What Keeps Librarians Up at Night

What Keeps Librarians Up at Night

You’d think that librarians being the calm, collected people we are wouldn’t stay awake at night counting sheep and wondering how to help our patrons – Y’all -- do research, but we do. Maybe this list will help.

We wish you knew that…

...more than your ONE favorite database exists for finding articles for your paper.

Tarleton has over 200 databases – over 200, just for you! That’s a lot of databases, so find more than that one comfy, familiar database!

How do you do that? Click on Subject Guides from the libraries’ homepage and find your topic area, then click on it. Tada! A whole page full of information about that area pops up. In fact, a whole bunch of databases you may never have seen before are right at the top of the page.  Click on one of those shiny new-to-you databases and off you go! You are on your way to developing a whole new relationship with a completely new database.

 

…you can’t just throw any old word, group of words, or - please NO - not entire sentences into the search boxes!

Our databases are not Google and won’t react well when you treat them like Google.  They are special and want better search terms than Google.  So just think about the main concepts that you want to research.  Put just one concept – no more, no less - in each separate box. When all the concepts are in their own little boxes, hit that search box. All this special treatment for those concepts should bring you up a pretty sweet list of articles to begin to search through.

...clicking the Full Text button should only happen when it’s 20 minutes before class and you have to bring an article with you!

Just don’t do it! Resist the urge to click that box in front of Full Text!  Doing so will cut you off from really good articles that you will never see again.  You’ll never even know that they exist just because of that check mark in box in front of “Full Text”. Even if you can’t directly get to the article through the databases, a mere request to Interlibrary Loan could very well bring you that best article in the world in a matter of days!

So that’s the short list to help to make your researching better, at least we hope so. We librarians would really like to get a full night’s sleep again!

                                        

From University of Michigan Health. www.helthblog.uofmhealth.org