Introducing Zotero, your personal research assistant!

Have you heard the news about the University’s new implementation of Zotero? You might be curious what Zotero is and what it does. Zotero is a free online tool that helps you store and organize your research sources (journal articles, book chapters, etc.) Zotero works as a desktop app on your device, but also has a browser connector to help you gather citations from your sources and a web-based version, too. Zotero generates bibliographies of your stored citations either as…

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Book Review, Free Resources, and New Computers!

It's hot outside right now. I mean people are literally moving away from Texas because it's so hot! Thankfully here in the library, we have A/C. I am an indoor person and while I like to go out and experience things, my perfect day out is one where it looks like it might rain. Regardless, stay safe out there - it’s going to be a long summer! Book Review I wanted to review this book because 1: I have never…

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Keep on Tweeting on (Responsibly)

Something that may surprise you is that I, a librarian, love social media. As librarians, we often tell students to shy away from social media and find “credible” and “scholarly” sources. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love watching TikToks or creating content for my puppy’s Instagram account. Social media can be fun. It can create a sense of community and make us feel good about ourselves. We can also learn new things from our friends and the people we…

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Library Hacks on Finding Information

We all have questions we want answers to. Those questions can be simple, like: what time does the library open on Saturday? What is the weather like this weekend? And what was the final score of the Islander baseball game? And usually, with a simple Google search, look at the weather app, or visit to the Islander Baseball team website, we can find the answers to our questions. But sometimes our questions are more complex, and Google’s algorithm cannot give…

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Red Flags: How to Identify Predatory Publishing

What is predatory publishing? The term “predatory publishing” refers to an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. If you are unfamiliar with the term “open access,” you can read about it in another blog post, but a quick definition of one model of open access, is that instead of having…

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Sharing is Caring: what librarians do when we’re stumped

Where do you go when you need research help? The library of course! But where do librarians go when we need research help? Well, there’s a secret closet in the back of the library where an eternal flame exists. If we sacrifice an obsolete form of information preservation, say a CD-ROM or a floppy disk, we’re allowed to ask the flame one question. That’s how we learn new stuff! Just kidding, that’s not a real thing. Definitely don’t go searching…

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Open Education Week 2021: Open Educational Resources in the Age of COVID

I’ve been talking for a while on this blog about open education and how it can lower costs for students while at the same time bring new, invigorating practices to the classroom. But when the pandemic hit last year, open educational resources (OER) became a solution to a problem that was now more urgent than ever before.   As a result of the pandemic, many students have been struggling financially. Access to physical books -- for example, reserves in the library which before the pandemic had been one strategy students could use to lower textbook costs -- were disrupted. Supply chains…

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Career Research at Bell Library

“Where do you want to be in five years?” Apart from being asked why you’re still single (it’s a choice, grandma!), perhaps nothing stokes the flames of anxiety like being asked where you see yourself in fives years. College students have plenty to worry about with classes, homework, extra curriculars, and jobs, and now folks are going to add this to the pile?? Well, yes. During college, while you’re maybe still trying to find a path that excites you, career research doesn’t…

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What’s a Journal Article?

So you’ve been asked to find a journal article, but no one told you what that means. You’ve come to the right place, my friend. Let’s talk. What are journals? Journals are publications that come out periodically, like once a month or twice a year, and are filled with all the new content that was submitted to them. There are journals for research, journals for book reviews, journals for creative writing—whatever you’re in to! Each time the journal publishes a…

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What’s in a Bib Record?

Do you ever see something so different or complicated that you just have to pause and think, “What am I looking at here?” I think library records can look like that sometimes, so I’m going to use this post to clear up what we’re seeing when we do a search in the library’s Quick Search tool. You can access the library’s Quick Search from the Bell Library homepage. Type whatever you’re interested in (monkeys, lime beans, emo kid hair culture, etc.)…

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