The goal of this workshop is to advance
your ability to find books and journal articles relevant
to your classes and research projects in religious studies.
Summarized below are the subjects covered in the workshop.
For a more comprehensive overview, consult the library's
Routes
to Research Tutorial or GALILEO's Online
Library Learning Center. Consult the Resource
Guide customized for this class for examples
of resources relevant to Religious Studies. Finally, use
the in-class or take-home
Exercises to solidify your understanding. At any
time, take advantage of the Research
Services team in Woodruff Library or myself (7-1277,
tbryson@emory.edu) for further assistance.
A. Getting Started
Consult with others and consult reference
works to develop or focus your topic and to identify quickly
some terminology, authors, and/or titles to begin with.
B. Constructing search phrases
Although most library catalogs and databases share
common elements in their search interfaces or processes,
they may appear very different. Checking for the following
types of features should help you familiarize yourself
with a new database quickly. See the Library
Tutorial for more guidance.
- Subject Headings-- Does the database
use a controlled vocabulary, such as subject headings,
to index its contents? If so, use it to select keyword
search terms to maximize your efficiency.
- Boolean operators-- These are the
operators 'and', 'or', and 'not' which may be embedded
in the search software invisibly or available as options
for you to select or input manually.
- Limit functions-- Most databases allow
you to limit search results by language, format, publication
year, publication type, or other categories.
- Wildcards-- These are symbols which
you can use to substitute for letters or word endings
to capture all forms of a word (e.g., women/woman,
religious / religion / religions / religiosity). The
symbols themselves vary from databases to database,
though *, !, ?, # and $ are the most common. Sometimes
a database offers automatic searching of other forms
of a word so you don't have to use any additional
symbols.
C. Finding books (monographs, edited volumes)
1. Catalogs-- Library catalogs list
books and journals, including full text electronic books
and journals, but not individual journal articles.
To find journal articles, use an online
database. EUCLID is Emory's catalog. Other
Library Catalogs are available from the General
Libraries webpage. Among the most useful are RLIN
which has the specialized resources of over 150 research
institutions and Worldcat
which includes the more general resources of most public
libraries and state colleges and universities.
2. ARCHE, GETS, and Interlibrary loan
(ILL)-- If Emory does not have the item
you want and you don't want to wait two or three weeks for
interlibrary loan, you can check to see if nearby university
libraries in the ARCHE
or GETS
consortia have the item; you can borrow from them directly.
Otherwise, you can submit ILL requests online through EUCLID
or RLIN
for materials we don't own. You can borrow books and get
photocopies of articles usually for free.
D. Finding
journal articles
Emory has access to hundreds of online databases.
Some are full-text archives of journal articles. Some
are merely indexes. Others contain non-periodical contents
like statistics. Use the Database
Locator to focus on the most relevant databases and
look at their individual descriptions or scope notes that
describe the content to see if the subject coverage is
relevant, the content is scholarly or popular, and geographic
and historical coverage is adequate to your purposes.
If a journal article is not available in its
full text form online, see if we have the print format
in the library. You'll need the author, title, journal
title, volume number, issue number, date and the pages
in which the article appears. The journal title is what
you will type into EUCLID to determine if we subscribe
to the journal. If we do not have it, click on the Interlibrary
Loan icon in dark blue at the top of the EUCLID screen
to submit a request. That office will contact other libraries
that have a subscription; their ILL staff will then photocopy
the article and send it to us.
http://web.library.emory.edu/subjects/humanities/religion/rel300/index.htm
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