Library resource highlight: library eBooks

Tags

Ebooks, faculty, research, students

About Kirkwood’s eBooks

Kirkwood Library Services has a huge collection of eBooks, and all can be found through our main library search (WorldCat search). Kirkwood’s eBooks look and work quite differently from the eBooks or audio books you might check out from your local public library. In general, instead of loading them to a mobile device through a special app, our eBooks either appear immediately in your browser, or download in chapters as PDF files.

How to search for eBooks

There are a few different ways to search for eBooks:

1. Use the library search from our homepage, also called WorldCat Discover. This is a “meta-search” that searches multiple eBook collections at once. For a demonstration of searching for eBooks, see this video on our Research Help guide. You can search by topic, title, or author.
2. Search individual eBook collections to use special search features or filters of a certain collection. The following databases all contain eBooks:
   1. EBSCOhost eBooks contains our largest collection of eBooks at over 150,000 titles. Titles can be read immediately on a computer or tablet, and portions can be downloaded. Page limits for downloading vary from title to title. Many titles may be checked out and downloaded using Adobe Digital Editions. Directions for this can be found in the Library’s Research Help guide.
   2. Project MUSE is a scholarly collection of eBooks and journals from major university presses. Many titles are also open access, making them even easier to share with students and make print copies for yourself. Open access titles are marked with “OA” and have an open padlock icon.
   3. Gale eBooks, formerly known as Gale Virtual Reference Library, is a unique collection containing many encyclopedias as well as some scholarly titles. If you want to search for encylopedia articles, this is going to work much better as a direct search, instead of trying to get at those articles through the WorldCat search.
   4. Salem Press is another specialized collection containing encyclopedic type articles from books. Most titles are related to history topics, and include collections of primary historical documents.
   5. DSM Library contains an online edition of the DSM Manual of Mental Disorders, as well as a few other selected APA published titles.
   6. Opposing Viewpoints contains a collection of essays from the popular “debate book” collection that has long been a staple of both Kirkwood libraries. Essays are browsable and searchable by topic.

Note to faculty

All eBooks can be linked directly from Talon. Most databases will provide a link or “permalink” that will provide a consistent link to a specific title or chapter. If you’re unsure about how to link to these resources, please contact the library for help.

Just as faculty can request book purchases for the library, you can also request eBook purchases. Not all book titles are available as eBooks, but we are happy to investigate any book you want to provide access to for your students. Just email the library (library AT kirkwood.edu) or chat using the “Ask a Librarian” function on the library website to make a request.

Library Streaming Video Options

“157:365” by chrisjtse is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

 

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we relied on DVD or even VHS technology for viewing films outside of a movie theater. Now we’ve come to expect streaming video availability for just about everything! At home we might use YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, or any of the newer niche streaming services for our video viewing needs. But at Kirkwood Library Services we have been adding more ways to access streaming video for educational use. Let’s look at a few of the options:

1. Films on Demand is a comprehensive video database, including documentaries, world cinema, and specialized videos in some academic areas like history (archival) and nursing. Like all of the library databases, Films on Demand may be accessed through our A to Z databases page, linked from the library homepage. It can also be bookmarked with this URL: https://guides.kirkwood.edu/fod.
2. Kanopy is another comprehensive video database, and contains a wide range of educational videos produced by PBS, BBC, Documentary Educational Resources and more. Like Films on Demand, it is searchable by known title or by subject. The direct URL may be bookmarked: https://guides.kirkwood.edu/kanopy.
3. Symptom Media is a newer streaming video service that provides short videos for mental health education and training, with a library of over 500 mental health simulations. We are seeing it used in the fields of nursing, education, human services, and psychology. The bookmark URL is: https://guides.kirkwood.edu/symptom.
4. The Library continues to purchase DVDs by faculty request. If the video you need isn’t available streaming, please contact a librarian to request the purchase of a DVD. Find out more about Kirkwood’s VOD service for faculty here.

Better Study Habits

We have a student project to share with you today on the LibBlog! Two sociology students here at Kirkwood, Camden Roeder and Angel Franco, have created a one-page study habits guide. In their research they found some quick and easy ways students can boost the effectiveness of their study time. Take a look and try out some of their suggestions as you prepare for your final exams. And the best of luck to you in your last days of classes and finals!

Better Study Habits

New Database Subscriptions!

Tags

Databases, dsm 5, film studies, human services, nursing, psychology

Back in October the Library had trial subscriptions to three different databases, all requested by Kirkwood faculty. We are pleased to announce that we have decided to subscribe to two of these, and both will be available beginning in January 2020.

Please welcome the newest additions to the Kirkwood Libraries Databases collection:

1. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text

This database provides a collection of scholarly and popular articles on film and television topics. It strives to be comprehensive and balanced, and as the title suggests contains the full-text of indexed articles. Besides the obvious uses in film studies, this content could also be used by students writing research papers in any number of different courses where a film or series is used as source material. As a bonus, this database is contained in the familiar EBSCOhost interface.

2. Symptom Media: Films for Mental Health Education

This collection of short educational and training films contains mental health simulations, and includes assessment tools related to DSM 5 and ICD. We heard positive feedback on this content from faculty in psychology, human services, and nursing & allied health.

Thanks to all the faculty who recommended these databases and gave us feedback on their potential usefulness for our students. Check the library website in January to try them for yourself!

New Health Reference Database

  Kirkwood Library Services announces subscription access to an extensive set of consumer health reference books. These 82 (and counting) books cover a wide range of health topics, including stress, cancer, women’s health, men’s health, sexual health, dental, depression, diet & nutrition, and many more.

All titles contain basic, authoritative information presented in language understandable to non-experts. They provide background information on each topic, as well as in-depth discussion of treatment options and prevention, key statistics, and sources for further research. This database is updated regularly as new editions are published for each topic. It’s the perfect resource for a student researching a health topic for a speech or essay.

These titles are full-text searchable directly from the Health Reference Series database, and searchable by subject keyword through the Library’s WorldCat Search. As with most of our subscription databases, this is available to all Kirkwood faculty, staff, and students, on or off campus, by logging in with your k number and password.

 

Subscription Database Trials: Round One!

This fall your Kirkwood librarians have lined up trials for 4 different databases that have been suggested to us by faculty over the past semester. The first of these database trials is already underway!

Health Reference Series by Omnigraphics is actually a long-standing book series with in-depth and authoritative consumer health information. The Health Reference Series Online database simply takes the chapters from this book series and makes them searchable, readable, and downloadable online. We often recommend these books to students in composition or speech classes who need some good, solid information on a disease, disorder, or other health matter, but don’t want the highly specialized information a nursing or allied health student might need.

So if you have a minute to spare and an interest in trying out this database, please check it out, and let us know what you think! Also: stay tuned to this blog for information on Database Trials: Round Two, coming the first of October.

Health Reference Series Online

Feedback Survey for Health Reference Series Online

Free access to scholarship on gun violence

Project MUSE, a well-known non-profit provider of online scholarly materials for academic libraries, has worked with a number of publishers to provide free access to a collection of eBooks and online journal articles on gun violence. In a statement accompanying this release they stated “the goal is to encourage the broadest possible engagement with current research and expertise on [gun violence] as the latest round of gun policy debates and discussion continue in the wake of shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio.” Project MUSE provided a link to the collection, which is free and open to the public. Please make use of these high quality materials and share widely.

http://bit.ly/MUSEinFocus-Gun-ViolenceEMMA 

Summer Updates to Library Resources

Tags

credo instruct, Databases, Gale, Opposing Viewpoints, PsycArticles

Welcome back!

Over the summer there have been some mostly-minor changes to our online information resources, including all the Gale-owned databases, PsycArticles database, and the Credo Instruct tutorials collection.

1. Gale databases (this includes Academic OneFile and Opposing Viewpoints) had some big changes. First, their interface has been updated (improved!) with the aim of making them more consistent and more modern, and to ensure they meet accessibility requirements. The downside for some faculty is that the links to any bookmarked or otherwise linked articles from these databases are most likely now broken. You will need to go back into the database and grab that new link to put in Talon. Directions for inserting links to database articles are here in our Faculty Services guide. Just ask me (kate.hess AT kirkwood.edu) if you have any problems with this process. I’m happy to help!
2. PsycArticles has also changed its link. If you have copy and pasted a direct link to the database or to articles within the database into your Talon, you will need to update those links. The content is still there, but the links have changed.
3. Credo Instruct has added several new tutorials to their trove of research, critical thinking, and other information literacy tutorials, videos and quizzes. New tutorials are:
   • Research for Persuasive Writing
   • Selecting Appropriate Digital Sources
   • News Reporting vs. Opinion Pieces in Journalism
   • Evaluating Digital Sources Using Lateral Reading
   • Digital Privacy
   • Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Summarizing

Remember you can find out about all the resources and services the library provides to faculty over at our Faculty Services LibGuide. Best of luck in your new semester!

 

Let’s all become fact-checkers

Tags

evaluation, Fake News, Information Literacy

Even before the term “fake news” gained widespread use during the 2016 election campaign, Kirkwood faculty widely agreed (72% of those surveyed in 2015) that students need to do better at evaluating information sources used in their research.

We at the Library often get requests from faculty to help teach students how to effectively evaluate information sources, so we are always on the lookout for the best ways to teach these important skills. We have used tools like the CRAAP Test, which does a good job of guiding us to dig more deeply into a source, past its initial appearance. However educator and researcher Mike Caulfield has found that this deep dive to interrogate a source — an approach that serves us well in the world of academics — does us a disservice when we try to apply it to the overload of information in our daily lives and on our social media feeds. What this world of attention-grabbing, misleading headlines, and outright lies needs is a simple and quick approach that is easily understood and learned by students (and teachers and librarians!) of all ages. 

Enter “Four Moves and a Habit”, a process adapted from the work of professional fact-checkers to quickly gauge whether a particular news story, website, or piece of information is worth the time needed for the “deep dive”. Caulfield published an extensive (and free) online book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, describing this approach in great detail back in 2017. Since then he has been developing teaching materials and testing the method out on college as well as younger students to fine tune it. As of now these are the tools I recommend for teachers to learn for themselves and use with their students:

1. The (short!) YouTube video series “Online Verification Skills”
2. And as a reminder once you’ve learned the steps, this handy infographic of the 4 moves. 

I Heart Books!

There is a funny (to my mind) misconception that many people have about the work of librarians, and that is that we often sit around reading. This may be true of many of us librarians when we are not working, but one of the great tensions of our lives (well, of mine anyway) is that we are surrounded each day by books that we have little time to read. Well, October is National Book Month, and this made me pause and think back to why I was pulled to the profession of librarianship, and I can tell you it was all about the books. Surely others have expressed their love of books or the importance of reading in their lives more eloquently, more passionately, more analytically, more humorously, more engagingly than I, more deeply than I, but nevertheless I want to share.

I loved to read when I was very young. I’m sure I was read-to very often as an infant and toddler, but I mostly recall wanting to do the thing myself. I wanted to hold the book, and I wanted to decipher those symbols, to discover their meaning with my own eyes and mind. I remember sitting one day in the back of the car on a family trip, holding “Horton Hears a Who” in my lap, turning through the pages and telling myself the well-rehearsed story, when I suddenly realized that I knew what each word said, that I was actually doing the thing! I’ve been hooked ever since. But it was several years later at age 9 that I was browsing the book shelves at home and found “Danny the Champion of the World”, a book that had been given to my older brother (who shares the title’s namesake), and that quickly became my very favorite book in the world. I remember reading it, getting to the end, and immediately flipping the book back to its front cover and starting it again, from the title page and dedication all the way through to its exciting, dramatic, and touching conclusion. Ah! I can still feel that excitement and anticipation of a great story masterfully told, with complex, engaging, and troubling characters. I couldn’t have put it in words at the time, but looking back there was some mystery behind the story that I wanted to solve. How did this Roald Dahl, this name typed on a page, captivate my attention? How did he make me see Danny and his father in their caravan eating their dinner so vividly, how did he make me gasp when trouble descended, and laugh with them as they plotted one of the most satisfying revenge stories ever told?

Kate (Kirkwood librarian) and her daughter, with author Michael Chabon in Minneapolis, December 2016. Five hour road trip? Totally worth it.

That mystery is what keeps me reading voraciously to this day; it’s what keeps me up past midnight with a story I can’t put down; it’s what makes me drive for hours to a faraway bookstore where I can meet a favorite author and have them sign my book on the title page that retains my 9-year-old’s magical sense of the author as a person with miraculous abilities somehow tucked in behind that name typed at the front of the book, present but invisible within the words of the story. Author Haruki Murakami said recently that between author and reader “there is a special secret passage between us, and we can send a message to each other.” He too knows this magic that I sensed as a young reader and continue to feel today.

So thank you to all the authors, editors, and publishers that make books possible. And thank you to the librarians and booksellers who make those books available to us. At Kirkwood Libraries we have lots of great books to choose from in our Popular Books collections, and we hope you can find that perfect magical package of printed words on paper that gives you just the story you need.