Save time! Learn EndNote! May 13, 2008
Posted by Emily in : Citing Sources, Cool tools, Duke researchers, Research Help , add a commentStart your summer research with a bang by learning to use EndNote, a reference management tool that is sure to save you time and frustration. Duke faculty, students and staff may download EndNote to personal or work computers, free of charge.
Perkins Library is offering a free introductory EndNote session on Tuesday, May 27 from 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM in Bostock Library, Room 023. We’ll provide an orientation to the software, show you how to set up your personal EndNote library and then teach you to format a bibliography in a couple of keystrokes.
Interested? Register today! And stay tuned for more Intro and Advanced EndNote sessions this summer!
Search TRLN: Facets for Refining Searches May 12, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Catalog Tip , add a commentWe have already highlighted a couple of features of the Search TRLN Catalog, which allows users to search the combined library catalogs of Duke, UNC, NCCU and NCSU. If you missed them, see our posts on spelling correction and quotes.
Probably Search TRLN’s most innovative and powerful feature is that is it a “faceted browser” interface. After you perform an initial keyword search, you can narrow your result set by choosing one or more ‘facets’ from the menu on the left side of the screen.
Here’s an example. I am interested in Pylos, a Bronze Age archaeological site in Greece, which was also the site of a famous Classical Greek naval battle, and is today a small city that occasionally hosts academic symposia.
A keyword search for “pylos” pulls up books relevant to all of the above, but I am particularly interested in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, so I click the relevant facet under Subject:
Many of the hits are in languages I don’t read, so I open the Language facet to narrow my search to only items in English:
Search TRLN keeps track of the facets I have chosen, and I can broaden my search again by clicking the x to stop using one of the facets:
Other facets available include format (book, dissertation, map…), location (at Duke?), author, year of publication, and call number range. Happy faceting!
What are the library hours? May 7, 2008
Posted by Kathi in : Question of the Week , add a commentLibrary hours can sometimes vary on weekends, holidays and summer.
Perkins/Bostock and other Duke libraries hours are linked from the homepage banner (just below the website search bar).
Hope to see you soon!
Search TRLN Tip 2: Quotes! May 6, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Catalog Tip , add a commentAnother great new feature of the Search TRLN interface for searching across the Duke, NCCU, NCSU and UNC libraries is that you can use quotation marks in the search box.
Quotes are a great tool when you know the item you want and are trying to find it. Sometimes a Keyword or Title Keyword search returns irrelevant hits - though honestly, the Search TRLN algorithm is really good: in my experimenting, I found that usually the title I want is on the first page of hits. If you have trouble finding your title, putting quotation marks around it will usually help the item you want rise to the top of the results list.
You can also use quotes to link together keywords into a phrase. Instead of searching for ’social activism’, which gets you 1746 results, try ‘”social activism”‘, which results in only 164 hits - much easier to browse through.
