Maryville College Transfer Orientation
Lamar Memorial Library
Library Hours | Loan Periods | Fines | Study Carrels | Interlibrary Loans | Finding Materials on Reserve | Defining a Topic | Finding Books Available in the Library | Search for Books on Your Topic | Finding Books Available Elsewhere | Locating Journal Articles | Other Journal Databases | PsychLit, ERIC, MLA, FirstSearch, Chemistry Citations | Searching the Internet | Did you Know?
Welcome to the Lamar Memorial Library. This packet is designed to introduce you to the resources and services available in the library. You will be asked to complete exercises that cover various aspects of the library research process. These exercises are designed to prepare you for the kind of library research that is expected of you in most of your coursework at Maryville College.
Please feel free to ask at the "ASK HERE" desk for help
The exercises should take approximately two hours to complete. You may confer with classmates, but each student must turn in his or her own work. Please return the completed exercise packet to the "Ask Here" desk. The packet will be graded on a pass/fail system. Students who fail or do not complete this library exercise will receive library instruction later on in the semester.
NAME_________________________________________________
Academic Standing: Freshman______Sophomore______Junior______Senior______
Transferred from (name of institution)
Instructors will assign readings that are not found in your textbook. Many of those readings are kept on reserve files under the instructor's name and under the course title. To locate an item on reserve you must get the Code Number of the reserve item. You will then be able to checkout the reserve item.
You may access reserve information by going to the main menu of McQuest and choosing the option Course Reserves. You will have the option of looking for reserve information by Course Name or Instructor's Name.
For this exercise, go into Course Reserves and then, on the Reserve's Menu, choose Instructor's Name. A box will appear where you will enter the name Butler and click on Search.
You will see a list of three types of documents: books with a call number, journal articles with a code (A), and personal copies of books with a code (P). Record the call number and the codes below:
Title of book ____________________________________ call number ___________
Title of article ____________________________________________ code _______
Title of personal copy ______________________________________ code _______
Remember, the code is very important because you will need this to obtain the book or article from Circulation. Normally, you would present your valid student ID and the student assistant would checkout the desired item(s) to you. Today, you do not need to checkout the material.
Starting research on any topic generally calls for a definition of the topic or the main concepts associated with the topic. For example, if you were asked to prepare a paper on the influence of peer pressure and drugs on adolescent academic achievement, you would identify the main concepts in your topic or research question.
For our example, the concepts are "drugs", "drug use", "peer pressure", and "academic achievement."
Next, you need to define these terms or concepts.
The two types of sources that help you do this are dictionaries and encyclopedias. We recommend that you use Subject Dictionaries and Subject Encyclopedias for this step in the research process. In addition to defining terms, these reference sources also provide introductory articles about your topic. They may suggest how to narrow or broaden your topic, list names of experts in the field, and often provide bibliographies on your topic. When locating information on specific terms and concepts in a multi-volume encyclopedia, always go to the Index volume. Be aware that different encyclopedias may use different terminology for the same concepts. For example, what is under Adolescence in one source, may be found under Teenage Years or Youth or Students in another.
For this exercise, please refer to the handout in the plastic tray on the first reference shelf titled Selected Reference Books. From this list of reference books, find a source that discusses or helps define each of the following concepts. Provide the title of the source and the page number where the term is located.
The term Drugs is defined/discussed in (title) ________________________________on page(s) _______________
Peer Pressure is defined/discussed in (title) ______________________________on page(s) _________________
Academic Achievement is discussed in (title) ______________________________ on page(s)____________________
Now pick a topic or research question of interest to you (in your major, for example), identify the main concepts, and give one article from a subject encyclopedia or dictionary that provides useful introduction information to your topic. For example, your main topic may be the effects of divorce on children. Your concepts may be divorce, single-parent households, school performance of children with divorced parents, emotional well being of children with divorced parents, etc.
Topic_________________________________________________
Concept 1_____________________________________________
Concept 2_____________________________________________
Useful article on topic found in (title) ________________________________on pages______.
Finding Books Available in the College Library
After defining the terms and concepts in your topic and locating an introductory encyclopedia article on your topic, you need to find books on your topic. Use McQuest, Maryville College's online catalog, to locate books that are available in our library.
Go to the main menu of McQuest. To search the Library Catalog for books, click the mouse on the line Search the LIBRARY COLLECTION.
If you are looking for a book by a specific author, click on Author search.
If you know the title of a book, click on Title search.
For searches of topics, do both a Subject and a Keyword search.
A subject search will retrieve records that contain the exact subject you entered in the subject field. Note that the subject must be a Library of Congress Subject Heading. The library of Congress assigns terms to books describing their content in a uniform manner. For a listing of these, refer to the big red books on the tall table behind the online catalog.
A word search will retrieve records that contain your word in the author, title, or in a field describing the content of the item.
Researching the effect of illicit drug use on adolescent academic achievement, you could do a Subject Search on the subjects Drug abuse or Academic achievement or High School Students--Substance Use. These are terms assigned to books by the Library of Congress.
Now, to make sure that you find all books on your topic, do a Keyword Search. With this kind of search, McQuest will locate books that have the word or words you chose in the title or in the author or in a field that indicates the content of the book. For our example, you could use Teens and Drugs, Students and drugs, or Teenagers and drug use. You should try out as many different words as possible to allow McQuest to find all our books on your topic.
If McQuest provides a long list of books, pick the ones that best fit the requirements of your assignment. They may be the ones most recently published or they may need illustrations and bibliographies.
Now search for books on your chosen topic. (This is the topic from your major).
Your topic_____________________________________________________
Subject to search___________________________ How many entries/books found_______
Keyword or words to search___________________ How many entries/books found______
When performing a Subject search, you may get a list containing your subject divided in specific subheadings. This helps you to narrow your topic. You may find a subheading that better defines your topic, thus allowing you to find books that are relevant to your topic. Select one of the books you retrieved above. Go to the full record for the book and find out whether the book is available or currently checked out. Find a book that is available and provide the following information:
Author or editor _______________________________________________
Title ________________________________________________________
Place of publication ____________________________________________
Publisher ____________________________________________________
Year of Publication ___________________________________________
Call Number ________________________________________________
Book located in main stacks____________ reference______________ other__________
Examine the book and answer the following questions:
Does the book have illustrations________, an index_________, bibliographies________?
Is the book written for a general ___________ or a scholarly __________audience?
Would the book be useful for your Topic?________________________________________
Finding Books Available Elsewhere
You may find that you need to go beyond our collection. This is especially true for those students who are beginning their Senior Thesis.
The library provides access to library catalogs throughout the United States (and worldwide) via the Internet. The library most commonly consulted is at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. If you locate useful books at UT (or any other US library), ask at the "Ask Here" desk for an Interlibrary Loan form. However, check first to see if the Maryville College library owns the book.
At the top, left-hand portion of the McQuest screen, you will see the button marked Bookmarks. Click once on Bookmarks. This will give you a list of bookmarks that will be useful for research at Maryville College. One of these is UTK Library Collections. To get into the UTK catalog:
At this point, you should be in the UTK Library Catalog ready to search. From here, follow the screen directions. You will find that this is similar to McQuest--allowing you to do subject, author, and title searches.
Now that you are connected to UTK's library, search for a book on your topic and record the bibliographic information (author, title, etc.) and the call number.
Author or Editor___________________________________________
Title ____________________________________________________
Call Number ______________________________________________
Publisher__________________________________________________
The next step in your research is locating journal articles on your topic. Journal articles provide more current information than encyclopedias and books. Since they are generally shorter than books, journal articles enable you to incorporate many authors' viewpoints into your research.
Whereas McQuest (the library catalog) is the finding tool for books , Journal Indexes provides access to journal articles. Indexes come in paper format and in computer databases. General indexes help you find information on topics in all disciplines. Many of the journals indexed are written for a general lay audience. The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is a general index in paper format. InfoTrac Web Academic Index and Lexis-Nexis Universe are online general databases.
Specialized indexes, on the other hand, provide access to the scholarly literature in one or a few disciplines. The Social Sciences Index, the Education Index, and the General Science Index are examples of subject indexes in paper format. PsycLit, Chemistry Citations , and the MLA Bibliography are available on CD-ROM. Other indexes available via the World Wide Web are ATLA, a religion database, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ERIC, educational resources online, FirstSearch, and JSTOR, an archive of journal back issues in selected subjects.
To reach the databases that are available through the Web, go to main menu of McQuest and click on Search for Journal Literature.
For this exercise, do a Subject Search on InfoTrac Academic Index. Find one article, available in our library, on the effects of drugs or drug use and peer pressure on academic achievement. Provide the following information:
Subject searched __________________________________________
Author of article ___________________________________________
Title of article _____________________________________________
Journal in which article appears _________________________________
Volume ______________________________ Year ___________________
Found on pages _________________
Is this article available in full-text? _____________________
As in the previous exercise, you will find our online databases by going to McQuest and clicking on Search for Journal Literature. Although there are several databases that you can search, for this exercise choose Lexis-Nexis by clicking on Lexis-Nexis Universe.
On the main menu, you have several options. You may look for General News Topics, Company and Industry News, Biographical Information, etc. This is an extensive database providing full-text articles. You will probably discover that the Lexis-Nexis database will be very useful during your first year.
For this exercise on the how to use Lexis-Nexis, let's suppose that your professor wants you to find current information on drugs or drug use, peer pressure, and academic achievement.
LEXIS-NEXIS will now search for full-text magazine articles that have information on these terms. Record you search results below.
How many documents were retrieved? ________________________________
Find an article that you believe would be useful for researching this topic and record the following:
Title of the article _______________________________________
Title of the Journal _______________________________________
Author of the article? _______________________________________
PsycLit, ERIC, MLA, FirstSearch, and Chemistry Citations--Locating Even More Journal Articles!
As mentioned above, other databases are available providing citations to articles found in journals. These are subject specific databases (i.e. contain information specific to, for example, education, psychology, literature, or chemistry). The following are detailed descriptions of a few of these databases.
PsycLit - Provides abstracts of journal articles in psychology and related disciplines such as education, sociology, business, medicine and law. The database indexes more that 1,300 journals and covers 1887 to the present.
ERIC - Available
through the World Wide Web--Look on McQuest under Search for
Journal Literature or go to http://ericir.syr.edu/Eric
ERIC Abstracts over 700 journal in education: pre-school through adult
education, including educational psychology, special education, sign language
interpreting, physical education, and subject area journals related to
teaching. In addition, ERIC now contains over 2,000 ERIC Digest
records that features the full text of the original document. ERIC also
includes education document available on microfiche at the University of
Tennessee. Coverage is from 1966 to the present. Selected ERIC documents are
available in full-text on the ERIC webpage at http://www.ed.gov/databases/ERIC_Digest/index/
MLA Bibliography - Indexes over 3,000 journals, dissertation, series, and relevant monographs in modern languages and literature; linguistics; folklore; sign language; computer programming and other artificial languages; and theater. Coverage is from 1963 to the present.
Chemistry Citation Index (CCI) - Indexes the journal literature of chemistry, with abstracts, from 1991 to the present. Covers a core group of 300 relevant journals in full and additional items selected from other science journals.
FirstSearch - Available through the World Wide Web--Look on McQuest under Search for Journal Literature for FirstSearch. TO USE FIRSTSEARCH, YOU MUST OBTAIN AN AUTHORIZATION AND PASSWORD FROM THE "ASK HERE" DESK. FirstSearch is an interactive information system that gives you vital, timely information about journal articles and some books. Within the FirstSearch system, you will find over 60 unique databases covering a wide variety of topic areas. Once in FirstSearch, you will find databases covering medicine, biology, agriculture, business, sociology and economics. This is a particularly good source for information on biology and other natural sciences.
By this time, you should be able to locate any database in the Maryville College Library and perform a search for a journal article. Locate one of the databases mentioned above (PsycLit, ERIC, FirstSearch, JSTOR, MLA Bibliography, or Chemistry Citations Index) that is relevant to your major field of study. Following the instructions on the screen, search for a journal or monograph citation that is related to a topic of interest.
Database Searched______________________________________
Title of Article found in Database _____________________________________
In the library, you will use McQuest to search the Internet via Netscape. To access Netscape, click on the icon of the FLASHLIGHT that indicates "Search" .
In Netscape, you will need to choose a Search Engine to search the Internet. A Search Engine is the device that browses the Web looking for Subjects or Keywords that are contained on Web pages. It is useful to experiment with different Search Engines because the different engines search different parts of the Web. If you are unfamiliar with search engines, we recommend Alta Vista, Hot Bot, or Yahoo as a starting point.
For this exercise, go into Netscape by clicking on the "Search" Icon. This will take you to the Netscape "Net Search" page. Here, you will choose a search engine. Look for Alta Vista, Hot Bot , or Yahoo. You will click on the search engine you want to use. This will bring up a white box where you will enter the subject or keywords that you want to search. Go ahead and try a search using the topic from you major (the subject or keywords that you used in previous exercises). The search engine will retrieve a list of blue, underlined hyper-links that will lead you to web sites containing your search terms. Click on the blue, underlined text to view the page.
What Did You Find?
Review one of the Web pages that either Hot Bot or Alta Vista found for your search. Record the following:
HTTP Address (found at the top of the screen)___________________________
Title of the Web Page ________________________________
Name of Organization Publishing the Page ________________________________
Date You Reviewed the Page ________________________________
You may go directly into a Web page if you know the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). You have seen these--they usually start with http://www...
To go to an URL, click the mouse inside the NetSite box at the top of the page (where the current URL is located). Once your cursor is inside the NetSite box, you can delete the current URL and enter the URL of the site you wish to visit.
Enter the following URL: http://www.loc.gov
What is this Web site? ________________________________
*** KEEP THIS PAGE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE ***
*** DID YOU KNOW? ***
The databases that you used for this library orientation are accessible from any computer that is connected to the Maryville College Network (Citrix). This means that you can use these databases from your dorm room or from the computer lab in the Sutton Science Building. All you need to remember is the URL for McQuest....
http://library.maryvillecollege.edu
Once you are on the main page of McQuest, select Search for Journal Literature. This will give you access to Lexis-Nexis Universe, InfoTrac Web, JSTOR, ERIC (Educational Resources Online), and other databases that you will need to do college level research.
*** PRINTING FROM THE LIBRARY COMPUTERS ***
You may print full-text articles and web pages found on the Internet from the computers in the library. The charge is 5 Cents per page. This charge is the same as copying an article from a print journal.
*** RESPONSIBLE USE OF LIBRARY COMPUTERS ***
As students of Maryville College, you have access to the computers in the Maryville College Library as long as you use them in a responsible manner. Please remember these guidelines for responsible use:
Computers in the Maryville College Library are intended to support and facilitate teaching and research. Academic work by students, faculty, and staff takes precedence over all other uses of the computers. The primary use of these resources is for work related to academics. All other uses are considered secondary.
Since the computers in the library are dedicated to research and course work, students are asked not to use electronic mail (email) on these computers! Email is available in the computer lab in the Sutton Science Center and from your dorm room.
The use of "Chat Rooms" is not allowed in the Maryville College Library.
Created on: August 13, 1999
Last Updated: August 25, 1999