Presentation outlining how First year Earth Sciences students at the University of Melbourne can maximise their use of the Library

1. School of Earth Sciences
Introduction to library resources.
Guido Tresoldi
Earth Sciences Librarian
1

2. What is the purpose of this presentation?
 To introduce main aspects of using the Library and
its resources at the University of Melbourne.
 To show you how these resources can help you in
your assignment.

3. Where is the Library?
Eastern Resource Centre (ERC)
Is the Physical Sciences Library. Collections comprise
Chemistry
Earth Sciences
Engineering
Mathematics and Statistics
Physics

4. Where is the Library?
It’s only 5
minutes
walk away
from Mc Coy
Building.

5. You got a topic…
Where to start?

6. Think about how to get your
information – The search cycle.
Start

7. Planning

8. Planning
Keywords…..
Analyse your topic for its main concepts

9. Planning
Identify main concepts
Topic: Evolution of Earth’s
atmosphere and oceans
main concepts
atmosphere oceans evolution earth

10. Planning
Identify main concepts
Topic: Earthquakes at plate
margins
main concepts
earthquakes plate

11. Planning
Expand keywords
Earthquakes Plate
Seismic, uplift, stress Tectonics, Continental drift.

12. Planning
Narrow or broaden your search
General search operators narrow or broaden
your search (called Boolean Operators) and, or, not
Atmosphere and Ocean and Evolution
Evolution or Oceans or Atmosphere
(Oceans or Atmosphere) and Evolution

13. Planning
AND - narrows your search
Evolution Oceans

14. Planning
AND - narrows your search
Evolution
AND Oceans

15. Planning
OR - broadens your search
Evolution Oceans

16. Planning
OR - broadens your search
Evolution OR Oceans

17. Planning
NOT - eliminates a word from your search
”Natural
Evolution
Selection”

18. Planning
NOT - eliminates a word from your search
Evolution NOT ‘Natural
Selection’

19. Planning
Truncation
How to pick up both ‘Ocean’ and ‘Oceans’ in
your search?
Use ocean*
Other examples: Mineral* for Mineral and Minerals
Volcano* for Volcanoes
Etc.

20. Search
and Locate
Sources

21. Searching Sources
 The Catalogue
 Discovery
(Library Database)

22. Searching Sources
Library homepage - starting point
for literature searching.
• You can navigate to the
Library homepage via the
Student portal, or via the
University homepage.
• Access to the Catalogue.
• Access to Discovery.
• Information about
opening hours, branch
locations (maps),
services, computer
facilities, borrowing
periods, overdue fines,
skills classes you can
attend, etc.

23. Searching Sources
The catalogue
• The catalogue lists printed and physical resources (books, print
journal titles, reports, music scores, maps, pictures, CDs, DVDs,
kits, e-books,etc. available within the University’s collection)
• Covers all the university library Parkville branches and country
campuses.

24. Searching Sources
Discovery
It is one large unified database from many sources
Journal articles
Images
Books

25. Searching Sources
Doing a keyword search in the catalogue
Origin and earth
25

26. Searching Sources
Getting results
26

27. Searching Sources
Reading your results
Dewey number
Status: Available, On Loan
etc.
Hyperlinked subject headings
– widens your search. 27
Location

28. Searching Sources
Doing a keyword search using Discovery

29. Searching Sources
Getting and reading your results
What type of document is it?
Source it Melbourne
In some cases you
can get it straight
away as full text.
You can refine your search

30. Evaluating Sources

31. Evaluating Sources
Options: What is a good one?
Google
Wikipedia Google
Scholar
Library Specific
Discovery
Catalogue databases
And more...

32. Evaluating Sources
Wikipedia
Strengths Weaknesses
Vandalism, biases and
Easy to use, fast deliberate factual errors
Omissions, oversights
Updated quickly
Lack of citations
Covers many subjects
Hard to judge the credibility
Links to related material See the disclaimer
Good for quick definitions,
Should not cite
overview, keywords

33. Evaluating Sources
Strengths Weaknesses
Easy to use, fast Web crawler: Search Internet search
engine does not evaluate
information on Web sites:
engines:
no quality control Google, Yahoo!,
Broad coverage: covers Lots of results: information Bing etc.
many topics overload, hard to refine the
search
Convenient Irrelevant information:
ranking algorithm
manipulation: Google
bombing, Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO)
industry
Updated quickly Internet sources can be
unstable
Free Advertisements

34. Evaluating Sources
Google Scholar
Strengths Weaknesses
Lots of results, hard to judge
Easy to use, fast
relevance
Breadth of coverage: all disciplines
Full-text not always available
Scholarly information:
Journal article abstracts, theses, No detailed records: often just the
books, scientist homepages, public title
patent records
No source list: no way to know what
A good starting point (especially with
is covered
Discovery)
Good for locating a specific item
(especially with incomplete details)
Sources are not expertly or
selectively chosen for inclusion
*

35. Evaluating Sources
Checklist for evaluating sources of information
• Who is the author?
Authority • What are his/her qualifications?
• Is there bias?
Objectivity • How are the claims justified?
Intended • General public or scientific
Audience community?
• Facts/figures/dates cited and
Accuracy references included?
• How up to date is the
Currency information?

36. Evaluating Sources
Quote from feedback from academic:
“The issue in many assignments students have accessed
the papers online, and very probably not through
Discovery, but through a keyword search in Google. So
they do not realise that it is available as a paper entity
and reference it as an online accessed piece of
material.”

37. Evaluating Sources
*

38. Evaluating Sources
Primary and secondary sources
Primary:
• A journal article reporting NEW research or
findings
Secondary:
• Textbooks, magazine articles, histories,
criticisms, commentaries, encyclopedias

39. Document
and Citing

40. Document and Citing
Referencing - how, what, why?
There are a number of In scientific and
Failure to properly
ways of referencing technical report writing
acknowledge your
other people’s work you will often want to
sources may leave you
(APA 6th; Harvard; refer to other work that
open to accusations of
Chicago) but they all is somehow related to
plagiarism.
share some features your own.
A citation is inserted A full reference is
at the appropriate point given separately for
in your text to indicate each citation, to enable
the existence of related the reader to trace the
work. corresponding work.
Creaney, N., 2008. How to Use the Harvard Style of Referencing [Online]
(Updated 13 March 2009) Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/ohlcv/how-to-use-the-harvard-style-of-referencing
[Accessed 23 February 2012].

41. Document and Citing
Examples in the Harvard style of citation
Reference List
Bryson, B 2005, A short history of nearly everything,
Transworld, London
In text citation
Bryson (2005) has argued that ...
OR
... as found in his analysis (Bryson 2005).
Examples found on University’s ‘reCite’ website. Accessible through Library
Home page and your LibGuide.

42. Got all your information – how
the library can help you with
your poster presentation?
Library has software/hardware at your
disposal such as:
Scanners
Colour Printers
Adobe Photoshop
GIMP
And more!

43. More information
How can I remember all this?

44. Libguides are your friend!
• Summary of what we learned
today
• Contains further explanation
and tutorials (including video)
• Has useful links
• Contact the library details

45. So… to recap
Plan how you will tackle the research. (Identify keywords, Boolean
searches)
Search possible resources to use such as: journal articles, books.
Locate resources in the library and online.
Evaluate the resources you have found critically. (is the information
you are using relevant, current, authoritative and reliable?)
Document the details of the resources you use. (Cite your sources
and avoid plagiarism).

46. Let’s go and look at the Library!
46

47. References:
Lawrence University. 2011. Katy Cummings '11 at the 2011 Institute on Lake Superior Geology meeting,
accessed 14 February 2012, <http://blogs.lawrence.edu/news/tag/marcia_bjornerud>
State University of New York at New Paltz. 2007. Thomas Schramm Wins Award For Presentation at National
Geology Meeting, accessed 14 February 2012, <http://www.newpaltz.edu/geology/story.php?id=3717>