Information About Tutorials
Sometimes you just need a little help to either refresh your memory about the nuts & bolts of how to perform advanced searches in our search engines/databases, or else you realize that you never learned these techniques in the first place, and that it is time you knew what to do! This tutorial tab is for either need - and keep your eyes open, we'll be adding to them as we have the time!
Boolean Operator Tutorial
A whiteboard video about how to use Boolean Operators (don't know what those are? Watch the video and find out!) to quickly pull out the search results you are looking for - and *only* the search results you are looking for!
Phrase Searching Tutorial
Tired of performing searches and getting seemingly random results? Here is a whiteboard video on the search technique known as "phrase searching" - very very useful to refine your search results quickly and to be certain that you get exactly what you are looking for without having to wade through unrelated items!
What Other Tutorials Do You Want or Need?
There is no point in me giving you things that you don't want or need! You are too busy and your time is too valuable to waste time looking at things you don't need or to spend looking for something that you do need but can't find.
Please help me out with this! I've created a Survey Monkey survey to try and find out what types of tutorials you are looking for, where you get stuck when conducting library research, what kinds of things you want step-by-step instructions for versus what you just need in a series of quick screen shots, etc.
The more information you give me on this, the better resources I can create and provide for you!
Thanks!
- Susan
Possible Tutorial Topics:
How to see who has cited a specific paper
How to see all of the papers that an author cited in a particular article
How to track down a specific citation
How to request ILL stuff from us
Advanced searching like phrases, truncation, boolean - do a "draw your life" version:
- select words that relate to major concepts of your information need
- come up with synonyms
- avoid common stop words
- use truncation at the end or in the middle (wildcard) in order to get different variants
- use quotes around phrases
- use Boolean operators
- field-specific searches (search on a topic w/in a specific journal, etc.)
