A short YouTube video that demonstrates how to search York University Libraries' catalogue using Omni (an academic search tool shared between multiple universities).
Welcome to this video on finding library resources. To start your library research, use Omni. Omni, the
library’s discovery layer will help you find books, articles, videos, maps, primary sources and all other
library materials that you can’t find elsewhere on the internet. As a student at York University, you are
able to access high quality academic research that the library buys access to using a portion of your
tuition fees. All of these resources will help you find the information you need for your assignments.
There are a lot of ways to search for resources using OMNI. So what do you do if you are just starting
out your research?
Say you have an assignment on the use of films in fascist Italy and Germany…how can you use Omni to
help you?
First, go to the library website at Library.Yorku.ca. Here’s where you can begin working with Omni.
Click on advanced search and then add your keywords and connectors (should this be search
statement?) To learn about the connectors AND /OR, we have a short video that can help you master
them. You can find it under our How-to Videos page.
For our example, let’s use something like: cinema OR film* OR movie* fascism OR fascist* OR Hitler OR
Mussolini Italy OR Germany.
By default, the search is set to check our collections at York as well as the collections of other Omni
libraries. If you only want to look at resources from York Libraries, click here.
You can change the search option by clicking here. For example, if you know your keywords are subject
headings, you can select that to make it more focused. If you’re not sure what you want to search by,
you can keep the default option of “any field.”
Also notice OR is in capitals which helps Omni understand your search. And we used the asterix *for
truncation (or looking for multiple endings or variations in spelling). And a third row can be added by
click on “Add a new line.”
There are about 93,952 results. You can sort through these results using the filters on the left. To limit to
books and online – use your FACET limits on the left-hand side. This will focus your results even more.
What are facets? Consider a cube. Facets are the many sides, and angles that this sort of shape can
have. Library resources such as books or articles also have facets. Facets are the many ways these
resources can be described from different angles. Facets can be used to search or sort your results by
certain criteria.
Some important filters are: content type (like books and ebooks, or articles), availability, peer reviewed
journals, publication date, and available in york libraries.
Review your list of results to check if you’re happy with them. If you find that the results have great
books but aren’t returning the sort of article you are looking for, there might be a reason why.
Omni searches a lot of databases at once, but it doesn’t search all of the databases that you have access
to through the library.
For example, the following databases are not searched by Omni: Fine Arts, Art & Architecture Source,
Music Index Humanities, Historical Abstracts, MLA Bibliography Social Sciences, Anthropology Plus,
Women's Studies International Health & Sciences, CINAHL, SciFinder Environmental Studies
Environment Complete, and GreenFile.
Let’s use our sample topic again to search using databases not available in Omni.
To find all available history databases, click on “research guides”. Click on the “Subject” tab. Click on
“History.” Select history general. Click on the finding articles tab and Find “Historical Abstracts” in the
list of databases. In Historical Abstracts, the same search strategy can be used. Limiting to English
Language is helpful in this case. 176 records are retrieved. Not all are available online, so look for the
HTML or PDF full-text icons.
Now, what if you have a specific resource you are looking for. For example, what if your professor
suggested you find “Cinema and fascism Italian film and society, 1922-1943” by Steven Ricci.
You can copy and paste the title into the Omni bar and run a quick search. It looks like the book is right
here, we can tell because it says “BOOK” on the record information. Let’s quickly verify that it is the right
one by checking the author. Yep, looks good. So where can we get this book? Well, there is a physical
copy in Scott Library, and here is the call number we would need to locate it. There’s also an online
version we could access through ACLS Humanities eBook by clicking right here under view online. We
can access the ebook version by clicking the ACLS Humanities eBook link under view online.
You can also find articles the same way if you know their title!
If you are stuck, have questions, or need some guidance, please check out all the ways to get help! The
link is available on the main page of the library website. Or you could take a look at our helpful videos
under the How To Video page. Good luck with your research!
A short YouTube video that shows how to search more effectively using Boolean Search Operators (these are words like AND or OR that add or exclude information in a search, resulting in more focused and productive results).
Suppose that you’re researching academic performance. That’s pretty easy, right? We’ll just type
“academic performance” into our search and get back all of the results that have to do with “academic
performance.”
But wait a minute! What if someone wrote a whole article about academic performance but they only
used the word grades. We’d better add that word too.
We use “OR” to connect different words that mean similar things. Academic performance and grades
are not exactly the same, but they are similar.
This search will find sources that use the word “academic performance” or the word “grades” or both
words.
You can use OR to add as many words that mean the same thing as you want.
For example, we could add marks too.
Every time we add another word using OR the red area gets bigger, and we find more resources.
But what if we wanted to combine words that mean different things?
Suppose you're researching children’s academic performance. We want research that is about children
and academic performance
We use AND to connect different things
Children get grades, but grades and children are not the same thing
This search will find sources that use the word children and the word grades but not sources just about
children or just about grades
Just like with OR, we can keep adding concepts with AND. We could add the words physical activity to
search for the impact physical activity has on children’s grades
But wait, every time we add another concept the red area where all the concepts overlap gets smaller
and smaller. Soon our search might have zero results. What can we do about this?
Well, first we can take away some words to make the red area bigger, but what happens when we can't
take anything else away?
Remember OR? We'd still be happy to find sources that use the words children OR kids. So let’s search
for children OR kids AND grades. The red area gets bigger.
But what if someone wrote an article all about the grades and only used the word marks? I think you
know where this is going.
If we search for the words children OR kids AND grades OR academic performance the red area gets
even bigger.
So where can you use AND and OR? You can use them on the library website at library.yorku.ca using
the advanced search. You can use them in all kinds of research databases like ProQuest, EBSCOhost, and
Scholars Portal. You can even use AND and OR to search Google.
Just remember to use OR to connect words that mean similar things, and use AND to connect words
that mean different things. Happy searching!
A YouTube video produced by York University Libraries that explains the difference between a variety of resources and how to determine if they are useful or appropriate for your search.
Hello everybody and welcome to our video on different resource formats and how to evaluate them.
There are many different formats for the resources that we all use: we have books and articles and
movies, and we have data and maps and music and government information. It's all available to us, and
sometimes we have to find specific types, like what you have to do for this class.
One way to think about research is to think that when you are learning about a topic, when you are
looking for information, and when you are producing a research output, such as an essay or a
presentation, or a report, you're actually having a conversation about that topic. This happens when you
consume and create information that exists in images, storytelling, books and articles, on the web, and
on social media platforms. So, when we interact with information, we need to pay attention to a few
things. For example, when we are looking at a website, we can scan the domain in the web address and
form a quick understanding about that page. A .com is a very common registration, and it doesn't tell us
a lot. However, a .ca means that page was registered in Canada. A .org is usually used by a non-progrit
organizations, and a .edu is used by education institutions. You can also have a .me for individuals, or a
.biz or .ninja, which may not mean much without further investigation. But getting used to interrogating
information sources is the first step towards a successful research strategy.
As we already talked about, there are many types of resources, and we will now concentrate on three
formats typically used in university research. They are scholarly academic sources, popular resources,
and grey literature sources. An academic, scholarly, and peer-reviewed source is usually written by
scholars or researchers for academics. It also covers an in depth area of the topic. It's meant to advance
a field of knowledge. And it always includes a bibliography and citations. A popular source is often
written by journalists or staff writers. It's meant for general interest, sometimes for entertainment. It
usually includes photos or ads, and usually it doesn't contain a bibliography. Grey sources or grey
literature refers to government information or government documents: annual reports or working
papers. It sometimes includes bibliographies, but not always.
Now that you know the difference between these three types of sources let's talk about how do you
know when you actually have a good source - a source that will help you with your assignment? We now
need to learn about how to evaluate these sources of information. For that let's use the word PARCA to
remember what you need to evaluate sources. PARCA stands for Purpose, Authority, Relevance,
Currency, and Accuracy.
Let's talk about Purpose. When you find a resource, ask yourself: why was it produced? Was it meant to
educate, to inform, to entertain? Was it produced for an academic environment?
Next think about Authority. Think about the author. Is that author a scholar, an expert, a journalist?
What do you know about the person who produced that resource?
When it comes to Relevance, ask yourself: Does this particular source match your topic? Does it match
what your professor is asking? Does it fit the area or the geography or even the time frame that you're
looking for?
When it comes to Currency, ask yourself: How recently was the article published? And how recently was
the data presented in the article actually collected?
Accuracy is the last concept we're going to talk about here. Look at the resource and ask yourself: do
you trust the data? Do you trust the references, or the claims presented in that source?
After watching this video, you know about different formats and how to evaluate these resources using
the acronym PARCA. You can always go to the library website at library.yorku.ca and click on "Ask a
Question" so you can connect with a librarian. Thanks for watching and learning with us.
