 Welcome. My name is Lisa Bartle, and I'm one of the reference librarians at the FOW Library. The purpose of this video is to demonstrate some of the resources available to students for doing research at home. Topics covered in this video will include how to find your databases, how to search your databases, how to use the results, and how to get further help. Let's begin. How to find your databases. From the campus homepage, you will see a link to the library. Once on the FOW Library's homepage, scroll down to the Choose a Database option. When you click it, you may choose between an A to Z list for when you know the name of the database you are searching for, or a subject list, which includes subjects such as business, psychology, education, and others. You can also choose other helpful categories such as general, all topic, newspapers, or video. I will click on Educational Leadership. When you click on a subject area, you will see a list of databases that are useful for that group. The database listed first is the primary database, followed by other relevant databases. I will click on the primary database for education, Eric. Keep in mind that most of these techniques will work similarly across almost all databases in all disciplines. How to search your databases. If you don't know a great deal about the topic you are searching, it is common to begin a search by using a series of key, or important, words. Let's pause for a moment to ask, what does keyword mean when we search? A keyword in most databases is a word that appears in the record in either the title of the article, the author of the article, the journal's name, or where the article appeared, the assigned subjects of the article, and the abstract or summary of the article. If the keywords and phrases appear in at least one of those places, the article will appear in the result list. I'll type online learning. Looking at the results screen, we have retrieved too many items. How can we bring it down? Scanning the first few items. There are several that use online learning as a phrase. A phrase means that the words are in a specific order next to each other. In this case, online first and learning immediately after. If we want to search for a phrase such as online learning, we can wrap quotation marks around the phrase like this. We can see that this creates a smaller set of results, but there are still too many to work with. Let's limit the search further. Scrolling down on the left, we see a series of options. Scroll down to the subject limit. What are subjects? Subjects are two things. First, they express the aboutness of the article, rather than simply a word or phrase that appears in the record. The subject expresses what the article is really about. In addition, subjects express the preferred vocabulary of the database. For example, what is the word for their human creatures that are below 18 years old? Babies? Children? Teenagers? Adolescents? Minors? You can see that these terms are related in describing age 0 to 17-year-old humans, but they also have specific meanings and contexts. Teenagers is a commonly used term, but it isn't a scholarly word. If we are searching in a psychology database, adolescents would be the more appropriate term. Minors does the job, but that is used more in law enforcement and related fields. As you may not know enough about your topic in the beginning, using subjects helps you find the most relevant results in your search. When you click on the subject limit, it will expand and show you the most frequently used subjects in this set of results. If you click on Show More, you can see a larger list of all the subjects people use in this set of results. Reviewing the subjects can help you to narrow the search and make it more precise, while also forcing you to think about what interests you beyond the broadest keywords or phrases. For example, what exactly are we discussing with regard to online learning? Is it the educational technology? Is it college students? Is it K-12? I will select Graduate Students and Teacher-Student Relationship. Then click the Update button. This has brought down our results. You can return to the subject limit to specify even further, but let's move on to other kinds of limits. On the left, you can see your search actions so far. If you wish to cancel any of them, click the small X next to the action. Scrolling down, there is an option to limit to scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Let's click that. Below that is a date limit. You may not always need to use the date limit, but let's use it now to demonstrate. Type in a new starting date and hit Enter on your keyboard. Scrolling down again, there are many kinds of sources that are included in this search. Though we did previously limit peer-reviewed journals, let's also limit to academic journals to remove some of these other source types. Before we look at the results, let's talk about more sophisticated keyword searching techniques that we can combine with subjects for the most powerful searches. If you start with a more precise topic in mind, you might use additional terms in your keyword search from the beginning. Here is an example of a more advanced keyword search. Let's break down that query. We can see the use of the phrase in high school, but what is after the word school? That is an asterisk or shift 8. You can use an asterisk to say you want any variation after the word or phrase. High school with the asterisk after school will bring up the phrase high school, but also high schools or high schooler or high schoolers, high schooling or anything that begins with the phrase high school. You can see the use of the asterisk in other places such as learn, which will find a result with learn, learning, learners. You can see it in incomplete words such as motivat, which will bring up results including motivate, motivates, motivation, motivations, guns, and any other word that begins with motivat. So you can use the asterisk as part of a single keyword search or you can use it with a phrase search inside quotation marks. Let's take a look at the use of or in the query. When you have terms where you want either one term or the other, in this case learn or course, a great big capitalized or between them and slam a pair of parentheses around those words. That tells the database you want either of those words. The words may or may not be synonyms, but you want either of them. In the sample query, I demonstrated or with the keywords attitude and motivat as well. I want results with either the keyword attitude or variations of the keyword motivat. Even using this more complex query to obtain precise results, you still may want to use subject limits, date limits, or source type limits depending on your assignments needs. Note, sometimes formulating your search can be the bump in the road that takes more time than you'd like. Don't get frustrated. Get a librarian. My rule is, trying for more than 15 minutes to get a good set of results, get a librarian. How to use your results. After you've done your best search, review the results. Read the first page of abstracts or summaries. I know you want to dive in, but taking a few minutes to read some abstracts will tell you if you need to make your search query more precise or if the results are even on target. This will save you time. Click on the first article's title and read the abstract. Use the arrow to go to the next one. Just read 10. After reading a few abstracts, you may want to reformulate your query or your limits. You may be completely satisfied. Either way, you'll know more about both your topic and your results after reading 10 abstracts. It's a valuable step. Having done that and adjusted if necessary, it is time to find the material. You will want to know, is this article available in full text through the library? You can see if an item is in full text in this database if it offers you a full text link, usually PDF full text. Clicking the link brings up the entire article, which you can read, print, or download. Some databases offer email as well. In the result list, you will also see the link to the full text. In Eric exclusively, you might see the full text from Eric link on the article's abstract screen, or in the result list. Eric is a government database, and sometimes the full text is available only from the government version of the database. The full text from Eric link will take you to the government database to obtain that full text if it isn't available in our version of Eric. What if you don't see a link to the full text? Then you should see a blue search for full text button. The purpose of this button is to find the article in any of our other full text databases, or in a select group of free online archives that we trust. Click on the blue button, and a new tab will open. Your set of results is still in the other browser tab. If the library has the article online in another database, it will provide a link to the article in the other database. If the library does not have that article in one of our other databases, you will see that the library does not have a copy. If this is the case, you may order the item using interlibrary loan, or ILL. If the item is an article, we can order it from a library that has a subscription to that journal, and obtain a PDF of the article for you. Usually you can receive that article in three to five working days. However, don't bet your grade on that estimate, as the specific journal or circumstances at other libraries can change that delivery estimate. In normal circumstances, paper, book, and physical video ILL is also possible, arriving in about five to ten working days. These items are sent by ground mail, so it takes longer to arrive. But they are not possible when the campus is closed, as there are no staff to process the requests for physical items. While this service costs the library about $40 each, it is free to you. Let's take a step back and return to the FOW Library homepage. The first thing you see is the OneSearch text box. This allows searching across several article databases and searching for books that we have in the FOW Library, both paper and eBooks. OneSearch, Books and Media, CSUSB. You may type in a simple keyword search as we did in the Eric database, or you may type in a more advanced keyword search. When you finish typing, do not immediately hit the search button or the enter button on your keyboard. Notice the drop-down menu prompts you to search for either everything, articles, Books and Media, CSUSB, Books and Media, All CSU, and course reserves. I find everything to be too many things for most searches, and I rarely use it. I don't recommend articles, as it too provides too many results and may not be searching the databases most relevant to your needs. However, it is an option, and it can be very useful for esoteric topics or if you have a specific article title that you want to track down. However, OneSearch is essential for searching for books. Use the drop-down menu to select Books and Media, CSUSB. Commonly, the results display physical videos, such as DVDs, streaming videos, paper books, and eBooks. Physical items can only be accessed when the library is open while streaming videos or eBooks can be used at any time. There are other types of materials in the catalog, but I will forgo that discussion. Looking under the resource type, I'm going to click the link to limit to books. If the book is available in paper, it will display Available, the floor it is on, and the call number of the book. Paper books can only be used if the library building is open, so you can find and check out the item with your student ID. If you want eBooks, be sure to limit to Full Text Online on the left. eBooks will display in OneSearch with an available online link. After clicking this link, you will see where it is available. There are many eBook platforms where our eBooks are located. Sometimes there is one platform where the book can be accessed. Sometimes there are several platforms. Sometimes eBooks are temporarily accessible or through subscription. These books might disappear from our holdings. Other times we own the eBook and it will never disappear. Sometimes eBooks allow an unlimited number of people to use it at the same time. While other times it allows a limited number of users at the same time. Users beyond the limited amount will receive a turn away message telling you that the item has reached the maximum numbers of users. You will have to try to access the item again later. Many eBooks allow you to download limited numbers of pages each day as a PDF. In that case, look for chapter level downloads as PDFs. These are yours to keep for academic purposes and do not expire. Using the PDF, you may read it on a phone, tablet or computer and you may print them. So far this video has covered how to find your databases, how to search your databases, and how to use your results. The last topic is how to get further help. While I hope this video is useful for researching from home, it would be surprising if it answered all your questions. Doing research is a skill that takes practice. The Fowl Libraries reference librarians have been practicing for decades. We are here to help you. You can reach us in a variety of ways. On the Fowl Library homepage, click the Ask a Librarian button. If you see a large white box and the words available, there is a Fowl Librarian online to help you. The reference chat is for an immediate need during business hours Monday through Thursday 8am to 6pm, Friday 10am to 4pm, and Saturday 10am to 2pm. You might catch a librarian during other hours, in which case, it is a librarian being awesome. Alternatively, you may choose to email a librarian. This allows you to take your time, provide complete information to the librarian, by explaining your need, your search efforts, and your problem. This service is monitored during business days Monday through Friday 8am to 4pm, and Saturday 10am to 2pm. Emails outside of that time will be answered on the next business day. Text messages are monitored similarly. What if you want to talk to a librarian and see the librarian demonstrate the search? During the reference chat, you may ask the Fowl Librarian to start a Zoom session. They will either start a session or pass you to a librarian able to do so. During a Zoom session, the librarian can share their screen, demonstrate their technique, and talk with you to discuss your research problem. What if you want a consultation during a specific time? You may schedule a consultation with a librarian two ways. The first way is the research appointment button on the library's homepage. Scroll down and select a date, time, and a specific librarian, or no preference. During the 30-minute appointment, a librarian will use Zoom to demonstrate and discuss your research question. What if your life hours differ from the librarian's working hours? As the liaison for the College of Education and the Nursing Department, I can schedule consultations for off hours in those areas. For other subjects, your subject librarian may be willing to provide a consultation during off hours or off days. How do you know who your subject librarian is? Remember to choose a database button on the library's homepage. Select your discipline, and you will see your librarian's name and email. Reach out to them for an off hours consultation. If your need is general, or your subject librarian is unable to help during off hours, contact Brent Singleton. Alternatively, you may use the 24-hour Ask a Librarian service. It is located on the library's homepage under the Ask a Librarian button. The 24-hour service is staffed by non-CSUSB librarians around the world. They may not know some of our library specifics, but they can help you to select the right database, create a query, help with citations, and other questions. Lastly, please take a look at the library's online guides, or LibGuides. On the library's homepage, click the link, Library Guides, and then choose from the disciplines. There are also general areas, such as Citing and Writing, Research Skills, and other guides that can help no matter what your major. Know that the librarians of the Fowl Library are here to help you, as are your faculty members and other essential campus services. Don't be afraid to ask for help.