Results of last year’s library survey

survey word cloud Last spring, almost 1,000 of you responded to the library’s survey evaluating the use and quality of the our collections, services, and facilities. That’s 584 WOU students, 143 faculty, 128 members of staff, and 100 graduate students. Thank you so much for your participation!

We’ve crunched the numbers and created an executive summary with the results and some info about what we’re going to do with your feedback. It’s available in WOU’s digital repository, Digital Commons@WOU.

Pages 1-3 summarize the survey itself, basic demographics, overall results, improvements made since the survey, and what’s next. Pages 4-7 are single-page reports of results from specific groups: undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff.

It’s OK to order things OnDemand!

When you run across an article in your research that is available through “Get It Now” or “OnDemand,” don’t let that stop you from getting the article you need.

These terms mean that Hamersly doesn’t have access to the journal that published the article you are looking for, but we can still get the article for you. In order to get access, you will go through a short process – since the library pays (on average around $30) each time an article is viewed through the Articles OnDemand provider’s website, we want to make sure you actually want the article. We budget for Articles OnDemand use though, so we want you to use it when you need it! We simply ask that you:

Read the abstract of each article to determine how likely it is to suit your needs before viewing the full text and incurring charges.
Be sure to save the article somewhere you will be able to get back to it (e.g. your H:/ drive, My Documents folder on your personal computer, a USB drive) so that the library only pays for it once.

Happy researching!

Need a midterm break? Check out Films on Demand

Watch online streaming videos about everything from biographies of famous musicians to the history of unions in the U.S. to tips for writing fiction from famous writers (and much more!) for free. Watch the videos in Films on Demand for class or for a study break – there’s something for everyone.

Films On Demand is almost like the library’s version of YouTube, except it’s all legal and appropriate for use in class assignments!

The vast Films on Demand archive currently includes more than 6,100 complete titles and 63,000 shorter video segments. You can browse by subject, such as Health & Medicine, World Languages, Nursing, Criminal Justice & Law, or Archival Films & Newsreels, under the ‘Collections’ menu option. Or you can simply search for videos using keywords.

Happy watching!

Stream videos for class or fun with ‘Films on Demand’

Watch online streaming videos about everything from biographies of famous musicians to the history of unions in the U.S. to tips for writing fiction from famous writers (and much more!) for free. Use the videos in Films on Demand for class, to learn something new, or just to satisfy your curiosity.

Films On Demand is almost like the library’s version of YouTube, except it’s all legal and appropriate for use in class assignments!

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Happy watching!

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The ‘Find it @ WOU’ button is your friend

Doing research for that final paper? Then you’ve probably come across the ‘Find it @ WOU’ button. Often, students are confused about what it does, but it’s a powerful tool that can get you to the articles you need no matter where they’re located. So, it’s worth checking out!

[wpspoiler name=”More about ‘Find it @ WOU’…” style=”ui-lightness” open=”true”]When you click the ‘Find it @ WOU’ button for an article in any WOU database, you will see one of four different scenarios for getting the full text of the article:

A link to another WOU database that has the full-text article
A message that WOU owns the article, but in print. You can either go to the physical shelf in the library where the journal is located and copy or scan your article, or you can choose the ‘Scan and Deliver’ option and we will scan it for you and email it to you as a PDF.
A page or link that says WOU has access to the article via OnDemand. You will either be able to order the article yourself by following the on-screen prompts, or the library may need to order it for you, depending on which option shows up.
A note that WOU does not own the article, but that we can get it from another library if you fill out the WOU Interlibrary Loan form linked from the page.

Find out more about each of these scenarios and see screenshots of what they look like here: http://research.wou.edu/finditatwou

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Learn about other countries with ‘A to Z the World’

Thinking about studying abroad? Taking a class with an international focus? Just want to learn about another country? A to Z the World is the database for you.

Covering 175 countries and territories, A to Z the World is a great resource to learn about social and cultural customs, important travel and business information, and much more. It has a snapshot for each country – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – if you just want some quick info, or you can go into more depth on a variety of topics related to each country.

Get the full text – just click ‘Find it @ WOU’

Sometimes full articles are available directly from the library databases, and you will see this icon:
PDF Full Text
But in many instances, there is no link to the full text of the article, and you only have the summary (or even just the citation information). This is when you use the ‘Find it @ WOU’ button. It looks like this:

Just click it and you will be taken to a page with information about how to access the full text of your article.
Need more help? Check out our Find it @ WOU tutorial to discover the different ways we might link you to the full text in our electronic sources, to our print sources & Scan & Deliver service, to Articles OnDemand, and to Interlibrary Loan, as appropriate.

What do people think? Find poll results on your topic

Polling the Nations is an online database of public opinion polls containing the full text of 600,000+ questions and responses, from 18,000+ surveys and 1,700+ polling organizations, conducted from 1986 through the present in the United States and more than 100 other countries around the world. Questions cover politics and elections; big issues such as health care, education, and the environment; personal beliefs and household activities such as commuting, prayer and religion, and sleep habits; and opinions of prominent people. All the polls in the database used scientifically selected random samples.

EdITLib Digital Library

EdITLib D igital Library is the premier source of peer-reviewed and published international journal articles and conference papers on the latest research, developments, and applications related to all aspects of Educational Technology and E-Learning. From the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Biography Reference Center

Biography Reference Center serves up detailed and concise biographies, in full-text, from respected reference sources and magazine articles. In addition to searching by name for a known individual, you can discover notable people by searching fields or browsing categories. Search fields include profession or activity, nationality or U.S. ethnicity, gender, lifespan, and places of birth and death. Over 30 genre categories cluster together people who have commonalities even when their professions diverge: for example, Activists & Reformers, Business Leaders, Obama Administration, or World War II.