Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Hot Topic: Single-Sex Schools

A local hot topic hitting the news in Northeastern Ohio these days is the concept of the single-sex classroom. This fall the Cleveland school district will be creating four single-sex elementary schools, complete with standardized "uniforms" for the district. If you would like to investigate these topics for a research paper or speech topic, here are some ideas on how to get started:

Do a search in our online catalog or in the OhioLINK catalog. The established subject heading is "single sex schools," but you might also want to investigate the concept of "single sex classes" as well. To get a more well-rounded collection of research materials, don't forget to investigate the alternative by doing a search for "coeducation." Performing a word / keyword search will expand your search results to include chapters out of books.

For articles out of magazines and professional journals, try searching the Education Research Complete and ERIC online indexes. Both of these databases focus on the field of education, eliminating the need to weed out articles from other disciplines.

To look at local coverage of the topic, we recommend locating newspaper articles from the region. The Akron Beacon Journal is indexed in our NewsBank Newspaper database, and there are several Northeastern Ohio newspapers, including the Plain Dealer, indexed in the Lexis Nexis Academic database.

To access the periodicial indexes / databases listed above, view UA Libraries alphabetical list of all databases and scroll through the list alphabetically.

Whatever topic you decide to investigate, be sure to ask us if you would like help with your search strategy, from choosing appropriate keywords, putting together a Boolean search, or choosing the right database.

Maureen

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The library is so Del.icio.us!

Have you discovered Del.icio.us yet?

If you haven't, you're in for a treat (and read on...)!

If you have discovered this social bookmarking site already, then check out the library's Del.icio.us site and start using our bookmarked Internet sites at: http://del.icio.us/waynelibrary.

So, what is social bookmarking, you ask?

It's one of the newest customizable web features that allows Internet users to keep track of their favorite websites, just like saving bookmarks or "favorites" in your Internet browser. These bookmarks, though, you can access from anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can take your favorites with you wherever you go! Even better, you can share your bookmarks with others and see what other people have bookmarked.

Consider this research scenario:
Your in a class and are assigned a project to work with a group of classmates. Each of you are gathering websites on your topic, but you are not sure if you're duplicating what others have collected. Now you can create Del.icio.us accounts and easily access each other's bookmarks and share them as needed. Or, check out the library's del.icio.us page and see if we have some sites that we recommend on your topic.

Be sure to use the "tagging" feature that allows you to create keyword headings for each of your bookmarks so that they can be sorted and organized in a way that works for you.

If you would like more information about Del.icio.us, go to the main site at http://del.icio.us/ to find out more or to create your own account.