What is Full Text Finder? or, Where's the Find It Button?

    

An important Library service has been updated and improved! The Find It service has been replaced by Full Text Finder.

As you know, the Library provides access to a huge number of full-text articles, e-books, and online reference materials, as well as comprehensive collections of streaming audio and video files. In addition, our researchers have access to an even larger number of citations and abstracts for articles, books, and dissertations that don't include in the full-text.

All of these materials, those available in full-text and those that are not, are provided through a large number of online services from several different providers. Without a central service that links all of this knowledge and information together, it would be very difficult for researchers to work efficiently. A comprehensive search would mean performing the same queries in many different resources, over and over.

Both Find It and Full Text Finder provide these necessary linking services. Both know about all the full-text articles that Piedmont College Library users have access to, as well as precisely which services offer them. This is what allows you, for example, to be working in ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health and have direct access to the full text of an article that's provided in CINAHL Complete, an EBSCOHost service.

We recently made the switch from Find It to Full Text Finder, which we believe allows a much simpler workflow for research. Let's take this citation as an example:

With the Find It service, clicking the icon would lead you to an intermediate screen where you might have to choose from a list of multiple services containing that article.

With Full Text Finder, there is no intermediate screen. You will go directly to a service that contains the article and you can begin reading immediately:

But what if the full text of an article is not available? We all know the frustration of realizing an article we need for our research is inaccessible. Thankfully, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service for journal articles is very fast. Full Text Finder replaces the former hodge-podge of different ILL forms and provides the same interface no matter which service you are using.

Let’s look at different example. Let’s say you really want to read the article represented by this citation:

This is what you’ll see when you click on Full Text Finder:

And if you click on the ILL link, you'll always see this familiar form and you can fill out your contact information, click Submit, and in most cases, receive your article by email within 48-72 hours.

Why Students Need Librarians

"We recognize knowledge in action when we see it done effectively, but too many professors don’t teach this fundamental skill systematically and progressively as part of an academic program. . . . [F]rom community colleges to the Ivy League, a significant learning gap is widening. Librarians, trained in both digital and print research techniques, are in the best position to step into the breach. But that will require more support for library services at a time when budgets are under siege. And it will take an administrative commitment to ensure that training is incorporated comprehensively throughout the curricula."

Read the rest of "At Sea in a Deluge of Data" (Chronicle.com, July 7, 2014).

The Moral Dimension of Info Literacy

In a new Library Journal post, Barbara Fister discusses the tension between digital resources and the values important to librarians:

"When we fall into the trap of spending 50 minutes helping students learn how to find sources, as if acquiring and displaying them is the point of research, we imply that knowledge is other people’s property, procured and exchanged but not influenced by the student’s own life experience, thoughts, or beliefs. [Paulo] Freire believed that education should instead be 'the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.' . . .

"Our teaching practices should present libraries as more than the Bank of Sources, from which usable phrases can be withdrawn as needed. They should be workshops, labs, studios, or hacker spaces, where students engage with ideas and invent their own, through conversation with others interested in the same things. They should be places where students develop their own identities as they learn the critical habits that civil society requires."

Check out the full article for several complementary publications that inform her thinking.