The CSP Library Launches 24/7 Reference Chat Service

The CSP Library has launched a Reference Chat Service that can answer your questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Moving on from the discontinued Meebo service, the library has become part of the AskMN Chat Cooperative. Concordia Librarians will field your questions during normal Reference Hours when they are available to chat. When a CSP Librarian isn't on duty or is away from the desk, your chat question will be picked up by a knowledgeable and qualified librarian (usually with a minimum of 5 years Reference experience) who has access to details about our resource collections and policies. Look for the Chat Widget in our Subject Guides and in WorldCat Local Search Results, and use the full screen Chat Form at the Library Home page under Ask a Librarian. The full screen chat form has more useful features than the Widget, including a Web Browser that is fully functional and which will automatically navigate to URLs that the librarian passes along.

When is the Library Open?

You can always find the Library Hours for the current week at the top right of the Library Homepage, running horizontally.

To find out what hours are beyond the current week - including holiday and break hours - click on the More Hours link.


Starting on Tuesday, September 4th, regular academic year hours will be in effect. This means the library and Circulation Desk is open:

Monday-Thursday: 7:45 AM - 11:00 PM
Friday: 7:45 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sunday: 1:00 PM - 11:00 PM

The Reference Desk is open and staffed by a Reference Librarian to answer research questions:

Monday-Thursday: 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM
Friday: 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM
Saturday: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Sunday: 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM

CSP Library Now Subscribes to CINAHL Plus with Full Text - The Premier Nursing, Health and Allied Services Database

We are happy to announce that the CSP Library now subscribes to CINAHL Plus with Full Text, the premier nursing, health, and allied services database available. From the EBSCOhost Web site:

It provides full text for more than 770 journals indexed in CINAHL®, including many of the most-used journals in the index—with no embargo. Of those, 464 are not found with full text in any version of Academic Search™, Health Source® or Nursing & Allied Health Collection™.  Offering complete coverage of English-language nursing journals and publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses' Association, CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.  In addition, this authoritative file offers access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, educational software, audiovisuals and book chapters. 

Locate this database via our Databases A-Z or Databases by Subject List, found on the Library homepage under Research Tools, or via this direct link: CINAHL Plus with Full Text (EBSCO).

New ebrary Subscription Gives Access to 75,000 Academic eBook Titles

On July 1st, the CSP Library became a subscriber to the ebrary Academic Complete collection of eBooks, which provides access to over 75,000 eBooks from a wide variety of academic disciplines: http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.csp.edu/lib/cusp/ 

View these books using your Web browser through the ebrary interface or download the book to use offline. Help for downloading and using ebrary eBooks with an eReader can be found here: http://support.ebrary.com/kb/category/en/download/ 

Downloading and using ebrary books on your eReader requires that you create a personal ebrary account (at no cost) and install Adobe Digital Editions software. ebrary books can't be downloaded to Kindle. iPod and iPad use requires additional software: http://support.ebrary.com/kb/using-ipad-to-download/

Wikipedia: educational curse or blessing?

Ah, the world of Wikipedia:

"...in a recent piece on Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in the New York Review of Books critic Martin Filler made several factual errors. When the architect complained, Filler petulantly replied, “I am surprised that for someone so concerned about his image and the spread of misinformation, neither Koolhaas nor his office has bothered to correct his Wikipedia entry.” (Adams, Cecil, "Is Wikipedia more reliable than the Encyclopaedia Britannica?")

Anyone who follows Wikipedia stories sees stuff like this all the time.  The site sometimes seems to have turned the world upside down. 

That said, I think that there is a lot to appreciate about Wikipedia.  After all, where else can you read about every episode from the Star Trek series, just to satisfy your curiosity?  And as Cecil Adams says, what better place to go to settle bar bets?

Seriously though, what about the world of formal education?  What kind of place does Wikipedia have there? 

I think educators should be imaginative when it comes to using Wikipedia with their students.  In fact, I gave a talk attempting to show just how useful Wikipedia could be to educators* (based on this paper ; slide show here).  As Adams points out, Wikipedia is a great place for "getting an initial fix on a serious research subject" - or, in other words, getting "your bearings" or "the lay of the land".  Wikipedia also has strict rules about writing entries using information from [primary and secondary] sources generally considered to be reliable, so the citations and endnotes at the bottom of the page can also be good places to get started with research.  The recently produced infographic above gives you a sense of what people are citing in Wikipedia ("MySpace" and "Facebook" are probably used for popular bands - the citing of search engines is more problematic).

As Adams notes about the goals of "Wikipedians", "providing a starting point for further investigation is all nondelusional Wikipedia editors aspire to accomplish."

In other words, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is great for "presearch" - but, of course, a terrible place to end.  Adams again: "The problem is when even those who know better rely on Wikipedia as the last step rather than the first in finding the facts."

So, is it ever OK to cite a Wikipedia entry?  As a general rule of thumb, no.  But I would suggest that if you are a recognized authority on a particular topic (few of us, I know) and come across an entry in Wikipedia that beautifully sums up some actual knowledge that you have, citing it, in this instance, can be very appropriate.  It all has to do with having more advanced knowledge.  And of course, most people who have this knowledge are constantly going beyond Wikipedia - and the internet, for that matter. 


* - for a) developing solid research skills, b) thinking critically about the nature of authority and evidence, and c) producing persuasive written and oral arguments (guidance needed of course)   


Image credit: http://gizmodo.com/5929207/the-top-50-sources-where-wikipedia-gets-its-facts

Google Books, Copyright, and Research

Just a couple weeks ago, a judge ruled that "authors can sue Google in a class-action lawsuit over its plan to create the world's largest digital book library..."

I'm glad that the lawsuit will be moving forward - and I also expect that when the dust clears, Google will be successful in at least keeping Google Book Search as it is.   

That would be great for serious researchers, because as it stands now, Google Book Search is an amazing tool.  Note what a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis has to say about it:

“Google has offered up another new toy for analyzing texts. I’ve been growing in my appreciation for Google Books and its controversial program of scanning in old books because it makes available, sometimes in pdf form, out-of-print texts which are not easy to locate. So now when doing research it is quite easy to track down footnotes, whereas in the past one had to copy the reference down, trudge over to the library, fill out an ILL slip, hope our librarians found a library willing to lend a 150 year old book, and then wait for it to arrive. Instead of weeks of hoping to get a glimpse of a page, now often you can find things instantly, delivered right to your desktop. (No, I don’t get paid by Google for my posts).”[i]

I did a presentation on Google Books earlier this year in which I talked about it in the context of copyright law, research, and data-mining - see here for the whole paper (there were technical difficulties and I had to give my presentation without my PowerPoint, as can be seen in the picture someone snapped below : ) )  In the research section, I pointed out some of the plusses* of Google Book Search for research:

• Check to see if a specific book covers something you’re interested in

• Find out which books cite the journal article you are interested in

• Cut down on interlibrary loan usage

• Discover rare texts and those with small print runs

• Highly granular searching: easily find historical concepts that are not easily located using   simple library subject headings.

• Confirm a quotation or see how a famous quote has been used

• Discover unknown authors’ and works….

• And of course… access to stuff that previously only libraries had… (picking out the “best of the best” – decades of collection development work by top-ranked libraries)

·         Minuses? No authority control (i.e. controlled vocabulary), OCR without human help (resulting in scans that are not fully searchable), flawed dates, classification errors, mismatched titles and authors, Gov doc issues, multi-volume issues, and scanning errors.

Google Book Search - a helpful but only supplementary tool in your research toolkit!

---

 [i] Kloha, Jeff, “Words, Words, Words”, Concordia Theology (blog), December 21, 2010, (6:00 a.m.), http://concordiatheology.org/2010/12/words-words-words/

  

Current Google developments

Even as Google is now taking down 250,000 links per week due to copyright infringement (more than fifty times the amount it took down in 2009 alone), it also seems eager to make its ever-popular search engine all the more appealing and useful. 

It recently released a video describing its new “Knowledge Graph”, which Alex Madrigal, writing in the Atlantic, says “makes the process of Googling something faster, easier, and better”.  Here is that video:

(see here and here if you would like more detailed analysis of the “Knowledge Graph”)

Interestingly, Google has also just re-launched a site that attempts to help instructors to teach about “information literacy”.  It is called “Google Search Education”, and at the site, one will find lesson plans about “picking the right search terms”, “narrowing a search to get the best results”, “evaluating credibility of sources” and more.  

(note that Concordia’s library has done some videos regarding these things as well.  See the tabs on our help page – here is the tab for research steps in particular – I’ll be interested in seeing how they compare!)

In addition, Google's Daniel Russell, their "Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness" (yes, this is his job title), recently did a talk at Princeton: "What Does It Mean To Be Literate in the Age of Google?"  It may be worth your time.   

As to how we might begin to address the notion that Google is the best source for everything, I think the following analogy may be a useful place to start: information is food.

 

Hat tips: http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/24/technology/google-search-copyright/index.htm  ;  http://cloudofdata.com/2012/05/googles-knowledge-graph-bringing-semantics-to-the-masses/; http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/update-google-search-education/40023; and http://blog.jweinheimer.net/2012/05/what-does-it-mean-to-be-literate-in-age.html