Attention Communication Students! Stop by the library and finish up your papers.

ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, unveiled its new website design on September 4, 2012. Explore the redesigned site.

ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.

Wondering how your subject librarian can help you this semester? Read on!

Librarians are happy to help you:

• Find a topic for your research paper or project.
• Find an article or book you are required to read for class.
• Find a scholarly journal article.
• Find background information on a topic.
• Use a subject database to research a topic.
• Find data or statistics.
• Find news (current or historical) on your topic.
• Evaluate potential sources.
• Get organized with Refworks and individual research accounts.
• Find information about conducting your own research project.
• Cite your sources in APA or any other citation style.
• And more!

Kristyna Carroll
610-519-5391
kristyna.carroll@villanova.edu
Room 223

Kimberley Bugg
610-519-3073
kimberley.bugg@villanova.edu
Room 227

Welcome back to campus! Falvey Memorial Library is ready to help you and your students meet all of your research goals this semester.

Don’t forget to take advantages of Falvey’s services:

• Document delivery
• Inter-library loan
• Course reserves
• For materials the Library owns, such as electronic journal articles, consider directing students to retrieve the material on their own.
• Instructional services

If you are requiring your students to complete a research project, please consider scheduling a library workshop, or requesting a tailored course guide. Workshops can be conducted in one of the library’s classrooms, or a librarian would be happy to come to you. Act now: calendars fill quickly!

Librarians for Sociology, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Education, and Communication:

Kristyna Carroll
610-519-5391
kristyna.carroll@villanova.edu
Room 223

Kimberley Bugg
610-519-3073
kimberley.bugg@villanova.edu
Room 227

The library has received many DVDs across the social sciences recently.  Ease into the new semester with some new documentaries or movies.  As always, see a few highlights below, or browse the full list.

SoLa: Louisiana Water Stories
Documentary Film (2010)
Investigates how the exploitation of Southern Louisiana’s abundant natural resources compromised the resiliency of its ecology and culture, thus multiplying the effects of the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina.
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Waiting for “Superman”
Documentary Film (2011)
Provides an engaging and inspiring look at public education in the United States. [This documentary] has helped launch a movement to achieve a real and lasting change through the compelling stories of five unforgettable students such as Emily, a Silicon Valley eighth-grader who is afraid of being labeled as unfit for college, and Francisco, a Bronx first-grader whose mom will do anything to give him a shot at a better life.

Biutiful
Academy Award Nominee (2010)
Uxbal is a man on the wrong side of the law who struggles to provide for his children on the dangerous streets of Barcelona. As fate encircles him, Uxbal learns to accept the realities of life, whether bright, bad, or biutiful.

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Not Just a Game
Documentary (2010)
We’ve been told again and again that sports and politics don’t mix. In this documentary, Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation magazine, takes viewers on a tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly of American sports culture — showing how sports have helped both to stabilize and to disrupt the political status quo throughout history. Explores how American sports, at their worst, have reinforced repressive political ideas and institutions by glamorizing things like militarism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as looking at a history of rebel athletes who dared to fight for social justice beyond the field of play.

Beginners
Feature Film (2011)
Golden Globe® nominee Ewan McGregor (Star Wars I, II, III), Academy Award® nominee Christopher Plummer (Inside Man), and Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) star in Beginners, an uplifting comedy about how funny and transformative life can be. When graphic designer Oliver (McGregor) meets free-spirited Anna (Laurent) shortly after his father (Plummer) has passed away, Oliver realizes just how much of a beginner he is when it comes to long-lasting romantic love. Memories of his father, who, following the death of his wife of 45 years, came out of the closet at age 75 to live a full, energized, and wonderfully tumultuous gay life, encourage Oliver to open himself up to the potential of a true relationship. Inspired by writer/director Mike Mills’ own father. (Amazon.com product description)

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest archive of digital social science data, is now accepting applications for its annual summer internship program. ICPSR is a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. ICPSR’s data are the foundation for thousands of research articles, reports, and books. Findings from these data are put to use by scholars, policy analysts, policy makers, the media, and the public.

Interns spend ten weeks from June 4 – August 10, 2012, at ICPSR (Ann Arbor, Michigan), during which they will:

• Work in small groups and with faculty mentors to complete research projects resulting in conference-ready posters
• Gain experience using statistical programs such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata to check data, working in both UNIX and Windows environments
• Attend courses in the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research
• Participate in a weekly Lunch and Lecture series that covers topics related to social science research and professional development.

Compensation:
$3,000 – $5000* stipend, room and partial-board in university housing, and a scholarship covering the cost of fees, texts, and materials for coursework in the ICPSR Summer Program.

If you will be requiring your students to read scholarly articles this semester, please consider sending them to the library to find the full text themselves (assuming the article is included in the library’s holdings). Rather than sending the students a PDF via email or Blackboard, or simply distributing a printout in class, allowing the students to search out the article on their own has several advantages.

Good for students

Allowing students to search the library’s resources to find the full text of an article from the citation builds familiarity with the library and its website. This exercise also demonstrates that the library is a valuable place to find scholarly resources. As an added bonus, your students will learn to interpret a citation. Finding the full text is good practice for scholarly research!

To help with this task, we provide detailed instructions for finding the full text using an article citation on our Finding Full Text Guide. Feel free to include this link on your syllabus. Librarians are also available to help by phone, email, chat, or in person.

Good for the Library

Sending students to the library’s website for full text articles being used in your class helps the library keep better statistics. We regularly evaluate our collection to ensure that it is meeting the needs of faculty and students. If you distribute a printout of an article to the students of your class, our records will only indicate one download from that journal, although it is being used by many more patrons. Allowing students to download their own articles is one way of indicating that a particular journal is important to the curriculum.

Introducing two new library guides!

Finding Full Text

This guide includes several video tutorials demonstrating different methods for accessing the full text of library materials.  Topics include how to access the full text when you have a full or partial article citation, how to link to full text when searching a library database, how to find full text from the library’s online catalog, and how to link to the library’s full text subscriptions through Google Scholar.

DOI: Digital Object Identifier

Have you been painstakingly searching out DOIs for your reference lists but don’t really understand what they are all about or how they are useful to you?  This guide covers what a DOI is, where to find it, how to cite it, and how to use it to quickly find articles.

The library has received many new books in the area of research methods that are of interest across the social sciences.  See some highlights below, or browse the full list of new arrivals in research methods.

Successful research supervision: Advising students doing research
by Anne Lee
2012
Routledge
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Your research project: designing and planning your work
by Nicholas Walliman
2011
Sage Publications
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Doing your literature review: Traditional and systematic techniques
by Jill Jesson, with Lydia Matheson and Fiona M. Lacey
2011
Sage

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Social and behavioral research and the Internet: Advances in applied methods and research strategies
2011
Routledge
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Longitudinal data analysis: A practical guide for researchers in aging, health, and social sciences
edited by Jason T. Newsom, Richard N. Jones, and Scott M. Hofer
2012
Routledge
–

Cross-cultural analysis: Methods and applications
edited by Eldad Davidov, Peter Schmidt, and Jaak Billiet
2011
Routledge
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Cognitive methods in social psychology
edited by Karl Christoph Klauer, Andreas Voss, and Christoph Stahl
2011
Guilford Press
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Falvey Memorial Library recently subscribed to a large package of social science journals from Sage Journals Online.  These titles are now available in full text online through library resources.

The My Tools feature of Sage Journals Online allows users to establish email alerts, saved searches, marked citations, and favorite journals through personal accounts.  If you need assistance setting up a personal account or taking advantage of these tools, please contact Kristyna.

Here are some highlights from the newly acquired titles in the Communication Collection.  Check back with this blog for more highlights from other disciplines!

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
Holdings: 1999 – present
Convergence is a quarterly, peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes leading research addressing the creative, social, political and pedagogical issues raised by the advent of new media technologies. It provides an international, interdisciplinary forum for research exploring the reception, consumption and impact of new media technologies in domestic, public and educational contexts. It is edited by Julia Knight and Alexis Weedon.

Discourse Studies
Holdings: 1999 – present
Discourse Studies is an international peer-reviewed journal for the study of text and talk. Publishing outstanding work on the structures and strategies of written and spoken discourse, special attention is given to cross-disciplinary studies of text and talk in linguistics, anthropology, ethnomethodology, cognitive and social psychology, communication studies and law. It is edited by Teun A. van Dijk.

Global Media and Communication
Holdings: 2005 – present
Global Media and Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that provides a platform for research and debate on the continuously changing global media and communication environement. Its scope includes communication and media studies, anthropology, sociology, telecommunications, public policy, migration and diasporic studies, transnational security and international relations.

Science Communication
Holdings: 1999 – present
Science Communication (SC), published quarterly, is an international, interdisciplinary social science journal that examines the nature of expertise, the diffusion of knowledge, and the communication of science and technology among professionals and to the public. SC addresses theoretical and pragmatic questions central to some of today’s most vigorous political and social debates. This discourse crosses national, cultural, and economic boundaries on issues such as health care policy, educational reform, international development, and environmental risk.