This month, your BRCC Librarians have identified two
new tools that you can use to find information related to your course. Both of these resources could be used to
enhance your teaching and present your course material in a new and refreshed
perspective. Finally, this month also includes a reminder about the upcoming book sale and a call to volunteer.
What Works
Clearinghouse is a new resource identified by your BRCC librarians. We
have tested and played with this website and found some pretty useful
information. It is particularly suited for research in the teaching/education
related areas.
The
advantage of What Works Clearing House is that existing research is reviewed on
topics like programs, products, and related policies within education. The
stated goal of this clearinghouse is to make information available to educators
in order to effectively make evidence-based decisions.
Why
not take a look and see what you can find?
What
Works Clearing House:
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/
A recent article on Inside Higher Ed described a new
feature available through JSTOR. The article by Barbara Fister is included below.
By Barbara Fister
By Barbara Fister
A quick note: I've
been working with an intern to track some research down, but the keywords are
slushy and the controlled vocabulary in the databases we're using just hasn't
been cutting it. Mostly, we've been able to make some progress by seeing who is
citing the articles that seem most relevant, but even that traditional
citation-tracing method isn't producing quite as much as I hoped.
But then I happened on a
nifty new tool today, the JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer, thanks to the kind
of serendipty my Twitter community seems to promote. Basically, you upload a
document (something you wrote, a text you're reading, an article PDF, a syllabus,
even) and . . . something magical happens. The analyzer finds patterns in the
text and looks for similar documents. The words used in the pattern appear on
one side. There are sliders for how much you want to emphasize some concepts.
There's a collection of keywords roughly sorted by type, and you choose which
ones are most relevant to your interests or decide which ones aren't of
interest. You can even add your own words. If you want your results to
emphasize current content, there's a checkbox for that. Results can be limited
to the JSTOR content your library subscribes to, or you can search it all to
see what you might want to obtain through interlibrary loan. It only surfaces
JSTOR content, but that's a lot of good material.
Maybe it was the nature of
the fuzzy, interdisciplinary topic I was trying (and failing) to capture
through my usual methods, but this tool surfaced stuff I hadn't previously
seen, and it was easy to scroll through and quickly browse and select the most
promising results. The interface is clean and intuitive (which, I'm sorry to
say, can't be said of library database interfaces generally speaking). I'll be
playing with it and will see what my students think of it, but at first glance,
all I can say is WOW. This is cool.
Now I need to explore the
other projects that Alex Humphreys and the rest of the JSTOR Labs team have
been up to. Fascinating stuff.
Fister, B. (2017, March 2). Something Amazing From JSTOR Labs. Retrieved march 14, 2017 from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/something-amazing-jstor-labs?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=87fb62384d-DNU20170303&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-87fb62384d-197783033&mc_cid=87fb62384d&mc_eid=c59265f9be
JSTOR Text analyzer:
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/something-amazing-jstor-labs?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=87fb62384d-DNU20170303&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-87fb62384d-197783033&mc_cid=87fb62384d&mc_eid=c59265f9be
If you are interested in volunteering at the book sale, e-mail Kathy Seidel at seidelk@mybrcc.edu. It’s great fun, and you get first dibs on the books!
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