New Place, New Catalog, New Everything!

This semester is going to be one of changes. First, we have a beautiful, new library very close to the main campus. There are gorgeous grounds, and lots of space for more books. We have ideas for how to use this space to the best benefit of the students, but please, give us some ideas!

We also have upgraded the look of our catalog, so it looks completely different. It is designed to work with the catalogs of other libraries in Rome and in the world, as well as to help you surf the materials in the World Wide Web more effectively. It also works with the Library Information Wiki, which has lots of information designed to help you.

There are now online workshops on Information Literacy and Citations.

Finding Images

We have made a new research guide about finding images on the web. You can find it at http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/images.html.

It has some of the best research guides on finding images that we have found, plus an excellent article from Information Today entitled "Looking for Good Art." There are a lot of images on the web. Of course, what you can download is often lower-quality, and you would still need to get permission if you formally published them.

And don't forget to give the proper citations!

Citations and Their Power

Citations and Their Power
It is important to cite your sources for a couple of important reasons: to avoid plagiarism, and to let others know where you found the source of your information. But in addition to this, well done citations are an important tool in the hands of a researcher. To see how they can work, let's take a hypothetical situation. Say you are interested in researching the topic "fascist ideology in Italy" and you find an article that is exactly what you want. The problem is, it's from 1978.

From your article, you can look at the author's list of citations and find books and articles, but of course, those will all be from before 1978. You can guess that there are probably other materials that have been written in the meantime. How can you find those? Wouldn't it be great if citations worked not only in the past, but in the future as well? That is, wouldn't it be great to know the papers and books that cited your article after 1978?

There is such a tool, and it's called a citation index. They are relative latecomers to bibliography and the first scholarly one (The Science citation index) was not published until 1963. Since that time, there have been many other citation indexes created. Unfortunately, AUR does not have access to any citation indexes. But, there are new tools that index citations: the search engines such as Google, and its spinoff: Google Scholar. It's important to realize that Google's power comes from citations. How does this work?

Google works by weighing those websites with many links/citations to them more heavily (that is, it places the sites cited by others toward the top). The idea seems reasonable: an item that is cited more heavily would be better and more important, but this is often not the case. People work together and agree to place reciprocal links on their own pages. Companies will pay owners of websites to place links to the companies' sites. They will do almost anything to get to be number 1 in Google! It's life or death for a business: whoever is number 50,000 in Google may as well not even be in there. For more information, you can read How Google Works at Braintique.com

Google Scholar works similarly to Google, but it is aimed at scholarly literature. You can search Google Scholar to get a list of articles and books, e.g. Lega Nord. If you scroll down, you will see a book cited: The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies.
You can click on this link and see part of the book, but you can also see where this book has been cited later, in this case: 2002 in the article Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration? in Comparative Political Studies.
You can click on this link, but many times it will say that they want you to spend money for the article. This is where you can search something else.

Journal List
To see if you can get the article, copy the name of the journal (Comparative Political Studies) go back to the AUR catalog and click on Journals on the left side under the College of Staten Island logo.
This will open a list of all of the journals that we have access to. When it opens, paste in the name of the journal and you will find out if we have access to this journal and what the coverage is.
In this case, we have it going from 1968 to the present and therefore, you can see this article.

This is the main way to work with citations: find a book or article, then find who else cited those articles later. Do the same with the citations you find in these books and articles, find where they have been cited and so on and so on. Most of the time, you'll find plenty of material.

Why is This So Difficult?
Can this be made easier? Yes, but it already is easier than it used to be when everything was in paper. Just this little search that we demonstrated would probably have taken a few hours 20 years ago.

But we are trying to make it even easier.

Working With Citations

Everybody loves to hate citations. They are a lot of work to create and organize. But when they are done correctly, they are actually a very powerful tool for research. How do they work? But first, let's discuss how to get some answers to those questions: how do I cite this book/journal article/website ....?

One way of getting these citation guides is to get into the catalog and click Help. This will get you into the AUR Library Wiki and you can either scroll through the pages or search for citation guides and you will find this page: Citation Guides. Here you will find a list of links to citation guides created at some other schools. These are the guides that we feel are the best. There are normally lots of examples to help you create your citation. There is also a separate guide for electronic resources--something that is still rather new. If you are having trouble, or there is a format that you can't find, e.g. a map, don't hesitate to ask us.

You can also search in the AUR catalog for Style manuals.

"Automatic" Citations
A real advantage today is that often, you can get citations automatically. Citations for most books can be gotten from WorldCat, while most journal databases offer a way to get citations easily. See the AUR Help Wiki for more information.
It's important to realize that these citations are often incomplete, and you need to add extra information such as page numbers, translators, or change information for different versions of the text, e.g. electronic. You are still responsible for any citations you give.

Still, this can come in very handy and give you 75% or more of a citation. If you're lucky, you might get 100%!

In the next post, we'll discuss how citations are not only a pain, but how they can help you do your research. That is, if they are done well.

Research Guides

Every library has guides to help their students do their research. These can be anything from highly in-depth guides to more general ones. Now that the internet is easily available, it is possible to simply link to guides on the web created by other libraries. Very simple.

The problem is that every library does not have access to the same materials. This is especially true today of the electronic databases, which contain thousands of journals. If two libraries subscribe to two different electronic databases, often they have access to completely different journals. This is why AUR's research guides are a little different. These research guides help you to find materials suggested by other libraries and then discover if those materials are available here.

When you click on a research guide, you will see a page with three frames. The top frame gives access to the different guides at selected universities. When you select one, e.g. Johns Hopkins, it will load into the lower left frame. From here, you can read their recommendations, tips, etc. and if they suggest a database, you can compare it with our list, which is in the lower-right hand side. From here, you can go directly into the database.


Here is an example of how it works. Johns Hopkins has suggested ABI/Inform, Academic Search Premier, and Applied Science & Technology Abstracts. You can check with our resources and discover that we have the last two, but not ABI/Inform.

If you want individual journals, you can search Electronic Journals through CSI, and there are links to our catalogs.

Finally, clicking on Help in the top frame reloads the first page back into the lower left frame, and you can also click on Search Google for Other Guides, which will do an automatic search for library guides on the topic you have selected.

The guides are always available when you click on Help in the Current catalog. Click here to work with them now.

Changes in the Library

What is a blog?

There are several changes in the AUR Library from the previous semesters, including adding a blog. Here, we will try to inform our users on new services in the AUR library, new books or websites, or perhaps simply some interesting news.

The first important development is that the library has changed! There is a different classification for the new books: the Library of Congress Classification. The old books still have their previous numbers, but we will be reclassifying them. To find the books, now you need a Library Map, which shows where everything is.

There is also a new catalog, which contains all books received after July 2006, and lots of electronic books. To see some of the differences, search Mark Twain in the old catalog, and you will find one book: The Innocents Abroad. Search for Mark Twain in the new catalog, and you will find five works, all electronic (you can tell by the little laptop computer), but in this case, look especially at the one named [Selected works].

When you look at the record, you will see a link called: Link to Resource. When you click that link, you will go to another site, which has links to almost all of Twain's works, and almost all of them are available for free. Twain's books are not the only things that are available in this way--literally thousands of authors and tens of thousands of books are available if you search for Digital Book Index.

All we can ask is to please, please, please, be careful of printing these types of resources. Ask us in the library. We can all save a lot of trees if we work together.

There are a lot more changes. These are only the most visible ones. Many more posts will follow.