New Power Search!

Power Search was added in response to the complaints that library searching is too complicated, and people don't know which database to use. It is the first search box you and your students will come to on the library home page. It searches our catalog, thus our book, video, etc. collection, as well as most of the journals and newspapers we have online - over 46,000! It is not as good as Google, but sometimes brings back Google like results - tens of thousands of hits. There are ways to limit on the left hand side, e.g. limit to just books or scholarly articles, or to a specific topic.

Give it a try. Sometimes it really brings up just what you need - or gives you an idea what databases to search. BUT, if you prefer more sophisticated search options, the catalog is in the next tab over, ProQuest Research Library is still under the Articles tab, with links to the rest of our databases by subject. And if you know which database you want to search, the Databases A-Z tab is still there. Remember Women's Studies International, is the main database we have purchased for your program.

Set up a library instruction session for Fall 2010!

If you are teaching a class with a paper that will require library research, I hope you will set up some time with me. Our students really do have a difficult time finding appropriate scholarly sources outside of the free Web. Ideally you can bring your class over to the library for an hour or more, they can all work on a computer in our library classroom, and find the resources they need.The library classroom time is filling up quickly, so please set this up soon, since the hands on work is usually the most effective. If you feel you can't give up that much class time, I can come in and demonstrate available resources to your class - once they are ready to start their research - for as long or as short a time as you would like.

If your students have not had a library introduction, we have an online tutorial ResearchPath (under the HELP at the top of the library page), which we encourage instructors to assign before bringing their class to the library. There are quizzes for which you can see the results - we just have to make sure you are set up properly in ResearchPath.

I can help you create assignments that work best with library research and help you with any research you may be doing on your own. Please feel free to contact me at maira.bundza@wmich.edu or 387-5207.

Set up a library session for your class!

For those of you teaching Gender and Women's Studies classes that have a research assignment, I encourage you to bring your class in to the library to get your students on their way to finding appropriate materials for their research. This works best if they have already chosen a topic for their research and they know that they will need a certain amount of non-free Web sources. I usually spend about 1.25 to 1.5 hours with them, showing them our main resources and having them find those on their topic, but I can make this shorter or longer, as you wish. I will send you information on our revised tutorial ResearchPath, as soon as it is up. ResearchPath will be replacing Searchpath with an updated style, but it will still cover the basic research methods. We have encouraged instructors to assign this before bringing their class in to see us, especially if the students have not had any library instruction. Please contact me at maira.bundza@wmich.edu to set up a time and date. The library classroom calendar is filling up quickly.

New Library Catalog

For the past year we have been experimenting with and tweaking a new form of our library catalog which has become the default way to search our catalog. It is meant to be more of a discovery tool. I am thrilled that it no longer gets hung up on articles (a, an, the) in front of a title, lets you search for an author either first or last name first, and offers "did you mean" spelling suggestions. It is easier to narrow your search by format (books, e-books, videos, etc.), location, author, year. It lets you create lists of favorites or to tag items in the catalog. It still does searches by author, title, subject, etc., but if for some reason you don't like this new interface, or there was something the old catalog did that this new one doesn't quite do the way you would like, the old "classic" catalog is still there for you to use.

Canceling Contemporary Women's Issues

The Libraries' Collection Development Committee just approved the cancellation of the database Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI), as we now have Women's Studies International. Though they have improved the visual interface, functionally I still find the search hard to formulate and I am not fond of the list of results without options to narrow. I mentioned the cancellation of CWI in my January blog post, but have not heard from any of you. If CWI is important to your research, this is your last chance to speak out in favor of keeping this database. Please get back to me by the end of this week at maira.bundza@wmich.edu

Welcome to 2009

On behalf of the WMU Libraries, I’d like to welcome all of you in Gender and Women’s Studies back to campus and wish you a successful and interesting New Year! I have wanted to communicate with you on a more regular basis, but did not want to fill you e-mail boxes with attachments and more junk. I have used blogs for other professional and personal communications, so I am starting a blog: Gender and Women’s Studies at WMU Libraries. I will send out occasional information in an e-mail to all of you in WMS and a link to this blog, so in case you missed any previous information, that will be available to you. Please feel free to comment on this format, what you would like to know from me, etc. If you would just like a link to the blog, with maybe a table of contents, I could do that also.

Women’s Studies International - New Database!

This database indexes the core disciplines in women's studies, covering over 2,000 periodical sources, including those from Women Studies Abstracts, Women’s Studies Bibliography Database, Women Studies Librarian and several others. It includes references to journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, Web sites & documents, and grey literature. Coverage is from 1972 to present. We are planning to discontinue the database Contemporary Women's Issues, which we have found difficult to use, but please comment if this is a very important resource for you.