Secondary Sources: Works that are not original manuscripts, contemporary records, or documents associated with an event, but which analyze, evaluate, interpret or criticize primary sources. (UNCW Library Lingo)

Tertiary Sources: The term tertiary source is a relative term. What is considered tertiary depends on what is considered primary and secondary. A tertiary source may thus be understood as a selection, distillation, summary or compilation of primary sources, secondary sources, or both.[3][4][5] The distinction between primary source and secondary source is standard in historiography, while the distinction between these sources and tertiary sources is more peripheral, and is more relevant to the scholarly research work than to the published content itself. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sources)

Archives: 1.) Collections of valuable materials that are stored and preserved for historical purposes. 2.) The department in libraries that collects valuable historical information. The UNCW Archives makes the history of the university accessible to researchers.  This department actively seek university records, artifacts, and other primary source materials.  (UNCW Library Lingo)

Special Collections: A section of the library that contains rare and irreplaceable materials, archives, manuscripts, etc. These materials must usually be requested individually and may not be checked out. Special Collections is located on the 2nd floor of the library close to the Auditorium. (UNCW Library Lingo)

I thought the title of this article was very clever and catchy, but interesting because it is a very important point. I also like the author’s style of writing, and his one-on-one, casual tone. It almost felt like I was just sitting in my living room sitting in a cozy chair and just opened a new novel. I also really found it helpful that Eicher made point to clearly organize his important categories, making bulleted lists; separating them from the rest of the paragraphs. That also makes it easy for the reader to go back and reference the list, without having to search through each the paragraph. It also helped that Eicher bolded and italicized the important words continuously through the article. It really seemed to emphasize his points and help the reader identify and organize the author’s points. I really liked how Eicher continuously asked questions. It really keeps the reader thinking and helps process the information. I found that very useful. Overall, I found this article to be very helpful and well written.

Open access:

 Open access (OA) is a worldwide movement wherein full-text scholarly articles are completely free and unrestricted to all users to read, copy, download, and distribute over the World Wide Web.

“Western Carolina University – Glossary of Library Lingo.” WCU: Library Lingo. Western Carolina University. 06 Apr. 2009

Annotation:

A note that describes, explains, or evaluates; especially such a note added to an entry in a bibliography, reading list, or catalog. OR Process of making such notes. Annotation is the end product of making such notes.

“CSU Libraries: Library Lingo: A.” Colorado State University Libraries. CSU. 06 Apr. 2009

Citation:

Bibliographic information about an item: For books, usually the author, title, place of publication, publisher, and date; For articles, usually the author, title, periodical title, volume number, page numbers, and date. Citations are what you find in periodical indexes/databases and the Randall Library Catalog, or they may be in the footnotes or list of references at the end of a book, chapter, article, etc.

“UNCW – Randall Library – Topic Guides.” University of North Carolina Wilmington, Randall Library Homepage. UNCW. 06 Apr. 2009

Scope:

The focus, depth, or breadth of the coverage of an information source.

“UNCW – Randall Library – Topic Guides.” University of North Carolina Wilmington, Randall Library Homepage. UNCW. 06 Apr. 2009

Authority:

 For archival purposes, any commercial enterprise, organization, institution, or other corporate body that creates and manages records of its business, activities, or affairs. In very large organizations, subordinate units (sections, departments, offices) may function as separate agencies. In a more general sense, any person (agent) or organization that has the authority to perform a specific function, for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

“ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science.” Libraries Unlimited. 06 Apr. 2009 <http://lu.com/odlis/search.cfm>.

I never really put much thought into the issues behind the ‘rights’ of things.  This article about the filmmaker, John Else, and his issue with including a quick shot of  the sitcom The Simpsons in the background of his documentary, was quite interesting.  I found it very interesting that when Else was trying to clear his film, and talked to Simpson’s creator, Matt Groenig, everything was fine.  However, since Groenig no long owned the rights to the show, Else would have to contact Fox.  I was blown away that Fox wanted ten thousand dollars from Else to include the four second shot in the background of his documentary.  I felt that was a little ridiculous considering that Else’s project was actually being made for a pretty casual, education- documentary purpose.  This article was really interesting because it shows that the copyrights to something is an extremely serious issue that is not to be messed with !

First of I would definitely say when searching for a broad topic in the catalog, utilize the Boolean Operators.  Using the words, “AND, OR, NOT” to narrow down and specify the topic are extremely helpful. Also, truncation symbols are extremely useful.  Truncation symbols allow for the search engine to search for results that relate to even a basic root word.  Truncation symbol is an asterisk that is used in place of a later and will bring up all forms of that word.  And lastly, a major tip to narrow down search results is editing the “limit search results to” box.  Checking the boxes of certain types of results can limit them to books only or videos only, etc.   

Searching in Google, can be a very useful tool.  Google also operates with the Boolean Operators, which can be very helpful.  Another way to limit search results in Google is to specify where exactly you want Google to search. For example, searching “Baseball :mlb.com” will search for those results only on the mlb.com website.  Clicking the “cache” result page under the link will take you directly to a page that search result appears in on that site, which can be very useful if it’s a link off a large website.

Google’s wide range of options and different style-searches (like Google-Earth and Google-scholar) make it easily one of the better search results.  I also like how easy Google is to use!  Another feature that I found that was really neat was how at the top, next to “Images, Maps, News” etc,  you can hit the “more” tab and it opens you up to a new page that has all of the specialized features that Google has to offer.  One down side of Google is that it can infringe on privacy. The entire issues surrounding “Google Earth and Google Maps” where you can be taken to a page that has a direct satellite image of the address you want… some feel this is privacy infringement.  Also, dealing with the privacy issue is the fact that Google searches are tracked and documented.

I thought the opening to the article was interesting, debugging the myth that the “web” and the “internet” are the same.  I was a little confused when it stared talking about “Crawling the Web”, “It costs a search engine a certain amount of money each time it retrieves and indexes a page…” (Price). I didn’t understand that concept because I thought it was all provided free of charge? I also thought it was interesting to be reminded that a single search engine doesn’t search the entire web, leaving a lot of areas uncovered.  It is important to keep that in mind while searching off one specific engine because you could really be missing some good sources.  I also enjoyed the table 4.1, ” On the Web vs. Via the Web”, finding it very interesting as I had never really thought about the differences before.

The article starts out with ways to manage literature sources while researching, which can most often be the most difficult part of the organizational process.  I thought the concept of “ranking” the relevancy of different sources with post-it notes was a clever idea because so often in doing research I find myself getting caught up in a book that really doesn’t relate to my topic.  The piece also goes on to give an example of an Annotation method, demonstrating the importance of writing key words/phrases on the sice margins. I thought this article by O’leary was very helpful and provided some good ideas and techniques to use while working on my Annotated Bibliography.

Plagerism is something that is a subject that is equally stressed upon each student, no matter how young or old. Sometimes, many people don’t even know they are plagerizing; it’s purely accidental.  This article was interesting because it mentioned new ways about to aviod the simplest mistakes with plagerism.  It talked about developing a system of taking notes while researching, that is organized neatly by the source used.  I know sometimes I can get in a hurry while in the library and I can just find some information and be quick to jot it down on a random piece of paper.  Later, when I go back to use that information, I have no idea where I got it from and get frustrated trying to source it by memory… then I can’t use it at all! The method of taking notes that they talked about will definately help me in the future when I’m researching.

1.     Peer Review:

Process used for checking the work performed by one’s equals (peers) to ensure it meets specific criteria. Scholarly journals typically use the peer review process. This is also known as the referee process. Many journals are “peer reviewed” or “refereed.”

 (Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

2.     Stop Words:

 Words not indexed in the computer system due to too many entries or lack of meaning. (e. g., and, or, the).

(Defined by Colorado State University Library Lingo)

3.     Database:

Searchable list of information (including citations and full-text or articles, Dissertations, books, etc.). List of databases by subject and by name of database. 

(Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

4.      Citation Databases:

Multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals. It is indexed so that you can search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. Because the information stored about each article includes the article’s cited reference list (often called its bibliography), you can also search the databases for articles that cite a known author or work.

(Defined by the Institute For Scientific Information)

5.     Full-text database:

 Refers to a database or other electronic resource which provides the entire text of the work it contains (e.g., journal articles), in addition to the citation and abstract of each work.

(Defined by the Univ. of Wisconsin’s Library Lingo)

6.     Boolean Operator:

(Logical operators). Terms such as “and”, “or” and “not” used to express the relationship of one term to another when searching an index/database or catalog.

(Defined by University of South Carolina’s  library lingo)

7.     Microfiche:

4×6″ sheets of photographic film containing reduced images of text pages, illustrations, etc. Readers and reader-printers are available in Reference and Government Documents. By means of microforms such as microfiche, a large amount of information can be stored in a small space on a non-deteriorating material.

(Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

8.     Microfilm:

35mm reels of film containing reduced images of pages of newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, or other documents, illustrations, etc. Readers and reader-printers are available in Reference and Government Documents.

(Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

9.     Microform:

A term that encompasses

(Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

10.Citation and abstract databases:

 In academic research, databases are commonly used to obtain citation information about articles and other publications from indexes and abstracts…

Abstract– A brief summary that gives the essential points of a book,   pamphlet, or article. Abstracts can help give you an idea of what the   document is about without reading the whole document. Some abstracts are        descriptive, while others are evaluative; check with your instructor to see                    which type you need to be identifying and/or writing.

Citation index– A special type of index that lists works cited in later works, including a list of the sources from which the citations were gathered. Used         to locate sources related by subject to a previously published work.

(Defined by University of Washington Library Lingo)

11. Wiki :

A website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content. – ORIGIN from WikiWikiWeb (1995), coined by the US programmer Ward Cunningham, from Hawaiian wiki wiki ‘very quick’, reduplication of wiki ‘quick’.”

 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  Western Carolina University.  11 May 2007

12.Interlibrary Loan:

Interlibrary Loan supports the research needs of current faculty, students, and staff at UNCW.  This service locates and provides materials not available or owned by Randall Library.  Upon receipt of these materials, photocopies are mailed to campus addresses or delivered electronically via the web. Loans are made available at the Circulation Desk or, for faculty, are delivered to the appropriate department. (Department website) (ILLiad)

(Defined by UNCW Library Lingo)

13.WorldCat:

A union catalog which itemizes the collections of more than 10,000 libraries which participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative. It is built and maintained collectively by the participating libraries from more than ninety countries. The world’s largest bibliographic database. WorldCat itself is not directly purchased by libraries, but serves as the foundation for many other fee-based OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management).

(Wikipedia)