Monday, March 16, 2009

Concept Mapping a Research Topic








Concept mapping was developed in the 1970s and first used in the sciences. Concept mapping is a visual approach to developing one's thinking on a topic. This tutorial applies concept mapping to library research. Mapping a topic as the initial step in the research process will help to articulate questions, gather vocabulary, and uncover related facets of a topic. Use these questions, terminology and related terms when searching RISD Library's online subscription databases and the web.

Concept Mapping Tutorial

Related link: how to log in to RISD library databases from off campus

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Spring Break Library Hours

RISD Library Hours
RISD Spring Break, March 21-28, 2009

Saturday, March 21 (FIRST FLOOR ONLY) 10am-6pm
Sunday, March 22 LIBRARY CLOSED

Monday, March 23 - Friday March 27 8:30am-4:30pm
First Floor + 2nd Floor- Visual Resources & Picture Collection

Special Collections & RISD Archives, 2nd Floor Hours
Monday, March 23 - Friday March 27 9am-4pm

Saturday, March 28 LIBRARY CLOSED

Sunday, March 29 - the Library Resumes Normal Hours
which are:
FIRST FLOOR - Circulation & Reference, noon-11pm
SECOND FLOOR - Special Collections & RISD Archives, Picture Collection
11am-7pm

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Limiting to English language articles in online databases

In Margot Nishimura's AH 102 Medieval Art History class yesterday there was a discussion about how to limit search results to articles in English in the online article databases.

Here are some tips:

In Art Full Text/ Art Retrospective there is a Language of Document field in the drop-down menu on the front search screen. The default for the menu is "smart search".
Also in AFT/Art Retro's html full text documents is the option to translate the article to (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, or Dutch) or to listen to an audio file of the article.

In Art Bibliographies Modern, BHA, DAAI, and DAR, the initial search screen has a check box to select, Limited to: English only.

In Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals there is a Language selection box on the Advanced Search screen.

In AFT/Art Retro, ABM, BHA, DAAI, DAR there is the option to choose the language of the search interface - a fairly new feature.

In JSTOR, Limit to English on the Advanced Search screen.