Durham University Library

Geography Postgraduate Research Practice Programme 2003: Library Workshop

This workshop is intended to cover methods of identifying relevant books and journal articles. It covers various bibliographic databases and other catalogues as well as our own. It also refers to electronic journals and other electronic resources, including routes to information on the World Wide Web.

Objectives After completing this workbook you should be able to • Search the Durham OPAC and COPAC effectively • Connect to, and search in, several databases • Access electronic journals and other full texts and display articles in full • Use Subject gateways • Find other worthwhile resources on the internet

Note: if you are following this worksheet from a PC outside the Durham University network, you should begin by opening your web browser and going to the Library's web page at http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/ Services which require your ATHENS account will be accessible to you, but some services are only available from PCs within Durham University.

1. Using the catalogue

You will need to be able to use the Durham Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) to find out what books and periodicals we have in our own stock. There are 2 versions of this. There is a text version available on some catalogue terminals within the library, and over the Durham University Network. (To get to this click on Start at the bottom left of a networked PC and follow the route Durham Network -- Library OPAC – telnet.) The Web version is available on other terminals and from the Library’s Web page. The following examples will be based on the Web version, but similar searches can be made on the text (telnet) version, which may be faster.

First, go to the Library’s home page (http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/) and click on OPAC in the top left corner. You are presented with 3 boxes. To the right, services… offers options such as checking your own record (to see what books you have out), or looking at the regular listing of new books. In the centre limit to… enables you to limit your search, for examples to periodicals, before you search. To the left, search… is what you need to do a search, though there is also the quick search… box at the top.

Basic searching

If you are certain of the author and /or title of the book you want then use a title, author, or author and title searches. But as there can be inconsistencies in the list of authors, or we may use a form of name you don’t expect, do try a second search type if you fail the first time. If you are at all uncertain of the title or author of a book, or you want to find out what books we have on a particular subject, the best search is keyword, though it is a blunt instrument. The keyword index includes words from the author (if a corporate body) and the title and also from the subject headings given to the book. Subject searches are more problematic: subject headings for topics are normally those allocated to the books from a list compiled by the American Library of Congress, so may not be what come to mind first. But if you find some useful records via the keyword search you can look to see if there are other relevant books with the same subject headings, or with the same classmark, and widen your subject search by doing a Subject or Classmark search. Subject search can be good for people or places, but for people I suggest you just put in their surname in the first instance in the subject field.

Log on to the Networked PC Service with your own username and password.

2 Open Netscape. From the University’s home page click on the button for Library. Click on OPAC.

Simple searches: In author search check how many books we have written (or edited) by Ian Simmons In title search check for details of a work entitled A sense of place, a sense of time.

More complex searching

• Truncation can be used by means of an asterisk. If you put develop* in your keyword search you will find entries with the words developing, development, etc., as well as develop. • Boolean searching using more than one word or term can be employed. If you enter 2 words the Boolean operator and is assumed. You can enter not or or and employ brackets to make a more complex search. • You can Limit your results to reduce the number of hits. Language is one type of Limit.

An example to try: Russia (population or demograph*) This produces 17 hits. These can be sorted into date order of publication, most recent first, by selecting reverse year from the box at the bottom of the limit/sort options (this will show system sorted as default), and limited by language: selecting items in English reduces the number of items to 9. If one inspects the records one will find that several have subject headings which could be worth following up that have none of the words we started with. One book in the list, Human fertility in Russia since the nineteenth century, has among its subject headings Fertility, Human – Soviet Union – History. If you click on that you will find other works that might be relevant to the search with similar, if not identical, subject headings. Similarly several books clearly relevant to the theme are classified at 301.32947. If one does a classmark search on that number one finds 16 records, many not on the original list. In this case one would soon realise that one should search for Russia or Soviet Union in conjunction with other terms.

With this same search follow up some other subject heading, or another classmark found on items on the original list.

3 Try a subject search on a topic of interest to you and follow up subject headings or classmarks on some records retrieved.

Possible topics to try a search on:

Forests or forestry in Africa Irrigation in relation to rice-growing

Note that classmarks beginning 05 or ending (05) relate to periodicals or items in series kept together and not classified by the subject of the item itself.

Making more use of the catalogue records

You can mark items in a list of records, and save these. You can then select the View Saved records option and e-mail these records to yourself for further use. If you look at the catalogue record for an individual book you will see records for each copy or item. These item records give Location (e.g. Main Library), and Shelfmark which includes a number and usually 3 letters which are to help you locate the item more precisely on the shelf. In front of the number may be other information such as Pam or + which indicate that the item is in a separate Pamphlet, or Oversize, sequence, etc. You will also see a Loan Type, which will indicate for example that the book can be borrowed for the standard long loan period, or perhaps only for 3 days. The status column will indicate whether the book is currently out on loan or not: if it is the date due will appear – in this case you can usually recall it for your use. The Last checked in column is only really of any use if it has a very recent date which may suggest it is worth looking on the Awaiting shelving shelves on the appropriate floor.

2: Other Libraries’ Catalogues

We have online access to the catalogues of many other libraries. Research students can use most other British University Libraries. Apply for a SCONUL Research Extra card in the Library if you want to do this. Thus checking whether Newcastle University, for example, has the books you want could be well worth while. Many major research Libraries now contribute information on their stock to a joint catalogue called COPAC. The British Library is now among the libraries whose catalogues have been included on COPAC and the National Library of Scotland is following. From the Library’s home page select online information services and then OPACs.

4 You can then choose an individual library, or COPAC for example, and search in similar ways to those you would use on our own OPAC. If you select info for COPAC you can get to their full User guide. Note that the subject search in COPAC uses words from titles as well as from Subject fields in the records. If contributing libraries to COPAC submit records for the same book which have even fairly minor differences they may appear as separate COPAC records. If Durham is given as a library which has a particular work you can click on Durham at the bottom of the record and see the current information about the item: its shelfmark and whether or not it is on loan.

Try a search on Newcastle University Library’s Catalogue and on COPAC, e.g. Minorities Asia as keywords on both (as keyword in Subject at Newcastle, as words in the title field on COPAC), and/or author: Robertson, word in title Russia on COPAC.

3: Journal articles : General

Introduction

As a postgraduate student you will need to be able to identify journal articles relevant to your research. We will focus on the use of online databases for this purpose. You can follow the suggested exercises, then try out searches of your own

Online databases may be quite different in their coverage and appearance, yet have features in common, such as offering both "simple" or "advanced" searching. Whichever database you use, you should take note of

• limits - you can usually restrict your search in various ways, for example by YEAR • combining keywords - using “Boolean logic” – ‘and’, ‘or’ & ‘not’ • truncation - you may be able to search for words which begin with the same letters e.g. recover* to find recovery, recovering or recover • search options - the choice of different “fields” to search, such as TITLE or AUTHOR • help - online help is often available

5 Reviewing the available databases

From the University's Home Page, click on the button for Library. Click on Online Information Sources, and then Bibliographic databases.

This page lists the online databases available in Durham. To help you to navigate through the list, letters of the alphabet provide shortcuts to different points in the list.

Under Subject Searching of Databases use the drop-down menu and select Geography, then click on Submit Query to find a list of bibliographic databases of particular relevance to the subject.

The ‘info’ links listed take you to pages which offer information about the different services, their scope, strengths and limitations. You may want to refer to this in future.

In selecting the databases most likely to be of relevance for your work, you should have several things in mind:

• subject scope - is your subject area included? • extent of coverage - is it covered in depth or superficially? • type of material - is this an index only of journal articles, or other types of literature? • time span - when did the database begin?

Look briefly at a few of the ‘info’ pages, to see the range of information included.

Whichever database you choose for your own searching in future, bear in mind these points:

• use synonyms to describe your topic; don’t rely on a single keyword • use both American and British spellings (e.g. colour/color, humour/humor, catalogue/catalog,) • make use of truncation to allow for plurals or variant endings

You will probably find that no single database serves your needs fully - you will need to use more than one.

At the top of the database page (http://aesica.dur.ac.uk/delores/databases/databases.asp) there are links to explanations about ATHENS accounts and about what you can expect to access if you are not working on the university site. There are shortcuts to the most heavily used services, e.g. FirstSearch and Web of Knowledge.

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4: FirstSearch

FirstSearch is an American host for many different databases.

Begin at the Library’s web page of Bibliographic databases, at http://aesica.dur.ac.uk/delores/databases/databases.asp Click on the shortcut to FirstSearch . Note that this service is a collection of different databases; they are all searched via the same interface in basically the same way.

Click on the arrow next to the box which reads ‘select a topic or database’ to display a list of the different databases available through FirstSearch. Scroll through this list to get an idea of the range of available titles.

The two most useful databases for Geographers are to be found on FirstSearch. These are GEOBASE which covers the whole subject and GeoRefS which covers Earth Sciences so covers physical rather than human geography.

Enter ‘pingo’ in the ‘Search for’ box, and from the dropdown list at ‘IN’ click on GEOBASE. You will get around 75 hits. Try again on GeoRefS; there will be more hits, partly because GeoRefS covers a longer period.

If you select, from the first page of the list, an article by Gurney, you will see the message again Search the catalog at Durham University Library. Because the record on the database and the record in our catalogue both have the ISSN of the periodical you are led straight into our record for Progress in Physical Geography. Notice that we also have an electronic version of this periodical. Note that this message, Search the catalog at Durham University Library, only works if both our record and that on the database do have a standard number on them (ISBNs for books, ISSNs for periodicals): older books, and periodicals which ceased publication some years ago, will not have these, and there may be other reasons for failures to match. So it may be worth while searching in our catalogue again

From the OPAC record click on return, in the top right hand corner of the screen, and then home in the blue menu bar on the left of the page. Try searching for other topics on FirstSearch databases. Try ArticleFirst, which is a very general database as well as GEOBASE and GeoRefS.

Look also at WorldCat . This does NOT list journal articles, but books and other separate items (though it does sometimes have entries for essays in

7 volumes with contributors): it is a very large listing and there are often more hits on WorldCat than on the specialist periodical databases.

Note that you can put + at the end of words to obtain standard plurals as well, but the truncation symbol, an asterisk * only works if there are 50 or fewer words in this category.

Do an Advanced Search. If you are slightly uncertain as to an author’s full name and the titles of articles this could be useful. E.g. to see what articles Ian Shennan might have written on sea-level change select GeoRefS from the drop-down menu against ‘Jump to Advanced Search’ and enter sea level in keyword in one box, and using the dropdown menu, select author and put in Shennan in another box, then click on Search.

If you want to keep a list click on the box at the left of the record, and afterwards click the E-mail button ; you can then send the list to yourself.

You could enter your e-mail address, click on send and these records would be delivered to your mailbox.

To exit FirstSearch, return to the top of the page and click on exit in the blue menu bar.

5: Web of Knowledge

Web of Science is another important set of databases. Begin at the Library’s web page of Bibliographic databases at http://aesica.dur.ac.uk/delores/databases/databases.asp The click on the link to Web of Knowledge. Click on Login WoK and login with your ATHENS username and password. Select ISI web of Science. Click on Easy search. Then select Social Sciences Citation Index by clicking on the box next to the title, and click on Topic. Type pastoralism in the box; click also on the circle next to reverse chronological order if necessary, to get the most recent articles at the top of your list. Click on Search. Your results are then displayed, but the total is given only at the foot of the screen. Click on any title to get the full reference. You can then select the Holdings box, and, if we hold the periodical, and both our record and the Web of Science record have the ISSN, you will then see our catalogue entry for the periodical. If you do a Boolean search in Web of Science you will need to put in AND if wanted as well as the other operators OR and NOT. Brackets may be needed to get the search right: compare results from housing and Spain or Spanish with housing and (Spain or Spanish).

8 Now go to the Web of Science Home page and select Full search. Choose General search. Scroll down and set limits and options to English and Article. Click on Search. Then mark 2 items, click on submit marks. Then click on the Marked list button at the top of the screen. You can then select the format if you wish, and click on E-MAIL. You can then enter the necessary details to e-mail the references to yourself. You can also Save to file. You should get the option to save the file elsewhere, e.g. to drive J. Do this, amending the file name if you wish.

Choose some other topic in your own field and repeat an easy or Full search. E-mail useful results to yourself, or save them in a file.

Full Search also gives the option of a cited reference search. If you have found a useful article published a few years ago subsequent articles which cite it may also be relevant. If you enter details of author, date and periodical – or as much as you know – you can find whatever articles (of those indexed by the database) cite the original article. Enter Bentley, Antarct Sci (check the abbreviations in the list, and make sure you are not searching only on the Social Sciences Citation Index) and 1998. You can then check to find which subsequent articles have cited this original one. You have to click to get a tick in the box beside the article(s) you are interested in, then on the Search button. You can then decide whether any of these might be relevant. You may find apparent duplication in the list of articles if citations are not always made consistently.

6: Other databases

There are many other databases available, some for specific subjects. From the Library home page select online information sources then bibliographic databases and then using the dropdown menu select your subject in the subject searching of databases box. You might look at Online Geographical Bibliography or Population Index. If you have time, return to http://www.dur.ac.uk/Library/inf/biblinks.html and investigate any of the databases that interest you.

9 Zetoc

This is a very general database, indexing titles of articles in well over 20,000 journals received at the British Library. It covers publications only from 1993, including conference proceedings as well as journals, and for these recent years is well worth trying in case it turns up something recent you might not otherwise have discovered. It does index periodicals that may be less academic but still of value From the library home page select online information sources and then bibliographic databases. ZETOC is conveniently close to the end of the list. Click on ZETOC and then on search the Zetoc database. Coose General search. Enter ports Indonesia in the all fields box and click on search. The results are displayed in reverse chronological order. Some entries are for essays in conference proceedings etc. You can get fuller details by clicking beside the individual record. As this database is compiled at the British Library their Document Supply Centre location is given, but not the holdings of other libraries. This particular search produces more hits on ZETOC than it does on GEOBASE.

7: Electronic Journals

Introduction An increasing number of electronic journals are available to members of the University. These provide the full text of the journal articles online. For many titles the Library has both paper and electronic versions, but there are a growing number of titles which are available electronically which the Library does NOT have at all in printed format. Whenever you have a reference to a journal article, you need to make sure whether we have that journal available online. Many titles are available online from about 1995 and an increasing number of major journals are available through JSTOR from their first issue until a few years ago. (This JSTOR scheme is not designed to cover current issues.) In addition to finding electronic journals through the OPAC there is a general access page for e-journals at http://aesica.dur.ac.uk/delores/e-journals/ejournalshome.asp This lists titles which we know Durham users can get in full-text online. You can reach this page by clicking on E-JOURNALS on the bottom half of the left-hand panel on the Library ’s home page at http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/

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From the Library’s home page choose your own subject area from the List titles by Subject list and click on search. You will get a list of journals available in full-text online. Against each title are two boxes, Connect and Info. Look at Info first, as this gives details of how to connect. In practice most of these can be reached from within Durham without any special password and from outside with your ATHENS password. For some journals there are two or more entries in the list – particularly where we have back issues online from JSTOR and current issues from another supplier. Try some of these out, for example Demography, or Progress in Physical Geography. Although this listing takes you in at individual journal level, most of the services do offer the ability to search across other journals produced by the same publisher.

The type of screen that you will see varies a great deal depending on the journal’s publisher. In general, you need to access the service, indicate the volume you want to view, select the issue you want to view, select the specific article and then you may be asked to select the format in which you want to look at it. For most services the full text is provided in the Acrobat.pdf format. You should find that if you select an article in this format the Acrobat reader software will automatically start on your machine. The Acrobat controls allow you to move through the text of the article and allow you to save the article to a file or print it off. Select a title provided by NESLI, Project MUSE or Ingenta: these appear in the second column, after the title. This initially takes you to a screen where you can choose to see the individual issues of the title you have picked, but if have selected an Ingenta title you can also choose Search Ingenta from the left hand side of the screen and can then search for keywords across all of the journals provided by Ingenta. Try this for your subject area. There are other suppliers too.

8: Other full texts available in electronic form

More and more texts are available online. These may be current reference works or works which have existed in printed or manuscript form before. When existing works are digitised you may find a facsimile version online or a transcription of text, or both. For example you can look at a facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible.There are also collections available on CD-ROM. From the Library’s home page select online information sources and then electronic texts.

11 Some of the resources shown are ones to which we subscribe, some are freely available. Transport pamphlets is one collection of possible interest to geographers; have a look at this. Freely available as full text are the early Statistical accounts of Scotland at http://www.edina.ac.uk/map.shtml

Search by your subject all online resources which we have listed and try a search on one. Look at the Info box first. Note that unless a CD-ROM is networked it is not possible to search on it at this point.

9: Mapping Services

From the Library’s online resources page you can choose Statistics and data services. Quite well down this page you will find a section headed Map services. Digimap is a major service supplying Ordnance Survey data and you will need to register for that separately via ITS. For more information go to the University’s home page and form the tab labeled Service Depts select Information Technology Service. Then search the site. There is a guide available, no 118. Some other services listed also require registration. Multimap, at http://uk.multimap.com is a service you can use freely and obtain maps at different scales. It is also possible to obtain aerial photographs, though these are charged for if you wish to do more than look at the screen.

10: Gateways

A number of organizations exist which try to provide access to internet resources which are judged to be of high quality. Gateways are provided to these quality-controlled resources and the resources themselves may be indexed by the gateway provider in a standard format.

From the Library home page go to online information sources and select subject gateways. There is a section on Gateways to resources in the Social Sciences , but first select RDN, the first general item on the list. Then choose GEOGRAPHY & ENVIRONMENT. This takes you to GEsource, the geography subject gateway. The web address is http://www.gesource.ac.uk/home.html . You have several options, for example to do a word search straight away; to browse through the subject list or to look at selected news and features. Click on a subject that interests you and you will get an idea of the way in which the resources have been indexed, with details of coverage, responsibility and intended audience. This information is

12 produced by GEsource , or elsewhere in the RDN, and because the format is fairly standard you should be able to compare resources better than by going directly to the home page of the resource. If there is a resource that interests you particularly here go to its home page and investigate further.

As an example: Select General. Choose General reference, then atlases and maps. Choose one, e.g. Atlas of Cyberspaces. View the full record and then investigate the site. The record for this site was produced by SOSIG, the general Social Science gateway, of which GEsource is to some extent an offshoot.

Go to the SOSIG home page and select Geography. Here resources are listed alphabetically under various headings: choose Organizations/Societies from the left hand panel in the first instance; have a look through part of the list. View the Full record and then look at the site itself in one or two cases. Note that you may then find links to many other sites and these sites will not necessarily have the stamp of approval of SOSIG.

There are a number of other useful gateways available from our subject gateways page. For Physical Geography the appropriate RDN hub is PSIGate, which has an earth sciences section.

Another important resource among the Gateways to resources in Social Sciences is Eldis which covers development and the environment. For climatological information a good starting point is the Royal Meteorological Society’s Climate on the Web site at http://www.royal-met- soc.org.uk/cweb.html

The Archives Hub is another Gateway to resources which could be looked at. It covers Archive collections in British Universities.

Try out one or more Gateways and look for a subject of interest to you.

11: Data and Statistics

There are other sources of data, and from the Library’s online information resources page you can select Statistics and data services. Datasets resulting from statistical surveys are to be found at several sites.

13 One is the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex at http://www.data- archive.ac.uk . This has statistical data, and a service called Qualidata at http://www.qualidata.essex.ac.uk/ which is building up collections of qualitative research data. It also houses the History Data Service (http://hds.essex.ac.uk). Select Accessing data from the left hand panel. From Finding data look for some data and note the description of the sources from which this has been compiled and by whom. Then look at the ordering data section to see how you would get hold of it.

For official statistical material try NDAD, the National Digital Archive of Datasets, which contains archived digital data from government departments and agencies. This is found at http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk The Public Record Office remains the legal custodian of these records but the NDAD is managed by the University of London Computer Centre and The University of London Library.

Some statistical sources, including British census information, are available from MIMAS (http://www.mimas.ac.uk ) Investigate some resources available from these gateways.

12: Internet searching

Internet search engines can also provide access to online resources in an effective way but more caution is needed in assessing the quality of the material. It may be important to consider who is the provider of the information. From the Library’s home page choose online information resources then Internet search engines. People have their own favourite search engines, and these do work in different ways. Some search engines, including the two mentioned above, have the sites which they index listed in a well-structured way. To access via this structure on Google you will need to click on Directory on its home page. Geography is found under Social Sciences as a subsection of Science; on Yahoo you can see Geography on the front page as a part of Science.

Because Google indexes so many resources it is advisable to make your search as precise as possible. There is Help information available. If one mistypes and puts in a nonexistent word Google may suggest a more plausible alternative, but the problem is likely to be one of finding too many hits.

14 Try a structured search on Google and/or Yahoo, and perhaps on another search engine, and a search where you put a word or phrase directly in the search box.

As you go through your structured search you will have your route displayed below the search box.

At the bottom of our page of Internet search engines you will find 3 resources listed under Advice on which to choose. Guides to specialized search engines is the most up-to-date of these. It may be worth looking at this.

When you find a site of interest that you feel you may want to revisit you would do well to bookmark it; it may be difficult to remember in future how you found it.

13: Web tutorials

A workshop such as this one cannot hope to cover the full range of issues, tips and techniques involved in searching the web. We have looked at some routes into the material which is there. It is worth having a look at the Research Discovery Network's Virtual Training Suite, which offers a group of tutorials by subject to introduce users to internet searching. This is at

http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/

The tutorials are constructed to a standard pattern and include normally a small selection of sites and tips on how to judge the value of the sites that you have found. (See also http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/webeval.html for more information on the evaluation of web sites,)

14: Official publications

We have a large collection of British and European Union official publications. Not all of the items in these collections are separately catalogued, so you may not find useful items contained therein on the OPAC. Similar material relating to the Middle East is in the Middle East Documentation Unit, though not all of that is official. For more information go from the Library’s home page to using the library and then to using the documentation units.

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