Two workshops this week

We have two workshops offered this week in the library:

Tuesday, 9/30, 11am
How to Use: The Online Catalog for Finding Books in the Library
Instructor: Rhonda
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
Learn how to search the online catalog to find out what books are owned at the CAC library.  Students will know how to identify which campus has the book, how to find the book on the shelf or request it from another library, and how to check books out.

Thursday, 10/2, 3pm
Citing Sources
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
Students often have difficulty understanding why and when they need to cite their sources.  This workshop will help them understand the importance of citations and how to follow the MLA and APA citation styles.

Researching the Presidential Candidates

Now that we know the Presidential Debate is definitely on (airing at 6pm here in Arizona, by the way), we thought you might want to do some research on the candidates before hearing from them.

America.gov, part of the US Dept. of State, has brief introductions to each of the candidates, including their Vice President running mates, as well as statements from each of the Presidential candidates on a variety of issues.

Project Vote Smart, a non-profit and non-partisan group, has information on each of the candidates, including those that are running as Independents.  You can find out about their voting records, issue positions, speeches and public statements, and even interest group ratings. 

FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania, researches and provides an analysis of the accuracy, or rather inaccuracy, of claims made by politicians in the media.

You can also visit the official sites for John McCain and Barack Obama, but remember that one of the key criteria in evaluating website content is bias.  If the information presented is from the candidate themselves, you may not be getting both sides of the issues.

If you haven’t registered to vote yet, don’t forget that the deadline to do so is October 6th!  Arizona residents can register online and even request to vote by mail.  Not an Arizona resident?  Let one of the librarians know which state you’re from and we’ll send you the online voter registration link for your state.  It couldn’t be easer!

Calling all writers!

Did you know that the Signal Peak campus Learning Center has a Creativer Writers’ Workshop for CAC students?  We hadn’t either, but we do now and we think it’s a great opportunity for anyone who’s thought about writing the next Great American Novel.  Or poem.  Or essay.  Or… well, you get the picture! 

The workshop is held every Thursday from 12noon to 2pm and covers all styles of writing.  Who knows, maybe your book will be in the library someday!

Confused by AND and OR? Boolify!

Some of you may have been lucky enough to sit through an explanation on how to do advanced searching in the library’s online article databases.  If you are one of these lucky folks, you also probably heard about using AND and OR in your search.  These two words can really help you out in your research, but they can be a bit confusing to learn at first!  However, we’ve found out about a website where you can experiment with using them and see how they work. 

Go to Boolify and start with a green puzzle piece where you enter your keyword.  From there, you can use the OR puzzle pieces to add keywords and expand your search or the AND puzzle piece to add keywords and narrow it.  Be sure to watch the number of website results grow and shrink as you add puzzle pieces to your search!

Workshops for the week

Here’s the schedule for this week:

Tuesday, 9/23, 11am
Evaluating Online Resources
Instructor: McKay and Rhonda
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
Students will gain an understanding of the differences between the information they find using library subscription databases and websites found through an Internet search engine.  Then, using five standard evaluative criteria, students will learn how to determine if the websites they find are credible and accurate.

Thursday, 9/25, 3pm
Thinking Critically
Instructor: Jeff and Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
It’s becoming more and more important to think critically about the world around us.  We’ll explain to students why information providers of all types try to persuade us, the techniques they use and how to identify them, and which sources you can reliably use.  The use of language, statistics, and logic are just a few of the areas we will examine.

Topic Guides available for Env. Science and Country Studies

We’re slowly adding topic guides to our new topic guide wiki.  We have one available for those of you that might be doing any research on environmental sciences and country studies.  Remember that these topic guides are meant to be a general starting point in your research.  You can always check with a librarian to find out what more is available on your specific topic!

Thursday’s Workshop

We got so excited about telling everyone about Pop Culture Universe yesterday that we forgot to mention this week’s workshop!

Thursday, 9/18, 3pm
Research Strategies 101
Instructor: Nancy and McKay
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
In this workshop we’ll explore how to break a student’s thesis statement into search concepts that they can then string together in an advanced research strategy.  Students will learn how to use “AND” and “OR” to narrow and broaden their searches, how to effectively use wildcard functions, and critically evaluate the information they find to determine if it effectively addresses their research question. 

Remember that you don’t need to register in advance for the library workshops.  All you have to do is drop by the library on Thursday at 3pm!

It’s a Pop Culture Universe

Who can take a fun topic like pop culture and make it into work?  School of course, when you have write a research paper about it.  While the library can’t make a research paper less work, it can give you a great resource to use in researching it.  We now have the Pop Culture Universe database in our library.  This database is actually a selection of electronic books, available in full-text, on a variety of pop culture topics.  The best part about this database is how easy it is to use!  Go ahead and check it out – we know you want to!

Library Workshops begin this week

It’s that time of the semester as the library’s workshops start up again this week!  You can stop by any workshop - no need to sign up beforehand.  Remember that you can always check the library’s workshop web page for information on all of the workshops being offered for the semester, including dates and times, but we’ll also post weekly reminders right here at Word of Mouth.

Here’s the schedule for this week:

Wednesday, 9/10, 3pm
Introduction to Reference Resources
Instructor: Nancy
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
This hands-on workshop is a basic introduction to the various types of library reference resources that are available to students, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and general reference works in online and print formats.

Thursday, 9/11, 3pm
Jumpstart Your Research Process
Instructor: McKay
Location: Signal Peak Campus Library
This workshop will help students understand the different benefits of the types of information resources that the CAC libraries make available – print, online, and multimedia – in addition to differentiating these resources from non-library internet web resources.  They’ll also learn about coming up with keywords, the difference between keywords and subjects and identifying scholarly resources.

CAC Book Club – “Feed”

The CAC Book Club, presented by the Honors Program and the Library, is excited to announce its Fall book selection and discussion date!

 

Feed

by M.T. Anderson

Thursday, November 6th @ 12 noon

Signal Peak: Room O208A
Superstition Mountain: Room C324
Aravaipa: Room E11

 

From Publishers Weekly:

In this chilling novel, Anderson (Burger Wuss; Thirsty) imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies’ attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School. But everything changes when he and his pals travel to the moon for spring break. There Titus meets home-schooled Violet, who thinks for herself, searches out news and asserts that “Everything we’ve grown up with the stories on the feed, the games, all of that it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to.” Without exposition, Anderson deftly combines elements of today’s teen scene, including parties and shopping malls, with imaginative and disturbing fantasy twists. “Chats” flow privately from mind to mind; Titus flies an “upcar”; people go “mal” (short for “malfunctioning”) in contraband sites that intoxicate by scrambling the feed; and, after Titus and his friends develop lesions, banner ads and sit-coms dub the lesions the newest hot trend, causing one friend to commission a fake one and another to outdo her by getting cuts all over her body. Excerpts from the feed at the close of each chapter demonstrate the blinding barrage of entertainment and temptations for conspicuous consumption. Titus proves a believably flawed hero, and ultimately the novel’s greatest strength lies in his denial of and uncomfortable awakening to the truth. This satire offers a thought-provoking and scathing indictment that may prod readers to examine the more sinister possibilities of corporate- and media-dominated culture.

 

The Book Club discussion is open to all members of the CAC community, so be sure to pass this information on to others.

 

We hope to see you there!