How to Access Databases

Hey everyone, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to access our library databases. Any time you're trying to access any of our online resources, the first thing that you need to do is go to our website, dc3.edu/library.  When you type that into your browser, you should see this page. We have lots of great resources on here, but today we want to go to our catalog. So you just click on this purple rectangle right here and that'll bring you to our catalog. Before you can access our databases, you need to log in. You can do that by clicking on the login link right here in the top right corner of the screen, and when you do that, you should see this. You need to type in your student I.D. number with three zeros in front of it. The three zeros are very important and the first time you log in, your password will be userpass. After that, you'll be prompted to create your own password and you can log in using that moving forward. When you've typed everything in submit and you should be in. There are a couple of different places you can click to see our different databases. First, you can click on this stack here on the search bar and that'll pull up a list of our databases right here. You can also click on our databases tab and that will also pull up a list of databases. Down here we have our open source databases and open source essentially just means that anyone can access them. You don't have to be a student here. You don't have to work in a particular place. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can access those databases. We also have our nursing and our health databases and here we have encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are a really great resource to use when you're looking for a good overview of the topic and the one that I would generally recommend for most of your research is going to be EBSCO Database Resources. That's the first one under general databases. Click right here and you'll see this. Before you hit continue, you need to make sure to select all. That just makes sure that you are accessing all of the resources that we have available to us through EBSCO. Click continue, and you'll see the search bar. Now, you need to treat this search bar a little bit differently than you would Google. On Google you might type in something like "What is Continental drift?" or "How does Continental Drift work?" But on here, you don't want any extra words or phrases because it'll try to pull up articles related to all of the different words you type in. So if you're looking for continental drift, you just type in continental drift right there and search. Now, there are quite a few articles here, five thousand eight hundred and sixty nine, but there are a few things that you can do to limit this before you start scrolling through. First of all, you want to limit to full text that just guarantees that all of the articles you're seeing you have access to for free through us. Next, you want to click peer reviewed. Peer review is essentially just a process where experts in the field read over an article before it's published to make sure that the information in it is accurate, and it adds to the field. So they've already done most of the work of making sure an article is trustworthy for you. The only thing with peer review is that it can only make sure that an article is accurate when it's published. Sometimes new articles come out or new information is released that makes it so that older articles are no longer accurate. So to be safe, you want to look at articles from the past five years or so You can type that in right here, and now you can scroll through your list of articles. You'll see you have a much more manageable number now, about fifty three. So this one looks good. You can click here, and it will pull up a page that looks a lot like this. Here you have subject terms, which are words related to the article that the database recognizes. These can be really useful if you're having a tough time pulling up enough good articles because these terms, the database works well with. So you'll pull up a lot more results using those. On the right here, you can also cite the article, you can scroll down, they have APA, MLA, any citation style that you really need. You can also save it to your computer right here. Or if you're not on your computer, you can email it to yourself so that you don't have to search for it in the database every time you want to read it. Over here, you can also click on PDF full text to see the PDF in your browser or on your computer. Now, I'll show you a few more databases that you have access to. If you go all the way back to our library website, dc3.edu/library and scroll to the bottom, you will see a link to the State Library of Kansas. Click right there, and it should take you here. All of you have access to resources on the Kansas State Library because you're in Kansas and that doesn't expire when you're no longer taking classes here. You can access the resources on this Web site for as long as you're in the state of Kansas. All you need to do to access these resources are get a, are to get a Kansas State Library e-card, and you can do that at our front desk. All we need is your first name, middle initial, last name, date of birth and a good email address for you, and we'll get you set up with an e-card. To see the student research resources, all you need to do is scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on student research right here, and you'll see this really great list of databases. The first one I'll show you is issues and controversies. You  can just click here and it will pull up a website that has a lot of great information about different hot button topics. It has articles about what people think on both sides of the issues and really good articles that give a background on different issues. This can be really helpful in speech classes or sometimes in English composition classes, any class where you have to look at both sides of different issues. If you go back to the database page, you also can see our history reference center. Click there and you can see tons of great books, journal articles, lots of stuff on different topics in history. And go back here again and scroll down a little bit. You can see Bloom's literature. This website has lots of great information about authors, books, plays, works of art, really pretty much anything in literature or the fine arts. And there are lots of other really great databases that you can access through the Kansas State Library or even through our catalog. I really encourage you to look through those, explore them, and if you have any questions about any databases in this presentation or otherwise, please feel free to reach out to the library. We'd love to help. Thanks for watching!