Literature Searching

The common desire for many researchers in the traditional academic library setting is to first find and then use resources located in the library, whether online or in the stacks, and then, only if needed, obtain materials from somewhere else. Often this includes interaction with a reference librarian, during which the librarian will often conduct a reference interview, which consists of asking the researcher a set of openended questions. These help the librarian determine what the researcher really wants and gauge how to best instruct the researcher on how to find it. But due to the lack of a physical library in the distributed education environment, librarians and researchers must communicate by telephone or ‘virtually.’ Searching for scholarly work must be done in online databases ...