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 Journal Articles
The library offers quite a few databases on its Electronic Research Database page, where they are listed in alphabetical order. Some databases will return hits that are Full Text (FT) or Linked Full Text (LFT). Our databases are roughly arranged by subjects on this page.
In addition, the database called WorldCat will allow you to search anywhere in the world for a book, to see what libraries own a copy of it. 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 (your student ID number) and password. If you have any problems, check out this link, or contact our Circulation Desk at 985-448-4654 during normal library hours.
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What Do FT and LFT Mean?
Those databases that are denoted with an FT or LFT symbol have the possibility of retrieving Full Text or Linked Full Text versions of articles. For example, a search of the Academic Search Complete database (which is denoted as FT and LFT) for articles about Richard A. Clarke, retired counterterrorism advisor to four presidents, will produce three types of full text versions: HTML Full Text, PDF Full Text, and Lexis Nexis Full Text.
HTML Full Text is the easiest to both download and print. Simply stated, an article in HTML Full Text is one which has been retyped as a web page. It is still the original article in content and is still as authoritative a source as it was in its original form; however, it will be lacking charts, graphs, and images, and will have no pagination. This means that citing this type of full text means familiarizing yourself with the citation format for articles from a database.
PDF Full Text is slower to download, and can be slow to print, but is preferable because it is an actual photocopy of the article. Simply stated, an article in PDF format is one which has been scanned as an Adobe Acrobat Reader document, complete with color images, charts, and graphs. In addition, it more than likely will keep the original pagination of the article, which means that when citing a PDF Full Text article, you can cite it as if you had actually found the physical article in a journal and photocopied it yourself. In other words, it can be cited as an article from a journal or magazine, rather than as one from a database.
The message Lexis Nexis Full Text (or any other database name followed by the phrase Full Text) denotes that a full text version of the article is available, but that you will have to search a second database (in this case, Lexis Nexis Academic) to get that full text. In this case, you could click on the link to get to Lexis Nexis, but would then have to start a new search for News (a link located on the left in the database) in Lexis Nexis and enter the title of the article. A full text article retrieved this way is usually some form of HTML Full Text, and should be cited as an article from a database.
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Finding Newspaper Articles
By far, the best database for locating newspaper articles is the aforementioned Lexis Nexis Academic. However, the Lexis Nexis interface is unintuitive, so if you are coming to it for the first time, you should read this section and follow the helpful hints therein.
When you first see the Lexis Nexis search screen, it looks simple enough, and the search example of "campaign finance reform" makes it clear that, like in some web search engines, you are to use quotation marks when searching for a specific phrase. Likewise, as is usual for search engines that require quotation marks for phrases, you do not need to insert the boolean and; you simply have to insert a space between two terms. What may not be clear is that the Lexis Nexis simple search screen defaults to search only six months back for articles. If you wish to search further back, you must use the pull down menu to set the date back. Note, however, that the Quick News Search allows you to go back only two years. You should also note that there is a link for search Hints.
If you wish to go back further than two years, you must switch from the Quick News Search to the Guided News Search. This search will allow you to go back further than ten years, but it requires that you determine settings before you can search. You will have to select a News Category and a News Source. But once you have done these, you can enter up to three search terms, and can search anywhere in the article. You can also set specific dates, so that if you wanted news articles about September 11, 2001 that were published between that date and December 31, 2001, you could do so. You can also set your search to search a specific publication, so that if you wanted only Boston Globe articles about the Red Sox, you could specify this.
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