Happy Holidays

I would like to wish all the students and staff happy holidays! Remember that there will be no classes from December 24th until January 1st. Classes resume on January 2nd.

Evaluating Web Sites for Research: Part 3

Before you use a web site and its information for research purposes, you must evaluate it based on how objective it is. You can do this by determining the author's intentions behind presenting the information on the web site.

Be wary of an author who is merely attempting to express his or her opinions; there may be a significant amount of biased information behind those opinions. Online discussion boards and forums are something to watch out for in this regard, because the postings are often subjective.

If the author is merely trying to sell you something, the information on the web site could be biased as well. Some companies that sell products over the Internet are prone to making outlandish claims about what they offer in order to increase sales.

Other authors of web pages will make biased arguments based on their political convictions, so when you are researching a politically controversial topic, be sure to examine all points of view.

Enter a Drawing to Win a Flat Screen TV!

Everest College is holding a contest to reward students with good attendance records. Any student who has perfect attendance between December 10th and January 10th will be entered into a drawing to win a flat-screen television set. And any student who is in a class that has perfect attendance will be entered twice.

Free Books

The library is giving out free books in subjects ranging from Criminal Justice to Accounting. You can find them in the library on the table across from the newspaper display. Take as many as you like.

Evaluating Web Sites for Research: Part 2

Two weeks ago, I began a series on how to evaluate web sites for research purposes. This week I will discuss more criteria you can use to determine if a web site can be cited for your term papers and projects.

One way you can determine the reliability of a web site's information is by its currency. The currency of a web site refers to how often it is updated with new information. Just because the Internet is growing by leaps and bounds, it does not mean that there are no outdated web sites. You can sometimes determine if a site's information is current by checking it against other sources, such as other web sites, books, magazine articles, and so on.

Some professions, such as computer science or astronomy, are constantly changing, so you need to make sure that what you download is up to date. For example, if you download a web site that lists Pluto as a planet, you will need to find another source of information, because astronomers no longer consider it to be a planet. Even the field of literature changes. If you are doing research on the life of the writer Norman Mailer, you should check several sources to see if he is still living (he recently died).

Many web sites also indicate when they were last updated on the site itself; others will indicate the publication date of the articles or information on the site.

Another way to determine if a site is outdated is by clicking on the links to see if they still work. A very outdated web site will have links that lead nowhere; you will end up seeing an error message or a note that the information has been moved.

Evaluating Web Sites for Research: Part 1

When you are doing Internet research for a term paper or essay, you need to keep in mind that not everything you download is going to be reliable, objective, or even factual. If you come across a web site that you are tempted to cite for a term paper, you must first critically evaluate the site to determine if it is appropriate as a source of information.

One thing you must determine is who published the site and for what intentions was the information posted on the site. Keep in mind that almost anyone these days can post information on the Internet with the right computer programs, and some web hosting sites such as geocities allow people to create their own web sites very easily, without any programming experience required.

So when you download a web site, you can easily tell what type of site it is by looking at its URL, which is also known as its web address. Web sites of educational institutions end with .edu, whereas government sites have the .gov extension and nonprofit organizations have .org in their URL. Be careful when downloading information from someone's personal web page. Personal web pages are not always reliable for research; they often just contain the author's subjective opinions, so you need to regard them with a grain of salt. You can usually tell that a site is a personal web page by looking at the URL. Personal pages often have an individual's name in the URL, or the name of a web hosting service, such as geocities, tripod, or AOL.

Next week I will discuss more tips and techniques on evaluating web sites for research purposes.

An Online Criminal Justice Directory

The FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice has a vast online directory of links to other web sites that cover nearly every aspect of the topic. If you need to find information on forensics, censorship, federal criminal justice agencies, or drug and alcohol information, this site is a good resource to check out.

http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/p/cjl-main.php

A Good Web Site for English Composition

Since many of you are taking composition courses at Everest, I thought I'd post a link to a helpful information resource. The web site is called Dr. Grammar, and it has a very extensive "FAQ" section that answers many common grammar questions people have. Dr. Grammar also has a directory of links to other resources that you can use. I highly recommend it.

http://www.drgrammar.org

Everest College 110 Year Anniversary

Today Everest College will be celebrating our 110 year anniversary! The festivities will take place from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., and will include a blood drive, discounted flu shots, face painting, and carnival games for the kids. Pizza, hot dogs, popcorn and snacks will be offered. It is going to be a great opportunity to get information about our educational programs as well. Bring your friends and anyone who might be interested in going to Everest College.

Important Dates for the Term

October 15th: Classes begin for the fall quarter

October 26th: Graduation ceremony

October 27th: Deadline for fall term adds/drops

November 4th: U.S. Daylight Savings Time (turn clocks back 1 hour at 2 a.m.)

November 22nd-24th: Thanksgiving holiday (school closed)

November 26th: Mini-term begins

December 1st : Mini-term deadline for adds/drops

December 24th-January 1st: Winter Holiday (no classes)

January 2nd: Classes resume

January 12th: Fall term ends

January 14th: Winter term begins

Recreational Reading Suggestions for the Break

I hope you are all enjoying your time off in between quarters. Now that you have some spare time to read things other than textbooks, you might consider kicking back to do some recreational reading. Here are some books I recommend:


"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez takes place in the mythical town of Macondo in Latin America. The novel explores such timeless themes as love, war, poverty and death.

"Garden Spells" by Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of two sisters who learn to reconnect after a long absence, and of an enchanted garden where magical, life-altering fruit can be found.

"Skeleton Crew" is a collection of short stories by Stephen King that will help get you in the mood for Halloween.

Finals Week

I know that since this is finals week, a lot of you are writing final term papers. If you need information on formatting papers in MLA or APA style, feel free to ask me any time. I have numerous books and handouts on these styles. You can also visit the "Citation Machine" link on the right hand side of this web page. Citation Machine is a web site that will automatically format your bibliography for you in either MLA or APA style.

A Useful Resource for Medical Assisting Students

The Stanford Health Library has an Internet resources section that contains over 17,000 reviewed links to reliable health sites on various topics. I urge you to check it out. The web site for the Stanford Health Library can be accessed at http://healthlibrary.stanford.edu.

A Combination of Search Engine and Encyclopedia

Most search engines will only return web sites and pages based on the keywords that you type in. This means that you may end up with a lot of results that are irrelevant to what you are looking for. However, there is a new experimental search engine that takes a different approach. It is called factbites, and it searches for web sites based on the topic area of the keywords that you type in. So if you are searching for web sites about cancer, it will give you sites that are about cancer, not merely web sites that happen to have the word "cancer" in their pages. It will also display whole sentences from the web sites that come up in the list of results, so you can decide which sites will be useful for your research. This search engine is still in "beta" (experimental) mode, so some searches won't work, but I encourage you to check it out.

The search engine can be accessed at www.factbites.com.

Constitution Day Trivia Contest

To celebrate Constitution Day, Everest College is now accepting entries for a trivia contest until September 17th. On September 18th (next Tuesday) a winner will be drawn from the correct entries. The prize is a free USB drive! To participate in the contest, you will have to answer seven trivia questions about the Constitution. The question forms for the contest can be found in the Student Resource Center. If you have any questions, please ask Roxanne Phillips.

New Books

The following books have been recently added to the library:

"You Mean I'm Not Lazy Stupid or Crazy?!" by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo

"Handbook of Technical Writing" by Gerald J. Alred, Charles T. Brusaw, and Walter E. Oliu

"Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society" by Donna M. Gollnick and Philip C. Chinn

"Technically-Write!" by Ron Blicq and Lisa Moretto

The first book is about coping with Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD. The other books are about how to do technical writing, and multiculturalism.

Resources for Evaluating Web Sites

There are literally billions of web pages and sites on the Internet, with information on nearly every coceivable topic. So how does a student doing research evaluate if a web site is a reliable source of information? The following resources posted below set down general guidelines that will help you evaluate whether a web site is trustworthy or not. Feel free to look at them.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html

http://www.library.jhu.edu/researchhelp/general/evaluating

And don't forget that there is a link to the Librarian's Internet Index on the right hand side of the page on this site.

New Interlibrary Loan System

The Everest College Student Resource Center is now a member of SWIFT, which stands for Statewide Interlibrary Loan Fast Track. An interlibrary loan (ILL) is loan in which a patron can ask a library to borrow books from other libraries in the ILL network. For example, if you come to the Resource Center and we don't have the book you need, we can request it from other libraries that are members of SWIFT, if they have it. This network is a statewide interlibrary loan system, so we can request books from any library in the state of Colorado that is affiliated with SWIFT as a book lender. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Announcement

The online resources site for Everest College students has a new web address. It can now be found at the following link:

http://learningresources.everest.edu/

For those of you who have never used this site before, it provides numerous resources that you can use for your academic and career needs. When you access the main page, you can click on "General Resource Links" at the left, and it will take you to a listing of sites that have everything from online encyclopedias, career advice and government resources, to dictionaries and APA style guides.

Click on "Resource Links by Program" and it will lead you to web pages that have resources specifically geared toward each program Everest College offers. For example, clicking on the "Criminal Justice" link will take you to a listing of web sites you can access for research, such as criminal justice statistics, police organizations, and more.

An article about wikipedia you might want to check out

Wired.com has an interesting article about Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at Caltech who has built a database of millions of edits that have been made on wikipedia, the online encyclopedia your teachers want you to avoid. It turns out that Griffith has been able to track just exactly who has been editing the articles on wikipedia by tracing their IP addresses. The article can be found at the link below.

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

A Good Online Resource on Plagiarism

If you are wondering what the difference is between original research and plagiarism, there is a good web site that explains plagiarism in detail, and how to avoid it. Purdue University's guide to plagiarism can be found at the following address:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/01

I think you will find this web site helpful when you are assigned a term paper, and have to quote or cite sources for research.

Keyword Searching in the OPAC

Last week I discussed searching the library's OPAC according to subject, but this week I will touch upon keyword searching. Unlike subject headings, books and other media are not indexed with keywords. However, keyword searching is a much more flexible method of locating books and other materials. Keyword searching can be useful when you can't remember the exact title of a book. For example, if you have a fuzzy idea that Maya Angelou wrote a book with a caged bird in the title, but can't recall the title word for word, you can type "caged" and "bird" in the search field, and it might retrieve "I Know When the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, if the library has the book.

Another advantage of keyword searching is that you can locate books using jargon and buzz words if no subject headings have been created yet with those terms in mind. In databases that use Boolean connectors such as "AND" "OR" and "NOT" keyword searching is especially versatile, and can be used to find very specific books. For example, if you need to find information on Norse mythology but not Greek and Roman (classical) mythology, you could type in the keywords "Norse," "mythology," and "classical." You would then choose the AND connector between "Norse" and "mythology" and choose the NOT connector for "classical." This will bring up all the books on Norse mythology that the library may have, while excluding books on Greek and Roman myths, so you won't have to sort through as many results to get what you need.

There is a disadvantage to keyword searching that you must look out for: false drops. Last week I briefly mentioned that using a keyword such as "Mars" could retrieve anything from books on the planet, the Roman god, or even science fiction novels about Mars. If you are only looking for information on the planet itself, then books about the Roman god known as "Mars" are the false drops that you don't want, because they are irrelevant to what you are looking for. Whenever you search for books in an OPAC, you must keep in mind the various advantages and disadvantages of each search strategy, whether it is with keywords, subject headings, or other methods.

Subject searching in the OPAC

In the library's OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) there is an option to search for books according to subject. When you do a subject search, the OPAC will find books that have been cataloged with the subject headings that the book happens to be classified under. For example, the book "Data Structures and the Java Collections Framework" has the subject headings "Java (Computer program language)" and "Data Structures (Computer science)."

There are a lot of advantages to searching with subject headings. With subject headings, you can find many similar books even if the authors have used different terminology to describe them. Subject headings are devised in a logical manner, and are arranged according to whether the headings are related terms, narrower in focus or broader in focus, which could help you conduct more precise research. And although keyword searching is very versatile, using a keyword search can yield many irrelevant results if not done carefully. For example, using a keyword such as "Mars" could find books about the planet Mars, the Roman god of the same name, or even a music CD by the rock band called "30 seconds to Mars."

There are advantages to both subject heading and keyword searching. Next week I will discuss keyword searching in more detail.

How to Use Google More Effectively: Part 3

Last week I discussed how you can find news articles online using Google's advanced archive search. This week, I will show you how to use another interesting feature on Google. It is called Google Scholar, and with this tool you can find scholarly articles from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Google Scholar will come in handy when you have to write research papers for your courses.

To get to Google Scholar you will click on the "advanced search" link on the main Google page. Once you get to the advanced search screen, scroll down to "topic specific searches" at the bottom. Under this heading is a link to Google Scholar; clicking on that link takes you to the Google Scholar search page. To see more options for searching with Google Scholar, click on the "advanced scholar search" to the right. This will show you all the options available for finding scholarly articles and books.

The Advanced Scholar Search page allows you to limit your search to specific subject areas, which is useful when trying to find articles within a particular discipline, such as medicine. You can also find articles written by a specific author, or articles published in a specific academic journal.

When Google Scholar gives you a list of articles in response to search terms you have entered, it is important to know how to use the options that come with the search results. For example, if you are looking for articles published on stem cell research, and one of the articles listed seems relevant to your topic, you can click on the "related articles" link below the article to get others like it. Sometimes, if the article is in pdf format, you have the option of clicking on "view as HTML" to get a web page version of it.

As a research tool, I highly recommend Google Scholar.

How to Use Google More Effectively: Part 2

Last week I discussed how to use the advanced search feature on google.com to find specific topics of interest. There is another feature on the advanced search page that you might find useful: the google news archive search. The link to this feature is under the heading "topic specific searches" at the bottom of the advanced search page, and it allows you to search for news articles that have been published many years in the past.

After clicking on the link for this feature, you will see a web page with a search field. You can enter a topic of interest in the field, such as "Barack Obama" and clicking on the "Search Archives" button will lead you to news stories that have been published about him. Also, you can choose the "Show Timeline" button, and it will give you news articles in chronological order about Barack Obama.

If you want more options to search for news articles, you can click on the link that says "advanced archive search" on the right. This will lead you to the advanced search options that are available. Here, you can limit results to articles by a specific publication, such as the New York Times, or articles published within a certain time period. To get free articles, you can click on the drop down menu next to "Price" and select "no price."

If you are looking for news articles for your assignments, the news archive search is a valuable tool.

How to Use Google More Effectively

Google is one of the most popular search engines on the Internet; it is also one of the most versatile. It is important to know how to use Google effectively, however. Since there are literally tens of millions of web pages on the Internet, an ineffective search could yield many irrelevant results, and the web pages that you're looking for will turn out to be the proverbial needle in a haystack. So a well thought out search strategy can significantly narrow down the results to a manageable amount.

This is where the "Advanced Search" feature on Google comes in. On the main page of google.com there is a link on the right to the advanced search area. When you click on that link, it will take you to all the available options for a more discerning search. At the top of the page, there is a "find results" section. In this section you can find pages:

That contain ALL the search terms you type in
That contain the exact phrase you type in
That contain at least one of the words you type in
That do NOT contain any of the words you type in

For example, if I wanted to find historical information on the Titanic, but wanted to exclude web pages about the movie of the same name, I could type the words "Titanic" and "history" in the "with all of the words" field, and then put "movie" or even "Leonardo DiCaprio" in the "without the words" field. This would find web pages about the sinking of the Titanic, while leaving out web sites about the movie, so you won't have to sift through as many results.

You can also search for web pages according to how recently they've been updated, web pages that are made in a particular file format-such as pdf files-or even web pages created within a specific web site. If you are looking for information on a very specific topic, doing an advanced search on Google is recommended.

Used Magazine Sale

From June 4th to June 8th, the library will be having a used magazine sale. Back issues of the following magazines will be sold:

• Business Week


• Consumer Reports


• Ebony


• Forbes


• Jet


• Library Journal


• Newsweek


• Sports Illustrated


• Time

The cost is 5 cents per magazine or 10 magazines for a quarter.

An Interesting Search Engine You Can Use

Google is now beta testing an experimental search engine. It is called "searchmash" and it has no advertising at all, and when the user simply types terms into the search field, it will simultaneously retrieve images, videos, wikipedia articles, and web pages at once. It can be found at www.searchmash.com. I suggest you check it out. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

Using the Internet versus library books

Although the Internet is a very useful information resource, it is important to remember that not all research for term papers can be done exclusively on the web. And not everything that is found on the Internet is acceptable for research. A lot of what you find on the Internet is either misleading, biased, inaccurate, or outdated. Beware of web sites such as wikipedia.org since such sites contain information that anyone can add to, so there is no way of knowing if the articles are authoritative.

However, there is a lot of useful information to be found on the Web, but you have to know where to look. A good site to use is LIRN. It stands for Library and Information Resources Network. It contains databases that cover nearly every conceivable topic, from capital punishment to religion, and it is indispensable for conducting research on term papers for your courses. If you have any questions on how to search these databases, I'll be happy to help.