau of Justice and statistics and so on and so forth. Of course, as students, you always want to think critically about anything you see. But we know that typically the government is a fairly reliable source when it comes to statistics and those those fast facts and those numbers that you want. So that’s a really good way to sort of do what we call a smart Google search. You can you can change this domain. So instead of.gov you could do.org.

34:48 - And then we’ll get information from organizations so meet some of those nonprofits, for example, that I mentioned earlier that might be collecting statistics. Again, you need to think critically about the sites, though, because you know there might be an organization out there that’s incredibly biased. They still have a.org domain. So it’s up to you to evaluate your sources. But this pretty quickly narrows down our results here for you. So we have like safe horizon.org the hotline.org Do something that org. Again, I’m not necessarily saying these are all reliable sources but it helps us Get rid of all the extra stuff we’d normally get with a Google search.

35:30 - And you can do the same type of trick using Duck Duck go that Google alternative that doesn’t necessarily track you in the same way, or doesn’t have the same sort of privacy concerns the product like Google has. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and share that research guide link. I know we had a lot of people come in late, so I’m just going to review this with everyone at the beginning of our session today. There we go. I said that I have everything that was covered in today’s workshop in a library guide and a library guide can be found in the center of the library’s homepage. And these are essentially little web pages librarians have put together on particular topics.

36:22 - So if we scroll down to “research skills,” I have one for this this workshop, “Find Resources for Your Finals,” and it walks you through every single thing I covered today and more. So for example, if we go to our books tab I have like pictures of those lockers and step by step instructions about how to use them. I’ve got some videos, etc. I’m going to go ahead and share this link in the chat with you so that you can use it to sort of review what we covered if you need to or if you need more information. The last thing today is that I want to make sure you know how to get Research Help if and when you need it for. this semester and beyond. So from the library’s website on the right, we have the “Ask a Librarian” option.

37:08 - And this is an option where you can actually chat live with a librarian. It’s not a robot. It could be me. So, be kind. And we can help you out. This is really good if if you’re like hey this link won’t open or I need help, seeing if you have this book. Really good for sort of quick things. If you have a more in-depth question or research assignment, directly below “Ask a librarian” is our research appointments option. And so if you click on that. What this will allow you to do is set up a one-on-one thirty minute appointment with a librarian. And so over here you can select this particular staff person or it just defaults to no preference and then you would pick your date and your time.

37:53 - And then whoever you’re connected with will send you a Zoom link and it’ll be just like this. We would chat about your, your question or your research assignment one-on-one for thirty minutes. So a lot of students are taking advantage of that, since we’re all online right now. Right. And they can actually walk up to us in the library. So those are two options. I already pointed out library guides. We have a bunch on a bunch of different topics. So, you know, feel free. to explore those.

38:23 - I know you all were able to get to our workshops. But if we click on this workshop tile, we have over here are recorded online workshops and recorded citation style workshops that you can view on our YouTube channel. If there’s any earlier in the semester that you didn’t really get a chance to attend, they’re recorded here for you. All right, so I’m going to take some questions. .