Stuck at Home: A PSC Library Newsletter

March

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What's Newsworthy

The library now has subscription access to some JSTOR collections. These collections are particularly strong in the social sciences and humanities. A link to JSTOR is available on the library database list, and items from JSTOR will also show up in results from OneSearch. Please let us know if you have any questions about finding or using JSTOR.

Cool features include:

The JSTOR Understanding Series can help interpret original documents like the United States Constitution, or Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Each document includes citations linked to scholarly articles analyzing them.

Text Analyzer is a tool that will “read” any document you upload, determine the topic via keywords, and then recommend citations for further reading. This is particularly useful if you are short on sources.

How-to help students evaluate sources

A large part of the research journey is vetting sources. This is a learned skill and we know our students struggle. Our Evaluating Sources research guide can help students to think about how they vet their sources and make selections. This guide covers popular, trade, and scholarly sources since they are different.

How-to be vaccine savvy

The COVID-19 vaccine has gone from dream to reality, but it still needs to get in arms. Our new COVID-19 Vaccine research guide will walk you through the confusing maze of vaccine phases, new strains, and vaccine myths. It will be updated as information changes.

New blog series

Starting in February, we have a new blog series just for students, called, Library HELP!: a monthly blog to help you student. Our first issue is up and covers study tips for students. The goal of the blog is to bring the library to students, wherever they are, and make the library less of an abstraction. Each month we’ll give students practical tips on how to navigate college. We ask for your help in sharing this with them.

What’s new in the PSC Archives?

There are exciting projects happening in the PSC Archives! We are in the process of re-organizing collections and creating finding aids for them. We are also digitizing photos and making them accessible online. The goal for all these projects is to make collections more accessible to the PSC community. Interested in more about the PSC Archives and its collection? Please email the college archivist Alex Altan at: aaltan@prairiestate.edu and you can see the digitized collection here.

30 seconds to information literacy: the conversation of scholarship

It won’t come as a surprise to you that scholars don’t always agree, but it might be news to your students. Often students rely too heavily on one or two sources and get only one view point as a result. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses in her TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story,” only understanding one narrative is detrimental. Not only does it give an incomplete picture, it can be exclusionary, and as she correctly says, dangerous. Imagine the damage done by policy decisions made with one story, or medical procedures tested on only one population. (Actually, we don’t have to imagine this, do we?)

This is where the ACRL frame, Scholarship as Conversation comes into the picture. Scholarship is a conversation that occurs over many years between different researchers. Researcher A conducts original research and writes about it. Researcher B reads researcher A’s work, and disagrees. They write about it. Researcher C does a large experiment and thinks they are both wrong. The process continues and each new researcher adds to the body of knowledge and becomes part of the conversation. This means when reading research, a student is stepping into a conversation that has simultaneously already begun and is ongoing.

When students begin participating in this conversation with their own research, they may struggle to grasp this concept. By reading one piece of scholarship, they are not reading, “the final word” on that topic. We can help them understand that they are walking in during the middle of a conversation. I like this video’s explanation of this struggle. Instead, we can emphasize that their voice is contributing to a body of work on the topic. They too are part of that conversation.

Featured eBooks

These days, there IS no place like home. Yet, do you and yours long for adventure? This is a perfect opportunity to explore our OverDrive collection.

Settle in with a cup of tea and journey with Alice down that rabbit hole. Veil yourself in Scheherazade’s tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba. Fine tune your archer’s skills as you and your Merry Men caper through the Sherwood Forest. Defy the odds. Seek Platform 9 ¾ and whisk yourself away into a world of wizarding. Meet queens, knights, dragons, and the unexpected as you travel into the world of Grimm. Explore Middle Earth and determine if there really IS one ring to rule them all. Find that magical place in the wood and perhaps you too will become Terabithia’s royalty. Try on those silver slippers and follow that road of yellow bricks. You are human, but what if you’ve been raised in a graveyard by ghosts and werewolves? Maybe you need a little whimsical nonsense. Will you find it in a limerick or two?

We invite you to open that book and stay awhile.