Joe's Log
Today class met at Strozier library to learn how to utilize the libraries research tools. We met Mike who works behind the front desk of the Strozier library to help you out with everything from checking out books, computers, study rooms, textbooks (most of the major classes), go pros, projectors, scissors, and even rulers. Make sure to keep them inside the library otherwise you’ll receive a fine. These items are available for rent for 4 hours at a time. They have ‘research help now’ desks where graduate students can help with you anything research related. You can schedule an appointment if you need in depth help with your research. Mike described the complicated process of printing and how to set it up. We then proceeded to move to a private classroom and he began to tell us to go to FSUlibraries.edu. Before he dove into the website he stated that Wikipedia is not a viable source for a research paper but he doesn't have any problems with google. His criteria to trust something is if they have a long background and you know their credentials. He moved into each aspect of the library website specifically citation management. We opened ref works and made an account. This site can make your citations for you and is a place to save all your sources. He told us to make sure we verify that ref works is citing everything properly by going to purdue owl. He also said to question everything in college. We then moved to the database tab. You can find newspapers, magazines and, scholarly and peer reviewed journals. He talked about google scholar and said how there can be road blocks since it searches all the edu websites in the world and you can be taken to a Harvard database and not be able to access it since you don't have a Harvard login. Therefore, he encourages us to use other databases like academic search complete because it's very broad and a good place to start. These databases are very literal so you must input very specific terms to find what you want. The simpler the better and your search results will turn out with what you want. Don't ask questions it's not google. He then told us to play around with the website and search our own research proposals. Make sure to put the same ideas on the same line and different ones on another line. You should stay away from book reviews because if you use them as a source it will fall into the lines of plagiarism. Academic journals are written by professionals and made for professionals therefore they are very trustworthy. There's a system of check and balances to verify they're credible and don't contain false info. The only downside is it takes a very long time to go through the journal. Clicking inside a journal leads to the specifics of what's inside each journal. They contain the key terms used in each journal and a short summary otherwise known as an abstract, to help you understand what's in the journal. After you find a source you want to use you can export it right to ref works so it's saved for a future date. Mike then brought us to "one search." It contains all the info from all the databases in the whole library. You must make sure to be specific as possible otherwise you'll miss important information. We then moved to research guides tab and this contains the 32 librarians located here at Strozier. Each librarian builds guides they specify in. You can search our class and ask them specific questions about ENC 2135. You can even email them at 3 in the morning and they might answer you. We then took a survey about mikes presentation. Class was released after the survey.
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