Information Desk Specialist Traning Home - Databases

	CollegeSource Online
	Expanded Academic ASAP
	LexisNexis Academic
	UC-eLinks

Information Desk staff are responsible for four listings in Databases A–Z – CollegeSource Online, Expanded Academic ASAP, LexisNexis Academic and WorldCat. Being responsible for the databases means knowing how and when to use each one, as well as teaching patrons how to do their own searches.

WorldCat is covered under Resources outside UCSD since it’s a listing of library holdings. CollegeSource Online includes over 27,000 college and university catalogs plus their websites, profiles and maps. The other two databases index newspapers and/or journal articles. When patrons find a citation they want in those two databases and in WorldCat, they can use UC e-Links to find out if UCSD has print or online access. They can use the same feature to request an item from an off-campus source and UC e-Links is described at the end of this section.

CollegeSource Online

CollegeSource Online can be accessed via the main libraries web page http://libraries.ucsd.edu . Choose Databases A-Z and click on “C”. Scroll down until you find the CollegeSource link.

CollegeSource Online is a good resource for locating college campus catalogs online, in PDF format. In addition to finding college catalogs, there are usually links to the particular college web site and, in the case of schools outside the United States, there may only be a link posted (and not the actual college catalog). From the main page, you have the option to perform a simple name search for the college you are looking for. Simply type in the name of the college and press search. At this point, you also have the option of limiting the search to schools within the United States, schools outside the United States, or all schools.

Although this main search engine will probably take care of most of your searches, you may also click on “Search” at the top of the page for more comprehensive and detailed search methods and options. From this page, you may peruse an alphabetically organized list of colleges, select specific countries, and limit searches to particular criterion (such as tuition and enrollment). You may also get a listing of schools within a radius of a city in the United States or search the web site’s full text index of their entire catalog collection.

These additional search options make CollegeSource Online a good resource for finding schools in general. For example, if a patron asked you for a listing of colleges in the San Diego area, CollegeSource Online’s “Geographic” search option from the “Search Methods” page would be a great resource. CollegeSource does not limit their comprehensive catalog to four-year universities. Most community colleges and various other specialized colleges are listed as well.

CollegeSource Online also offers a “Resources” page (click on the “Resources” tab from the top of the screen). The resources page offers links to various college related web sites and information sources. These include links to Assessment Testing web site, Financial Aid Information, College Guides and Planning Information.

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Expanded Academic ASAP

What it does: Provides a combination of indexing, abstracts, images and full text for scholarly journals, general interest periodicals, newsmagazines and newspapers covering all academic disciplines. About 2,800 journals are included. Coverage is from 1980 to the present with full-text availability beginning in 1983. About half of the articles in the database are full-text.

When you would use it: If you aren’t referring the patron to a reference librarian, this database is the place to begin searching for articles.

Search tips:

• From the beginning, the search can be limited to articles with text and/or to refereed (peer-reviewed) publications. Note that the latter refers to the publication not the article i.e. there’s no guarantee that each article has had peer-review.
• There is an overall Help Index. Otherwise, Help is in the context of the page you are on.
• The truncation symbol is an asterisk.
• Navigate and print from the Infotrac (blue) part of the page, not from the browser tool bar. The only time you use the browser Back button is after reformatting in Print.
• PDF is the better choice for printing. The results are much better than they look on the screen.
• Email results will not include any images.

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LexisNexis Academic

LexisNexis Academic can be accessed via the main libraries web page (http://libraries.ucsd.edu). From Databases A-Z, scroll down to the appropriate link.

Although LexisNexis gives you the option of searching through news resources as well as finding information on business, legal research, medical information and general reference information, you are only responsible for the news section. For all other questions regarding this database, refer patrons to the reference librarians.

The default search page is Guided News Search. It allows you to look for news articles in a variety of ways. These methods include the broad General News search, U.S. or World News searches, and a search limited only to Transcripts (of television and radio news broadcasts). In addition to these main resources, LexisNexis offers searches of Wire Service Reports. This search option includes over 50 wire news services (such as the popular Associated Press State and Local Wire), which are updated at least daily, often multiple times a day. Other searches include limiting to only the current day’s news, arts and sports news, campus news (mostly student newspapers) and non-English language news. Languages supported are Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese. You choose from among these options in Step 1 - Select a News Category.

In Step 2, you select a news source. The most commonly used combination is General News in Step 1 and Major Papers in Step 2.

All searches of the LexisNexis News sections follow a simple keyword format. Enter the keyword or phrase you wish to search into the search box. Then select the field (section) e.g. Headline, Lead Paragraph or Full Text. If the keyword or phrase is specific enough, then go ahead and press search. You may, however, wish to narrow your search so as to filter out unneeded or duplicate information. To do this, simply enter any additional terms into the next box, then go ahead and press search. You may also truncate your search words using the exclamation point, use AND or OR to connect terms and use parentheses to limit searches further (see additional LexisNexis Academic sheet for examples). Once you have completed your search you may use the toolbar at the top of the screen if you wish to further edit the query or print or email an article.

The above two search options (keyword and field) are available for all of the news searches in LexisNexis Academic. Besides keyword and field, some of the news sources offer several other ways of limiting your searches. Foe example, if you were doing a general search, then you could limit your search to specific sources, including major newspapers, magazines and journals and newsletters. You would also have the option of specifying the dates that you want the engine to look through. If you were doing a search of U.S .News, you would have the option of limiting the search to a particular region of the United States.

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UC e-Links

Last Updated 8/31/05