What are the best sources of research information for a distance learner?

Assume you are already a registered distance learning student and do alot papers that need to be backed by credible research work different topics etc.

Besides ERIC, your textbooks, and whatever other informational sites your instructor has given you as reference, what other credible online sources of information are available?

 

That would depend on the subject that you need to research. They are probably too various to even begin to list all of them.

Not only is every subject different, you are going to find yourself investigating particular issues and questions within a subject. So the information that you are looking for will be very specific, focused and targeted.

Just in general, I'd start out with some of those big academic links sites that can turn you onto all kinds of things. I'd look for online journals. I'd investigate course webpages from a number of of universities and look for class notes, readings and so on. I'd see what the online bookstores like Amazon have. I'd look at museum websites, scientific databases or whatever was appropriate. I'd Google my subject with lots of different search terms. I'd talk to my local public librarian about interlibrary loans from academic libraries.

But you probably will have to physically visit a decent academic library from time to time. I certainly did when I was doing my DL masters.

Library resources are often crucial in graduate school and lack of them is the ugly little problem that DL doesn't really like to talk about.

 

when I was in grad school, I subscribed to elibrary.com . I just did a search and this site came up with elibrary's name:

http://www.highbeam.com/library/index.asp

This looks similar in how elibrary operated. I got full text journal articles. It was a great resource.

 

You may be able to get a library card at a nearby state university, and that may permit you to access online reference sources from the school.

 

As RandyP suggests, online databases at university libraries will be your best asset. EBSCOhost is a composite database of numerous scholarly journals and other literature that is available at most college and university libraries. I couldn't live without this access (of course, my office happens to be in the unversity library, so I am spoiled).

 

If your institution doesn't at the very least provide you with access to JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ from home, change institutions.

As a minimum, I'd expect to get an equivalent service to the one that my current college provides for distance learners http://www.bbk.ac.uk/lib/dls/dls2.html

Angela

 

At the risk of posting a no-brainer, I have found http://scholar.google.com to be extremely helpful. Beyond that, one would need to know details about subject; e.g., I can give good resources for psych and for patristics, as I have studied these and have needed online resources.

Matt

 

My school gives me access to the university llibrary online. I also get access to ProQuest, Ebsco, Lexi-Nexis, and other resources within the Kentucky state education system. Check your school to see what they allow you access to.

William

 

Lots of people have mentioned various online resources supplied through university libraries. So what have your experiences been?

Do you think that these kind of online materials can replace physical visits to an academic library? Do they make it possible for physically remote students to visit less often? Or do they merely supplement physical visits?

What's available online these days? Apparently most academic journals are. There's probably more available online than in all but the best university periodicals collections. (Which suggests that paper copies of journals may die out soon.)

But what about books? How many books are available online, full-text? My understanding is that books are progressing much more slowly than journals (but I'm hopelessly out of touch with most e-developments).

Google has big plans to digitize entire academic libraries, but copyright battles reportedly have slowed the effort to a crawl.

Text searching could replace stacks browsing, and probably much more powerfully. But it will be hard to replace the weird academic sensuality of breathing musty air surrounded by endless shelves of arcane half-forgotten knowledge. (I feel like Indiana Jones in there...)

I guess that my bottom-line question is whether it's possible to live in a cabin in the Grand Tetons (with internet access, of course) and have all the scholarly resources available at that remote spot necessary to complete a serious graduate program.

(For our British readers, imagine a graduate student on a wind-swept isle off the coast of Scotland.)

Has the blessed day arrived when students can actually do it?

 

For journals, the online stuff is definitely beginning to replace the physical copies. I have distinct and painful memories of B&M courses where there were sixty or seventy of us in pursuit of the journal that hadn't received copyright clearance to go into the course pack, and it isn't a pleasant memory. The other good point is that with the online version you can just browse the journal at your leisure, even if you're nowhere near the library. I definitely go to the library a lot less often that I would if I had to consult the journals.

Some journals do lag behind on online access, it's true (oddly enough, the classics journals I have problems with are nearly all US based), but most of them have at least the last few years online . . . and I've never met a university library yet that allowed one in at two in the morning wearing only a pyjama top and some faubourg 24 whilst waving a glass of wine! And even if the journal isn't online, at least over here you can always order a photocopy from the BL as your last resort.

The full text journals (and their fat subscription fees) are well on the way out. My husband was one of a team preparing a possible bid for one of the major academic publishers about 18 months ago, and I put him in touch with an ex academic librarian who now does consultancy. In consequence my husband's then bank walked away from the financing as they couldn't make the numbers add up (we admit to sniggering into a bottle of champagne when another bank financed a bid based on even more optimistic numbers, rapidly followed by the UK government backing open access to journals ;-).

Book access is the killer. Birkbeck allows long-distance borrowing at a cost (see my previous post), but that does bugger all if the book is in the short loan collection or is only held by a library that doesn't do postal loans.

Angela