Searchguide – BTH English

In this short clip you’ll learn how to find the BTH e-books through the library catalogue LIBRIS.

In the BTH Library catalogue you can search among about 35 000 titles that are held by the libraries at Gräsvik or Piren.

You will find the link to the Library catalogue on the Library webpage. It is a catalogue of the 35 000 titles, mainly in English and Swedish, that are held at the libraries at Gräsvik and Piren. The Library catalogue mainly contains records of print books and journals, but you can also find some records of other media types. Ejournals and ebooks are registered in special lists and catalogues, not in the Library catalogue. The subjects covered in the literature correspond to the educations offered at BTH.

Facilities of the OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) Library catalogue.
You can:

• Search and reserve books
• See when borrowed books are due
• Check what books you have at home and their due dates
• Renew loans
• Check what reservations you have made and your number in the queue
• Remove reservations
• Change PIN

Enter the word you want to search for (i.e. words from the title or the author’s name). It does not matter in what order you type the words. Neither is it necessary to enter all the information you have about a book (i.e. the whole title or the author name), instead pick the most specific (most infrequent) words from the title or author name.
However, using correct spelling is very important. If you are not certain about the spelling, masking (?) or truncating (*) might be a good idea. When masking, you replace the letters you are not sure of with a question mark.
E.g. Lund??ist (Lundquist, Lundkvist) or ubiq??tous (ubiquitous).

Truncation is useful when you want to do a simultaneous search on several word forms, e.g. comput* where the words can have different endings, for instance computer, computation etc.

When you have found some books you are interested in you can reserve them if they are borrowed by another patron. You can do this directly in the web catalogue with your Library card number and PIN. You will receive an e-mail when you can collect the book.

If the book is on the shelf in one of the libraries you can easily get it yourself by:

1. Checking which department has the book (Gräsvik)
2. Checking which shelf the books is at – 519
3. Noting the authors last name (if no information about author – see book title) – Baase

Library Catalogue

Since quite a long time many libraries have had public open access catalogues (OPAC) which facilitates book searching considerably.
BTH subscribes to both print and electronic journals and they are registered mainly in two different ways.

We will take a closer look at some of the most important book and journal catalogues and give some valuable tips and tricks.

• The Blekinge Institute of Technology Library Catalogue is a local catalogue of printed books, journals and other media held at the two BTH libraries: Gräsvik in Karlskrona and Piren in Karlshamn.

• BTH’s ebooks can be found on the library web page or in Libris

• BTH’s print journals can be found in the library catalogue and ejournals are most easily found in Find e-journal or in Summon@BTH.

• Libris is a national union catalogue that contains information about material held by Swedish research and special libraries. Here you will find references for print books, e-books, journals, e-journals, articles, maps, sheet music and more.

• Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog – KVK is a meta catalogue which does simultaneous searches in a large number of European national library catalogues and some of the larger Internet bookstores. You can search for both books and journals and you can also find out where you can access them.

• The British Library catalogue contains records of one of the greatest collections in the world. A visit to their web site is recommended, it is in truth a gold mine, among other things you can browse the sketch book of Leonardo da Vinci online…

• World Cat is a network of library content and services. You can search the collections of libraries around the world.

Eva Norling
20080206

Libris is a national union catalogue which contains information on what material can be found in Swedish research and special libraries. Here you will find references for printed books, e-books, journals, e-journals, articles, maps, sheet music and more.

LIBRIS is a national search service providing information on titles held by Swedish university and research libraries, as well as about thirty public libraries. At present the LIBRIS database contains almost 6 million titles.

LIBRIS is the joint catalogue of the Swedish academic and research libraries and is updated on a daily basis. The libraries providing cataloguing input all contribute jointly to building up the database contents.

In any hit list you may obtain, you can see the title, author, year of publication, etc., and often you are provided with additional information such as tables of contents, summaries, illustrations and links to full-text documents.

You can see which libraries hold the title which you are interested in, and whether the title is available for loan or as a full-text document on the Internet. You cannot buy books, periodicals etc. through LIBRIS, but rather through a bookshop.

The LIBRIS Department of the National Library of Sweden is responsible for the operation and development of this online search service.

1. Enter your search terms in the search form.
2. Refine your result set if your search returns to many results.
3. Check if the book is available at your library or if it is available in full text.

Some highlights:

• Cover pictures and summaries

• Refine your search

• Relevace ranking

• Spell checker

• Choose your favourite library/region

• Find other editions

• Customize LIBRIS and set your preferences

• Several reference formats

• Search outside LIBRIS

• Put LIBRIS on your site

• Short response times

Source: Libris Helppages
http://librishelp.libris.kb.se/help/help_eng.jsp

Journals are published periodically, e.g. once a month. They are often published by commercial publishers, but the publisher can also be an institution or organization.

Journals address different groups of readers and have different purposes and use. Amelia and Science are entertainment respectively popular science journals and their target group is anybody interested. Other journals are more specialized and directed toward professionals, students or researchers in a certain field, e.g. Sygeplejersken and
European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing.

When a journal article is “peer-reviewed”, its quality has been checked by other scientists before it was published. This system is most common in technology, medicine and science.

Journals almost always have an ISSN-number (International Standard Serial Number) which is unique for the journal and which is used for identification. The ISSN makes it easy to tell apart two journals with the same title or trace a journal that has changed title. An ISSN always consists of eight numbers with a hyphen in the middle: 0268-3962.

Apart from the ISSN you state year, volume or year and number to identify a certain number of a journal, and also pages if you want to identify a certain article. It can for example look like this: 2003(88):2, p.132-53 In order the following is stated: Year (volume/year): number, pages.

How can I find journals?

On the Library web site there is a link called “Find jornals”  where you can see which journals the BTH library has access to, both print versions and electronic versions. 

If you want to search for articles on a certain topic you need to search in other places. See the text on Scienctific articles or your subject guide in the Search guide to get tips about which databases you can search for articles on your subject field. In the Databases part you can get tips on how to search for articles in databases.

Find journal

Jenny Gunnarsson
2010-10-14

You can suggest the purchase of books you think the Library should have.

Students and staff at Blekinge Institute of Technology who are registered as patrons at the Library can leave purchase suggestions for titles you think the Library should have. You can leave the suggestion at a personal visit to the Library or by using a form at the Library web site.

Order books and articles

Internet bookstores

On the Internet you can find a great number of different bookstores. Apart from the fact that you can buy books from them, many are also useful for finding information about books.

In Internet bookstores, e.g. Amazon, there are often reviews and comments from other readers, pictures and “book cover” texts from the publishers. You can also often see the table of contents pages and read short excerpts from the books. On publishers’ websites there is also often some useful information, e.g. Studentlitteratur.

Check which book store has the lowest price for the book you want! Compricer, bokfynd.nu, antikvariat.net and Book Finder are examples of search tools that compare prices from several different Internet bookstores.

Public authorities, organizations and companies often sell their publications on their websites, e.g. Boverket. (The national board of housing, building and planning).

There are also many specialized bookstores, e.g. for used course literature, law literature etc.

Internet bookstores

Jenny Löfkvist
2005-06-22

It is good to know about the possibility of searching the great national libraries’ catalogues on the web. If you use a meta search tool you can search a great number of international catalogues simultaneously. But if you want to borrow course literature it is better to search the local libraries.

bibliotek.se

In bibliotek.se you can make joint searches in Libris (the research libraries’ collections) and BURK (the public libraries’ collections). The result list can be limited to a region or place, which can be good if you want to know what libraries in the vicinity have the book. If you want to know if the book is in a library in Blekinge you choose the “southern region”. There you can also choose a place.

Karlsruhe virtual catalogue

The Karlsruhe catalogue is a meta search tool that searches seveal large European library catalogues simultaneously. You get a standardized result list, and only when you choose one of the results you are linked to the library that holds the document.

British Library

which is Great Britains over 250 year old national library, and one of the worlds largest libraries, has a collection of more than 150 million records. In the main catalogue you can search for books, journals, music sheets and maps among other things and many of the documents can be ordered. There are also special catalogues of newspapers, manuscripts, maps, pictures and sound etc.

Eva Norling
2005-05-29

Find out what characterizes a scientific/peer-reviewed article, and read about how you can search for scientific articles on a certain subject.

Scientific journals

When a journal article is peer-reviewed this means that the scientific quality of the article has been checked by other scientists before it was published. This system is most common in technology, medicine and science, but it is also used in other disciplines. Scientific journals can also, apart from the peer-reviewed articles, contain other types of articles, e.g. book reviews, debate articles and commentaries. In the section Research you can read more about scientific publishing.

There are three types of scientific articles:

• Original articles where the author accounts for empirical studies, and describes the results of her research study for the first time.
• Overview articles which are critical evaluations where the author organizes, integrates and evaluates previously published studies.
• Theoretical articles where the author based on existing research presents a new theory, analyses or criticizes existing theories.

A peer-reviewed article contains the following elements:

• Abstract – a brief summary of the article which includes purpose, method, results and conclusion.
• Introduction – where purpose and problem are described, and background information for the problem area is presented.
• Method – where the method used is described so thoroughly that it is possible for the reader to follow and repeat the research process.
• Result – where the research result is presented in text and possibly with tables, charts and figures.
• Discussion – in this part the research result is discussed as well as those principles, relations or generalisations which are supported by the result of the study. Possible weaknesses in the study are addressed here.
• Bibliography – sometimes also called list of references. All documents used by the author should be included in the bibliography.

Where can I search for peer-reviewed articles?

Among the Library’s resources:

The Library subscribes to peer-reviewed journals both in print and in electronic format. Among the electronic journals the Library subscribes to there are many peer-reviewed journals. In Summon@BTH you can search among almost all of the Library’s e-journals which span many different subject fields. A search in Summon@BTH does not give a complete overview of what is currently published in your subject, but if you search here you will find many interesting peer-reviewed articles which you can read on screen or print directly.

If you want to get an overview of what peer-reviewed articles have been published internationally in your subject of interest it is often easiest to search the reference database which covers your subject field, e.g. Medline for peer-reviewed articles in medicine. This will give you a pretty good idea of the current state of research in your subject. In the Searchguide’s subject guide you can see which database(s) specialize in your subject.

In a reference database there are many functions which facilitate your search considerably. A reference database contains references to many different kinds of documents, not just articles, but you can often set limits for your search so that you only search among journal articles or peer-reviewed articles. If this is not possible you must check every reference in order to see what type of document you have found – is it a journal article or a dissertation? Since reference databases are international it is also important to check the language of the document. The reference is in English, but the document it refers to can be written in Japanese or Russian. In section Database guide you can read more about reference databases.

In a reference database you cannot always find the whole article, you may only be able to read an abstract, a summary of the article. Sometimes you can get the whole article via the SFX-button or other linking, but if this is not possible you can check if the Library has the journal in print or in electronic format. If the journal is not available at the Library you can order it as an interlibrary loan if you are a student or staff at BTH.

Searching free resources on the Internet:

You can search for scientific articles on ordinary Internet search engines like Google or Yahoo, but it is neither particularly easy or effective, especially when you are searching for articles on a particular subject. It is often like searching for a needle in a haystack. If on the other hand you are searching for a particular article, and you already have some information about the article, e.g. article author, article title or journal name it may be worthwhile to search for it on for example Google.

It is more relevant to use search engines which specialize in scientific information, e.g. Scirus or Google Scholar. In Scirus’ advanced search form you can for example choose only to get articles in the search result. Through search engines like Google and Yahoo you only reach a small amount of all the information on the Internet. Even if the contents of a database or web site is free to access it can, for various reasons, not always be searched from for example Google. Instead you need to search directly on the web site you are interested in. Because of this it may be good to be familiar with some good search tools for free scientific resources on the Internet. In the section Internet you can read more about the Invisible web.

Free scientific journals – as a reaction against publishers’ extreme price increases for scientific journal subscriptions there is a movement which promotes free access to scientific information on the web. BioMedCentral is one example which contains free resources in biomedicine. DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals, is another example. Read more about Open Archives Initiative and Free scientific resources in the section Research.

Finally, as always when you are searching for information on the Internet you need to pay extra attention to criticism of the sources! Read more about this in the section Criticism.

Jenny Gunnarsson
2010-10-14

An e-journal is a journal which is published electronically. Journals sometimes exist only in electronic format or in parallel electronic and print editions.

E-journals that the Library subscribes to are collected in different databases on the Internet. Some databases collect journals on a certain subject, while others are general. They have different search interfaces and offer different search facilities.

You can often search for articles in two ways:

• by finding a certain journal in the database and browsing its articles
• by searching for articles in a certain subject among all the journals in the database

The most common full text formats are PDF (Portable Document Format) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Articles in HTML look like regular text on a web site, whereas PDF gives the article’s original layout complete with pictures and diagrams. To be able to open PDF-files on your computer you need the program Acrobat Reader from Adobe which can be downloaded free of charge.

How do I find the Library’s e-journals?

On the library web site > Information resources > Electronic journals you can see the different e-journal collections that the Library subscribes to.

In LIBRIS you can see which e-journals the Library subscribes to. You use the extended search form and enter “library code” Bth and “publication type” periodicals.

The easiest way to access the Library’s e-journals is by using Summon@BTH, where most of the titles are searchable. Thus, instead of searching each of the journal collections separately you can make one search in Summon@BTH. There can also be some advantages to searching one particular collection directly. You often get better search facilities if you search directly in the e-journal database, or you might prefer a certain search interface to Summon@BTH. There might also be some collections that are particularly good for your subject field.

Free e-journals

There is an international movement that works for “Open access”, i.e. free access for research results. Many university libraries have started their own archives on the Internet where scientists can publish their results, for example the BTH Electronic research archive.

The background for this is the recent extreme rise in subscription rates for journals. Libraries around the world can no longer afford subscriptions for necessary journals, which counteract the idea that research should be available at no cost and easy to access.

Research is often publicly financed. Researchers who get their salaries from universities and colleges publish their results in journals without getting any payment from the commercial publishers. Mostly, the scientist also gives the publisher the copyright of the article. Other scientists contribute as editors or work with peer-review, sometimes without economic compensation. Then libraries at universities and colleges who are most often publicly financed buy the journals at a very high cost. For researchers it is important to get their articles published in prestigious journals, because it is a way of improving their qualifications.

Some examples of free e-resources are PubMed Central, DOAJ Directory of open access journals and Highwire.

You will find links for free e-resources at the Library web site > Information resources.

Jenny Gunnarsson
2011-03-02