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October 23, 2008

                                                                         Regina Clark, Professor

                                                                              COMM 208-03

I. The George T. Potter Library Homepage

• Provides access to the catalog (OPAC), databases, course reserves, interlibrary loan forms, and more.
• Library Research Strategies Worksheet  Use to track your research and  to refer back to when compiling your work cited list.

II. Electronic Resources

• Some useful Databases for your projects:

Scholarly/Peer Reviewed/Refereed articles have been reviewed by a selected panel of experts in the discipline covered by that journal. Many of the databases allow you to limit your search to these articles.

III.  Journal Finder and Interlibrary Loan

• Journal Finder: indicates whether full-text articles in the George T. Potter Library  are in print, microform, or through a full-text database. This feature also appears in many of our databases.

Tips

1. Switch to the Advanced Search page in a database. This will give you more control over your results.
2. Use Boolean Operators--AND, OR, NOT and Quotation Marks when running a search. For Example: "investigative reporting" and war
3. Always check your Spelling if the database results are zero.

      4.  Use the Subject Terms or Thesaurus link, if available, to find the best terms to use in a database.

IV.  Web Sources

• Use the following Subject Resources under the Newspapers and Electronic Media links to find supplemental information on news.

V. Other Web Site

• Newslink - find online media by states and more

• Journalism Resources - from the University of Iowa, locate annotated or search for journalism information

• Use Evaluating Websites to determine if the site is authoritative enough to use in your paper.

 V. Reference Material

• The reference stacks are located on the 3rd floor (this is also the library's entrance).
• Suggested materials for your projects:

 VI. Finding Books at the Potter Library

• Catalog: use this to find books, periodical titles (NOT articles), government documents, serve items, music,and movies owned by the Library. You may limit a search by language, year(s) of publication, type of material, etc. This may take a few seconds to load.

• Search the catalog using Subject Browse feature if you know the relevant Library of Congress Suubject Heading
  for example:

Tips

1. Start with broad searches. It is much easier to discard too much rather than start with too little.
2. If you don't know the Subject Heading, use the Subjects etc. tab located on the top of a catalog record to get to the headings. This will help you focus in on more relevant material.
3. You can "virtually" browse the shelves by clicking on the call number in a record.

VII.    Preparing Bibliographies

Need more help?

• Contact Shirley Knight at 201.678.7315 or sknight@ramapo.edu

• Visit or call the Reference Desk: 201.684.7574

• Course Reserve: need either Ramapo ID (R#) or bar code (provided by the library)

• Use QandA NJ: a 24/7 virtual chat with a reference librarian.