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Regent University
Come hear Nancy Pearcey talk about her book
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Information Literacy and the Library
The results were not all negative. The ETS singled out the following positive findings:
ETS also singled out three troubling findings:
The University Library recognizes that what has come to be known as information literacy—the ability to find, evaluate, and use information—is an essential proficiency with which Christian leaders must be equipped. One of the goals in the Library’s mission statement speaks to this necessity: “to educate students in information literacy to enhance their opportunities for success and develop lifelong learning habits.” To this end, the Library has developed an array of services designed to improve Regent students’ability to find and use the best possible resources:
At least once a year, the Library faculty carefully scrutinize the effectiveness of these programs based on results from our customer satisfaction survey. At all times, however, we are happy to receive comments and suggestions for improving the services we offer the Regent community. Our goal is to help students become the best leaders possible by equipping them with excellent information literacy skills. 1 Andrea L. Foster, “Students Fall Short on 'Information Literacy,' Educational Testing Service's Study Finds,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 53 (October 27, 2006) : A36. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i10/10a03602.htm Rediscover
the Web with Firefox
One of Firefox’s most significant features is “tabbed” browsing. Typically with Internet Explorer, switching between websites requires the opening of multiple browser windows, which can quickly clutter a Windows taskbar. Navigating and switching between a group of tabs in Firefox is much easier. If you open several websites in multiple tabs during the course of your research, you may easily save these as a single folder of favorite bookmarks, or even set these as a collection of home page tabs which would open simultaneously the next time you start Firefox. For an example of tabbed browsing, see: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/tabs.html.
Firefox also sports an integrated search engine in its main toolbar, where users can quickly search Google, Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon. Need more? Adding Wikipedia, Open WorldCat, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary to your list is just a few clicks away. More information about Firefox’s search features can be found at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/search.html. Perhaps the greatest strength of Firefox is a slew of free, add-on “extensions” which can extend the browser’s capabilities. One such extension called FoxMarks, can automatically synchronize your bookmarks across different computers. Add-on “themes” allow users to customize the look and feel of Firefox altogether. Have a USB thumb drive? There’s even a version of “Portable Firefox” that can run entirely from your thumb drive, along with all of your favorite bookmarks and add-ons. Click over to http://tinyurl.com/mam23 to download and install this free variant of Firefox. For a demonstration of Firefox’s features and some popular extensions, please join us for a special library instruction class on Thursday, November 16 at 3:00 p.m. by registering at https://www.regent.edu/events/training/. Author's postscript: Firefox 2.0 was officially released on October 24th. Some add-ons may not be compatible yet with this new release, so don't feel compelled to upgrade right away. A list of new features in Firefox 2.0 can be found here. What is Google Scholar?
To answer these questions, we must look first at what Google Scholar searches. Google Scholar generates content from three sources:
The actual records retrieved fall into three categories:
The cited references are extracted from journal article bibliographies and constitute one of the most useful features of the search engine—the ability to see immediately the scholarly impact of a given book or article. Google Scholar is strongest in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) disciplines, although it presently is unable to search for content in Elsevier or the American Psychological Association.2 In other fields, coverage is much spottier, often relying on multi-disciplinary collections (e.g. Project MUSE) rather then specialist resources. Perhaps the number one complaint made by information specialists against the search engine is Google’s secrecy about its actual coverage. The company refuses to list the publishers and journals in its database.3 Strengths Google Scholar features the easy-to-use interface for which the company is famous. It functions as a kind of metasearch engine, searching across databases, websites, and intranets. Since it attempts to index gray literature and preprints, it sometimes can retrieve articles not found on the Web or in databases. For Regent users, the most attractive feature of Google Scholar may be the ability to link to full-text articles in our subscription databases. The screen capture below shows the result of an author search, with retrieved book, citation, and article records:
In the fifth record the article includes a link (circled) to a list of Regent databases that contain the article. The link leads to a University Library webpage:
The article links circled go directly to full-text copies of the article in the Library's subscription databases. This linking feature is available on the Regent campus and to off-campus users by logging into Google Scholar through the Library database page. Weaknesses It is important to remember that Google Scholar is currently in “beta,” meaning that the software is still in development. The biggest weakness of Google Scholar is its incompleteness, with “stunning gaps [that] give a false impression of the scholarly coverage of topics and lead to the omission of highly relevant articles.”4 Another limitation that distinguishes Google Scholar from most scholarly databases is the inability to sort results. The only order in which to view results is the search engine’s relevancy ranking—a major drawback if one is searching for the most recent scholarship on a subject. Google Scholar’s linking is still imperfect and may omit links to articles that we actually have in full-text. In an article on Google Scholar, information professional Joann Wleklinski demonstrates what may be the best approach for researchers who wish to use this new tool. After performing some searches and discussing her results, Wleklinski summarizes, “Is this scholarship? Hardly. Could I have written a credible research paper from the information Google Scholar returned? Of course not. Did it lead me to other sources? Definitely. Most importantly, it gave me a good first-start overview on the subject. It’s a helpful beginning.”5 1. Mick O'Leary, "Google Scholar: What's in it for You?" Information Today 22, no. 7 (07//Jul/Aug2005 2005): 35-36. 2. Roy Tennant, "Is Metasearching Dead?" Library Journal 130, no. 12 (07/01/ 2005): 28. 3. Péter Jacsó, "Google Scholar: The Pros and the Cons," Online Information Review 29, no. 2 (2005): 208. 5. Joann M. Wleklinski, "Studying Google Scholar: Wall to Wall Coverage?" Online 29, no. 3 (05//May/Jun2005 2005): 24. Inside
the Library Room 212: The Media Equipment Room
Undergraduate
Research New Online Resources for Undergraduates So far this year, the University Library has purchased three new online resources that are especially useful to our undergraduate students..png)
Merriam-Webster Unabridged is Merriam Webster’s premium online service. It features Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—the most authoritative dictionary for American English. The database also includes eight other Merriam Webster products:
Each of these categories is linked to the references in the collection for the given topic. Merriam-Webster
Unabridged, AccessScience, and Xreferplus have been chosen
to augment the Library’s database
collection because they are premium resources in their fields.
Next time you have a reference question concerning words,
science, or one of the topics covered by Xreferplus, stay
away from Google and the free Web! Try the premier references
the Library has purchased for you. Collection
Spotlight--Total
Truth,
by Nancy Pearcey
Perhaps the greatest strength of Pearcey’s Total Truth is its logical and systematic argumentation. The book is divided into four indexed sections: 1. “What’s in a Worldview,” 2. “Starting at the Beginning,” 3. “How we Lost Our Minds,” and 4. “What Next? Living It Out.” In the first section (in this reviewers opinion, the most crucial and best argued portion of the book), Pearcey demonstrates how the Christian Church has adopted a secular worldview and evaluates Christianity through that premise. She correctly asserts that the opposite should be true. Christians should have a biblical worldview and evaluate every aspect of life through that lens. In her words, “The purpose of a worldview is to explain our experience of the world-and any philosophy can be judged by how well it succeeds in doing so. When Christianity is tested, we discover that it alone explains and makes sense of the most basic and universal human experiences.” (pg. 396, emphasis by reviewer) Pearcey shows how our post-modern world is dichotomous or bifurcated keeping values or the spiritual separate from facts or reality. Post-modernism demands that each individual is allowed to establish his or her own values whereas facts apply to all. Pearcey absolutely demolishes the premises of the post-modern argument and reveals its many fallacies. She correctly identifies that with a biblical worldview, values and facts are integrated together, complementing each other, and can only be understood through proper relationship with God and His Word. In Pearcey’s second section, she advocates for Intelligent Design Theory primarily by revealing the fraudulent and non-scientific evidences for Darwinism. Pearcey’s arguments are valid and well organized, especially as she reveals the basis and implications of Darwinism. However, her arguments are designed for the novice in this subject area and as such, the section is surprisingly weak compared to the rest of the book. The novice will find this section informative, but better and more convincing arguments are presented in the books mentioned in her bibliography. Pearcey’s third section is a direct indictment against the Christian Church, especially the Church in the United States. Pearcey backgrounds key elements and events in which the Church compromised biblical values and a Christian Worldview in exchange for cultural acceptance and short term gains. Probably the most controversial chapter in this section is “How Women Started the Culture War.” This chapter is the epitome of how a secular worldview distorts and destroys all that it touches. But all is not without hope. In Pearcey’s final section, she outlines the principles for a return to a Christian Worldview. For this reviewer, given the strength of the rest of her book, this section was a tremendous disappointment. Pearcey’s presentation is valid, informative, and helpful, but her suggestions are too broad and vague to give specific direction. This appears to be the result of covering too much information in too small a space. However, given the strength of the rest of the book, these principles would be an excellent outline for her to establish a sequel or volume two of Total Truth. If such a book is written, I will eagerly read it. All said, I would strongly recommend everyone read this book. Because the logic is so structured, weak sections of Total Truth can be easily glossed over without losing the overall, outstanding benefit and validity of its message. I concur with the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Al Mohler, “Total Truth is one of the most promising books to emerge in evangelical publishing in many years. It belongs in every Christian home, and should quickly be put into the hands of every Christian young person. This important book should be part of the equipment for college or university study, and churches should use it as a textbook for Christian worldview development.1” 1 http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?cal=go&adate=9%2F8%2F2004
Past Issues
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An
October 2006 article in 
For
those dissatisfied with web browsing as usual, Mozilla’s Firefox
browser offers a veritable oasis and is a powerful research tool
in its own right. This powerful upstart has even caught the notice
of developers at Microsoft who are redesigning Internet Explorer
to incorporate many of the same features already available in
Firefox. Mozilla’s award-winning browser can run on any
major operating system and can be freely downloaded at 
Looking
for a place to watch a video or DVD for class, but you don’t want to leave the campus?
Find an audio cassette that could have great information for
a paper you are
writing, 
but
you don’t own a cassette
tape deck anymore? Then head to the Media Equipment Room in the Library,
Room 212! There are
DVD/VCR players, a laserdisc player, a CD player, and an audio cassette
player available for your use. Also, inquire at the Circulation Desk
if the members of your study group need to
watch a video together – we
have a TV/VCR/DVD player that can move into the Group Study Room of
your
choice.
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