Tuesday Tips: Take advantage of a local college librarian

As a small business owner, it is unlikely you have a budget to hire someone to do your research for you.

But guess what? If you join a local library, or even better  a local college library, the librarian or reference librarian will help you and teach you how to do your research. This is what they went to college to learn how to do and they love to help you find the obscure information that you need. According to Ventura College Associate Librarian Peter Sezzi, helping students find what they’re looking for is the most important task he has.

Getting a library card provides you with access to a HUGE number of databases that ARE NOT available to you using a typical search engine like google. At Ventura College, a library card is free but only students and faculty can access the databases from home; people in the community have to search in the library. This is true for most public universities and colleges and less true for private schools or very expensive databases.

When you’re doing research, you want to look at a combination factors. Don’t just go for the first article that comes up–it might be popular but it may be ancient news. So look for materials that are focused and recent and have authority.

Using an online database is really great because it provides you with topical information AND you can email the text to yourself. It will also cite it correctly for you and include all the information you will need to find it again or for someone else to find the information.

In a database, you can search by subject or keywords: subject is broader, keywords are more focused. If you put “quote marks” around search terms, it will limit your search to those two words together. For example, if you search for organic food, you will come up with a list of every article that has both words. If you search for “organic food,” you will get fewer but better sources if what you want to know more about is “organic food” not organics and food.

If you have a Ventura College library card, login and then check out some of the biggest and best library data bases which offer authoritative research which might help anyone doing research:

ProQuest offers full-text magazine, journal, and newspaper articles, some going back as far as 20 years. This is the biggest database but that doesn’t mean that you want to search here first because you just might get overwhelmed by the results.

CQ Researcher provides in-depth information on a specific, often controversial topic.

Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center “is a virtual laundry list of controversial topics,” says Peter.

JSTOR is a database that often shows up for me when I do a google search on literary or other topics that interest me as a writer so I had Peter discuss JSTOR also. This one is much more sophisticated: it’s written for academics by academics. But it takes much longer for articles on a subject to come out. Try doing an advanced search and really focus your topic because academic articles are typically very focused.

Where’d I find the researching cat image above? Here at danah boyd’s apophonia website. Speaking of research, she’s a top social media expert with a Ph.d from UC Berkeley.