Exam # 2
What is America: History and Life?
"provides English language abstracts of scholarly literature (journal articles, articles in collections, dissertations, book and media reviews) on the history and culture of the U.S. and Canada." Goes back only to 1964.
What is the ProQuest Research Library?
"provides one-stop access to more than 4,000 periodicals from one of the broadest, most inclusive general reference databases ProQuest has to offer. Search from a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, and magazines covering over 150 academic disciplines."
What is crowdsourcing?
"the process of getting work or fundingor funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers."
What is MediaWiki?
...
What symbol do you use to indicate "NOT" in a Google search?
...
Give an example of an ebook file extension.
.epub .mobi
What are the two widely used book classification systems?
1. Dewey Decimal Classification System 2. Library of Congress Classification System
Give an example of a primary source.
1969 UCLA student newspaper article
How many books (that is, unique editions) have ever been published, roughly?
30,000,000 unique titles had been published
What is Google Images?
A database of images
What is Academic Search complete?
A general-purpose database that is the best first stop for looking for old magazine and newspaper articles as well as some of the bigger scholarly journals.
What is MARC?
A method invented in the 1960s of encoding bibliographic metadata so that machines could read it. Library catalogs still use MARC records today.
Name a search engine that isn't Google.
Bing.
What does the acronym DRM stand for?
Digital Rights Management
Describe how you would correct an error on Wikipedia.
Edit.
What does the acronym ILL stand for?
Interlibrary loan
What is an ISBN?
International Standard Book Number
Who is one of the founders of Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales
What does MARC stand for?
Machine Readable Cataloging
Give an example of a secondary source.
Most books and scholarly journal articles are secondary sources.
What does the acronym OCR stand for?
Optical Character Recognition
When would you want to use primary sources instead of secondary sources for your research?
Primary sources for first accounts
What is Duck Duck Go?
Search engine.
What is ProQuest Historical Newspapers?
This database offers full-text and full-image articles for newspapers dating back to the 19th century.
What is WorldCat?
a "catalog of catalogs" that includes library catalog records from thousands of libraries around the world, including of course GMU's.
What is an ISBN?
a book's ISBN is a unique number assigned to that book that helps people and machines distinguish that book from other books.
What is Google Books?
a collection of about 15 million scanned books from libraries that allows full-text search.
What is Google Scholar?
a good general search engine for scholarly articles
What is JSTOR?
a large general database of scholarly journals (JSTOR stands for "Journal Storage"). Note that recent articles from the last two to five years are *not* in JSTOR; only articles older than that can be found here. Some journal issues as old 1880s can be found here.
What is a periodical?
a publication that is released part by part, issue by issue, on a scheduled basis (daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly) rather than all at once like a book. Newspapers, magazines, and journals are all periodicals.
What is HathiTrust.org?
a scholarly website that in some respects is a duplicate of Google Books; it is a site where the libraries whose books Google scanned make available the scans of those books.
What is ILL?
a service that lets people borrow a book (or similar item) from a library other than the one they have official access to and have it delivered to their own library.
What is DRM?
a set of technologies that controls which file formats can be accessed on which devices.
What is a plug-in?
a small application that is designed to "plug in" to an existing application.
What is a wiki?
a website that runs on wiki software and thus allows collaborative editing.
What is Google News?
allows you to search across many, many newspapers worldwide. Best for very recent news. Also allows you to create a personalized news page and to look at non-U.S. editions of newspapers.
What is an e-journal?
an inaccurate and misleading term used by many research libraries (despite scads of evidence that they shouldn't) to describe the full-text online version of any periodical.
What is Project Gutenberg?
an old (in Internet term) crowdsourced site where volunteers have put out-of-copyright books on the web.
What is a primary source?
any material that is of its own time rather than something reflective written later.
What is a secondary source?
any reflective, narrative, or analytical material that uses and discusses primary sources or original data.
What is metadata?
data about data
What is bibliographic metadata?
data used to describe books and other materials cited in bibliographies
Why is it important to know if a journal is peer-reviewed?
higher quality than a non-peer-reviewed publication.
What is Zotero used for?
is a powerful, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research.
What is a proxy server?
is a server (a computer) that will "stand in" for another server; you use it to access one network while you are using another.
What is an algorithm?
is a step-by-step procedure for calculations
What does it mean to "crawl" or "spider" the web?
is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing.
What is Wolfram Alpha?
is more than a search engine. It gives you access to the world's facts and data and calculates answers across a range of topics
What is a pre-print?
the final version of a scholarly paper before it has been copyedited, typeset, and published in a journal; the author's own final draft.
Name two of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia.
the five rules that govern Wikipedia: 1) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, 2) Wikipedia has a neutral point of view, 3) Wikipedia is free content, 4) Editors should treat each other with respect, and 5) Wikipedia does not have firm rules.
What is Wikimedia?
the name of the nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia and related projects such as Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons
What is a call number?
the number that indicates the location of a book on the library shelves.
What is a codex?
the physical form of a printed book; cut pages bound at the back. In opposition to the scroll.
What is OCR?
the technology that allows a scanner to recognize printed text characters on a page and convert them into digital text rather than just making an image of that page (like a photocopy).
What is peer review?
the volunteer system by which scholars look at one anothers' work to make sure that it is 1) original, and 2) reasonable
What is a library catalog?
usually and historically, a master list of all the materials a library owns.
