finding information
sb admin | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
cpikas | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
sb admin | July 15, 2010And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines.
What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians…
cpikas | January 16, 2010This is a session by Stephanie Willen Brown and Dorothea Salo .
They started with a bunch of questions. About half the room was librarians, of the others split between affiliated with an institution and not. Where do you go for full text? Google, Google Scholar. Does that work? Sometimes - if not quick if not free to me then move on.
See if your state library has research databases - like NClive, iConn. Contact one of us and we'll put you in contact with someone local.
Come ask your librarian if you need help with anything - even if they don't already provide that service, you help them with…
cpikas | November 3, 2009One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few:
Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/. Sure there are lots of books on information…
cpikas | October 17, 2009Cross-language information retrieval is an important research area with lots of activity. There are all kinds of elaborate algorithms and ways of doing it. There's a lot of domain specificity and connotation kind of things that have been really improved in the past decade.
Most people searching won't really have the support of the fancy specialized tools. I've approximated some of this searching for years using various basic search engine language tools. Luckily, recently they've added a lot more Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Russian translation options in addition to the Western or…
cpikas | July 25, 2009Some of these are better than others. Some don't have nice controlled vocabularies and are a bit wonky in the free version. Nearly all of them you can get through another interface for a fee if you need more precision in searching or to export your results. (oh, as an aside - you've got the database producer who puts the whole thing together, and then you have options for interfaces. For example, for Inspec, you can pay for access via STN, DIALOG, Web of Knowledge, EbscoHost, Engineering Village - used to be FirstSearch and Ovid, too, but I don't remember if they're still offering it.…
cpikas | July 24, 2009Previously, I had a post about finding information in books using things like Google Book Search. This post talks about finding information on a topic, or more specifically, why you should start your search with a research database and more about what research databases are (like the real ones). In a post coming up, I'll give some information on some free to you research databases (the real ones).
You should start your search with a research database to be more comprehensive, to cover multiple sources and publishers, to have real searching power/precision, and because of the vocabulary…
cpikas | June 19, 2009I've talked about this a bit at sessions I taught at my library and also at Web Search University but it's still a favorite. Plus, you asked for posts on finding information. Oh, and one of the tools just released some updates so this is fairly timely.
This is not how to use the catalog to see if a book you want is available in your library and to get a shelf location! Also not about finding something good to read (frankly, I'm completely out of practice with reader's advisory, so can't help you there). Books are useful containers for information, data, and stuff you need to make new…