Help With Research
REFERENCE LIBRARIANS ARE AVAILABLE TO HELP!!! DON’T SPEND HOURS SEARCHING. WE CAN USUALLY HELP YOU IN A MATTER OF MINUTES!
During the school year, reference librarians are available:
Monday – Friday 9 am to 4:30 pm
Sunday – Wednesday 7 pm to 9 pm
During May term, Summer school and interim, reference librarians are available:
Monday – Friday 9 am to 4:30 pm
* * * ASK FOR ASSISTANCE * * *
Finding DVD’s and videos
All DVD’s and videos are included in the online catalog and there are two ways to locate DVD’s and videos. Choose Search Specific Collection from the opening catalog screen. Select Roanoke College Media Collection. A search done at this point will retrieve DVD’s and videos in Fintel Library.
Another way is to choose Search Entire Collection button from the opening catalog screen and conduct a search. After a list of titles is retrieved, select the drop down box View The Entire Collection and choose Roanoke College Media Collection. Select Search. This will limit the titles retrieved to those located in the Media Collection.
Researching the Roanoke Times
There are three ways to search the Roanoke Times. Use Lexis-Nexis or Factiva for back issues.
IN LEXIS-NEXIS:
From the Roanoke College homepage, select Quick Links/Library
Select LexisNexis.
Select the button at the top right “Sources.”
Type Roanoke Times in the search box.
Select search this title.
Fill in the search screen as desired.
The Roanoke Times is full text in LexisNexis beginning in January 1994 to the present and is updated within 24 hours of publication, except Sunday which is posted within two days of publication.
IN FACTIVA
Use Factiva to locate full text articles from the Roanoke Times from 1993 to the present. From the Roanoke College homepage, select Quick Links/Library. To limit your search to the Roanoke Times follow these instructions:
In the large box type rst=RNKE and what ever search terms are needed. Adjust the date range if desired and click Run Search. For example, to search for articles on Victory Stadium in the Roanoke Times in the search box, type:
Rst=RNKE and “Victory Stadium”
The quotation marks tell the computer to search for the two words right next to each other as a phrase.
DAILY EDITION:
Daily edition and seven previous days of the Roanoke Times are available here: http://www.roanoke.com
Finding scholarly journal articles
Scholarly articles may be found in several library resources. These are good places to start. From the Roanoke College homepage, select Quick Links/Library
JSTOR – all full text, all scholarly but not all subjects included and nothing more recent
than about 3 years ago.
Academic Search Complete – limit search to articles with text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals
OmniFile – limit search to full text and peer reviewed.
Searching and obtaining better results on the Internet
Any one search engine can only retrieve about 15% of what is available on the Internet. Even so, massive amounts of relevant and irrelevant information can be obtained with just a few keystrokes. Here are some tips for making a search more efficient.
Use www.google.com. Use quotation marks around two or more words to be searched as a phrase. For example:
“Tiger Woods”
“genetic engineering”
“American Chemical Society”
Limit your search to a particular type of web server. To limit a search to an educational web server on the topic abortion, type
site:edu abortion
To limit a search to a government web server on illegal aliens, type
site:gov “illegal aliens”
Other web server types are:
org = non profit organization
mil = military
com = commercial
Also, try Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/
This search engine retrieves mostly from more academic, professional type web servers. Beware: many full text articles are obtainable only with a fee! Don’t pay. Use interlibrary loan to request a copy of the article.
Locating book reviews
New books are reviewed within the first few months up to two years after publication. Reviews appear in newspapers, magazines, journals, and on television and radio programs.
Fintel Library offers many resources that contain full text book reviews. Here is a list of those resources and tips on how to search in each one. These are accessible from the RC homepage/QuickLinks/Library
JSTOR contains all scholarly publications in many disciplines. There are lots of book reviews here but nothing more recent than about 3 years ago, depending on the individual journal. From the JSTOR screen, select Search. Then select Advanced Searching. In the advanced search screen in the box next to “The exact phrase,” type the title of the book. Under “Narrow your search to,” check the box for “Review” as the type of article.
Book reviews may also be found in the library resources listed below. To search for reviews in these, follow these general searching directions:
In the search box, type the title of the book in quotes, and the author’s last name. For example, to locate reviews of Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty, type:
Sachs and “The End of Poverty”
If the book title is fairly generic and/or the author’s name is fairly common, add the word review to the search. For example, to search for reviews of Simon Blackburn’s Lust, type:
Blackburn and Lust and review
Or to search for Huston Smith’s Why Religion Matters, type:
Smith and “Why religion matters” and review
Academic Search Complete– limit search to articles with text, if desired, and follow directions above.
OmniFile - Select OmniFile Full Text Mega from the selections at the top of the screen and follow directions above.
eLibrary – Select the Boolean radio button and follow directions above.
Access World News – follow directions above.
Factiva – follow directions above.
How to read a Library of Congress call number?
http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml
How to read a government document number?
Comments/questions to rheller@roanoke.edu
Updated 4/09
