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Lynch School Library
Newsletter
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28 Jan, 2004 |
Number 2 |
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BC Libraries
Online Databases E-Journals E-Books Other Libraries Scholarly Communications
Interlibrary Loan
Online Requests/ Forms Faculty Research Support Course Reserves MetaQuest Digital Library Initiatives Circulation Services Hours |
Welcome, This is the second issue of the Lynch School Library Newsletter. Below are brief details of a very small number of databases, guides, websites, tools, etc. that are potentially useful to one engaged in educational research. Obviously, this Newsletter could be many times larger. Even a brief account of all the Education related databases accessible through BC Libraries would result in a much more voluminous Newsletter! At any rate, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me if I can help in any way with either your research or teaching. Best wishes for a good Spring Semester, Brendan Rapple (rappleb@bc.edu ) x24482 Contents:
Free Online Scholarship Newsletter Boston College Libraries are committed to the open-access scholarship movement – the worldwide effort to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. If you wish to learn more about this movement, an excellent source of news and analysis is the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) written by Peter Suber. There is also an unmoderated discussion forum to accompany the newsletter, the SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF). For daily news updates, see Suber’s Open Access News blog . For more information about the Newsletter and the Forum and for details about subscribing to them see http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html . return to top Using the 
Button in DatabasesIn many library databases, after you have done a search, you will see the “Find It” button next to your results. When you choose a record and click on Find It, you will see a menu of choices related to that citation. Find It links you from one database to many other BC databases, so that you can easily find out how to get full text either online or in print. If BC does not own the article or book you need, Find It will offer a link to Interlibrary Loan. For more information and a list of databases that include Find It links, see the Find It Frequently Asked Questions page. return to top Education Book Reviews One may locate reviews of education books from a multitude of sources. A good guide is the BC Libraries research guide Finding Book Reviews which provides an overview of print and electronic resources which index reviews of books. Two other web sites are particularly useful: Education Book Reviews and Education Review: A Journal of Book Reviews . return to top Education Discussion Lists This is a useful research guide (prepared at Washington State University Libraries) listing numerous discussion lists (also called "mailing lists") relevant to educational topics. Such lists use electronic mail to create a community of scholars, students, professionals, and interested observers who use the list as a forum to announce new resources, discuss ideas, debate issues related to the subject of the list, etc. return to top Using MetaQuest to Cross-Search Databases MetaQuest is a research tool which contains links to hundreds of databases and library catalogs. MetaQuest allows you to cross-search multiple databases using one simple search, to create your own list of favorite databases, and save your search results within MetaQuest . MetaQuest also links you to thousands of e-journals and links the Libraries’ subject research guides, as well as a new alert feature which notifies you when new articles on your topic are added to a database. MetaQuest is available from the Libraries home page and at http://metaquest.bc.edu . A MetaQuest Quick Guide is available in pdf format. return to top Chinese ERIC (or C-ERIC) Chinese ERIC , modeled after the US ERIC database, provides free access to the Chinese Educational Resources Information Centre Project (Chinese ERIC), with online information provided by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Coverage includes journal articles, policy papers, masters and doctoral dissertations and theses submitted for degrees of the Chinese University. It is a very useful database for educational materials, in Chinese and English, pertaining to Chinese societies: the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. One may search in both Chinese and English. After accessing the site, note that the link to the search screen is at item D in the table of contents. return to top Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle is available in electronic format from 1995 onwards. A title search in Quest will lead you to it. Or use the direct url: return to top Women's Studies /Women's Issues Resource Sites Women's Studies /Women's Issues Resource Sites is a selective, annotated, highly acclaimed listing of web sites containing resources and information about women's studies /women's issues, with an emphasis on sites of particular use to an academic women's studies program. Very many sites pertaining to diverse aspects of women/girls and education return to top International Archive of Education Data (IAED) The International Archive of Education Data is a project sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the United States and other nations. The Archive acquires, processes, documents, and disseminates data collected by national, state or provincial, local, and private organizations, pertaining to all levels of education in countries for which data can be made available. Data will encompass the "inputs" to education (funding, personnel, teaching resources, facilities, teacher and student preparation, etc.), the variety of processes by which teaching and learning occur, and the "outputs" of education (graduation and matriculation rates, drop-out rates, test scores, job placements, life histories, life assessments, etc.). The data stored in this new Archive are intended to support a wide variety of comparative and longitudinal research through the preservation and sharing of data resources. The Archive seeks to serve the needs of academics, policymakers, and researchers in the field of education. return to top Gateway to Educational Materials The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education , is a Consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. Users may browse through lists organized by subject, keyword, or grade/education level; search by subject, keyword, title or the full-text of the resource's catalog record; and go directly to the resource. A list of Frequently Asked Questions about the Gateway may be found at http://www.thegateway.org/faq.html return to top Finding Images Online Bapst Library points to a very useful guide that provides help on locating images from a multitude of sources. It includes a specialized list for finding visual materials, for example Project AMICO (an online collection of 50,000 high quality digital images of works of art in American Museums), AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive (containing more than 700,000 photographs from the Associated Press' current year's photo reports and a selection of photos from their 50 million image print and negative library), and Hulton Getty Picture Collection (one of the largest collections of photography and illustrative material in the world containing over 40 million images, covering prints, engravings, cartoons, illustrations, maps, periodicals and other ephemera). These are just a few; to see more go to http://www.bc.edu/libraries/centers/bapst/resources/s-images/ return to top Searching Web Resources: A Research Guide BC Libraries have created a new guide that’s intended to facilitate searching web resources. The guide helps clarify the different kinds of search engines and directories on the web and how they may be most effectively used. Many of us now tend to rely amost solely on google.com. Google is a great search engine but it is not the only one. A particularly useful section of the guide is Selective Web Guides . This section points to web guides that are built by librarians, scholars, and other educators. The websites to which they link have been reviewed for accuracy and content. Use these guides when you are looking for high quality information. return to top
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