Tag: Music

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Are you using the best information to make your point?

With the huge volume of information available and the speed with which you can find something on just about any topic with a simple search, it can be difficult to be sure that you are using the best quality information for your task. Your tutors will often give advice such as recommending that you use academic or peer-reviewed journal articles, and it can be tempting to stick to ‘safe’ types of information such as books.

But depending on your assignment topic, you will need to explore a breadth of different information types, including many that will be online. So how do you know which ones to you?

You will need to consider many issues, including authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency and coverage within an information source. This will help you make decisions about the quality of the information, its reliability and what role it could play within your thinking.

You will evaluate information all the time without thinking about it. It doesn’t need to be a conscious or difficult task. Our Six Questions video will help give you some ideas for the types of questions to keep in mind to make your own judgement.

You may also sometimes decide to include a piece of information, even though it may not be from a credible source or its impartiality is questionable, because it illustrates the point you are trying to make. Being aware of your reservations about a reference allows you to be more confident in your judgment.

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Resource in Focus: Statista

This is an extensive statistics platform covering over 1.5 million data sets (and adding an additional 500 each day) with revenue forecasts up to 5 years into the future and historical data going back 10 years on over 170 industries.

Data is collected from over 22,500 sources covering over 80,000 different topics.

The platform can broken down into different elements including:

Statistics : where you can choose your industry e.g. Consumer goods, Retail & Trade.

Reports : This section is very comprehensive and you can select :

  • Dossiers which are a quick quantitative overview of a topic. These are in house reports which contain the most recent and relevant statistics concerning a single subject. You can export these in PowerPoint or PDF format.
  • Outlook Reports which are trend forecasts
  • Surveys which are market insights from an expert and consumer perspective
  • Toplists which are company ranking for sales and analysis
  • Market studies
  • Industry Reports which are perfect for highlighting key figures for a particular industry sector. These are updated annually and contain textual information as well as numerical data such as turnover and revenue.
  • Global Business Cities Reports which are ranking and key statistics on particular cities.
  • Brand reports contain insights into the brand itself
  • Country reports
  • Further studies which are more in-depth reports

Outlooks; these provide information on specific areas and help you identify the potential in those areas. This can include forecasts, detailed market insights and key performance indicators.

Statista online help video

This short video from Statista gives a nice overview of the different search functionalities:

Access via https://www.statista.com/ or via the record on Library Search.  (If you are accessing on campus, the platform will authenticate using IP address. If you are accessing off campus you will be taken through EzProxy so access should be seamless if you’ve logged in previously using your Campus username and password).

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EndNote

What is EndNote?

The official blurb on EndNote is that it is “…the industry standard software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references.”

Have you drifted off yet? Don’t – read on!

EndNote takes a little getting used to and we recommend you familiarise yourself with it at the start of your research process. But as Library Staff, we wouldn’t spend a significant amount of time demonstrating and training our academic staff and students on what EndNote is, and how to use it, if we didn’t think it was valuable. It will save you a huge amount of time in terms of writing up your assignments.

Essentially, you can use EndNote to create and organise a personal library of resources relevant to your research. You can import references from Library Search, and a huge range of databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore and Business Source Complete. You can ask EndNote to locate the full-text PDFs of the resources you are going to use in your research, and you can annotate them as you wish too. Did you know you can instruct Google Scholar to import references into EndNote? No? Try it. Finally, if you already have materials stored in your home folder (H:\) then you can attach them to a manually-created reference within EndNote, bringing all your research together in one place.

In addition to organising your references (and this is the clever bit) you can then get EndNote to ‘talk’ to your word processing software, e.g. Microsoft Word, and insert the citations into your work for you in your chosen referencing style, e.g. Harvard at Newcastle, Vancouver, APA or MLA. If you don’t want to do that, then EndNote will also allow you to create an independent bibliography of your references, saving you an awful lot of typing.

Using EndNote

Intrigued? You should be. Take a look at our EndNote Guide. It contains all the introductory information you need, step-by-step workbooks to train yourself on the use of EndNote (the Desktop and Online versions), videos, useful FAQs, and contacts for help, should you need it.

Finally, Newcastle University provides support for EndNote but it is not compulsory to use. You may prefer Mendeley, Zotero, RefWorks or another piece of bibliographic management software. That’s fine, whatever makes your referencing lives easier. Go on, give them a try.

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When is a website not a website?

A common mistake made in referencing is grouping all sources found online under the category and reference type of a website. Your aim should be to reference the information you have in front of you rather than where it was sourced. Simply grouping items found online as a website would be the equivalent of referencing a book by the publisher details rather than the author and title.

For example, a government publication found online would be referenced like this in Chicago.

United Kingdom. Department for Education. Cloud computing: how schools can move services to the cloud. London: The Stationary Office, 2016. Accessed: February 01, 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cloud-computing-how-schools-can-move-services-to-the-cloud. 

An electronic journal article might appear like this in APA.

Gillum, J. (2012). Dyscalculia: Issues for practice in education psychology.  Educational Psychology in Practice, 28(3), 287-297. doi:10.1080/02667363.2012.684344

While a video posted on the Tate website would look something like this in Harvard.

TateShots (2016) Grayson Perry: think like an artist. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/grayson-perry-think-artist-tateshots (Accessed: 27 November 2018). 

Identifying the type of information you are using as well as the source, are essential skills of evaluation and developing a critical approach to information. In many cases, you will be unconsciously using your judgment to assess the value of information for your purpose. So when you are using any source of information, ask yourself what it is you are looking at, what details are recorded about it, and whether it measures up as a quality piece of information.

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New resource in focus: Literary Print Culture

A bookbinder’s workshop, with the finished products in a domestic scene over on the right. Date: 1875

Continuing our series of blog posts exploring our brand new resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to Literary Print Culture: the Stationers’ Company Archive. This is one of the most important resources for understanding the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions, and the history of bookbinding. Explore extremely rare documents dating from the 16th to 21st century in this invaluable resource of research material.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The primary sources include many different record types, relating to finance, membership, court, trade and charity. More recent sources include photographs and oral histories. These sources are supplemented by contextual essays and other commentary to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search buttons. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme.

For some of the documents in the archive, you can now use handwritten text recognition to enable you to search the handwritten items effectively. Split screen viewing enables you to view a document and its index simultaneously.

Have you used Literary Print Culture? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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Cambridge Histories Online: what’s new?

We subscribe to Cambridge Histories Online, the internationally renowned book series which first started in 1902.  We have access to over 360 volumes online, covering many different subject areas in depth, including history, music, language and literature.

We have recently bought access to several new volumes (in some cases, multiple volumes) which cover the following topics:

Ireland

Moral Philosophy

Intellectual History of Byzantium

Judaism

Communism

Modernism

Slavery

All the Cambridge Histories are individually catalogued and searchable via Library Search, or if you prefer, you can browse them all together on the Cambridge Histories platform.

 

 

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New resource in focus: Rock’s backpages

Rocks back pages logo

We’re looking in more depth at some of the great new online resources we’ve bought recently, to help you get the best out of them.

Rock’s Backpages is an online archive of music journalism, containing over 37,000 articles from the 1950s to the present, including reviews, interviews, letters and features, plus 500 audio interviews.

It covers a wide range of artists and genres: from Aaliyah to ZZ Top; from BB King to PP Arnold; from 10CC to 999; and from The Rezillos all the way to….. The Revillos. Hold tight!

Articles are taken from music publications around the world, such as NME, Rolling Stone, Smash Hits, The Face and Mojo, together with music articles from non-music magazines and newspapers. You can read the work of writers such as Lester Bangs, David Hepworth, Nick Kent, Jon Savage, Caitlin Moran and many more.

Hot tip! Choose Advanced search or Library for a full range of search/browse options, including by genre, artist, journalist or publication. If you want to read the first reviews of The Beatles, analyse how LGBT issues have been handled over the years, or explore Chrissie Hynde’s early years as an NME journalist, you can do it here.

New content is added to Rock’s Backpages every week, and highlighted on the home page. Follow them on Twitter to keep up to date, or listen to the weekly podcast which highlights the latest additions.

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To google or not to google?…That is the question

Can you remember life before Google? It is such a huge part of our lives that even those of us who can remember a time before it (hmmm, yes I am that old!) can’t imagine life without it now. It is a great place to find the latest cinema listings or who won last night’s football match, but what about finding information for your latest assignment or research?

There is a time and a place to use Google, but you need to be aware of its limitations. Google, after all, is a business. It earns the majority of its money from advertising, and it will not reveal how it ranks its search results (every wonder how Wikipedia always appears at the top of every search you do?). A search that we do today and repeat tomorrow for a piece of research could give us hugely different results, with no explanation of why. We are also often bombarded with millions of search results and the reality of our searching habits mean that we rarely look beyond the first or second page.  Admittedly, advanced search features on Google and the use of Google Scholar can really help us to become a smarter and effective Google users, but is it enough for our own research? Are we finding everything that is out there?

We need to think about our information needs before we work out where it will be best for us to search. Imagine, for a moment, that we are want to buy a particular local cheese, which we love. Would we go to a general shop or would we go to a specialist deli? We are probably going to need to go to a deli. It is just the same when searching for information. Google may be great for some background information or a starting point of a project, but it may simply not give us the high quality, niche information that we need to give us top marks for an assignment. So what are the other options?

Aimee Cook, a Liaison Librarian here at Newcastle University, explains more.

So next time you think about googling something for an assignment, stop and check out Library Search and your subject guide first for the books, eBooks and specialist databases that are available to you. If you are going to use Google, make use of the advanced search features and get to grips with Google Scholar. Happy searching!

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

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Guest Post: A Review of Box of Broadcasts

BoB Screen GrabLaura-Jayne Beattie, a final year Law School student, takes a look at Box of Broadcasts, and reviews a film she watched using it (a Law Library favourite!).

BoB (Box of Broadcasts), available to all Newcastle University students regardless of degree discipline, is an excellent resource. Best of all, it’s FREE for students studying at Newcastle (just what a student wants to hear)! You just have to select the university from the list of institutions, sign in with your university login details (username and password), and away you go! You’re free to explore the thousands of television programmes, radio broadcasts and films available on the website. It’s incredibly easy-to-use, and reminds me a lot of Netflix, but is less guilt-free as most of these programs and films are education-related in some way. The broadcasts may relate to your degree or another academic interest of yours (e.g. psychology-related films).

You can watch live TV, or search (by name) for a pre-recorded film, radio show or television programme. The system holds over 2 million broadcasts, which have been shown on television or aired on the radio at some point since the 1990s. If you don’t have a specific film or programme in mind which you would like to watch, why not try out the advanced search feature? Click on the ‘Search’ icon, then on ‘Search options’, change as many or as little options as you like, and then hit ‘search’! A list of broadcasts matching your search criteria will be shown. I’m sure there will be at least one that interests you!

SCreen grab of BoBAfter a few minutes of exploring the website, I decided to choose a film from the ‘Law in Literature Newcastle University’ playlist. To find this, I clicked on the ‘Search’ icon (on the tab across the top) and selected ‘Public Playlists’. I then typed the playlist’s name into the search box. I was surprised at how many titles were available within this collection (all related to Law). I chose to watch ‘Legally Blonde’, a personal favourite of mine but one that I haven’t watched for years.

Here’s what I thought…

‘Legally Blonde’, a fun-filled film showcasing a story of love and success, shows Law in a new perspective and is a must-watch for any Law students (Yes, even you boys). It’s a feel-good film, and is motivational in terms of showing that anyone really can succeed if they put their mind to it! It’s particularly perfect for any law student who feels ‘out-of-place’ with the supposed societal ‘ideal’ of who should be studying law.

Defying all pre-conceptions derived from her appearance, Elle Woods gains a place at the prestigious Harvard Law school. While this was initially to follow her ex-boyfriend, who broke her heart just before he proceeded to study Law there, she soon develops a passion for Law and becomes top of the class. She helps to win a case while on work experience using her knowledge of fashion, and later delivers an inspirational speech at graduation saying words like “you must always have faith in yourself”. When making this speech, it’s clear from the smiles in the room that she has won the hearts of students and staff alike and made lifelong friends with her heart-warming personality. Graduating with a job in a high-ranking law firm, she puts her career ahead of everything and even rejects her ex-boyfriend who wanted her back towards the end of the film.

‘Legally Blonde’ relates to Law, as Elle overcomes sexual harassment while on work experience (Employment Law). Initially, Elle doesn’t report the man and decides to drop out of law school- possibly as she thought she wouldn’t be believed or that what happened wasn’t actually a crime (a common occurrence amongst victims in reality). Parts of Law lectures are filmed, and Elle overcomes stereotypes that are derived from her appearance (blonde female who evidently loves the colour pink) (Law, Gender and Sexuality). Despite not being a typical Harvard student, she still succeeds without letting these stereotypes stop her.

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Resource in Focus: historic newspapers in Gale Primary Sources

We have access to a wide range of digitised British historic newspaper archives, which you can access through various different platforms (see the historic section of our Newspaper Resource Guide for more detail). If you want to search across many historic newspapers at once, we would recommend using Gale Primary Sources.

Gale Primary Sources searches across 15 different archives, including major titles such as The Times, The Daily Mail, Financial Times and The Economist (all dating from their very first issue) together with historic collections of regional titles. You can select to search as many of the archives as you require.

Watch this short introductory video to help you get the best out of searching Gale Primary Sources. If you want information on how to access current, business, and international news, then visit the Newspapers Guide.