Distance Education

At first glance, it seems that electronic books would be a wonderful and convenient resource for distance ed students - if the book you want is available electronically. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of electronic books and a strategy to help you use them most effectively.

Advantages:

• No shipping - e-books, being electronic, are available immediately online.
• Searchable - even if the e-book reader software does not include a search function, you can still use your browser or .pdf reader software to search the text.
• Accessibility for disabilities - electronic book text can be run through screen-readers or changed to make it more readable.
• Portable - You can get your ebook pretty much anywhere, you don’t need a library to house it.

Disadvantages

• Only available online - Some of our ebooks can not be downloaded, so you have to be online to read them.
• It’s hard to read text on a screen - This may be more personal preference than anything else, but I find it harder to read big blocks of text on a computer monitor than I do on paper.
• Not very portable - You need a computer or some other device to read it and can’t just pull that book out of your bag when you have 15 minutes.

So, how can you, as a distance ed student, take best advantage of these things?

First, don’t look specifically for ebooks. Think less about the format of the book and more about the content that will be most helpful. Search the library catalog for books on your topic and take the best ones, whether they are ebooks or not.

Here are some other ideas

• Get familiar with how the ebook system you’re using works. Many ebooks, but not all, come as .pdf files you read using the Adobe Acrobat reader you are likely already familiar with.
• Learn to search the ebook. Tables of contents and indexes are useful, but one major advantage of ebooks is that you can use the computer to sift through them for just what you want rather than you skimming the pages directly. Take advantage of that.
• Use InfoHawk to find ebooks. We buy many collections of ebooks like Books 24/7, Cognet or netLibrary. All the individual ebook titles are listed in our library catalog, though. Use the Advanced Search and change the Format menu to “E-Books” to find only ebooks on your topic.

Let us know what you think. Do you prefer print or electronic books? What other advantages or disadvantages do you see?

Dan the Librarian

Online articles are awfully convenient and certainly a timesaver for distance students, but finding online articles is not always as straightforward as we would like. That’s why the University of Iowa’s InfoLink system is so useful.

Each copyright holder needs to grant permission for different databases or providers to make their article available online and there is no single source that covers all online articles. If you search a database like Academic Search Elite for articles on a topic, you’ll find citations to articles on your topic. Some of those citations will have obvious links to online versions of their articles and some will not.

Each University of Iowa database - Academic Search Elite, ERIC, ABI-Inform, Social Work Abstracts, any of the others - is connected to the InfoLink system and will have a small yellow InfoLink button by the citation for each article. If you click the InfoLink button, a separate window will open up and either tell you that the article is not available online or give you links to where the online article is available -whether it’s in the database you searched or not.

If the article is available online, you’ll see one or more links to different sources. Each provider of online articles does things a little differently, so clicking the links might take you right to the article or might take you to a page for that journal where you’ll need to choose the volume and issue for the article you want.

If your article is NOT available online, InfoLink will give you a link to the Article Request form. Use that to ask for a copy. We will first see if it is on our shelves in print and send a scanned copy to you electronically. If the article you want is not on our shelves, we’ll automatically request a copy from another library through InterLibrary Loan and deliver a scanned copy to you electronically.

With InfoLink, you don’t need to worry about where or how the article is available, you just need to know that you want it.

It is not a perfect system, but it can save you a lot of time and make those articles that are available online a lot easier to find. If you have any trouble finding articles or linking to online articles, contact me.

Dan the Librarian

A student sent in this great question, which is so obvious I’m sorry I didn’t think to put something on the blog already.

Hello there,

I want to research portable classrooms. I am interested in severe weather risks to children in portable classrooms vs conventionally built classrooms, terrorist/shooter risks, exposure to noxious chemicals from the building materials/molds of portable classrooms, effect on learning and test scores of portable classrooms, etc. What database(s) would you recommend I use?

Thank you.

The University of Iowa buys access to to several hundred databases and electronic resources in different areas. It can be pretty overwhelming to figure out where to start. Here are some suggestions.

• Ask a Librarian: This student did a smart thing asking for help. In this case, I would recommend the ERIC database, which covers journals in the field of education, and suggest using ERIC’s subject heading “Mobile Classrooms” to find articles about portable or temporary classrooms and combining that with subject headings like Hazardous Materials or Environmental Standards or School Safety or Weapons or Health Conditions or Academic Achievement, etc, depending on which aspect of the topic the student wants to focus on.
• Use the Resources by Subject pages: Rather than look through all of the databases we have available, let our Resources by Subject list guide you to the best resources in your area. The Education resource page lists ERIC along with several other education resources and describes them briefly so you’ll have a better idea about which to use first.
• Use SmartSearch: The Find Articles section of our Smart Search will let you search multiple databases at the same time. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to narrow your search down effectively while searching many resources at once, but you can do a simple search in SmartSearch to see which database covers your topic best and then do a better search in that database alone to narrow down to a reasonable list of good articles you can actually use.

There are lots of ways to figure out where to search in your area. Share your favorite databases and search strategies in the comments.

Dan the Librarian

As part of a follow up to another question, a student asked…

“Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. You have been very helpful. One more. Is there a way to search all of the data bases together for one subject?”

Yes, you can use the Smartsearch, linked from the main library webpage, to search more more than one database at a time - http://smartsearch.uiowa.edu/. Smartsearch is pretty straightforward, but here are some tips to make it easier.

1. Make sure the Find Articles tab is selected.
2. Use the “limit to” feature to select a set of general databases or select one of the subject specific sets such as Health Sciences or Social Work.
3. Perform your search in the basic search field or using the advanced search.
4. Use SmartSearch to find databases that cover your topic, then do a better search in that individual database.

There are some disatvantages to using Smartsearch.

• Since it searches several database at one time, the system can take a while to work.
• Also, we buy access to databases from competing vendors and the Smartsearch system must work with all of them. Each database has it’s own way of working, but the Smartsearch system can’t take advantage of them. In effect, you are often doing the same bad search across many databases.

You can also find Smartsearch pages on many of our Resources by Subject pages - http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/eresources/refsubject.asp.

Have you used SmartSearch? Do you have any strategies that might help this student? Use comments to share your ideas.

Dan the Librarian