Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
To begin, type in the URL for MySEU (http://myseu.seu.edu)
This brings us to the login page. Enter the same login and password
that you use for your Southeastern email or Blackboard account.
On the MySEU page, you will see square icons in the top left corner.
The first icon is TK20. Your professors will let you know if you need to use this for a class.
The next icon is for your SEU email. This is one of the ways that your professors will be communicating with you.
The next icon is for Blackboard. You will become very familiar with Blackboard in the near future.
The A+ icon is for your grades and transcripts.
The book icon takes you to the library. And the last icon, the speaker, takes you to SEU’s radio station.
For this tutorial, we will click on the book icon.
Here we have the library’s webpage. On the left hand side you will see all of the links you need for graduate level research.
The first link is Library Guides. We call them Lib Guides for short.
There is a guide just for you. If you scroll down you will see we have guides for
Distance Students, Online Students and Graduate Students.
For today's purposes, we will click on the online students guide.
This gives you information about checking out books from the library,
about ebooks that you can read on your computer,
InterLibrary Loan articles, SEU Central and other internet resources that will help you with your research.
Our second link is Find Southeastern Books.
This takes us into SPARC the library’s catalog.
With SPARC you can find books, DVDs, and even electronic books that you can read on your computer.
In the search box at the top, type in your subject, author or title.
Click the Go button. For our example I will type in education and reform.
SPARC found 403 items that matched our search for education and reform.
When we click on the title of a book, we are given the Citation Screen.
This screen contains all the information that you need for your Reference page at the end of your papers.
Notice the Author, Title, and Publication information.
To get the physical book, you need the call number.
The call number is at the bottom of the screen.
This piece of information helps you find the book on the second floor of the library.
For those of you that cannot come to the Steelman Library, we can mail books to you.
Please send an email with the Citation Screen information to ill@seu.edu
There are some books that you can read on your computer.
No need to come to the library.
When we go back to the results screen and take a look at the second item,
you will see that at the end of the title there are brackets with [electronic resource]. This means the book is available online.
When we get to the citation we click on the link “bibliographic record display…”
When we get to the citation screen we click on the link “bibliographic record display…”
This takes us directly to the book. Click on the link “View This Ebook.”
On the left hand side you will find the table of contents.
The right side has the text of the book.
You can click on the chapter titles or you can do a keyword search in the bottom left corner.
Keep in mind that you cannot download these ebooks or print them in their entirety.
You can print about 10 pages from each book.
That’s all there is to finding books.
Now let’s look at how to find scholarly journal articles.
We will go back to the library web page and click on library databases.
The Steelman Library has over 80 journal databases.
For your convenience we have grouped them by discipline.
Clicking on the link for Education will take you to a list of all the databases that index education journals.
For our first example we will click on EBSCO
This is the basic EBSCO search screen.
Let’s assume that we need to write a paper on Educational Reform.
First I will need to pick out the keywords that would make a search phrase.
We could start with “education.” This search will give us over 1 million results in EBSCO.
That is too many for a two page paper. How can we narrow down the results?
One way to narrow the results is to add another search term into the search box.
Using the word AND between your search terms tells the computer we want both search terms but in any order.
EBSCO has found over 28 thousand articles that match our search “education and reform.”
Now let me show you how to narrow these results so that you end up with a more reasonable list.
First look in the left hand column. One way to quickly narrow down results is to get rid of articles that are not “scholarly”.
In academic research, professors typically do not want magazine articles (examples are Time, Newsweek, People Magazine).
After clicking the “Update” button, there are now 14 thousand results.
Then we will click the box for full-text.
This tells the computer you want only the articles that you can read right on your computer.
Now we have eight thousand.
On the left hand side you will see a list of subject headings to help you narrow or broaden your search.
In this case, one of the subject headings is “Educational innovations”.
After clicking the update button, you will see 312 articles.
This is much better than 1 million.
Now let’s take a closer look at the results.
To read more information about the article, click on the title of the article.
The next screen has the article citation information – the title, author, journal title, date of publication and place of publication.
You will need all of this information for your bibliography.
In the right column you will see icons for printing, emailing, or saving the article.
Clicking on the Cite link will put the article information in APA formatting for you.
This list shows the article information in different types of citation styles.
Always double check the computers’ work.
There are often mistakes in the capitalization of the title, or there may be more information that is required.
It is up to you as the student to make the corrections necessary.
To get the entire article, click on the PDF or HTML link in the left hand column.
The PDF version will show you the article as it appears in the print journal.
It will also include links to other articles in that specific issue of the journal.
Use the icons in the PDF window to print, save or email the pdf file.
If you have further questions, please contact a librarian by phone, email or the Ask A Librarian service.