Digital Literacy. Library Tutorials. Jump to Navigation Ask Us! Off-Campus Access Libraries | Colorado State University You are here Home > Help > Library Tutorials Research Strategies & Searching Techniques We have a series of workbooks built with these tutorials and tutorials from other libraries available with a quiz here: Library Tutorial Workbooks Anyone may link to these tutorials without requiring explicit permission. Colorado State University Libraries Tutorials by Colorado State University Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .
Running the tutorials requires the free Adobe Flash player Library Catalog Help (Books & Other Materials) Tutorials provided by our Database Vendors Main menu. Home - Evaluating resources - Library Guides at UC Berkeley. To find out more about an author: Google the author's name or dig deeper in the library's biographical source databases. To find scholarly sources: When searching library article databases, look for a checkbox to narrow your results to Scholarly, Peer Reviewed or Peer Refereed publications. To evaluate a source's critical reception: Check in the library's book and film review databases to get a sense of how a source was received in the popular and scholarly press. To evaluate internet sources: The internet is a great place to find both scholarly and popular sources, but it's especially important to ask questions about authorship and publication when you're evaluating online resources.
If it's unclear who exactly created or published certain works online, look for About pages on the site for more information, or search for exact quotations from the text in Google (using quotation marks) to see if you can find other places where the work has been published. The University of South Carolina Beaufort. So, you're still getting those 1,670,000+ responses to your search queries on the Web, and you're still too busy to do anything about it, like reading the lengthy, and sometimes confusing, "help" screens to find out how to improve your searching techniques. Look no further! Real help is here, in the USCB Library's BARE BONES Tutorial. You can zip through these lessons in no time, any time. They are very short and succinct; each can be read in a few minutes. The information contained in the following lessons is truly "bare bones," designed to get you started in the right direction with a minimum of time and effort.
Lesson 1: Search Engines: a Definition Lesson 2: Metasearchers: a Definition Lesson 3: Subject Directories: a Definition Lesson 4: Library Gateways and Specialized Databases: a Definition Lesson 5: Evaluating Web Pages Lesson 6: Creating a Search Strategy Lesson 7: Basic Search Tips Lesson 8: Searching with Boolean Logic and Proximity Operators Lesson 9: Field Searching User Agreement. The Best Research and Reference Sites Online. Whether you're looking for the average rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, researching Roman history, or just having fun learning to find information, you'll get some great help using my list of the best research and reference sites on the Web. Types of Reference Sites There are generally two types of reference sites. The first consist of specialized Web sites maintained by subject experts, who will provide detailed and specific responses to your questions.
The second are run by generalists (often reference librarians) who don't necessarily answer your question but point you to the best resources for conducting your own search. Which Kind Of Reference Site Is Best? Which type of these resources you choose depends on what your question is. If you're interested in a really complex or obscure topic—the history of the mullet, for example—your best bet is to ask an expert on that subject. Find and Ask An Expert Via Search Engines "expert+subject" (substitute your own keyword for "subject")