Source Awards

And the source award goes to… I’m sorry that was the first thing I thought of when I saw the word sources. For serious though; I actually picked up a lot of neat tricks from this module on sources. I remember writing a paper not too long ago, struggling to get through worldcat and finding sources through OSU libraries for a group project was frustrating at times. If only I knew then what I know now.

Using limiters for results is a great way to narrow your search. On OSU libraries searches you can limit things based on date published, type (journal, peer reviewed journal, book, magazine, newspaper, etc.) language and a whole host of other things. This can really help you narrow down your search. Probably the most useful tip I learned was that if a book was only available in text, you can actually request the library to scan in the pages you need and get it through interlibrary loan! Article Express allows you to input as much information about the source you’re looking for and even allows you to write a note to the librarian. That’s pretty useful and somewhat amazing to me.

The google scholar choices also intrigued me. It’s convenient to know that you can search OSU libraries through it, and worldcat as well. I also enjoyed the tip that by using advanced searches on google you can limit results by type of website (.gov or .edu for instance) and this time I tried solidifying some of the boolean logic search tricks as well. I have to remember that the dash can be used to omit terms, basically acting as a minus sign, instead of a hyphen.

Overall this was probably my favorite and most useful module yet. I thought I was pretty good at searching the web, until I realized that there are several tricks that I wasn’t aware of.

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