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Research tutorials enter 21st century
Viewing videos online has grown in terms of popularity and accessibility. Today, you can surf the Internet and be bombarded with streaming commercials, media clips of pet tricks and even political debates. This media explosion finally has reached the world of academia, with a growing number of online research tutorials available from libraries and database vendors. The following is a listing and brief description of some of the many online tutorials available for free that explain how to conduct research using these information products.
The UB Libraries has two interactive tutorials—a basic and an advanced—on how to find books in the libraries' new online catalog. The tutorials, available at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/help/findingbooks.html, walk you through the process and require the viewer to click various links to continue the tutorial.
Web of Science has a very extensive video collection at http://scientific.thomson.com/support/recorded-training/wok/. In addition to English, the site provides videos in Korean, Chinese, French and Spanish, to name a few. Topics covered include how to run a citation search, how to save results, how to set up alerts (to stay current on research in an area) and how to run a topical search. Each tutorial is around six minutes long and includes video and audio.
JStor provides tutorials on how to search and how to browse at http://www.jstor.org/about/tutorials/. While they are only available in English, they do provide transcripts in other languages, including Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish.
Science Direct also has an extensive tutorial collection in a host of languages, among them French, Chinese and Russian, at http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/using/. In addition to how to search the database, the tutorials also cover how to create customized alert notices and how to perform a citation search.
EndNote citation management software—version 10—has an online tutorial at http://www.endnote.com/training/tutorials/EndNoteX_tutorial/EndNote.asp. It is only available in English. The tutorial covers how to create an EndNote library, how to import citations, how to search a database from within EndNote and how to cite while writing. The video does require downloading before it can be viewed.
All these products attempt to provide the viewer with instant instruction that can be repeated as needed. Didn't catch how to limit a search by year? Go back and view it again. If you want to know if your favorite database or the one recommended by your subject librarian has an online tutorial, simply log into it and look for their help documentation. There often will be a link immediately available titled "demo" or "tutorial." Good luck and remember that while online tutorials are great for 3 a.m. searches, they should not replace a face-to-face meeting with your subject librarian. He or she is the best tutorial out there.
—Cynthia Tysick, Arts and Sciences Libraries