Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

Getting Weird Results When Searching by Author in PsycINFO?

A psychology faculty member emailed me about a bug/problem/interesting he found when searching for articles by a specific author. Even though he typed in the author’s entire name, including middle initial, the results included articles written by everyone with the same first and last names. I repeated the search, enclosing the name in quotes and then in parentheses and got the same results.

But they probably do that because middle initials are pesky things that are often wrong in citations. Still..

Use the Author Lookup. Click on the link below the search boxes.

Then, type in as much of the name of the author as you know.

You’ll get a list of authors indexed in PsycINFO. Check those that might be your author; they’ll be added to a list on the right hand side of the page.

I was interested in finding Carol A. Padden. I entered “padden” into the Author Lookup. Several “paddens” were found. I clicked on Padden, Carol and Padden, Carol A. They were placed on the right hand side. If I want to remove either, I can just click on the trash cans.

Click on the red “Add to Search” button, and they’ll be placed in the search boxes on the search page, as below.

(Padden, Carol A) OR (Padden, Carol) have both been added to the search box in the “author” field. I can limit the search further any way I want and get articles only by Prof. Padden.

It’s very specific and focused, but requires a few more steps.

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I can’t download APA Journals from home!

This has happened a couple of times this semester. APA reported massive downloads from our proxy server several times. To protect itself, APA blocked our proxy’s IP-address from access to PsycArticles and PsycBooks. APA believes the download occurs via a robotic method. You might have noticed that last weekend until yesterday (March 31 - April 4, 2007) access was again down. (Then again, you might have been too busy watching the Gators win a 2nd National Championship in Basketball!)

If this happens again, please access PsycArticles and PsycBooks through the VPN. I know that a few of you have had problems with the VPN and at least one of you have a complicated local network which the VPN interferes with. However, for most of the off campus UF community, the VPN should mimic your computer life on campus.

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Searching Sources in LexisNexis — Voluntary Deportation Program

Last week, during during the thunderstorm, I was driving home to my family in South Carolina. It was Saturday . I was listening to NPR and something interesting came on the radio. “Hmm,” I thought. That would make a nice topic to build a blog around.”

A week later, I can’t remember a thing about the story. Was it about children? Something about demographics? Shoot.

When I got back to the library, I realized I could look in LexisNexis to find the transcript from NPR and figure out what I was listening to. (I could have done this from my parents’ home using the VPN, but I was busy crocheting and finding furniture in junk stores.)

LexisNexis includes news sources from all over the world, including articles from newspapers, transcripts from television and radio, book and film reviews, and reports from the newswires. But on Monday morning I wanted to know what I’d been listening to on NPR, so I went to the library’s home page and clicked on databases in the first column. In the second box on the databases page, I typed in LexisNexis. There are several different parts to LexisNexis — the one that contains the news is LexisNexis Academic. (There are no scholarly works in here. I think it’s called “Academic,” because it’s marketed to academic libraries. Yeah.)

LexisNexis will open to this screen:Click on the “Sources” tab at the top. (If you want to search all sources at once, you can use this screen without going to the sources screen.)

In this case, I know exactly which news source I want — NPR — so I’m  clicking on the FIND SOURCES under tab at the top and typing in NPR in the box. Then I’ll click on the search button, Find Sources, at the right side of the screen. 

Notice

You have to click the box next to NPR and send it to the front page for the search:

You can also get transcripts from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Official Kremlin Intnl News Broadcast, and CNBC/Dow Jones Business Video among others. If you look at all of the drop down menus from the first box and their secondary dropdown menus (i.e., the second dropdown menu changes depending on the first menu) you’ll find an amazing variety of sources. Enjoy! To find these, use the Browse Sources tab at the top.

Then, to find the report I was listening to, I realized since it was over the weekend, it would be on the “Weekend Edition.” My search looked like this (Note “all things” in the “show” field): from the previous week(end).

And the results:

There it is! An article on the low number of folks who voluntarily turned themselves into the deportation program before it ended last Friday.

 However, as I look at the list of transcripts, I realize that I must have started listening after the reports on the large numbers of child abuse cases reported by juveniles in institutions in Texas and across the United States. Hmm…many interesting articles…

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So, Which Database Should I Use Already?

One major problem researchers often encounter is deciding which database to use. UF Librarians develop Subject Guides listing databases for each domain, but the lists may include 20 databases! How is a confused student to decide among them? Mostly, folks just use the databases they always use. Often it’s not a good one for what they’re looking for. And then they say…

“I can’t find anything about sleep disorders! Someone must have written about it! I see it on TV commercials all the time.”

Well, Sociological Abstracts is probably not the best database to find articles on sleep disorders. (Though I was surprised to find some interesting things on it there. But they might not be what a psychology students expected or needed.)

What are the differences between databases?

• Which journals does the database index?
• Which subject area are the journals in?
• Are the journals all in one subject area or are the journals in all subject areas?
• Are the journals almost all scholarly or almost all popular or is there a mix?
• How many journals are covered?
• What does the database index besides journals?
• Does it include books, chapters in books, websites, encyclopedias, dissertations?
• Does the database include abstracts or summaries of the articles or just citations?
• Does the database have an interface that’s easy to use?
• Do you have a choice of interfaces?
• Is the interface not easy, but powerful (You can find everything, if you spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Some well-designed interfaces are both.)

Here is a chart that compares the features of databases useful in our departments. I will writing more about making these decisions later. Enjoy!

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The Imprisoning of Deinstitutionalized Mentally Ill People

Last Sunday night, CBS’s 60 Minutes reported on the death of Timothy Souders, a young man with Bipolar Disorder, who was in prison for shoplifting. The major contention of the producers is that since the deinstitutionalization of people with chronic, severe mental illnesses many are being shunted into the prison system. They are not able or willing to deal with them, not sensitive to their needs. Not aware of their illnesses.

For instance, people who are diagnosed as suicidal and may cut themselves (e.g. cut out pieces of their organs), the prison staff may call “manipulative with extreme behaviors.”

Here is a search from PsycINFO about the prison system and deinstitutionalization.
(Remember you’ll have to be logged into the library either by its proxy system or the VPN to access these articles.)

Frontline has a program (you can watch online) called The New Asylums, along with a website with more indepth interviews and research material.

I understand this response and the feeling that we might want to reopen or find havens for chronically ill people, but I also worked at a state mental hospital during graduate school. Horrible events occurred there.

If we do decide to find homes for people who are severely ill, we need to think hard about how to make them good places for the patients/residents living there and the staff working there. The working conditions at the state mental hospital took control and dignity away from the staff. Of course the residents suffered. There was a reason the State Hospitals were closed in the first place. It wasn’t only because the drugs seemed to be miraculous. It was also because the hospitals appeared to be hellish.

Some books to look at:

Deinstitutionalization : promise and problems
San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, c2001.
EDUCATION LIBRARY — – RA790.A1 N43 no.90

The role of the state hospital in the twenty-first century /
San Francisco : Jossey Bass, 1999.
EDUCATION LIBRARY — – RA790.A1 N43 no.84

Baum, Alice S.
A nation in denial : the truth about homelessness /
Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1993.
LIBRARY WEST — – HV 4505 .B378 1993

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Recently 2 graduate students asked me if online databases would find print journals articles as well as electronic ones. And, they wanted to know, would they find articles that weren’t in their own database. “Would Sociological Abstracts find journals that weren’t full-text in Sociological Abstracts?” That was pretty ironic, since Sociological Abstracts actually contains no full-text journals.

“Huh?” you say. “I found an article that was online from SA just yesterday.” Yeah. Sort of.

This explanation might bore you to tears (which is why we rarely tell anyone). On the other hand, it might clear up everything in the world for you.

Here’s my beautiful diagram:
The first two boxes under the main database box show that some databases only index journals and articles, but don’t have full text themselves. In our fields, these are the databases used most often, like LLBA, Sociological Abstracts, and PsycINFO.

You look through these databases for articles of interest. If you find one, a software, called SFX uses DOIs (digital object indicators — numbers that link to articles) to find the ARTICLES we have access to through other databases. Sometimes articles don’t have DOIs or our SFX database isn’t up to date. Then you can follow another link to our catalog where we list whether we have print copies of the journal or whether we subscribe to the e-journal for which time period. (It doesn’t tell you if we have the particular ARTICLE there.) If we have ever subscribed to it (through any database), it will link to our database of e-journals and then to the database where the journal is. You need to look for the article there.

Other databases only contain full text journals — most of these are publisher’s databases or Open Access databases. In the Social Sciences you generally don’t use these to look for articles. They are basically archives of journal articles. Generally, you use SFX or serial solutions to provide links between the indexing databases and the archiving databases.

But there is another type of databases. Like Academic Search Premier or Gale’s OneFile. These have journals from lots of different publishers. The database indexes all kinds of articles, scholarly and popular, from all different fields — science, social science and humanities. Some is full text, some are just citations.

So you can look up citations to full text or print in almost any index and find full text and print articles there. Link to them. Link to the library catalog. Pretty much just play around for as long as you’d like. I hope this made some sense and was a bit interesting to you…

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The Historical Context of African American Newspapers: The 19th Century and The Chicago Defender

When Woodrow Wilson was mentioned in the Chicago Defender, it stated “President Woodrow Wilson (white) yesterday announced…” because that was how the African Americans of the time were cited in white-owned papers.

Last weekend I was watching TV (okay, so I watch a lot of TV while knitting and spinning) and I saw a fantastic program on PBS called The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords (Video #4678). Like much of what passes for entertainment on television today, it was fascinating. It delved into the blossoming of Black-owned newspapers all over the country after the Civil War when African Americans, especially in the South, were first allowed to read and write and used their literacy to keep abreast of what was happening in their world and also to actively change it.

When certain cities, again especially in the South, outlawed the distribution of the newspapers, Pullman Porters distributed them between towns by tossing bundles of them off trains. They said each purchased paper of the Chicago Defender was read by 4-5 people, since they were passed among friends.

More information, the entire transcript of the program, additional transcripts and videos of journalists, historians, and everyday folks talking about the importance of Black-owned newspapers are available free on PBS’s website: The Black Press.

The UF libraries have electronic access to a database of African American Newspapers from the 19th century. We also have access to the Chicago Defender through the Black Studies Center.

In addition, if you search in our catalog under the subject “african american newspapers,” you’ll find 6 newspapers. However, if you look at that result list, you’ll see that in many entries “african american newspapers” is followed by the name of a state in the U.S. Thus, we have a newspaper or newspapers from that state in microfilm. We probably have newspapers from at least 20-25 states. Often more than one from each state. (The following is just one page of the results list.)

Browse List: Subject

So we have maybe a hundred newspapers to wander through. And books on the history of those newspapers as well.

Go ahead and start with the online papers, but look at the papers from your own neighborhood. See if you can find your family and friends in there! You never know when you’ll find a cousin, your grandmother, or the man you most admired in your life in a newspaper article!

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Logon from Home with the Virtual Private Network

Most of you know that you can access almost any of our databases or e-books from home. There are 2 different ways: the Library Proxy or the Virtual Private Network, each with a set of pros and cons. (You can link to them from the link in the upper right hand corner of most library pages — in the blue stripe — at the link “Remote Logon.” But more about that later.)

Basically, you have more freedom when using the Virtual Private Network and fewer concerns about being knocked off the proxy. Furthermore, it’s actually more secure for the library. However, if you’ll only use a particular computer once, you might still want to use the Library Proxy.

So here’s the deal. Here’s more information about the VPN — at the upper, left-hand corner of the page. If you’re convinced, download the VPN. You’ll need your GatorLink ID and password. There are versions for Windows and MACs. Contact me with any questions you have. If I can’t answer them, I’ll find someone who can. And enjoy easy surfing through the library resources from home, Taiwan, or Iceland!

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Find Tests, Measures and Inventories in PsycINFO

Another tip about finding Tests and Measures. When you get into PsycINFO, type in the domain of interest to you in the search box — say, body image.

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The Schomburg Collection 74 Black Studies Journals The Chicago Defender in Full-Text (and even more)

We’ve had it for a few weeks. You might have checked it out already. If not, you’re in for a great treat!

Faculty members, Graduate students, Undergraduates, Friends, Neighbors, Folks interested in fascinating stories. Do we have a database for you!

ProQuest’s Black Studies Center includes one of the most comprehensive collections of the African Diaspora in the United States. Multidisciplinary essaies, an index of black studies journals, and over 1,000 full-text dissertations (yay!). It is lovely. It’s just fun to play in, let alone do real work.

Before the digitalization, you would have to find a nice grant for a flight and hotel room, or a few dollars from your parents to hitch hike or ride in stinky bus stations and maybe sleep there so you could study. Then you’d have to find a blanket and sleep in the New York Public Library. But now you can stay in your own apartment, dorm, or friends’ rooms in Gainesville and look up the material here in the library or on your computer at home.

The Schomburg Building at the NY Public Library is beautiful, but you probably don’t want to sleep in the bus station too much. So use your computer, ours or your friends’.

You can perform a “quick search” by typing a few words in the upper left hand corner of the home page and then look at the the most interesting resources by format: essays, newspaper articles, journal articles, etc. The Black Studies center marks especially important, core articles that it considers “required reading” with a read star.

So have a good time looking through this amazing resource. You should find many different uses for it. Lots of material on language, socialization, psychology, mental health, life, love, where we are and where we’ve come from. Everything is here. It’s a joy to have and I’m thrilled to pieces!

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