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.

Research Instruction

If your course contains an assignment that will require research using library materials – books, articles, primary sources, etc. I really encourage you to schedule an instruction session with me <maira.bundza@wmich.edu> or one of the other librarians. Though our students are excellent Google users, they do find it difficult to navigate in all the library databases and evaluate good sources for their research. I think it is most useful if the class comes to the library and gets instruction and hands on experience working on their topic for the assignment. If you really haven’t scheduled time for that, I could come in for a brief demo in class or prepare a short guide (online and/or print) for your assignment.

Is this journal peer-reviewed?

We get this question all the time. Some databases let you limit your search to peer-reviewed articles, but many do not have this feature. Now, everyone can easily find out this information. Enter a journal title under the Journals tab on our home page http://www.wmich.edu/library/ or click the Find it @ WMU button when you find an article in our databases. In the top right corner you will now see a note if the journal is peer-reviewed, its journal type (academic/scholarly, trade, etc.), and its frequency. The "…more details" link goes directly to information such as subject coverage, a link to the journal’s web site, the editor’s name, etc.