Mission Statement
The Ellender Memorial Library supports NSU's mission to "commit itself to offering an excellent comprehensive education, including a majority of nationally accredited programs, that meets the needs of the communities it serves in south central Louisiana and beyond through teaching, research and service." As part of that mission, the library aims to meet the needs of Distance Education students by meeting various Distance / Distributed Education support criteria defined by The Association of College and Research Libraries in 2000:
Providing access to adequate library services and resources. Members of the distance learning community are entitled to library services and resources equivalent to those provided for students and faculty in traditional campus settings.
Instilling lifelong learning skills through general bibliographic and information literacy instruction. The library attempts to meet this need through its web presence, e-mail contact, and phone contact.
Providing highly personalized library services to offset the lack of daily contact that on-campus students receive.
Providing funding for ready and equivalent library service and learning resources to all students, regardless of location.
Acting as a liaison between the library and other complementary resource bases such as computing facilities, instructional media, and telecommunication centers.
Assuring that distance learning library programs meet or exceed national and regional accreditation standards and professional association standards and guidelines, by conducting ongoing assessments and acting on those evaluations.
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The Library Homepage Explained
www.nicholls.edu/library
Important information on the Ellender Memorial Library Home Page includes links to the following:
The Library's Hours, including Holiday and weekend hours.
LOUIS and The Louisiana Union Catalog, which allows researchers to search all of Louisiaina's academic online catalogs simultaneously. Thus, you can find a book at a library near you.
The Library's FAQ Page, where common patron questions are answered.
iLink, the library's Online Public Access Catalog, which allows for a Simple Search and a Power Search.
The Electronic Research Databases Page, which contains databases in subjects such as business, chemistry, psychology, education, nursing, and agriculture, as well as generic databases for current events and news articles.
NetLibrary Accounts and E-Books, where students are given access to over 38,000 electronic titles which can be found via an iLink search or by searching NetLibrary directly.
Information Literacy Tutorials, which provide information on various research courses taught through the library, as well as tutorials on plagiarism and copyright.
The Library Terminology Page, which provides definitions for often used library terms.
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Finding Books in iLINK
Ellender Memorial Library's Online Public Access Catalog is called iLink. To search for books, videos, periodicals, etc., simply click on the link from the library's homepage. You may click on either iLink or on the iLink Power Search. The simple search allows you to search by author, title, keyword, subject, or periodical title. If you know the author or title of a source, or it is a simple keyword search, such as distance education or research papers, then the simple search will suffice.
However, if you wish to compose a complex search, such as finding books and videos about teaching children through play acting, or finding videos about investing for retirement, you would be better off using the Power Search. For example, to find the former, you could try either of the following:
word or phrase=education AND word or phrase=play acting
The above search returned 0 hits.
word or phrase=education AND word or phrase=role playing
The above search returned 7 hits.
The important thing to remember is that searching effectively involves coming up with a search strategy, and that strategy will probably involve using various synonyms and similar terms to maximize effectiveness.
By the same token, if you wanted to find videos about investing for retirement in our library, you might try the following:
word or phrase=investing AND word or phrase=retirement AND type=audio-visual
Unfortunately, the above search returned 0 hits.
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Using LOUIS and the Union Catalog to Find Books Near You
Whenever you get zero hits in iLink, or whenever you need to find out if an academic library near you has a book, video, or periodical (a scholarly journal or a magazine) in its collection, you can use the LOUIS link off of the library's homepage. Scroll down the menu on the left hand side of the page, and you will see the link for LOUISiana Libraries Catalog. This link will take you to the Welcome to the LOUISiana Union Catalog page. In the top left corner, and on the bottom left, you will see a link that allows you to search the Union Catalog.
This means that you can simultaneously search every academic library catalog in Louisiana at once. To do so, once you have clicked on the link, check the box which says All Libraries. By the same token, you can check off only certain libraries, if you are geographically limited. Once you have done this, scroll back up to the top left of the page, and type in your search term(s). Make sure you click on the correct type of search for your term, with the choices of Author, Title, Subject, and Keyword. Your results list will have blue hyperlinks to the catalogs of libraries that have the item you are looking for.
For example, if you were looking for the title Hooked on Horror: A Guide to Reading Interests in the Genre, you would type in hooked on horror and click where the grey box says Title. The results list shows that six libraries own that title, and one of them is Louisiana State University. If you lived in Baton Rouge or in the vicinity, you could find out about Middleton Library's (LSU) reciprocal borrowing privileges using LaLINC cards, which means that you, as a Nicholls student, may have borrowing privileges at Middleton. Or you can check to see if Middleton Library offers courtesy cards to patrons who are not students, so that they might have check out privileges. As is the case with this particular book, which is a reference book (reference books are non-circulating), you could go to the library and use the book, without having to inquire about special cards.
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Using E-Books at NetLibrary
Ellender Memorial Library has access to over 40,000 electronic titles through netLibrary. Most of the library's netLibrary books can be found by searching iLink. You may also search netLibrary directly. But to check-out or read netLibrary books, you'll first need to create a netLibrary account. You must use this link to create an account from off-campus.
NetLibrary is optimized for IE 5.5 and above, Netscape 6.2 and above, and Other Gecko from Mozilla 1.1. To acccess netLibrary, you should update your browser with the latest version to take full advantage of the many new features now available from netLibrary. After April 2, 2004, you will no longer be able to access netLibrary without an upgraded browser.
Visit this link for updates about Nicholls' netLibrary accounts.
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Finding Articles in the Electronic Research Databases
The library offers quite a few databases on its Electronic Research Database page, where they are listed in alphabetical order. If you follow this link, you can get a list of our databases, roughly arranged by subjects.
When you are accessing these databases from home, you will be asked to authenticate yourself as a Nicholls student. The page which asks you to input a user name and password should be self-explanatory, but if you have any problems, check out this link, or contact our Reference Desk at 985-448-4625 during normal library hours.
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Ask a Librarian
Do you have a reference question for our librarians? Complete this form and it will be received by a reference librarian at the reference desk. For immediate assistance, the reference desk number is 985-448-4625. The librarian will answer your question as quickly as possible. Submit a new form for each question and always provide your email address.
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Information Literacy Classes / Class Pages
The library offers classes in searching iLink, the Electronic Research Databases, and the World Wide Web. These classes attempt to make students information literate, which is to say that they leave knowing how to find information in various formats, and how to evaluate that information for relevance and authoritativeness. Most of these classes are brought in by instructors for specific assignments. However, we do offer On the Fly Classes. Near the beginning of each semester, the Reference Department releases a schedule of drop in sessions, which range from teaching iLink and Electronic Database basics, to learning how to find library resources in Business, Education, Nursing, Literature, and Research Paper Writing. To see if a session is offered at a convenient time for you, check our schedule.
Links to handouts produced for these classes, in the form of web pages, can be found on our Information Literacy webpage.
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Helpful Websites
By far, the best search engine on the World Wide Web is Google, which is located and maintained at Stanford University. Google allows for phrase searches, for combination (boolean) searches, and for domain limitations. For example, if you wanted to find Distance Education sites at university campuses in Louisiana, you would type in the following (including spaces and punctuation):
"distance education" Louisiana site:.edu
The Google command for domain limitation is site: followed by the domain you wish to limit results to, such as government agencies (.gov), universities (.edu), not-for-profit organizations (.org), and military sites (.mil). By typing site:.edu in the above search, you are telling the search engine to return only those sites that come from universities and educational institutions. The Google command for a phrase search is enclosing the phrase within quotes. So when you typed "distance education" (in quotes), you tell the search engine not to return sites with the word distance in them, unless that word is immediately followed by the word education. The space between the phrase and the word Louisiana takes the place of the boolean operator and, thus allowing you to combine terms.
Try typing the following into Google:
"distance education clearinghouse"
This search will return the site for "a comprehensive and widely recognized Web site bringing together distance education information from Wisconsin, national, and international sources [where] new information and resources are being added ... on a continual basis."
The other excellent search engine on the web is called All The Web. However, it is not as intuitive as Google. You have to click on Advanced Search in order to get it to handle phrases correctly, or in order to limit your results by domain extension. Still, alltheweb.com allows some commands that Google does not, so if you need to do an expert search, give it a try.
Finally, the following is a list of websites that act as Distance Education information kiosks or virtual reference desks:
The American Center for the Study of Distance Education
The ACSDE conducts empirical research that adds to the educational knowledge base, disseminates this research and practice-based knowledge about distance teaching and learning through publications and professional development activities, and provides distance education program evaluation services to academic units and external partners. Click on the Resources link.
The Educator's Reference Desk Distance Education Guide
Includes links to articles, studies, and discussions.
Distance Educator
A comprehensive collection of distance education resources. Click on the Learners link to test your capacities for being a distance education student.
RefDesk
This is the web's best "virtual library," hands down. Sites have already been evaluated.
The Internet Public Library
This is similar to RefDesk, but is not as easy to use, as it uses the directory structure popularized by Yahoo. Sites have already been evaluated.
The WWW Virtual Library
Sites arranged in a directory structure.
Librarians' Index to the Internet
"The mission of Librarians' Index to the Internet is to provide a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources, serving California, the nation, and the world."
Why Evaluate Websites?
Though this is not a virtual library, this site is an excellent introduction to the importance of website evaluation.
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