Larry Library Tutorial#3

Okay so now we are going to look at specific databases, you’ve had a chance to look at the general search box the discover box for Galileo homepage, but let’s go ahead and take a look at specific history databases. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go over here to browse by subject and click on that link and then you’ll notice that we have history listed right here in our subject list, so I’m gonna click on that link and then I have other options to choose from but for the sake of just keeping it simple and focused on history we’re going to choose this last link right here in the drop down box and now we have a listing of all the history databases that are available to us in Galileo and there are a ton and we certainly won’t look at all of these or even half of these but I do want to key on the most useful databases. So let me come back up here and I really like Academic Search Complete it is the first database in the list, very easy to use and for the sake of the demonstration we can do again Salem Witch Trials and we’re going to choose full text here, click on that box, if we don’t click on that box we will get not only full text articles but we will get abstracts which are just paragraph summaries of what articles say, so we want to limit this strictly to full text articles dealing with the Salem Witch Trials and then we can do our search. And you notice we get 146 results, now you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t want to look at all 146 of these, some of these articles may even just mention the Salem Witch Trials but I really need something that deals with the history of those trials, so what I’m going to do at this point is I’m gonna tweak the search by going to advanced search and click here and this gives me an opportunity to enter in other terms which may narrow our search down. So I’m going to go with Puritans for my second term and then I’m going to change this from and to not and I’m going to key in reviews, so another words one thing you will find with Galileo is that you have a lot of book reviews that are listed along with the articles, from magazines, and academic journals. Well that’s fine and dandy if you have to write a book review, but most of us don’t have to do that and so what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to eliminate all of those little citations that are really book reviews not really articles about the Salem Witch Trials. So what I’ve done is I’ve used multiple terms this is called a boolean search and I’ve just simply used multiple terms Salem Witch Trials and Puritans, but not book reviews and now I’m going to do the search and this cuts the list down to eleven and that’s a much more manageable list. Another words you may decide that yeah I think I might look at these Witch Hunting in Salem and that looks like an excellent introductory article dealing with the Salem Witch Trials, so let’s take look at that one just for a moment. And here we have the article itself that comes up on the screen. Good introductory article and I like Academic Search Complete because it tends to be very simple, it doesn’t use a lot of highfalutin terms and yet it gives you the meat of what you’re trying to find. So that’s a great introductory article and another thing I like about Academic Search Complete is that you can also cite this article, you have the option to come over here and you have all of these different commands that you can execute, you can print the article out if you’re connected to a printer, you can email it to yourself, you can save it to a disk, you can also cite the article and so if you click there on cite you will notice that you have all of these different citation styles that come up on the screen, well one is AMA, the other one is APA but you can also choose a different citation style; Chicago/Turabian, which is something the history people like to use. There’s the Harvard style, there’s MLA, wow all these different citation styles some of which I’ve never seen before, but for the purposes of Georgia Highlands more than likely you will either use APA, the Chicago/Turabian style, or MLA. It’s a pretty safe bet that most of your instructors will require one of those three styles. So I think that’s a really neat feature. In the old days we had to spend a lot of time looking things up in Harbrace and other guide books to try to find out how to properly cite something and it was very time consuming. So this is here is some other things here that you can look through. One thing I need to do that I did not do on the search was I did not check the full text box so I noticed here that some of these that are coming up on the screen have the finded option so what that tells me is that we do not have access to the full text article but we can find it if it’s at another college and we can do inner Library loan at that point but what I want to do is I want to go back and I want to tweak that search one more time very briefly. Oh, here we go I can come down here to full text and check that little box there and that should cut our list down to only full text articles and now we do update and now we’ve cut it down to five, okay, so there we go, there we go. Always important to remember that if you’re going to do a search you want to make sure you check the full text box and that way then you have access to these articles. Now this is, this is just one database in Galileo you’re looking at this and you’re saying we’ll is this all that they got on the Salem Witch Trials? Absolutely not, those are the only articles that are in Academic Search Complete, but we could do this search in at least a half dozen other databases in Galileo and probably come up with close to fifty or sixty articles, so I brought up Academic Search Complete because it’s one of the easiest databases to use, but certainly you can find a lot on the Salem Witch Trials by looking at some of the other databases.