Using Library Search for your assignment

Welcome to this video from The Open University Library, which is on using Library Search for your assignment. The slides for this video and an accompanying handout are available to download. You will find the link in the video description on YouTube, or on the Introduction to Library services training session page on the Open University Library website. You'll need to be a current Open University student or member of staff to be able to download these. We strive to make our sessions as accessible and inclusive as possible. I'll therefore be including audio description of any visual elements that we use in this session. Learning outcomes, what will we cover. By the end of this session, you'll be able to search by title or author. Your tutor, for example, might give you the name of a book or 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 and author. Search by subject. There will be occasions when you are asked to find information on a particular topic. We'll also therefore look at how to do a subject search on Library Search. Access, help, and support. We'll finish off with looking at where you can get help after this session. 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 provides a single search box for Library Resources. You're going to hear me mention databases a few times in this session, so I thought it would be useful to explain what I mean. 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 the collections online where our online content is stored. As I have said, Library Search is a tool which allows you to search across most of our online databases at the same time. It's important to understand, though, that the Library Search doesn't search every single database that the OU library subscribes to. Library Search doesn't connect well to our image, law, or newspaper databases. If you want 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. As well as being a useful tool for finding information, you can also use Library Search to save results so that you can easily find them again. And we will look at this function later. Library Search is available at open.ac.uk/library/ Library resources. In assignments and module activities, it's common for you to be asked to find and read a particular ebook chapter, journal article, or to search in a particular database for information. In case it's useful, a journal, like a magazine, is a collection of articles that is published regularly throughout the year. To find these resources, you will need to use Library Search. I'm now going to demonstrate how to use Library Search to find resources. This slide displays the titles of the ebook, journal articles, and databases that I'm going to search for. I'll read these out now and during the demonstration. Ebooks. "Cybersecurity: a self-teaching introduction" by Gupta and Goyal. Journal articles. 'A supermassive doughnut' in the journal Nature Physics, Volume 18, issue 6, on page 612 by Reichert. We will also be looking at "Travel with dogs: The need to accommodate messy trips in healthy and sustainable transport transitions," in the Journal of Transport and Health, in volume 28, article number 101559. And this is by Kent and Mulley. And we'll be looking at the database ScienceDirect. So demonstration-- finding items using Library Search. I will now be moving from the slides to the screen. So something different will appear on the screen shortly. The screen is now showing the library home page. The first search I'm going to do is a search for the ebook, "Cybersecurity: a self-teaching introduction" by CP Gupta and KK Goyal. I'm going to start off by searching for the title of the book. And I'm simply going to copy the main title, "Cybersecurity," into the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. Before I even look at the results, I'm going to sign in, as 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 will allow me to save results, which we'll look at later. So I'm going to click the button 'Sign In' the middle of my screen. And my name is now showing in the top right-hand corner of my screen to say that I'm signed in. Cybersecurity is a broad term, so it's not surprising that the book I am looking for isn't at the top of my results. So let's try narrowing down our search. Let's try adding the authors' names, Gupta and Goyal, to the search bar. So I'm going to type Gupta and Goyal into the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. Now the ebook, "Cybersecurity: a self-teaching introduction" by Gupta and Goyal appears towards the top of the results. I could have also used the options on the right-hand side to filter my results. For example, I could have specified that I'm only interested in ebooks by selecting the Ebooks option in the resource type column. So I should scroll down, locate the resource type, and I could have selected Ebooks. It can also be useful to search for the full title, including the subtitle of resource, to see if it's the top of the results. I'm going to scroll back to the top of the page, as now that I've found the ebook, I have some different options. If I click on the Full text available link, I'll directly access the full text of the ebook. I can, however, click on the ebook title to find out more details first, which is what I'll do now. So I'll click "Cybersecurity: a self-teaching introduction." This then opens a page where I'm giving links to the database providers where this book is held. This book is available from a number of providers. I'm going to click on the option called Ebook Central Academic Complete UKI Edition. And this opens the book in the ProQuest Ebook Central platform. I can now either read online or download the book. If you choose the Download option, you will have the book for a loan period of 21 days. Library ebooks work in a similar way to print library books. You don't get to keep them forever, you just borrow them for a loan period. I have returned now to Library Search so that we can look at searching for a journal article. We'll be using the journal article, 'A supermassive doughnut' in the journal Nature Physics, volume 18, issue 6, which appears on page 612, and is by the author Reichert. It was published in 2022. The process is very similar as searching for books. In most cases, when you're searching for a journal article, you can simply enter the article title into Library Search. I'm going to copy the title, "A supermassive doughnut," into the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. This returns a list of results. And the article, 'A supermassive doughnut,' is appearing at the top of my results. I simply click on the article title for more information, just as I did with the ebook. So I should click "A supermassive doughnut." And then I can click on the provided link on the page for it to open. So I shall click the link Nature. And this opens my article, 'A supermassive doughnut' by Stefanie Reichert. As you might suspect, it doesn't always go this smoothly. Sometimes, even though we 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 good idea to try searching for the name of the journal. This will tell you if the library subscribes to the journal. And if we do, you might be able to navigate to the article this way. So let's try our third search this way. I shall return to Library Search. I've returned to Library Search and I want to find an article called 'Travel with dogs-- The need to accommodate 'messy trips' in healthy and sustainable transport transitions.' And this is by the authors Kent and Mulley. I can tell from the reference that it is published in a journal called the Journal of Transport and Health. I also know that it was published in 2023, in volume 28 and its article 101559. So let's imagine I've tried to search for the article title and not found it. So I'm going to try searching for the journal title, Journal of Transport and Health. So I shall copy the title Journal of Transport and Health to the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. Now I'm on the list of results. There are a few results that look relevant for this search. I'm going to choose the one, though, that's identified as an online journal. Just as I did before, I'll click on the title for more information to find links to the database providers which hold this journal. This record has been labelled peer reviewed. Be aware that even when a journal is marked as being peer reviewed, not all types of articles within it will have undergone the peer review process. For example, items such as editorials, book reviews, and news articles won't have been reviewed and won't count as peer reviewed articles, whereas research articles will. It's best to check the individual journal or article itself to check. I should scroll down, and there is one provided for this journal. Sometimes, a journal is held in a range of different databases. So you might need to check their coverage, for example, which years they hold, and choose a provider that covers the year your article was published in. As there is only one provider, I can click the link to Elsevier, and this takes me to the journal itself. On the journal homepage, there is a link for articles and issues. I shall then click 'All Issues', which provides a list of all the volumes available. I know from the reference my article was published in 2023, and in volume 28, so I shall scroll down and click the link 2023, volume 28 to 33. I shall then select the link for volume 28. And scrolling down, I can see the title I am looking for, 'Travel with dogs: the need to accommodate 'messy trips' in healthy and sustainable transport transitions.' I can then view the PDF or look at an article preview. So this is how you navigate to an article by searching for the journal title. I've returned to Library Search. Because the final search I want to demonstrate is a search for a database. You might sometimes choose to search for one of our subject-specific databases. If you know the name of the database you want to search, you can find it in Library Search. So let's imagine that your tutor has asked you to look in ScienceDirect, which provides full text articles in science, technology, medicine, maths, management, and social sciences. All you need to do is enter the name of the database in Library Search. So I'm going to copy in the title ScienceDirect to the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. The first result is identified as a database. I'll click on Full Text Available to access this database. If you're asked to sign in, use the 'Find Your Institution box'. So I'm going to copy in the Open University and select the Open University from the dropdown list. And now I am signed in to the ScienceDirect database. Now I'll finish the demonstration. We'll go back to the slides. So something different will appear on your screens shortly. Your turn. Searching by title or author. Now I'd like you to try searching on Library Search. I'd like you to have a go at finding an ebook, a journal article, and/or a database. There are suggestions for all three on the slide, or you can choose a resource from your own studies that you are interested in finding. Pause the video for five minutes to do this, then return to the video when you are ready. The e-book 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," from the Journal of Public Understanding of Science, and its volume 29, issue 8, and page number 868 to 880, by Lee and Barnett. And our database is Credo Reference. Just a reminder, Library Search can be found at open.ac.uk/library/ How did you find the activity? Now you'll have some experience of searching for specific titles in Library Search. Subject searches. You can also use Library Search to find information on a particular 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 are searching for sources on a given topic. And Library Search can help you with this too. Other example topics on this slide are generative AI, cybercrime, mythology of unicorns, and prison reform. For this demonstration, we'll look at the topic mythology of unicorns. So demonstration-- using Library Search for a subject search. I'll be moving from the slides to a screen share, so something different will appear on your screen shortly. I've returned to Library Search. We will be trying the search for the mythology of unicorns. So I shall add my search terms to the search bar. So I'll copy unicorn and mythology into the search bar. I've put "and" in between the terms as I want to find both words. Advanced search is useful for more complex or targeted searching. For the purposes of this demonstration, we'll stick to the basic search. So I'll click the magnifying glass to search. And this has returned over 5,000 results. So let's have a look at the resource type limiter. These are appearing on the right of my screen. So I shall scroll down and find Resource Type and click Show More. If I knew I wanted an overview of something, I could choose ebooks and maybe reference entries from the options here. If I wanted quite a bit of detail on a narrow topic, I might be better looking at an article. But I think I want to start with an overview, so I'll select ebooks and click Apply Filters. And this reduces my search to over 2,000. There is an option to limit by date on the right. So I shall scroll down, and this is at creation date. This can be really helpful if you want to see recent thinking in your topic. It's not so helpful here as we aren't looking for research in a fast-moving area, so we'll ignore that for now. I'm going to scroll back to the top of my screen and click New Search, as I'd like to rerun the search with different search terms. I'm going to change the search terms to unicorn and folklore. I'm going to copy those into the search bar and click the magnifying glass to search. Let's look again at filtering our results. And let's look at the subject limiter. So I'm going to scroll down and find Subject and click Show More. You can choose as many filters as you would like. I'm going to choose mythology from the subject areas. And I'm going to scroll back up to Resource Type and click Ebooks again and apply those filters. This can narrow your results even further to just those that are really relevant. These results look really good, so I can start going through them. I'm going to scroll down and browse the titles and select this fifth result, "Imaginary animals: The monstrous, the wondrous, and the human." We could open this by selecting the link Full Text Available. But if we wanted to save this result, we can click the pin icon labelled 'Add to my Favourites'. So I shall click this pin. And this will be saved to my account. To find this, we'd need to locate the pin icon in the top right of my screen. So I shall scroll to the top of the page and find the pin in the top right of my screen labelled Go to my Favourites and click this. And a list of saved results, including this title, will appear. Your turn-- searching for a topic. So it's over to you again. I'd like you to have a go at doing a subject search. Take six minutes to explore with Library Search. Choose a topic and get searching. Pause the video for six minutes and return to the recording when you are ready. How did you get on with that activity? Now you'll have some experience of searching for a topic in Library Search. Now it's quiz time. I'm going to ask you three questions to check that everything has made sense. For some of these questions, there's more than one possible answer. I will read out each question and pause for you to consider the answer. Then I will reveal it. Question-- why is it best to be signed in to Library Search? A, to make sure that search is return all relevant results; B, so that you can use the 'My Favourites' feature; C, because it can help resource platforms to recognise me; or D, all of the above. I'll give you 30 seconds to consider your answer. I shall share the answer. And the answer is D, all of the above. If you're not signed in, you're not seeing all the relevant search results, and any resources or searches you favourite won't be safe for the next session. Signing in ensures platforms recognise you as an Open University user. Next question. A search by article title failed to find the article you need. What do you try next? A, add more information to the search for an example and author; B, search for the journal title instead, once you've found the journal you can search for the article; or C, go through all the search results, it will be there somewhere. Select all that apply. I'll give you 30 seconds to consider your answer. So I shall share the answer. Both A and B are correct. Generally, you would try A first as it is a quicker solution. When you search for the journal, don't forget to check the journal coverage dates to see if our library subscriptions cover the publication date for your article. Next question. Library Search has a 'Filter My Results' option. If you use the subject limiter, what will happen to your results? A, the number of results will increase; B, the number of results will decrease; or C, nothing, the subject limiter doesn't affect the number of results. I'll give you 30 seconds to consider your answer. I shall now reveal the answer. And the answer is B. Using the subject limiter will limit the results to only those that are relevant to the selected subject. There are no more quiz questions. Where to go for help. If at any point during your studies you have problems using Library Search or finding information, please remember the library help desk is there for you. You can webchat with us 24/7, email us anytime, and our phone lines are open 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday. Additional information and guidance. If you want to know more about using Library Search, we have created some library activities that you can work through at any time and visit as many times as you need. These are entitled, "Library Search," a short animation, and an "Introduction to Library Search," a 30-minute activity. Learning outcomes revisited. We have now come to the end of the session. And we have covered how to search Library Search by title and or author, how to search Library Search by topic, and where you can go for help. You might like to reflect on what you have learned and whether you feel you've achieved these outcomes. Remember, you can return to this video at any time if there are sections you wish to recap. Feedback. We're always looking for ways to improve our resources, so if you'd like to give us some feedback on this video tutorial, you can find a link to our feedback form in the slides available on the page with this video. Thank you for watching.