Hi there!
My name is Rachel Karasick, I'm a librarian at the Australian National University with
a specific focus on supporting the academic disciplines of science, technology, engineering,
mathematics, as well as health and medicine.
Today we'll have a look at the library's online resources that can help you with your coursework
and your research. We'll also have a look at finding your textbooks online.
So let's get started.
The first thing you'll need to do if you're connecting to library resources from off-campus
is to login to authenticate in order to gain access to ANU Library resources.
So when you click on an e-book for example or you try to open an e-journal, you'll likely
see a window to log in via the single sign-on with your U number and password. If you're
already logged in to Wattle or another ANU online system you may not be prompted to login
because you're already all set. If you have any trouble with your username and password
you can contact the ANU IT Service Desk and they can help you reset your password and
just troubleshoot any login again issues you may be encountering.
So, before we even get started I'll show you how to in touch with ITS. I'm going to share
my screen with you (just one sec), okay here we go - now you can see what I'm seeing! So
So this is the ANU homepage, I'm sure you've all seen it before, but just if you need any
help getting set up with your password you would come up to Services and then under this
bar here we have Information Technology, and then if you hit the Help and Support link
it'll give you some information about how to access some help. You can log a job online
through ITS’s Service Desk Portal or you can give them a call to get help it in that
way.
So the next thing I'm going to do once we figured out how to log in and we're all set
with that – I’ll go to the Library home page.
So the ANU Library does have 5 physical branches on campus, but we also have so much for you
online. In fact, most of our most current and our more highly used resources are available
to you as e-books, online journals, we have databases and other digital research tools.
So today we’ll have a look at how to find some of those online resources to help you
study and jump-start your research.
So the first thing we'll take a look at is the Catalogue Search. So from the ANU Library
homepage there’s a lot of information and we have a couple of different search boxes
up here. So let's talk about SuperSearch a little bit later. But let's say I'm looking
for a specific book, a specific e-book, at the ANU Library I would come to the Catalogue
Search, and if we're looking for a specific journal title that's another place that I
would also come to take a look it's looking for those thing, those works, that ANU Library
owns and have access to online.
So if I were looking for a textbook I could look for Campbell biology, for example, I'll
type that into the Catalogue Search and so this is showing me 65 results. This
particular textbook is widely used and it's been used for a while by the ANU, so you see
that we have a lot of results, here we have 65. So you can have a look at when the different
versions were published, you can see down here that we have a couple that we have in
our reserve room at Hancock Library in print - that's probably not going to be quite as
useful to me as this one here. So this one we can see is printed material but if I wanted
to access the e-book you can see here in the medium that this one should be available as
an internet resource. So that's a quick way to get a sense of what format of the material
that you're looking at is in.
So if I click on this, this title, I can see a little bit more about the edition, I can
scroll down and get a sense of the table of contents, and if I find that this isn't actually
the one that I meant I can go back to the catalogue record and have a look for the one
that I'm actually after. Like let's say I maybe wanted the 2018 Edition instead of the
2019, I could come back and find that one, click on it. And then with any of our e-books
you just hit the View Online button and then I have access to the e-book here.
So you have a bunch of different options and different publishers have slightly different
different approaches to their e-books so there can be different ways to engage with them.
So almost all of them will have this Read Online option and most of them will also have
an option to download an e-book. So this is essentially the equivalent of checking
out a physical book so you have it for a certain period of time and then it eventually will
get returned to the library using a specific software program. It is really easy just if
you just want to get into the book really quickly just hit this Read Online button,
so I'll go ahead and open this in a new tab, and then over here I have the Table of Contents
for the e-book so I can actually just go to a specific area that I'm looking for. Like
let's say now I'm ready to look at a tour of the cell, I can go right to that section
of the e-book, and just read it online in this way.
So if you know you need to access it from offline for a bit you can also download it
so that's another option and then you can see there are also specific options to download
one chapter at a time - over here - that's another option for this particular e-book.
There are usually restrictions on how many chapters or pages you can download at a time,
so that information is usually here as well.
So I'll go back to the ANU Library homepage.
So that's one way to find an e-book if you're after a textbook for one of your classes online.
Another way that you can come in and find course readings - I'll go back to the library
homepage - and under the Catalogue Search there's this option that says Advanced Catalogue
Search. So if I click on that it's going to give me a couple of different options. If
I know that I'm looking for a specific title or author that's an option for me here and
there's also this option that says Course Reserved - this tab right here - so when I
click on that I can search by lecturer name or if I'm looking for a course name I can
also go ahead and type in a course name to find the course readings.
So let's say I'm looking for MEDI1001. I've put in that specific course number and it's
going to show me my readings here. So keep in mind a lot of these will be e-books or
online readings and you can come in and find things by the course name or a lecture code
or a lecturer name.
Alright so the next thing we'll take a look at on the ANU Library homepage is our Subject
Guides.
So Subject Guides are a really great way to get started with your research, to just see
what the different resources are in a certain discipline or subject area. So from the ANU
Library homepage there's a number of different ways to find it. One of the fastest ways is
just to come down to this Library Information box and two of the areas where I would find
Subject Guides are the How-To Guides (which are going to be more walkthroughs and tutorials
on software and different research techniques), the Subject Guides are a little bit more focused
on specific disciplines and library resources for those subject areas.
So you can see that we have them divided up by types of guides - you have arts and social
sciences; Asia Pacific; biology, environmental, physical and mathematical sciences (so a lot
of the science ones will be here); engineering and computer science; health and medicine;
and law. So library staff from all of the ANU Libraries put these guides together and
again they're curated collections of the resources for your subject.
I'll go ahead and click on this one. You can see we have a variety of different guides
here. If I were focused on environmental sciences I could click on the Environmental Science
tab and these are sorted all very similarly, they have a similar list of options, so you
can see over here there really are options that are sorted almost like the research process
itself.
So at the top we have Reference Sources - so again that's going to be your foundational
materials where you might look up definitions, research keywords and synonyms, before you
even get started with your research or a project that you're doing.
So these are some examples of resources. We also have a listing of dictionaries, encyclopedias,
handbooks and guides. There's information about books and e-books in your topic area,
so we usually have some featured books, some information about e-book collections where
you might actually go directly to find e-books, you can also again use the catalogue and subject
searches or topic searches. But this is one way to find collections of e-books as well.
There's a section on databases. So different databases that are going to be the most useful
for certain subject areas appear here. Journals and Magazines has some information about how
to find e-journals in your subject areas and then also a listing of some of the highest
impact journals in your fields. Then we have news, how to find theses, some writing and
referencing information and always contact information as well.
So just keep in mind that these guides are are here for you. We have them in a whole
range of different areas, and so you can come to them for any of the classes that you're
taking - including the sciences.
Alright so the next thing we'll take a look at (I had mentioned that we'd have a look
at SuperSearch later), so SuperSearch is a great place to start your research. It really
does go all the way down to the article title level. So whereas the Catalogue Search is
going to take you down to book titles and journal titles and the names of DVDs and other
kinds of media, it's not going to take you all the way down to specific research articles.
Whereas SuperSearch is going to take you all the way down to Journal article titles. So
it's a little bit more broad and it's really looking through all of ANU Library's resources
in a very granular way.
So let's say I wanted to broadly look up information about hydroelectrics or I know there's another
way to spell this all this. Looking for resources on hydroelectric power. I can plug in my terms
and you can see we have a lot of results, so we have over 600,000 results - sorted by
relevance - coming up here and if I wanted to get a little bit more of a sense of what's
in that article I could click on the Preview and it would give me some information, usually
a summary, some information about where this information was published, and you can get
a sense of what kind of material it might be as well.
There are a wide variety of limiters - ways to kind of refine your search - over here
on the left-hand side.
So let's say I was asked by a professor to only include peer-reviewed research in my
paper, I can select this option and that should take out resources that may be word newspaper
articles or published in popular magazines, things that haven't been reviewed by a peer
of scientists, a group of peer scientists, in the same fields before publication.
So you can see that my results have narrowed significantly. So I went from over 600,000
to 47,000 results - you can see that again up here at the top. If I only wanted to look
at resources that I could get right now that were available full-text online, I could click
this button as well and that's going to filter it to resources that I should just be able
to access immediately, because ANU Library has subscriptions to the journals they are
published in or they're available openly on the web through Open Access publishing.
So down below we also have content types. So this can be really useful if you're just
looking for say journal articles, there's usually also e-books; datasets; lots of different
format types over here, so we can see what all of those are.
But let's say I just wanted to look for journal articles, that will narrow my search results
a little bit more. And last but not least I can (there's a lot of other options here)
but I can narrow by date. So if I'm looking for the most recent material published on
this topic I can hit the last 12 months, so now you can see that my search results are
much more narrowed down, I have 2,900 results. It's still a lot of results, I probably won't
have time to read all of them for the paper I'm working on, so then I might actually go
back to my search and add in a few other terms. Like let's say I was looking at hydroelectric
pumping stations or something like that, I could go and add an and, and another group
of terms to narrow down the search results.
So if I actually have gone through the search and seen a couple of different results that
look useful for the paper that I'm working on, I can click on this Full Text Online link.
So let's say this is one that looks like it would be useful for the project I’m working
on. I select Full Text Online - what's going to happen is going to take me to the article
at the publisher site so now I can actually go ahead and read this article online if I
want to, but most of these sites usually also have something that says download PDF or PDF
and if I click on that it's going to give me a nice PDF that can download and save on
my computer and my research folder, or print it, however I want to work with that article.
So that was Super Search, very briefly. I'll just go back to the ANU Library website. So
that's just some quick information about how to access e-books, how to access journal articles
and other kinds of resources for your work at the ANU.
You can always get in touch with us if you have questions, if you can't find something,
if you can help with a citation that you have tracking it down. Feel free to get in contact
with us. Under About - up here - and then if you hit Contacts & Feedback, there's a
bit of information up here. So if you just have a general library question - how do I
find something; how does that thing in Super Search work again, feel free to just shoot
us an email here and there's also information on all of the subject specialists within the
library – down below - so you can also reach out to us directly if you have a question
that's really discipline specific. So my information is down here.
Alright so thanks for joining me for this brief overview of how to access library resources.
Hopefully you will be able to use lots of our e-books and electronic collections online
to support your learning at ANU this semester.