Your writing course and beyond: the PCC Library supports your life!

We hope the resources we’ve provided this quarter have been helpful as you complete your writing course. But remember, the PCC Library has all kinds of information to support your academic pursuits, personal interests, and everything in between. For example:

• Check out our customized research guides (http://www.pcc.edu/library/classes/) that provide suggested resources for everything from Business to Biology to Building Construction Technology
  
  
• Prepare for certification exams in a variety of professional and technical fields with the Learning Express Library, an online guide to test preparation in everything from civil service exams, college prep, GED, real estate, cosmetology, US citizenship, firefighter and much, much more!
  
  
• Shift your job search into high gear with the Library’s many resources on resume writing and job hunting strategies, and career paths.
  
  
• Pursue personal interests with information on art and crafts, health, parenting, personal finance, starting a business, travel . . . Like PCC itself, the PCC Library is all about your future!
  

Please tell us how we’re doing!

We are eager to know if this service has helped you in your distance learning Writing course and how we may improve this service for future distance and campus courses. If your course ends in Week 8, your instructor will be emailing you a link to an online survey evaluation this week. If your course ends in Week 10, your instructor will email the link to the survey evaluation at that time. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey.

Best wishes to those of you completing your course this week. For those of you continuing through Week 10, we look forward to sharing with you additional Internet tips.

See you next week, Robin and Sheila, Fusion Librarians

Web Searching -- Start your engines!

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a few lesser-known, but very handy, search engines. Ujiko and Clusty both group results; Ujiko lets you refine searches by focusing on the results you want, while Clusty separates ambiguous terms like "log" (from a tree) and "log" (a record of a journey). Soon we'll have a similar visual search available in our EBSCOhost databases; after selecting databases, choose the "Visual Search" tab to try it out. Right now you won't be able to retrieve articles using Visual Search; our library technical team is working on it.

We promised you a few more ways to find useful, reliable information online, and here they are!


Health and medical information: Medical information is a high-stakes area -- wrong answers can do some serious damage! Two internationally respected consumer medical resources are free for everyone to use: MEDLINEplus (www.medlineplus.gov) and Health on the Net (www.hon.ch).
MEDLINEplus is a service of the National Library of Medicine. It contains links to a wide variety of reliable health information -- it's more a portal than a search engine, so you know the information you retrieve is reliable. Selected information is available in multiple languages, in easy-to-read formats, or as animated tutorials.
Health on the Net is based in Switzerland, and its search engine can be used to search only the medical websites that subscribe to a code of ethics, or all health websites. It'a available in English, French and Spanish. The web sites you find may be in any of these languages as well.

Legal Information -- another high-stakes area. There are a few good places to start looking for legal information. FindLaw (http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com/) provides pretty comprehensive access to a variety of US legal information. It is supported by advertising, but it's also widely respected and recommended.

Science and Technology change fast; web searching can be a good way to keep up with current research. Try Scirus (www.scirus.com), and don't miss the Science News results at the bottom of the page.
Science.gov (http://science.gov/) offers access to science research. Unfortunately, not all science.gov results are available free in full text; you might need to use interlibrary loan to request interesting articles.

Finally, here's a short list of favorite web sites:

• SciTech Daily (www.scitechdaily.com) provides a quick dose of science research and comentary.
  
• Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) does the same for the humanities.
  
• The Library of Congress (www.loc.gov) has amazing online exhibits, collections of historical images, sounds, and videos, and everything you need to know about legislation and Congress. Check out the American Memory section, and use Thomas to see how your legislators are voting!

Some of you are in 8-week courses, others in 10-week courses. As your course comes to a close, we'll be asking you to let us know what you think of this service. We'll also have more information for you next week on information resources for the rest of your life -- that is, your life outside of classes. Until then, good luck with your writing!

Robin and Sheila, Fusion Librarians

Coffee Break: The 2:00 am blues – getting help 24/7

So far we’ve talked about topics of our choice. Hopefully they’ve been helpful in your Writing class this summer! We invited questions last week, but didn't receive any -- I hope that means everyone is finding great resources. From experience, though, I'm pretty sure at least a few people will discover critical questions at the last minute. Let's look at ways to get the answers you need, exactly when you need them.

If the library's open, feel free to call the reference desk -- at Sylvania, the number is 503-977-4500. A PCC reference librarian will be happy to help you.

If you can’t think of a question now, but a critical one comes up at 2:00 am upon which your final paper depends, don’t freak out! In this age of Internet access, you can ask a librarian anything, any time through virtual reference services. L-Net connects you to a librarian any time of the day or night. You won't always get a PCC librarian, but you'll almost always chat with a college or university librarian who's an expert researcher.

When you ask a librarian for help, he or she will ask you a few questions. She'll want to know where you've looked for answers, what kinds of information you need, and how much you're looking for -- a two-page essay and a ten-page research paper need different resources. If you're just starting out and need places to look, that's fine -- the librarian doesn't want to repeat what you've already tried, and also doesn't want to overload you. This is the kind of work reference librarians love, so give us a chance!

Summer quarter is rolling by quickly, and next week we’ve got a special treat for those of you enrolled in 10 week courses -- We’ll be taking a second look at the Internet to discover so much more than Google. Search the invisible web with Dogpile, discover really useful and reliable web sites and portals, and even search visually with various search engines. If you haven’t heard of these terrific tools, be sure to tune in for super savvy searching to support your academic success and beyond!

See you next week, Sheila and Robin, Fusion Librarians