Textiles Graduate Seminar

1
Textiles Graduate Seminar

• Honora F. Nerz
• Head, Textiles Library and Engineering Services
• September 7, 2005

2
Changing Expectations

• You must use authoritative sources of information
• You must evaluate sources of information you
  choose
• You must do exhaustive research
• You cannot ignore print resources

3
Authoritative Information Sources

• Where do they come from?
• You should be focusing on traditional academic
  literature, i.e., journal articles, conference
  papers and books.
• And therefore, you should be mainly using
  databases (World Textiles, ABI Inform, etc.) to
  access the literature.

4
Evaluating information sources

• Relevance
• Authority
• Accuracy
• Objectivity
• Currency
• Coverage

5
Exhaustive Searching

• Multiple searches
• Advanced search techniques
• Using indexing systems
• Search alerts/saved searches/keeping track
• Multiple databases
• Multiple libraries
• WorldCat
• ILL

6
Print Sources

• Reality vs. our preferences
• Books vs. e-books
• Journals
• Most textile journals only available in print
• A lot of chemistry and engineering titles are
  available electronically
• Some management articles are available full text
  through databases like ABI Inform

7
Print, contd

• Databases (things are getting better)
• Full coverage in World Textiles (1970 - )
• Textile Technology Index
• 1978 present searchable electronically
• 1945 1977 in print
• Full coverage in Web of Science (1945 - )
• Full coverage in Compendex (1848 - )
• Full coverage in ABI Inform (1905 - )

8

• Never fail to know that if you are doing all the
  talking, you are boring somebody.
• - Helen Gurley Brown

9
Questions?

• Thank you!