Luther Seminary Library

Biblio Bread & Butter – Find Full-text Articles Online

In this video tutorial Bruce Eldevik shows you how to find online journal articles without leaving your chair. There are several avenues for finding journal articles online, either through our databases or our Journal A-Z list. Bruce shows us three examples of finding and accessing full-text articles. Download the Handout.

Video on Finding Full-text Articles

Join us each Wednesday as we show you how to find a variety of online resources. We're on campus 11:45-12:20PM in Bockmann Computer Lab. If you're off-campus watch our tutorials. We'll post each week on the library blog, Behind the Library Mask.

October 6    Finding Full-text Articles Online

October 20    Early Church Resources

October 27    Find Books and More in the Online Catalog

November 3    Lectionary Resources for Advent

November 17    Find Articles, Essays, & Book Reviews in ATLA

December 1    Bibleworks 8

—Jennie Bartholomew, e-services librarian

GusDay 10

Last week, several seminary staff members (the Learning Design and Technology team: Kris Payne, Dan Ruth, and Ryan Torma; Jana Ratkovich and Nunu Vongsouvan from Computer Services; our webmeister, Jim Dudley, and I) spent a day at Carleton College, attending GusDay 10. This is an annual event “designed for the technology staff from the Minnesota Private Colleges and other like-minded institutions to gather and share successes, challenges, strategies, and friendships.” The Carleton staff, all decked out in colorful shirts to go with a Hawaiian conference theme, provided warm hospitality, good food, and door prizes. Kris Payne continues to be the lucky winner at GusDay. Last year she won an iPod, this year she took home a reconditioned laptop.

There were a number of interesting sessions on topics ranging from Windows 7, project and software management, cloud computing, and web design. Kris, Dan, and Ryan presented on “Creating Engaging Online Courses.” The Learning Design and Technology group has created lots of excellent content to support online classes at Luther and their session was one of the few that is addressing this need in the region. http://www.luthersem.edu/orientation/default.aspx?im=171

One of the nice things about Gus Day is the chance to visit other campuses and see what resources their tech staff are supporting and what the priorities are for their campus culture. It’s also a great chance to network. New ideas and ways to collaborate are increasingly important in these times of budget challenges. A highlight of the Carleton campus tour was our visit to the server room where our host waxed eloquent on the server racks, the fiber-optic cabling, the voltage, and other details that make “his baby” unique. We saw first-hand how providing uninterrupted access to the computer side of learning and communicating requires knowledge, resources, and creativity.

 
This is true at Luther Seminary. Our team of tech experts is doing a great job, working with the challenge of reduced budgets and competition for resources. Thanks be to God for all the men and women who work hard to make our access to technical resources seem easy.

— Jennie Bartholomew, e-services librarian

Summary Summer Tech Talks

Learning, Design and Technology (Kris Payne, Dan Ruth, Ryan Torma) is collaborating with the library (Jennie Bartholomew) to bring you a series of 30 minute discussions about some new, exciting, curious or interesting aspect of technology. We give a brief presentation on how to use the technology, and follow it with a round-table discussion to answer questions and generate ideas for using it.

 

Luther Seminary students have many wonderful tech tools to play and learn with. This week we debuted the summer presentations with BibleWorks 8. Coming up the week of July 21st is PowerPoint; GoogleApps the week of August 4th; Endnote the week of August 18. Click here for the full schedule. Talks are in Northwestern on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The Tech Talks are a good place to get your feet wet. Come and hear the general overview. Find out what you might want to learn more about. Pick up a few tips, say hi, and tell us what your tech needs are at Luther.

Full-Text Online Articles: Buddhism? Ecotheology? Christianity and Literature?

I don’t lose a lot of sleep over this question but the fact remains that I think about it at odd times: How do we get good online resources out to our patrons? I wrote earlier this fall about the Depth and Breadth of our periodical collection. I’d like to emphasize the many online, full-text options that are available to you.

To find serial content: look for a journal in our A-Z list. Some of the titles we’ve added access to this fall are:

·         Ecclesiology: Journal for Mission ,Ministry, and Unity

·         Horizons in Biblical Theology

·         Pneuma

·         Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

      

Or look for articles in one of these databases (use HomeLab if off-campus):

·         Academic Search Premier

·         ATLA Religion Database (also includes ATLAS)

·         New Testament Abstracts Online

·         Old Testament Abstracts Online

·         AgeLine

ATLAS is one of our very best resources. This acronym refers to the Full-text journal articles that are available through the American Theological Library Association’s Religion Database. “Serials” is one of those library-geek-speak terms for literature that comes out periodically, or serially.

This month’s ATLAS report from ATLA noted that over 8, 050 articles and reviews were added with the November update. Here are three of the 11 new titles that were added:

·         Christianity and Literature, by Pepperdine University

·         Ecotheology, by Equinox (Continued by Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture)

·         Pure Land (new series), by International Association of Shin Buddhist Studies

Don’t limit yourself by just looking for resources in the Library’s collection (MARTIN). Try one of our serial options. Be sure to use your HomeLab account if you are accessing these resources off-campus.

Jennie Bartholomew, Electronic Services

Save Time: Correct Citations with Endnote

Save time! Simplify bibliographies! Create perfect footnotes!

If you routinely write papers and cite your resources in a bibliography or footnotes you can save time using Endnote. This software program allows you to create files holding your bibliographic data. These are called libraries. You can add resources manually or search in catalogs and/or databases and add them automatically.

Once you have created a library of resources (books, journal articles, interviews, websites, etc.) you are all set to repeatedly cite this information correctly. Endnote reduces the amount of typing you have to do when you’re working on a paper. You can also create annotated bibliographies automatically without having to format them.

Anyone who has writing a thesis on their To Do List can simplify the process with Endnote. Luther Seminary has a site license and the software is available to load on your computer. Contact Network Services for a copy.

A workshop or a refresher tutorial can be arranged. Contact Jennie, x458 with questions.

Scavenger Hunt: Open to all students currently enrolled at Luther Seminary. Begins October 1, ends October 28. All questions will be posted in the Library Blog (Behind the Library Mask) during October. Keep a list of the questions & your answers and submit all at the same time with your name and contact information. All entries are due by 2:00pm October 29. All correct entries will be entered in a drawing to be held during the Open House.

Scavenger Hunt Clue #5: What notice is posted above the copy machines?

What law does this refer to?

What is the blue poster to the right of the copy machine on level 4?

Tag Clouds: Both Sides Now

A church I attended at one time had a preacher whose sermons seemed to take an awfully long time to come to the point. As someone who had previously preached regularly myself, I was of course pulling for the guy, wanting to sense that he was connecting well, but it wasn’t always easy to stay hopeful.

The thought crossed my mind that preachers should either be given or (maybe better) to give themselves a quota of words they could not exceed in delivering a given sermon. This would dictate that every word used unnecessarily would at least potentially be at the expense of a word that was needful. A good way of respecting not only language but the attention spans of our hearers. Whether preachers or not, we can all benefit from discipline in the both the volume and the variety of words we use.

Now, I wonder if something like this might help us? A link from one of my favorite blogs (Instapundit.com) tells me that some clever soul took the time to use a tag cloud to look at the speeches by Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin at the recent GOP convention, right here in St. Paul. You can read the whole article, but the basic idea of tag or word clouds is “to represent a frequency count of terms in a given piece of text, providing a clue to the importance of certain ideas.”

If it helps shed light on campaign speeches, would it also work (dare I ask) on sermons? At least one website, http://www.sermoncloud.com , seems to be doing a roaring business, not only as a gathering point for sermons (in text, audio, RSS, etc.) but in sleuthing out the language by using tag clouds.

A question worth pondering: would I be more eager to try this out on someone else’s sermon, or my own?