As the end of the semester draws near you might feel stressed about research papers and upcoming exams. The Library has all sorts of resources to assist you! The library site, http://www.dccc.edu/library/ereference/homework.html offers links to a variety of online help sites such as tutoring assistance and research help from a librarian. For writing help, this site http://www.dccc.edu/library/ereference/writing.html offers a long list of helpful resources. Don’t forget that DCCC librarians are available to assist you with your research needs. For more information click on this link http://dccc.edu/library/contact.html (esd)
Archive for November, 2009
Overwhelmed? Get help with these great sites!
Monday, November 30th, 2009Quality Movie Reviews on the Web
Monday, November 23rd, 2009Are you headed out to a movie over Thanksgiving break? Or, are you working on a critical analysis of a motion picture for class? Then do see the “external reviews” link on the ever popular Internet Movie Database. First fill in the name of the film, then scroll all the way down past the User Comments to Related Links: External Reviews. Here you will find published reviews from the LA Times, NY Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian,Variety and other quality reviews on the movie you selected. (mg)
Create a mini search engine with Rollyo
Friday, November 20th, 2009rollyo.com allows you to gather a few favorite sites to create a customized search engine on a particular area of interest such as movie reviews, health sites, genres in literature, etc. You can choose from some ready made groups or create your own by listing the web sites you want to include. This site would be useful to an instructor who wants students to research within a selected group of websites only and for any student with a hobby or area of interest. (mg)
Web browser redux
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009You are probably familiar with Internet Explorer (IE) for looking at websites considering its huge market share in the past. That is changing now with IE only holding 64% of internet users.
Firefox is the biggest competition with 26% of the market. Firefox was originally a branch of Netscape Navigator (now defunct, but the team now does the Flock browser), but became famous for making tabbed browsing popular, quick loading, being open source, and allowing third party extensions.
Recently you made have see some commercials for a new browser from Google called Chrome (the ads are all over Hulu). Chrome is based on the Webkit engine that powers Safari (Apple’s browser) and it’s gaining market share for being very quick to load and its simple streamlined functions. Not to mention some really neat themes (any browser where I can set my theme to a bird sticking out its tongue is okay by me). 
Also worth mentioning is Lunascape, which is three browsers in one (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome/Safari).
Now, go forth and browse!
(Paul Proces)
Eat Smart, Don't Gobble
Thursday, November 12th, 2009Did you know that the average American consumes 3,000-6,000 calories on Thanksgiving? Get tips about having an enjoyable but healthy meal in “Eat Smart, Don’t Gobble,” an article from Science World available in the library’s MasterFile database. In “Have a Healthy Thanksgiving,” from Essence, you’ll find a calorie-saving recipe for sweet potato pie that saves 363 calories per serving!
For more information about using the library databases for magazine articles and recipes, just ask a librarian at library@dccc.edu OR 610-359-5146. (jt)
Diigo: highlight the web
Monday, November 9th, 2009We’ve had social bookmarking tools like delicious for a while now, but a new site called Diigo is adding some more features to the concept. Diigo allows you to highlight, bookmark and comment on live web pages. Have a paper where you are doing some research on a website? Login to Diigo and you can highlight and take notes right on the page. Then every time you come back, you can see your notes and save yourself some time. There are also educator accounts for professors and students so that your teachers can highlight and write notes on a web page and have a class look at that information. They call it “social bookmarking 2.0.”
(Paul Proces)
What is a DOI? / APA Citations and DOIs
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Each book has a unique ISBN number. An example is 9781597776387 for The Obama Revolution by Kennedy-Shaffer published in 2009. With the explosion of information, we need to identify other resources with unique numbers like journal articles, books, and book chapters. DOI represents digital object identifier. CrossRef is the official association that collects DOIs for scholarly publications. The DOI is assigned by the publisher and registered with CrossRef. An example is 10.1037/a0015919 for the article “Are There Developmentally Limited Forms of Bipolar Disorder?” by Cicero, Epler, and Sher in Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The DOI is a required element in APA format which is used by Psychology and Science disciplines. The DOI provides a consistent link to content. All publishers have not complied yet but in the future we will be using another long string of numbers and letters to identify sources. Here is a sample entry for a journal article:
Ferretti, R.P. Lewis, W.E. & Andrews-Weckerly, S. (2009, August). Do goals
affect the structure of students’ argumentative writing strategies? The
Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 577-589.
doi:10.1037/a0014702
For more information, go to http://crossref.org
(cv)