Google Scholar On and Off Campus

Google Scholar is Google’s way of letting your search for scholarly publications online without bringing up all of the non-academic sources that come up in a regular Google search.

It’s not as refined a search tool as the many databases the BC Libraries make available to you, and it will miss many things that those databases find. But, used in conjunction with – not instead of – these databases, Google Scholar can be one more tool in your communication research toolkit.

It’s especially useful for hard-to-find terms because it searches the full text of many articles. But it can be frustrating when searching for more common terms because there is little distinction between articles that simply mention the term and those that are really about that topic. So use it carefully.

Here is one very important thing to keep in mind:

If you find an article via Google Scholar and click on the title, it may not let you have it without a password, even if BC has a subscription to the publication online or in print. Look for the FindIt@BC link instead to get the article via the Libraries subscription.
If you’re on campus, the FindIt link will appear automatically (if BC subscribes). Off-campus, you have to let Google Scholar know you’re affiliated with BC.

Here’s how:

1. Click on Scholar Preferences next to the Google Scholar search box.
2. Enter boston college in the Library Links box and hit the Find Library button.
3. Check off the box next to “Boston College Libraries - FindIt@BC”
4. Hit the Save Preferences button at the bottom of the page.
   

As always, let me know if you have any questions or need help.

NY Times: Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens

"SUBSCRIBERS to print newspapers have gone missing, as everyone knows. Book publishers are also wondering where readers have disappeared to.

And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research."

Read the full article

New Communication Books in the BC Libraries

New books on many aspects of communication studies continue to be added to the BC Libraries’ collections all the time. There are a couple of ways to see what has arrived in recent weeks.

An RSS feed on the Libraries website -- http://bc.edu/libraries/materials/rssfeeds/communication.html -- shows recent additions with the newest ones always at the top. Click on any title to go to the full record in Quest, the BC Libraries catalog, for more information.

You can visit this page at any time or, if you use an RSS feed reader like Google Reader, Bloglines, or My Yahoo, you can click on the orange RSS icon to add it to your own page.

For a more categorized list of new communication books, go to http://www2.bc.edu/~lissk/newbooks/. Here you’ll see links to sets of the most recent additions and to books on particular aspects of communication (i.e. Television and Radio, Interpersonal Communication, Rhetoric, Gender and Communication, and more.)

If you want to recommend a communication-related book for the collection, send the info to me in an e-mail or sign in to your account in Quest – there’s a link at the top of the page – and click on Recommend Library Materials. Just be sure to select Communication from the subject list on the recommendation form so that your recommendation gets to me and not to another librarian.

One last note: If you come to O’Neill Library for a new book and don’t find it on the shelf, check out the New Books display area in the lobby. It may be there.