All posts by Kim Duckett

Uncategorized

RCR Library Programs for New Graduate Students

The Duke University Libraries is offering a number of RCR programs for new graduate students. These workshops are designed as a complement to the required RCR orientations for new graduate and professional school students. The library will offer a number of additional RCR programs through the academic year.

Workshop Description

This interactive online workshop will introduce you to a variety of library resources to support your research practices. We’ll cover copyright and fair use, citation practices and avoiding plagiarism, research data management, [using rare materials and manuscripts], and issues in scholarly publishing from an author’s perspective. You’ll meet library experts relevant to your discipline and leave the session informed on how to dig deeper and get individualized help when these topics arise in your graduate student career. This workshop has been approved for two hours of RCR credit.

You must register for the workshop. Click the link to register.

My Duke Library, Uncategorized

My Duke Library: Andrea Kolarova’s Perspective

Hello! My name is Andrea Kolarova and I am graduating with a B.S. in Environmental Science (2020). During my three and a half years at Duke thus far, I have traveled all around the world, meeting new people and exploring unique ecosystems.

My main areas of interest are within ecology and conservation science. I am an avid reader, rock climber, and music lover. No matter where I have gone or where my interests have taken me, the Duke library system has followed me, supporting all my adventures!

How has the library impaDuke senior Andie Kolarovacted your Duke experience?

The libraries at Duke have been an integral part of my experience at Duke. During my four years, I’ve used the libraries in a variety of ways: there are study spaces for group projects or focused reading, textbooks on reserve, movies to rent, and seemingly limitless books. The librarians have also been an important part of my education — they’ve assisted me in getting the resources I need for my research projects, even when I was living way out in Beaufort!

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library or library’s collections?

The Duke Archives are such an interesting corner of the library system! My freshman year, I found out that we have a large collection of third wave feminist zines. It’s incredible to see and feel the original creations of folks from an era that excites my interest and admiration.

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

Even though I’m now a senior, I sometimes return to Lilly Library to study with my little sister. I enjoy coming back to where my Duke journey began, especially in the big rooms with long tables and desk lamps.

Andie’s library pro tip:

Get to know your librarians! They are friendly, knowledgeable, and here to help you! They can assist you in using the inter-library loan system or familiarize you with the databases the university is subscribed to. Being a part of the Duke library system opens you up to an incredible breadth of material — take advantage of it!

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department

Life in the library, My Duke Library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Boyang Zhang’s Perspective

Boyang Zhang, who is from a small city in Northern China, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering. His research interests are in the safe guidance and control of multiple agents, such as autonomous ground vehicles and unmanned quadrotor aerial vehicles, in dynamic and uncertain environments.

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?

I have found that Duke University Libraries offer many useful resources and tools to assist me in my research. They also provide a friendly and welcoming environment, and I thoroughly enjoy studying and researching there.

Boyang stands in front of the writings of one of his favorite authors, Jin Yong
Boyang stands in front of the writings of one of his favorite authors, Jin Yong (金庸)

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library or library’s collections?

I’ve had many pleasant experiences in the library, including its free access to numerous online research databases, notably IEEE, Web of Science, and Science Direct, that I can search and from which I can instantly download relevant articles. Moreover, it offers a variety of interesting and helpful workshops such as how to use the citation management software EndNote and how to find suitable journals to publish my research work. I’ve also enjoyed participating in advanced lectures on machine learning and data visualization in The Edge.

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

I greatly appreciate the document delivery and interlibrary loan services. The libraries locate books and articles I request and deliver them directly to me in a timely manner. 

Boyang’s library pro tip:

Don’t hesitate to ask for help! The librarians are friendly and supportive, and are always willing to help.

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department.

My Duke Library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Zhuoyu Li’s Perspective

Zhuoyu Li is a first year master’s student in the Electrical & Computer Engineering program at Pratt. She came from Taiyuan, China a month ago to study at Duke. She instantly connected to the Duke University Libraries because of her love of libraries and books.

Zhuoyu enjoys a jigsaw puzzle at the Oasis on the fourth floor of Perkins Library.

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?
I’ve been at Duke for only a few weeks, but I’ve already found that the Perkins and Bostock Libraries are amazing places to study and get help with research. I am glad that I came to Duke.

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library?
I’ve realized that the library isn’t limited to self-study space. The Libraries provide so much more than just study space and books. I’ve found exhibit galleries, the OIT service desk, multimedia project studio, group study rooms, and meditation rooms, places where I can meet, study, and take a break from studying.

What’s a favorite space or service? Why?
It is challenging to pick only one. I love Oasis! It is a space on the fourth floor of the Perkins Library where I can relax from studying and enjoy puzzles.

Zhuoyu’s Pro Tip
Enjoy the sunshine and warmth in a comfy chair on the bridge between the Perkins and Bostock Libraries.

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department.

Announcement, Digital Scholarship, Events, Instruction, Uncategorized

RCR Days! A Fall Break Program

The Duke University Libraries will be offering a suite of RCR workshops for graduate students over Fall Break, October 7-8, 2019, including:

Monday, October 7

Shaping Your Professional Identity Online
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This workshop is designed to help you consider the best ways to navigate how you want to present yourself online.  We will discuss topics such as what to share and how to share, the ethical issues involved, and how to maintain the right balance of privacy.  We will also examine some steps you can take, such as creating a profile on Google Scholar, creating a Google alert for your name, creating an ORCID ID, interacting professionally on Twitter, and creating an online portfolio.
More information and registration

Project Management for Academics
10:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
The skills of project management are valuable skills for academics at any stage in their career and for a range of activities. This workshop will present basic principles for managing goals, time, and people, including how these can be applied to work with project teams. Activities and discussions will enable participants to begin formulating their own strategies for project management and help them build a toolkit of ideas and approaches that they can use in their academic life.
More information and registration

Copyright in Online Environments and International Collaborations
1:00 p.m. -3:00 p.m.
International collaboration in research, teaching, and publishing requires gathering and sharing archival materials, digital primary sources, and academic publications. What copyright laws apply when sharing materials in learning management systems, digital publishing projects, open educational resources, or academic publications, including the thesis and dissertation? How can scholars be confident in Fair Use analysis? Come learn from a wide-ranging consideration of copyright issues in international online environments.
More information and registration

Tuesday, October 8

Project Management for Academics
10:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
The skills of project management are valuable skills for academics at any stage in their career and for a range of activities. This workshop will present basic principles for managing goals, time, and people, including how these can be applied to work with project teams. Activities and discussions will enable participants to begin formulating their own strategies for project management and help them build a toolkit of ideas and approaches that they can use in their academic life.
More information and registration

The Empowered Author: Evaluating Publishers, Negotiating Contracts, and Navigating the Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem 10:00 am. – 12:00 p.m.
This is a workshop about the process of being an author, about getting published and getting the rewards of being published, while sharing the benefits of your research with as broad an audience as possible. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on activities you will learn about methods to:
– evaluate publishers, avoiding “predatory” journals and scams,
– analyze and negotiate publication contracts, and
– increase the reach of your work outside of traditional publications.
More information and registration

Digital Text Analysis
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
This session provides an overview of text analysis methods that are useful in humanities scholarship.  Participants will learn about the kinds of textual analysis that are possible using various techniques and concepts, including collocates, measures of distinctiveness and similarity (e.g., term frequency-inverse document frequency), collocates, topic modeling, and document classification. Using Voyant Tools for hands-on exploration, participants will learn how to apply these techniques to sample corpora and to their own research questions.
More information and registration

Ethics and Visualization
1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Data visualization is an increasingly important skill for researchers in all disciplines, but it is easy to focus more on the mechanics of creating visualizations than on how visualizations relate to ethics. This session introduces participants to core ideas in the ethics of visualization – designing to avoid distortion, designing ethically for broad user communities, developing empathy for people represented within the data, and using reproducibility to increase the transparency of design.
More information and registration

Finding a Home For Your Data: An Introduction to Archives and Repositories
1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Publishing and preserving research data within a trusted repository helps researchers comply with funder and journal data sharing policies, supports the discovery of and access to data, and can result in more visibility and higher impact for research projects. This workshop will provide an overview of the different types of repositories, including Duke’s own Research Data Repository, and the overall role of repositories within the data sharing landscape. Key repositories in various disciplines will be explored and attendees will learn strategies for locating and assessing repositories. Attendees will also have an opportunity to explore potential repositories for their own research.
More information and registration

Digital Publishing 101:  The Audiences of Digital Publishing
1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Who are the intended users of a digital publication? How can scholars reach new audiences and keep existing audiences actively engaged? We’ll learn about some of the ways successful projects connect with their users and promote their work to potential audiences and how you can incorporate these into your own publication planning. We’ll also consider how to effectively and ethically involve and credit audience involvement in one’s research. Participants will leave this session with an understanding of how to engage audiences and incorporate audience involvement into digital publication practices.
More information and registration

Life in the library, My Duke Library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Christine Wei’s Perspective

Christine Wei is majoring in Public Policy with a minor in Education. About her Duke experience she says, “Duke’s been a big part of my life since 2013; I was originally in the Class of 2017 and had to take two years off because I went through a mid-college-career crisis. Since then, I’ve shifted my priorities to put health first ahead of everything else and found myself happier and healthier than before. The only project I’ve been working on is a kindness and happiness-based one. I try to look for one to three positive moments in each day and document those to focus more on the positive rather than the negative, particularly in a world dominated by tragic news.”

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?

Librarians have helped me with my research in almost every class. I’ve needed to access databases and refine searches for peer-reviewed articles and more. Duke Libraries also offered employment through my work-study, and that’s been helpful beyond words.

Duke student Christine Wei in Perkins Library

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library?

I’ve rediscovered my innate curiosity for the way things work and why things are the way they are. For instance, I haven’t taken many natural science courses since high school, so learning more about popular science can be eye-opening.

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

I love talking to librarians by the Perkins Service Desk. Doing so reminds me I’m always a part of something more and that collaboration trumps competition every time.

Christine’s library pro tip:

Don’t be afraid to ask for help! You’ll often find more than you expected.

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department.

Life in the library, My Duke Library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Elizabeth Smithwick’s Perspective

Hello! My name is Elizabeth Smithwick and I’m from Jacksonville, Florida. I am a senior at Duke studying chemistry. My undergraduate thesis focuses on calculating the redox potentials of iron-sulfur proteins. After graduation, I will be pursuing my Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Minnesota. Outside of school I enjoy hiking, painting, and reading science fiction. My favorite book currently is The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin.

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?  

For me, the libraries have always been a place to connect with other people while also tackling my courses at Duke. In contrast to being in my room studying all the time, I feel a sense of camaraderie with my peers in the library that I don’t always feel in other spaces at Duke. I am reminded that everyone here at Duke is working hard to do their very best.

Duke senior Elizabeth Smithwick

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library? 

My sophomore year I was enrolled in an Italian Renaissance art history class and as a research project, we were assigned to investigate an obscure Italian painter. For the painter I received, Marco Basaiti, the amount of information online was sparse, and I was unsure where to go next. Thankfully I was able to find a few physical books on art in the Renaissance that made brief mention to Marco Basaiti in the collection at Lilly library which opened a few more avenues of investigation. Specifically it was a book of drawings by old masters that led me to a few of his more well-known contemporaries that allowed me to find more material on Basaiti himself. Most of the research I had done in the past had mainly been in the form of online journal articles so exploring the stacks in Lilly was a novel experience and gave me a much greater appreciation for the large collection Duke already possesses.

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

My favorite service of the library is the Document Delivery Service. The ability to access almost any scientific article reasonably quickly and easily is an extremely powerful tool and one I wouldn’t know what to do without.

Elizabeth’s library pro tip: 

Reach out to the librarians for research help with class projects and independent studies. Odds are they know of something that will help make research easier or more efficient. I know my life was forever changed as soon as I learned about EndNote which is a way to manage references for papers.

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department.

Life in the library, My Duke Library, Tips and Tricks, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Tyler Chery’s Perspective

Tyler Chery is a junior studying Mechanical Engineering and Religion.

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?

Ironically, I have never thought of myself as a “library person.”  I always appreciated the “college feel” that university libraries provide, but I never truly believed that I would identify with such a stressful and business-oriented establishment.  This all changed when I first discovered the wonders of The Link during the second semester of my freshman year.

Duke student Tyler Chery

Every Monday and Wednesday after my 8:30 am EGR 121 lecture I would commandeer group study room 11, grab a huge bean bag, and sleep like a baby until my next class. I still remember the awkward looks I would get as people walked into the study room only to find me sprawled on the floor knocked out. On Fridays I would return and crank out hours of homework before the weekend began. The Link became my productivity secret. 

As sophomore year rolled around I challenged myself to find all the nooks and crannies of Perkins and Rubenstein. Now, as a junior I consider myself to be an expert at finding study (and sleep) spaces in Perkins, Rubenstein, Bostock, and even Lilly on East Campus. In addition, I have had the pleasure of meeting a lot of the library staff now that I have a work-study job in the collections department of Perkins. I practically spend half of my time in the library these days.

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library?

RESERVE TEXTBOOKS! I literally checked out a reserve textbook 20 minutes before taking one of the rare open-book examinations in all of my time here at Duke. I still remember reading off a few exam answers word for word in the text.

Also, I highly recommend going on the Duke Libraries website and taking the time to search for online resources and databases before wasting your time on Google when writing essays. I have found some serious gems for my religious studies papers just by searching the online catalog.

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

The Link!  Naps, vending machines, technology support; it has everything you need to complete an abundance of work over the course of one day. I have spent hundreds of hours in there.

Tyler’s library pro tip:

If you are someone who supposedly can only study in your room, or where no one else is watching, I challenge you to try any of the above locations that I have mentioned. You may feel uncomfortable for the first 30 minutes but eventually you will realize that you cannot afford to watch an hour of YouTube videos if everyone else around you is doing actual work.

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department.

Life in the library, My Duke Library, Services, Tips for students

My Duke Library: Tyler Goldberger’s Perspective

Image

Tyler Goldberger is a senior studying History, Spanish, and Jewish Studies. He’s writing his double honors thesis on Spain’s difficulty in commemorating all of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism dictatorship and the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica to actively confront this history. Tyler recently authored the Duke Chronicle editorial Confronting Being a Low SES Student At Duke.

How has the library impacted your Duke experience?

The Duke Libraries have provided me with incredible opportunities to perform well in my classes and conduct research. As a low SES (socioeconomic status) student, I thought I would struggle with purchasing the necessary books to excel in my coursework. However, through the help of the librarian staff and search queries, I have never had to pay for a textbook, reducing my financial burden and allowing me to concentrate fully on my classes. Through the library system, especially through the ILL opportunity, I have also been able to retrieve necessary primary and secondary sources for various research projects over my four years. Duke Library System has greatly enhanced my academic journey, and I am so thankful for all of the resources it has provided me.

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library?

The library has allowed me to really learn what research is all about. Before entering the library, my vision of research was limited to high school experiences that really just made me synthesize secondary sources. Once coming to Duke, I have realized that research is alive, especially with the incredible resources provided by Rubenstein. I have had the opportunity to engage with local election results in Durham, abolitionist pamphlets from the 19th century, human rights policy in Spain, and so much more!

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

The Chat a Librarian function on library.duke.edu has been extremely helpful. There have been many times when I am stuck somewhere but need to know the various resources that exist at the library. This service has saved me time and has helped me locate great sources for a project or personal research.

Tyler’s library pro tip

Utilize the specialist librarians. They will help you formulate questions and find resources for your next great research project!

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department