Using Library Search for your assignment

Speaker: Welcome to this video from The Open University Library on using Library Search for your assignment. Slides for the video and an accompanying handout are available to download. You can find the link in the video description on YouTube or on the using Library Search for your Assignment page on the Open University Library website. You will need to be a current Open University student or member of staff to download them. 

 

We strive to make our sessions as inclusive and accessible as possible. I will therefore be including audio description of any visual elements that we use in this session. 

 

Learning outcomes. 

Let's take a quick look at what the session will cover. This session will help you to find and access the information you need for your assignments and your studies. By the end of the session, you will be able to perform a title search in Library Search. Your tutor might give you a reference to a book or a journal article and ask you to find it in the library. We will show you how to use Library Search to search for sources by title. 

We will also show you how to search by subject. There will be occasions when you are asked to find information on a particular topic, so we will look at how to do a search using keywords to find resources on a topic.

And we will finish by exploring how you can use the Research Assistant tool to pose research questions using everyday language, and I will show you how the tool generates a short answer to your question with information generated from library resources. 

 

So, what is Library Search?

Library Search is a powerful, user-friendly search tool that searches across most of the resources in the OU's online library. It will enable you to find good-quality academic information, and it provides a single search box for library resources. 

You'll hear me mention databases a few times in this session, so I thought it would be useful to explain what I mean by databases. In the OU Library, we purchase a lot of our content through subscriptions to online databases, so rather than purchasing a title individually, we often subscribe to a collection of titles which are all held in an online database. So, when I'm talking about databases, I simply mean those collections online where our online content is stored.

 

So, as I've said, Library Search is a tool which allows you to search across most of our online databases all at the same time. But it is important to understand that Library Search doesn't search every database that the OU subscribes to. Library Search doesn't connect well to our image, law, or newspaper databases. If you'd like to know more about searching within specific databases, we offer a separate training session on this called Smarter Searching with Library Databases. 

During this session, we will only look at searching with Library Search and its Research Assistant tool. 

As well as being a useful tool for finding information, you can also use Library Search to save your results so that you can easily find them again later. And we will look at this function later on in the session. 

In assignments and module activities, it's common for you to be asked to find and read a particular ebook chapter or journal article, or to search in a particular database for information. And in case, it's useful, a journal, a bit like a magazine, is a collection of articles that is published regularly throughout the year. To find resources like these, you will need to use Library Search. 

 

I'm now going to demonstrate how to use Library Search to find specific resources. This slide displays the titles of the ebook, journal articles, and database that I'm going to search for, and I will read out these titles during the demonstration. 

 

The screen is now showing the Library homepage which you can find at university.open.ac.uk/library. 

The first search that I'm going to demonstrate is a search for the ebook Maslin, M. 2021, Climate change-- a very short introduction, Oxford University Press. So, I'm going to start off by searching for the title of the book. It is best to search by the full title, as the main title, Climate change, is likely to bring up lots of different results. I will enter, Climate change-- a very short introduction, into the search bar. 

 

Before I even look at the results, I'm going to sign in. This will give me the best chance of finding what I need. It will also help with authentication when I access the full text of resources and if I want to save my results. And we'll look at both those things later. 

 

So, I'm going to sign in by clicking on the 'Sign In' option which appears towards the bottom of the screen. So, I know that I'm signed in because my initials, JE, are showing towards the top of the screen. 

 

So, let's look at the search results now. My search has worked, and the book I need now appears at the top of my search results. If it hadn't worked, I could have made my search more specific. For example, I could have added the author's surname, Maslin, to the search. Alternatively, I could have used the Ebooks filter, which appears above the search results, so that my results only contained ebooks. 

 

Let's have a look at the search results now. On the results page, I am provided with the title, the author, the creation date, and a brief summary for each resource. 

 

The top two results have the title, Climate change-- a very short introduction, and the author, Mark Maslin, that I am looking for. If I look at the creation date, however, I can see that we have two editions of this book, one published in 2014 and one published in 2021. I want to access the most recent edition from 2021. 

 

So now that I've found the book, I have a few different options. If I click the 'Full Text Available' link, I will be taken directly to the ebook. I can also click on the ebook title to find out more details first. And that's what I'm going to do now. 

So I'm going to click on Climate change-- a very short introduction. And the screen will change. And I am taken into a page where I have a bit more information about the book. And if I scroll down, under the View Online option, I am shown details of the database where the book is held. This book is only available in the 'Oxford Very Short Introductions' database. 

To open that database, I just need to click on the database title, which will take us into the 'Very Short Introductions' database. I can now scroll down the page to see a table of contents, and I would then click on each chapter title to open that chapter and read the content online. 

 

There's also a really useful option to search in this book. You can use this search box to see where a particular term or concept appears within the book. I find this feature really useful. Other e-book providers also give you the option to download a chapter, or sometimes even the entire book as a loan. I am going to close this database now and return to Library Search. 

 

Let's look now at searching for the journal article. Bradley, PK, 2024, 'Using inclusive language in nursing education-- when words matter,' The Journal of Nursing Education, volume 63, issue 4, pages 203 to 204. Searching for a journal article is very similar to searching for a book. In most cases, you can simply enter the article title into Library Search. So, let's try that for our article. So, I will now type the article title, 'Using inclusive language in nursing education,' into the search bar. If I look at the search results, this search has found the article that I need. I can then click on the title of the article for more information, just as I did with the ebook. If I scroll down the page a bit, I get to the View Online section which tells me which databases host this article. And in this case, it's available in two different databases. So, all I need to do then is to choose a database to open this article online. So, I'm going to choose Gale Academic OneFile. The screen will change, and we will go into that database. I can now read this article online. Or I could select the Download or Print options if I wanted to read it offline later. 

 

As you might suspect, it doesn't always go this smoothly. Sometimes, even when we do have access to an article, searching for the name of the article doesn't bring it up in Library Search. So if you find that searching for an article title doesn't work, it's a really good idea to try searching for the name of the journal instead. This will tell you if the library subscribes to that journal. And if we do, you might be able to navigate to the article that way. So, let's try our third search this way. This time, I'm going to search for a reference from a law journal. So from the reference, I know that I'm looking for an article called 'The interpretation of oral contracts' by authors called English and Winzer. And I know that the article is published in a journal called Law Quarterly Review. And I also know that it was published in 2026, volume 142, in the July issue. 

So first, let's try a search for this using the article title. I will enter the article title, 'The interpretation of oral contracts,' into Library Search. This time when I scroll through the results, the article doesn't appear. This happens sometimes with articles from law journals. Library Search just doesn't find them when you search by article title. 

So now I'm going to try searching for the journal title, The Law Quarterly Review. I'm going to select New Search to clear my search. And I'm going to type in Law Quarterly Review. The first result is the journal I'm looking for. The entry in the results list tells me that this is a journal with the title, The Law Quarterly Review. And I can see a Full Text Available link, which tells me that it is available online. 

 

You might have noticed that it also has the Peer Reviewed label. When a journal is marked as being peer reviewed, that doesn't mean that all the articles within it have undergone the peer review process. For example, items such as editorials, book reviews, and news articles won't have been peer reviewed, whereas research articles will. 

 

OK, back to our search results. Just as I did before, I'll click on the title of the resource, this time the title of the journal, for more information and to find links to the database providers which hold this journal. There are two providers for this journal, and beneath the name of each of those databases, we are provided with further details about its holdings. HeinOnline provides access to issues of Law Quarterly Review between 1885 and 1949. But the article we want was published in 2026, so it won't be included in HeinOnline's holdings. The Westlaw UK Journals and Law Reviews database holds all issues of the journal from 1986 onwards. So, this is the database that I'm going to choose. 

 

On the journal home page, there are drop-down boxes for year and issue, and I can use these boxes to navigate to the issue that I want to read. So, in the Year box, I'm going to select 2026. And in the Issue box, I'm going to select July. I can now scroll down the contents for the July 2026 issue, until I find the article that I'm looking for, 'The interpretation of oral contracts'. So, this is how you navigate to an article by searching for the journal title. I'm going to close Westlaw now and return to Library Search.

 

I want to finish this section by searching for a database. You might sometimes choose to search within one of our subject-specific databases. And if you know the name of the database that you want to search in, you can find it on Library Search. So, let's imagine that your tutor has asked you to look in Science Direct, which is a database which provides full text of articles in science, technology, medicine, maths, management, and social sciences. 

All you need to do is enter the name of the database into Library Search, so I'm going to type in Science Direct. The first result is identified as a database. So, I would just need to click the Full Text Available link to access the database. So that's the end of the demonstration and we will now return to the slides. 

 

So now I've got a task for you. I'd like you to search for an ebook, a journal article, and a database. And there are suggestions for all three of these resources on the slide. The ebook is, Violence-- a very short introduction, by Dwyer. The journal article is, 'Will polar bears melt? A qualitative analysis of children's questions about climate change," by Lee and Barnett from the journal of Public Understanding of Science. And our database is Credo Reference. You don't have to search for the titles we've suggested. Please feel free to search for resources from your own studies instead, if you prefer. And just a reminder, Library Search can be found at university.open.ac.uk/library. So please pause the video for five minutes while you do this task, then return to the video when you are ready. 

 

So how did you find the activity? Hopefully, you were able to use Library Search to find those resources. 

 

We're going to move on now to look at keyword searching in Library Search. You can use Library Search to find information on a topic. You might want to know more about climate change or artificial intelligence, for example. In this scenario, you aren't looking for a specific source. You're searching for any relevant source on a given topic. In your assignments, you will often have to search for a topic, and Library Search can help with this. 

 

The first thing you need to do is to decide on your search terms, and these should reflect the main concepts of your topic. So, let's look at the example on the slide. The topic here is "the impact of generative AI on assessment design." So the main concepts of the topic are generative AI and assessment design. And if you don't get the right results using just those two terms, you can always add "impact" later as a third search concept. I'm now going to demonstrate how to run the search and will be sharing my screen again. So, the screen will change as I return to Library Search. 

 

So, I've entered my search terms, "generative AI" and "assessment design" into Library Search. My search has found some useful results, but there are rather a lot of them. So, let's look now at ways to filter our search results. I'm going to select the All Filters option. I am now presented with options under the heading Filter My Results, where I can choose to limit my results by different criteria. I am going to limit my results to those which are available in full text online by selecting the Full Text Online filter. From the options under Resources, I'm going to limit my results to Articles, Ebook Chapters, and Ebooks. The creation date filter is one which I use a lot. It allows me to limit my results by the date that they were published. So it's really useful if you're looking for time-sensitive information. All of my search results were published between 2021 and 2026, which I am happy with. So for this search, I won't use the Creation Date filter. The subject filters are also very useful. I'm going to limit my sources to those which focus on artificial intelligence and education. This will eliminate sources which contain my search terms but have a different focus. Then I need to select Apply Filters. Using these search filters has helped me to ensure that my search results are relevant and appropriate for my research needs. 

 

Library Search also allows you to save your search results so that you can easily find them again later. 

Make sure that you are signed in to Library Search if you want to save results. There are icons above the title of each source in your search results. These include options to save, cite, and export your search results. I am going to select the bookmark icon to add some results to my saved records folder. 

To find my results, as long as I'm signed in, I can select my initials to open a drop-down box where I can select Saved Results. This shows all of my saved results. If you have lots of saved results, you might find it useful to organise them into different topics. And you do this by adding labels. Each of your saved results includes the option to add a new label. I'm going to add the label "AI and Assessments" to the results that I've just saved. At the top of my list of saved results, I have the option to Filter by Label. I can then select the AI and Assessment label to display only those results that have been tagged with that label. 

 

I want to finish this section by pointing out the Help Me Build My Search option, which appears next to the Library Search bar. This is a generative AI tool which can help you build your search. 

If you type your topic or search statement into this box, the tool will then identify the keywords and combine them into a search statement. Be careful, though, when using this tool. It is still quite new and might need to be improved in terms of search accuracy. So that's the end of this demonstration. I will return to my slides now. 

You can also carry out searches on a topic using the Research Assistant tool. The Research Assistant tool is a generative AI tool. You can ask the tool questions in natural language, so you can phrase your questions in the same conversational way you would ask a question in everyday life. The Research Assistant tool will then provide a concise, 200-word answer with five references from the library's collection. It also provides suggestions for related research questions. And if the answer is not what you are looking for, you can use the Try Again button to generate an alternative answer. So, Research Assistant is a useful tool if you want a quick overview of a topic, links to some relevant library resources, and a summary of what those resources say. However, you need to critically evaluate any AI-generated answers as they might not always be accurate or up to date. This means you need to check the relevance, quality, and usefulness of the resources that the research assistant picks to answer your question. 

 

If you use the Research Assistant tool, you will need to reference it, and there is a section in the Cite Them Right referencing guide on referencing generative AI tools.

I'm going to do a final demonstration now to show you the Research Assistant tool. The screen will change now as I return to Library Search. 

 

The Research Assistant tool is accessed from the search results page. So I will first repeat my earlier search for generative AI and assessment design. The Research Assistant tool now appears on the search result page. I'm going to open it in a new window. 

Now I'm going to ask the tool my research question, "What impact does generative AI have on assessment design?" And I can direct the tool to filter my results. I have the options to filter by resource type or creation date. I'm going to specify that I'm interested in sources which are available online. 

Let's look at the answer to my question now. It starts by listing five resources from the library collection. I can click on each of these resources to find out more, and I also have options to view other related resources within Library Search. I'm going to click on the first resource now. This provides me with an abstract and a link to view the full text online. 

There is also a link labelled More Details and Request Options, which will take me into the full bibliographic record in Library Search. Beneath the list of five sources, Research Assistant provides an overview of those sources in the form of a brief answer to my question. This includes numbered citations, which refer to each of the five selected resources above, so you can easily see where the tool has got the information from. 

Beneath the overview of sources, there is a link labelled How to Cite AI-Generated Content, which takes you to the relevant guidance within the Cite Them Right database. There is also an option to try again, which will pose the same question again, but will generate a different answer. 

 

The tool also keeps a record of your search in the Research History panel. You can select a question from your research history to rerun that question again within the Research Assistant tool. That's the end of this demonstration. I'm going to return to the slides now. 

 

This slide provides a quick recap of the different approaches to research on the topic of the impact of generative AI on assessment design that I've just demonstrated. I first demonstrated a keyword search in Library Search using the keywords "generative AI" and "assessment design." I then demonstrated a natural language search using the Research Assistant tool, where we asked the question, "What impact does generative AI have on assessment design?" 

 

I now have another task for you. I would like you to try a subject search. You can search for any topic you like, or you can try the search on generative AI and assessment design that I've just demonstrated. 

Please try both a keyword search in Library Search and try the Research Assistant tool. Remember, the Research Assistant tool appears on the Search Results page. So please pause the video now whilst you perform this task. I recommend spending approximately 10 minutes on it. When you have completed the task, please return to the video. 

 

So how did you find that activity? Hopefully, you were able to use Library Search and the Research Assistant tool to complete a subject search using the techniques that you've learned. Now it's quiz time. I'm going to ask you four questions to check that everything has made sense. For some of these questions, there is more than one possible answer. I will read each question out, then I will pause for you to consider the answer before revealing it. So you might want to pause the video after each question whilst you think about your response. 

 

The first question is, 'Why is it best to be signed in to Library Search?' The options are, A, to make sure that searches return all relevant results; B, so that you can save your search results; C, because it can help resource platforms to recognise you; or D, all of the above. 

 

The correct answer is D, all of the above. If you're not signed in, you aren't seeing all the relevant search results, and any resources or searches you add to saved records won't be saved for the next session. And signing in ensures that any platforms recognise you as an Open University user.

 

Now, question two, 'A search by article title failed to find the article you need. So what do you try next? Select all that apply'. A, would you add more information to the search, such as an author? B, would you search for the journal title title instead, and once you've found the journal, you could search for the article? Or C, would you go through all the search results just in case the article is there somewhere? 

 

A and B are correct. Generally, you would try option A first, as that is a quicker solution. And if you do try option B to search for the journal title instead, don't forget the journal coverage dates to make sure that our library subscriptions cover the publication date for your article. 

 

Now question three, 'Library Search has a Filter My Results option. If you use the subject limiter, what will happen to your results?' Option A, the number of results will increase; option B, the number of results will decrease; or option C, nothing will happen, the subject limiter doesn't affect the number of results. The correct answer is B. Using the subject limiter will limit the results to only those that are relevant to the selected subject. 

 

And now for the final question in the quiz. What does the Research Assistant tool provide? A, help with typing up your research; B, a brief overview of the most relevant OU library resources for your search; or C, access to other universities' library resources? 

 

The correct answer is B, the Research Assistant tool searches the OU Library's resources and provides a brief overview of the top 5 resources that it has selected. 

 

Where can you go for help?

If you need help finding information, please remember the library helpdesk is there for you. The contact details for the helpdesk are on this slide and can be found on every page of the library website. In case, it helps, I will read through the contact details. You can contact the library via webchat at open.ac.uk/library/help-and-support/contacting-the-helpdesk or via email at [email protected] by telephone at (0)1908 659 001. Or you can access the Help With Online Resources page at open.ac.uk/library/help-and-support/help-with-online-resources.

 

If you want to know more about using Library Search, we have some library activities that you can work through at any time and visit as many times as you need. The short Library Search animation covers the main features of the Library Search tool, including filters and saved results. The Introduction to Library Search activity is a 30-minute activity which introduces Library Search, showing you how to carry out simple searches and how to use features within Library Search to save and tag your results. 

 

And here we have guidance about how the Research tool works. And we have also linked to the Generative AI for Students policy. The policy also includes a link on how to reference generative AI using Cite Them Right. 

 

We have now come to the end of the session. You will now be able to search Library Search by title to find resources from a reference. You will also be able to search Library Search using keywords to find resources on a topic. And you can also now interact with the Research Assistant tool using natural language queries to generate a list and summary of key library resources on a topic. 

You might like to reflect on what you have learned and whether you feel you have achieved those outcomes. Remember, you can return to this video at any time if there are sections you wish to recap. 

 

We are always looking for ways to improve our resources, so if you would like to give us feedback on this video tutorial, you can find a link to our feedback form in the slides, which are available on the page with this video. If you fill out the evaluation form, you might be the lucky student to win a £20 shopping voucher. 

 

Thank you so much for watching.