DCCC Library Books and Bytes

It’s that time of year again. For those looking for a modern tool to help organize your resources, check out Zotero. Zotero is a free extension for the Firefox browser that helps to collect the important information from online journal, magazine, newspaper articles and more. It will gather the data necessary to do your works cited or references page including title, author, and publisher. Zotero will also help you do your citations after you are done with the research phase of a final paper. It also lets you take notes about your sources (”This page is somewhat biased, check facts.”). Zotero is sponsored by library, museum and university groups. For more information see, www.zotero.org.

(Paul Proces)

While Google is a helpful research tool, there are other options.  Clusty, as its name implies, “clusters” your search results. What does this mean?  It groups your results into topics: as specific as “current climate change hypotheses” or as broad as “research.”  These topic “clusters” are listed on the left hand side of your results page, with links and with the number of corresponding hits.  Rather than scanning through pages of results, you have the option of searching these narrower topic clusters and increasing your chances of finding what you need, maximizing efficiency.  To give it a try, go to http://clusty.com/
(MS)

Pictures and images are available in the library’s databases at http://libdb.dccc.edu. So as an alternative to Google Images, select MasterFILE Premier by Ebsco (or another database); scroll down to Image Quick View Types, and select one of the following: b/w photo; diagram; illustration; chart; color photo; graph; or map. Try this feature out using Michele Obama or General Petraeus, for example, and color photograph, or glaciers and color photographs. Related images on the right show beautiful pictures. Entering “world hunger” and diagram provides easy to understand charts.
(CV)

Your paper is due soon. You have some ideas about what you’d like to write, but you need more, and you’re not sure how to organize all that information once you have it. Try creating an online mind map. Bubbl.us is a free, easy-to-use online mind mapping tool that helps you brainstorm ideas and organize them. Start with just one colorful idea bubble and build on it, generating more ideas and showing relationships among them through links. You can also collaborate with your classmates and build shared mind maps for group projects or presentations. Give mapping your mind a try at http://www.bubbl.us
(hb)

Prefer to search the web in a language other than English? Google recently introduced a new translation tool that allows viewing search results in up to five languages at once. It can also translate those results immediately into one of the forty-two languages currently available. While translation was possible before using Google Translate, this new translation tool is integrated with the main search engine. To give it a try, enter a keyword in the search box on the Google homepage. At the top of the results page, choose “Show Options.” Next, choose “Translated Search” from the list on the left side of the page. In the box that appears at the top of the next page, select up to five languages to see a results list of webpages written in those languages. To translate those results into your own language, change the “My Language” option at the top of the page and the results will be translated immediately. (hb)