hello welcome to this brief introduction to library services and resources for graduate
students my name is roman koshykar i'm the computing and information sciences
librarian and graduate services coordinator at the rit libraries
and in this presentation i'd like to point out some resources on our website that will help
you get familiar with the different services and resources that the rit libraries offer
to graduate students this is intended primarily for our new graduate students who are entering rit
so one of my job responsibilities here at the library is to provide a liaison service from
the library to the rit graduate school and that is why i'm presenting this to you
now let's take a brief tour of the rit library website at library.rit.edu
at rit the librarians support specific colleges so you can meet with them if you have questions
and schedule a consultation and if you scroll down a little bit there's a button here that
says meet your librarian and you can get an understanding of which librarian meets
with which colleges and which program that way you can access our contact information
email addresses phone number you can also make an appointment to meet with any of us and we can
meet with you to talk about any kind of research that you're engaged in using our library resources
back to the library's home page librarians are available via chat email phone or by appointment
and you can also refer to schedules on our hours button here of service times that we
are available to meet with you you can also chat with a librarian
on duty by opening up the chat button and sending a brief question that way
taking a quick look at the library website there are search boxes in the center here that toggle to
our summon search which is a discovery of just about everything that we can access in
our library's online collections you can search by the name of a database
a specific subject resource that you may want to refer to and again the librarian for your
college would be very knowledgeable about which databases apply most to your field of study
you can look up the name of a particular journal and find out where we get that and how to
access it you can also search the library catalog to locate both printed and online
books both print and e-books can be found by searching our library catalog we also have
a number of different services here that are outlined under the services section and then
under research help many more access points to different resources that the library offers
one of the most important is the info guides these are online guides compiled by college librarians
they're searchable and available by subject and type so if you're interested in
locating guides on a particular subject area you can browse the info guide's main page but
you can also check to see if there is a guide for your degree or your program
as well the most important guide for you as a new graduate student is open in a new tab here that is
the information and services for graduate students guide you may want to bookmark this
guide and refer back to it frequently and the address is infoguides.rit.edu/gradinfo
notice that it is organized on the left side here with a number of different categories
and on the start page you can search summon from here as well and you can also
is very of course very highly recommended to start by meeting your college's representative librarian
and following again that meet your librarian link i mentioned searching for databases by name that
uses our database finder tool graduate students will need to consult appropriate databases in
your subject area and again the different college librarians are subject specialists in your field
of study we can walk you through which databases are the most useful for research in your field
on the guides page are links to a number of other info guides that can
help you with various aspects of graduate study one of the most important ones i think is
accessing library resources through google scholar more broadly that guide also walks you through
remote access to online library resources so that you can work from wherever it is that
you are you don't need to be present in the library or even on campus we maintain a list
of thesis and dissertation databases and websites for researching past
theses both written by rit students and by graduate students at other institutions
there's also some various resources on researching your thesis and dissertation and also in getting
help on writing and engineering and science and information about copyright and fair use
which actually goes off of the info guides page to another website maintained by the library
on the training page
link to streaming tutorials
using different citation management systems such as endnote and zotero and mendeley
the mendeley tutorials are at the time of this recording under development but i will post the
link here once those are ready so another reason to come back and check this guide frequently
as a graduate student at rit you have access to a subscription to linkedin learning
and that is something that is a benefit of being a student at rit a variety of
streaming video tutorials on a massive number of topics both technical and software training
and practical subjects such as business skills and professional skills and finally we also have
a link to the events calendar for the rit graduate school any events that they sponsor
will be found there under the services page
currently this is a bit thin but the reason that this page exists is to link you to
other places that you can access materials from outside of our library collections
basically if there is something out there that you need but we don't have it at the
rit libraries we can get a copy of it for you at no charge to you the library absorbs the cost of
getting this there is no fee to use this service it is a service available to graduate students
primarily what you're going to be using is ids express interlibrary loan and i have a
link here to that service we aim to resume access card borrowing in the near future where you can
physically use other libraries in the rochester area including the university of rochester
libraries however that is at the time of this recording unfortunately still
yet to resume but the services page again links you to services you can use to
expand beyond just what we have in our library collections on the support page of the guide
i have a link to rit scholar works our
online repository our institutional repository of scholarly work produced at rit including
all past graduate theses and dissertations written by students at rit this is a very
valuable research tool and also can give you an idea of what some students in your program
have researched and written about prior to you coming to study here you can also
get writing assistance from the university writing programs writing commons
they have a page detailing the information the services that they provide for graduate students
one thing to know about that is they do not provide copy editing or proofreading directly
at the writing commons but they do meet with graduate students to discuss
improving your writing skills and it is certainly something that you can use to your advantage while
you are studying at rit and writing research proposals papers and eventually a thesis
dissertation or capstone project and then i have a number of outside resources different things
that you may want to read and use as resources just to learn about being a graduate student
and that is found here on the page labeled support on the tools page i have links out to
guides on using endnote zotero and mendeley citation management systems that we
are interested in connecting you to these are very valuable tools for graduate research
another valuable tool is our dissertation and thesis calculator a time management tool that
is intended to help you plan out the process of writing a dissertation or thesis which is a
very lengthy project and then also on here are different browser extensions that can help you
connect to research as you search for things online you can install a google scholar button
which can instantly connect you from google scholar to
the full text from our library collections that's very helpful unpaywall allows you to
locate an open source or open access version of a research paper that you're interested in
and you can also use the endnote click plugin if you're an endnote user to organize
the research that you find online and make that available to you anytime anywhere no
matter where you're working the final page on this guide goes actually to a different guide
called thesis submission instructions this may sound premature at this time but remember that
we do have an official guide for the policies on how to submit your thesis or dissertation
for publication and that would be electronic publication through the rit libraries
finally if you go back to the library page under about rit libraries
we have a student newsletter that comes out three times per semester you can subscribe
to receive that by email or read the archive of previous issues very helpful to know that
and i mentioned before on the training page of the grad info guide is a link to the rit graduate
school calendar of events the rit graduate school web page also under their community
section has links to the graduate student advisory council and the doctoral student association
these are student-run organizations that i think are very valuable to to either join or to
sign up for their communications so that you know what is going on as a graduate student
on campus please come to visit the library at any time and remember that we are here
to assist you in your research and i will just briefly end by going back to meet your librarian
and pulling up the staff directory and you can learn who your librarian
is and meet with that individual at any time to learn more about our services
thank you for your attention and i wish you the best of luck as a graduate student at rit