Here is a cartoon from Doonesbury from April 27, 2008, that shows how not to do research. To succeed in university, it is important to understand what are your tools and how to use them. Each tool has strengths and weaknesses. This online workshop is designed to help you understand these issues more clearly and to make your work both easier and better.

When people look for information, what do they really want to do? They want to find books and articles on specific topics and/or written by specific authors. (Of course, with the Internet, there are more things than just books and articles, and we'll discuss this later) There are several parts to this statement. Let's examine one part more closely:

Books & Articles: what are these things exactly? Here are some definitions:

• Book: [an item] complete in one volume or intended to be completed in a finite number of parts ... containing a single work or collection of works. See: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science (=ODLIS. excerpt taken from monograph)
• Article: A self-contained nonfiction prose composition on a fairly narrow topic or subject, written by one or more authors and published under a separate title in a collection or periodical containing other works of the same form. ODLIS (taken from article)

Look for books in catalogs. There are different types of catalogs:

• Catalogs of single collections, e.g, catalog of AUR, Salve Regina
• Catalogs of multiple collections, e.g. WorldCat (includes thousands of libraries around the world), SBN (includes thousands of Italian libraries)
• All catalogs contain citations only (also called a catalog record, bibliographic record or today’s term metadata record) and although there may be links to full-text, you are not searching the full-text of books. Here is an example. Although from this catalog record there is a link to the electronic book (Link to Resource), when you search in the catalog, you are not searching the full-text of the book, itself. You are searching only the information in the catalog record.

For more information on how to search for books in catalogs, see:Traditional Bibliographic Tools

Articles
Look for articles in journal indexes.

Why aren’t records for books and articles all in the same place? Because it was too much work to put the citations to all of the articles into the catalog. Librarians tried it for awhile and soon gave up. They outsourced the work to special indexes (See definition of index in ODLIS).

Each journal would make an index only to the articles and issues of their own journal (if they made one at all!), but then people who were doing research on a topic would have to search all the indexes of each journal separately! This was too much work for people, so businesses were established to create more professional indexes and to bring together the indexes of different magazines into multiple-indexes. Poole’s index was the first multiple index (1848). Since that time, there have been many, many more of these multiple-indexes. Everything was based on citation records, like in a catalog. From that time on, everyone has always had to look in two different places: catalogs for books, and indexes for articles.

Here is an example how it worked using Poole’s index, which is now available digitally on Google Books. (Google Books will be discussed later).

Let us suppose that a searcher was looking for articles on alligators:

1) The person would look up A, browse to Alligator and find the following citation:
Alligator, Natural History of (J.J. Audubon), plus something that says, Mus. 11 : 272.

Searchers then looked up what Mus. meant in the Abbreviations, Titles, and Editions section and discover that Mus. stands for Museum of Foreign Literature.

Searchers then looked for the journal Museum of Foreign Literature in their library's local catalog to see if it was available in the local collection. (Here is the record for the journal in the catalog of the Salve Regina Library)

If the library had the journal, the searchers would go to the shelf (at Salve Regina, it is actually a microfilm and its location isURI Mform Area/Sect.3 APS 2 : 0147-0148, 1246-1248). Once they found the journal on the shelf, they would take down volume 11, and find page 272, which is where Audubon's article is supposed to be. Its title is probably something like The Natural History of the Alligator. The title in the index that turns the words around: Alligator, Natural History of, was called a catchword title, and this evolved to become our concept of keywords today.

To summarize, the steps were (and remain):

1. find an article in an index
   
2. find the name of the journal
3. search the journal title in the local catalog
4. if it is there, go to the shelves and find the correct volume and issue (e.g. vol. 8, issue 6)
5. find the article using the page numbers.

We still follow this same practice to get articles from

early physical journals that have not been digitized!

When we use computer databases, we are doing

essentially the same thing, just using different tools!

Today, we have tools called databases (e.g., the CSI databases) that comprise many of these multiple indexes. One way to think of them is like mega-multiple indexes, such as Academic Search Premier which alone has over 4000 journals. Not only are there citations similar to a catalog, but often people can search the entire article (full-text) as well.

There is one very important part that is still necessary, however: the list of journal titles.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like it did before: you can't search all the journal titles in the local catalogs. The reason is the same as before: it has turned out to be too much work to maintain the links to the thousands of journals. So, the list of journal titles has been outsourced to specialized companies. To search CSI's journal list, click here. You will see that this list is very similar to Poole’s listing of abbreviations: a list of all the journals indexed in the mega-multiple indexes.

Summary of bibliographic tools:

1. Local catalog (e.g. AUR catalog)
2. Catalog of multiple local catalogs (e.g. WorldCat)
3. Journal index (e.g. CSI databases)
4. Journal list (e.g. CSI Electronic and Print Journals)
   

To repeat from the beginning of this section: when people search for information, they want to find books and articles on specific topics and/or written by specific authors.

• Books: search for books in catalogs. There is no full-text searching available and all searching is done on the citation record (also called catalog record, bibliographic record or metadata record). AUR’s catalog is unique in that it does a few new tasks (searching catalogs and AUR's catalog will be discussed at length in the section: Traditional Bibliographic Tools).
• Articles: search for articles in journal indexes. But first, we must consider a few additional points.

What is it that you really want to search?

Do you want to search only within a specific database, within a specific journal, or do you really want to find articles on specific topics or by specific authors, no matter where they happen to be? 99% of the time, people want articles and they don’t care in which journals or in which databases they are located.

Therefore, people usually want to search for individual articles, and not entire journals or databases. For example, most people want a specific article from Time Magazine. Very few people want all the thousands of issues of Time Magazine from its beginning in 1923. Even fewer people care if the article they want happened to be published in Time or Newsweek or the Manchester Guardian. And even fewer people care which database the item is in: Academic Search Premier or JSTOR.

So it turns out that people do not just want to search the articles in a specific journal, or in a specific database but rather, they want to search everything. How can this be done? I may find something good in Academic Search Premier, but there may be something even better in ScienceDirect. How can I know this?

First, we could search each and every database (or all of the mega-multiple indexes) separately, but nobody does that since there are so many of them. There are over 100 of them in the CSI databases alone!

In reality, it turns out that each person has their personal favorites, so they focus on JSTOR or Lexis-Nexus or whatever, but it should be clear that when you search databases individually, you may be missing a lot. There should be one box that searches them all at once: i.e. what could be called a hyper-mega-multiple index. Unfortunately, this type of index does not exist.

There is some help today, however: Google Scholar comes to the rescue. Both of these services search many databases simultaneously and you can search multiple databases at once!

BUT there is a serious drawback, since Google Scholar does not provide a list of the journals it indexes. As a result, there is a big question mark concerning its coverage. Still, it indexes many, many materials and are the closest to a hyper-mega-multiple index that we have. They also index many materials that are not in the big databases: in particular the materials in open archives, which may provide free versions of the articles that are in the paid databases. We discuss these materials in the section Open Archives: What They Are and How to Search Them.

• Unfortunately, there is a final twist: it turns out that when you find just the right article on Google Scholar or Microsoft Live Search, and even though we may have access through CSI, you will still not be able to access them by simply clicking on the link because you won't have the appropriate permissions. REMEMBER:
  

To summarize, the process is:

1. Find an article in Google Scholar and click on it
2. you may be able to get the article directly
3. if you can’t, you must copy the journal title and search it in the Journals list. At AUR this is the journal list from the College of Staten Island
• See below for special information for Study-Abroad Students!
  
4. if the journal is available, you can go into the journal and find the specific article

Search in Google Scholar for "Lega Nord" and you will find something similar to the following result. Note the difference between the title of the article (which you can click on) and the title of the journal.

Always click on the article title, and you may be able get the article. In this case though, it will ask you for money. If you don't want to pay, this is when you search for the title of the journal in the CSI List of Journals. In this case, we discover that the issues of Political Geography from 01/01/1992 to the present are available in a database called the ScienceDirect Freedom Collection. The article we want is from 2000, so therefore it is available.

Once you are in the database, you will probably have additional options for further searches. Here is the view of the record in ScienceDirect, with links to Related records

Here is a similar record in Academic Search Premier, and it shows how you can revise your search, through narrowing the results, or by finding citations within the database.


Be aware that CSI's list includes all of their journals, including those materials that are available only on their shelves. As an example, see: Library Issues , which is available only in print.

If we do not have access to the article, you can ask a librarian for help. Practical advice: find another article if at all possible. Inter-library loan can take some time.

Why is this process so complicated?

Of course, this process could (and will) be made simpler. But be aware that already it is much simpler than it was 20 years ago. Searches that today take 10 minutes, resulting in the articles in hand, could have taken weeks or more 20 years ago. The current system is in a state of change and will undoubtedly improve.

Books
Something has been left out in this scenario: the full-text of books. As we pointed out earlier, when you search a catalog, you are not searching the full-text of books, only the citations. Yet, there is a lot of information buried within the books and some of it may be on specific topics people are interested in, yet we wouldn’t know it from these citations in the catalog. Are there any options? Today, there is, but it is very new and still in the experimentation stage.

Google has a project called Google Books in which they are digitizing 10,000,000 volumes from different libraries. It is a controversial project and is only about 1/2 completed at the time of this writing. In any case, there will ultimately be a lot more full-text of books in libraries digitized by Google and other organizations. There are other similar projects as well, and there will certainly be many more in the future. See: the list of the libraries participating in the Google project

Because of copyright issues, it is impossible to predict how much of a book you will be able to read. Sometimes you can read the entire book and even download it. Sometimes you can read only part of it. This may be enough. There are other things called "snippets."

For now, we want to emphasize that often you can see enough to know if you want to see the rest of the book. You can then search for the book in the AUR catalog and it may be available.

Example
Search love elegy gender sulpicia in Google Books. It will give you the book The Roman mistress : ancient and modern representations / Maria Wyke, which is in the AUR collection.

• This is still experimental!

Study abroad students
Study abroad students can do exactly the same things as CSI students, except when you access the articles, you must go through your home school. See: Electronic Resources for Study Abroad Students

• Every library collection is different. Not everyone will have access to the same materials!

You still don’t know everything yet! Next will come how authors create and distribute information, along with all the changes caused by the internet. Later, we will discuss how to actually search—and find!—materials in catalogs, databases and the internet.