The University of St. Thomas
News, Events and Musings from the UST Libraries

Posts Tagged ‘research’

Welcome, Dr. Sullivan!

By: Laura Hansen

Published on: Thursday, February 14th, 2013

We at UST Libraries are excited to welcome our President-Elect and share with her our tradition as ”the intellectual and technological crossroads of information resources, teaching, and learning at UST.” 

To get started, here are some highlights we hope Dr. Sullivan will find helpful and interesting as she transitions into her new position (and that we thought you library-lovers out there might like to check out, too!):

Our Newly-Designed Website and Online ResourcesNew site screenshot

Providing easy-to-use mini research portals to through our Google-like Summon search engine, catalog, research Subject Guides, and more.  Read more about it here.

Great Scholarship

USTRO

UST Research Online, our online reseach repository, is a wonderful place to familiarize yourself with the work being done by faculty and students

Virtual Tours and Histories of  St Thomasarchive_photos 

University Archives Photograph Collection contains a fascinating array of images related to the school’s history

Historic Walking Tour of the Saint Paul campus is a great way to get oriented with the history of the campus – can you find the pictures of Lake Mennith?

Written Histories of St. Thomas and the Saint Paul Seminary:

stpaul academyThere have been many books written about UST.  Here are two of the most popular:  

More can be found in the University Archives.  

 

*For more information about our President-Elect, Dr Julie Sullivan, please visit the St Thomas Newsroom.

Posted in Kudos, Libraries, News & Events | No Comments »

Take a 15 Minute Speed Tour of the Library

By: Lindsey L.

Published on: Friday, February 1st, 2013

signed nametagAre you new on campus? Have you forgotten everything you know over J-term? Do you think the library is only where the coffee is? 

Monday, February 4th through Friday, February 8th library staff will be giving 15 minute speed tours of library resources. Look for a sign saying “The Tour Starts Here” in the OSF Lobby at 9 am, 12 pm, and 3 pm each day. If you can’t make it to any of those times, you can always go to the Circulation Desk and ask for a personal tour of library resources. We can also tailor tours to meet your specific needs.

What is included in the tour?
It’s not your average architectural and stained glass window tour. In 15 minutes you will know how to discover and locate materials in the library and online; you’ll learn to navigate our study rooms with confidence; heck, you might even request a book from another country!

Why should I spend 15 minutes on a library tour?
If you’re paying tuition to learn and do research, shouldn’t you be using all the tools at hand? We can show you how to get your money and time’s worth in the most efficient way possible.

Posted in Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library | No Comments »

How much do YOU trust the internet?

By: Laura Hansen

Published on: Tuesday, August 14th, 2012

Okay, everyone, it’s time to admit it: we ALL (librarians included!) use the internet to find information on a regular basis.  Google, Wikipedia, and even Twitter have become seemingly indispensible sources for anything and everything.  I mean, where else are you going to quickly find out that answer to a crossword puzzle, why there is a protest going on across the street, the hours for your favorite coffee shop, or even why Olympic long jumpers are allowed so many attempts?

But the question remains:  with so much information out there, how do we know what to trust?  Where can we go to get valid information?  A recent article (and I’ll be the first to admit that there are getting to be so many of these published  that I’m starting to question even their validity) published this chart about the perceptions of trust-worthiness that most of us have about various kinds of websites out there.

But, as we all know, perception is not always reality  (as the new Bourne Legacy movie forces us to consider).  And this whole dilemma makes the prospect of gearing up for research paper season again all the more daunting, doesn’t it?

But, ladies and gents, guess what?!  It doesn’t have to be!  This  is where your friendly UST librarian comes into play.  We are all more than happy to help you figure out if that “perfect” source you found online happens to be as good as you really think it is.  Heck, we even have a whole section of our website geared towards helping you figure it out yourselves if you’d like (in librarian-ese, this whole topic is called “information literacy”).

Check it out, and feel more comfortable in your search.  You can even brag to your friends that you are positively “search-savvy!” (and if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is!)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

RefWorks Classic says, “Farewell forever”; RefWorks 2.0 says, “Oh, were you still here?”

By: Kari Petryszyn

Published on: Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Attention all you old schoolers out there: RefWorks Classic has at last bid its final adieu! After months of hanging around as an optional click back into familiarity, POOF! It has gone off to sunnier climes.

Have no fear! RefWorks 2.0, which has been the default since last summer, is still there to gather, organize, store, and share all types of your reference information and is just waiting to instantly generate your citations and bibliographies.  Watch the video below to discover where all your favorite features have gone off to, and don’t be shy about discovering the new ones. Can I just say, “drag and  drop?” Yes, please!

YouTube Preview Image

Now to all of you who I can hear… “Say what now? Ref….Woooorks?”  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it is your lucky day! Your information gathering will never be the same again. RefWorks is an online research management, writing, and collaboration tool that will allow you to easily save your citations as you do your research, which will allow you to not only find them again, but will format them for you to instantly generate your citations and bibliographies.

RefWorks has its own channel on YouTube and is a great way to get started.  Also, UST libraries has a very helpful guide (in the process of being updated for the new interface), and RefWorks offers its own guide. And of course, our super duper librarian friends are never too far away!

 

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials | 4 Comments »

Happy Valentine’s with Euromonitor Passport!

By: Laura Hansen

Published on: Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Welcome to Spring Semester, business researchers!

We’re less than one week away from Valentine’s Day, and I thought it was a good time to share some interesting Valentine’s-themed nuggets of note our vendor has shared with us that will (hopefully) help you to fall in love with one of our favorite market research databases: Euromonitor Passport GMID!

First, the Dashboards in Euromonitor Passport GMID reveal that the US is the largest market in the world for chocolate confectionery.  Good news for chocolate lovers, but growth in this market has declined since 2009.

 

Secondly, Mars is the dominant player in the confectionery market after overtaking The Hershey Company in 2008 (I’m excited to see Lindt and Ferrero on this list, personally).

And finally, if jewelry is more your style this Valentine’s Day, new data available for Passport Industrial reveals that Tiffany’s is the largest producer of jewelry in the US.

(more…)

Posted in Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials | 1 Comment »

UST Librarians share findings from their feeder school librarians and UST faculty on library skills

By: Julie Kimlinger

Published on: Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Donna Nix, Marianne Hageman and Talia Nadir – reference librarians from the UST Libraries –   presented “Information Literacy: Turning the Page From High School to College,” this past Oct. 28, 2011 at the American Association of School Librarians conference in Minneapolis.

Their session focused on data gathered from parochial high school librarians (feeder schools) on the information literacy skills of their seniors, as well as UST  faculty perceptions of the information literacy skills of undergraduate students enrolled in their introductory research classes.  

If you would like to learn about their findings, please feel free to follow up with them.

Posted in News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library | No Comments »

Welcome students

By: Carolyn DeLuca

Published on: Thursday, September 8th, 2011

I’d like to welcome all new and returning students to the library. We’re really happy to have you back on campus.  It’s always a much livelier place when you’re around.  I just want to welcome you to campus in general and to the library specifically.  Here are a few things to help speed and ease your library experience this year:

  • Research Guides Let’s say you’re looking for library resources on a topic and you don’t know where to start.  Has that ever happened to you? Well now you know where to start cuz I’m telling you a good place to start… Research Guides. We’ve got guides for subject areas, guides for specific classes and database guides.
  • Summon Summon is like Google for scholarly articles. Wait, you say, isn’t Google Scholar basically Google for scholarly articles? Yes it is and I encourage you to use Google Scholar (using this link will get you to the full-text of journals the library owns if the full-text isn’t freely available in GS). But I also encourage you to use Summon if you’re looking for a few articles from scholarly or peer-reviewed journals, magazines, newspapers or if you’re looking for books or ebooks on a topic.
  • Ask a Librarian. I implore you (cuz when’s the last time you were implored?  Or impaled, for that matter? I know that vampires are all the rage these days, so I thought I’d ask about the impaling.  Also, imploring made me think of impaling, so there you go.  And now, my new little kittens, you’re getting a glimpse into how I think and what to expect from this blog for the next year).  Where was I? Oh yes, I implore you to not waste time.  If there’s one thing there’s just too little of -other than love, according to Jackie DeShannonYouTube Preview Image it’s time. [Did you check out that choreography?  Yikes!  How in the world did all those back-up singers learn it? So complicated! ] So if you spend more than 5 minutes looking for something in the library and you don’t see it, please, please, please ask us.   You can ask in person, via email, via texting through IM or SMS or just call us.  I implore you!

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events | 1 Comment »

Research Guides Re-imagined

By: John Heintz

Published on: Monday, September 13th, 2010

Not sure how you can find those “peer-reviewed” articles your prof wants you to use in that research paper?  Don’t know where to find the definition of “heteroscedasticity” for that econometrics assignment? Trying to trace the first usage of ’Google’ as a verb? Wondering how the heck you’re supposed to find books on ‘Cosmopolitanism and the geopolitics of feminist rhetoric’?

Try the Libraries’ Research Guides!!

The Research Guides, accessible from the library home page or via this direct link are authored by our liaison librarians and will give you specific suggestions of appropriate sources (e.g. scholarly library subscription databases, book catalogs, vetted free web sites, etc.) by format, subtopic, etc. This summer, we completely rebuilt this portion of our website, using a new software product called Libguides.  The new system offers a number of advantages over the old web pages, including:

  • Tabbed layout for understandable organization and easy navigation (see screen shot below)
  • More engaging visual layout, easier integration of images, audio and video content
  • More dynamic content with automatically updated lists of new books, feeds of relevant news and article content, etc.
  • Easy access to your librarian’s contact info for follow-up, plus integrated chat reference service
  • Ability for users to comment on and rate the resources
  • Ability to be notified if changes are made to a guide

libguides_screenshot

 

Note to faculty members:

Many professors have linked to our old web pages on their Blackboard or other course web sites: if you have done so, please update them by finding the appropriate links from the subject listings.  You may also want to review our web page that demonstrates how to link a Research Guide to a Blackboard course.

Instructors wishing to have a new guide created to address research assignments in their specific courses, or who would like resources added to an existing guide should contact their Liaison Librarian for assistance.

Posted in Libraries, New Materials, News & Events | No Comments »

Summon

By: Carolyn DeLuca

Published on: Monday, September 6th, 2010

Just in time for the fall, a whole new approach to doing library research.  UST Libraries is now offering Summon – a new discovery tool that allows you to search many (but not all) library resources the same way you search the free web. Think of it as a Google-like approach to the libraries’ resources.

Summon is a rich, bibliographic searching tool that retrieves content from most, but not all, of the library resources.  Your results will return such varied media as:

audiovideobookscore

journaldissertationconfebook

If the item isn’t available in full-text in Summon, it links you to the full-text (or tells you where the paper copy is on the shelves) through the Get it button.

It works by indexing content from thousands of publishers.  Then it retrieves results from publishers with whom we have agreements.  Summon doesn’t index content from all publishers, nor do we have agreements with all publishers.  So in many cases you’ll still want to use subject-specific databases to find more info.  But when you don’t know where to start, Summon is a good place.

Here’s an example of beginning my research on water as a human right.

summonscreenshot1

Your results are retrieved in ranked order.  If your keyword shows up in the title of the article, it ranks highest.  The ranking  order continues with  abstract, metadata, and finally full-text.  The full-text is available by clicking on the title and you can save records to export to email or Refworks.  Like Google, you’ll get many, many results because Summon indexes articles, books, and book chapters, as well as library catalog records.  However, don’t get overwhelmed, there are several excellent limiting options.

summonscreenshot2

Give it a try – go on, you know you want to.  I’m curious to know what you think about Summon so please feel free to comment.

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials | No Comments »