News & Blog

Welcome to the Libraries new blog topic: Ask A Librarian Featured Questions. Our popular virtual Ask Us reference service supports the UCF community from wherever they are located. It provides options for chat and text from the UCF Libraries’ homepage in addition to phone and email support.

The most asked question on Ask Us: “How do I open this article?”

This question comes to Ask Us staff largely through our most used mode of contact, our chat feature.  

When someone clicks on an article in a result list accessed through QuickSearch, there is a link to our chat widget “Ask a Librarian Chat” below the article record.

Taking a look, we can check the left side of the page and see which link is provided.

• Find Full Text – click this button and on the next page select the link: Full text from (database name). The database should open with the article information and a PDF link, if not, you can copy and paste the article title into the database search box.
  
• PDF Full Text – click this link and it will go directly to the PDF of the article
  
• Request Item/See Options – this link indicates that this article is not available through QuickSearch. Please note that not all of our Databases are searched when using QuickSearch. Click on the link and another tab will open with links to check other options. A good one to try first is “Search for (journal name) in Publication Finder” to see if we have access to the journal and year the article is from. If so you can click on the Database link that contains the article, and search for the article title in that Database. Another option to try is: “Search for this article title in Google Scholar” sometimes it may come up and have a PDF link to the right of it. If after this you cannot access the article you can click on the link: “Request this item through interlibrary loan.”  This will bring you to the NID login and then to the auto-filled request form. ILL will access the PDF for you from another library, this usually takes 3-5 days.

Make sure to visit Ask Us to ask questions about research, library resources, services, and policies. We look forward to assisting you!

The video that was here is out of date and has been archived. Click here to download the video for viewing.

Wednesday, October 7, 2020
3:00 pm- 4:30 pm

Register to attend at Zoom – Supporting Hispanic/Latinx Communities through Florida Libraries 

Please join us next week for the UCF Libraries’ inaugural event to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, “Supporting Hispanic/LatinX Communities through Florida Libraries.” Sandy Avila, Science Librarian and UCF’s Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) Engagement Librarian will moderate an informative panel highlighting the role Florida library staff play in supporting their diverse Hispanic/LatinX communities in the Panhandle, around Central Florida, and in South Florida.

Come join our fantastic speakers from the Bay County Public Library, Orange County Library System, and Broward College as we share insights into our Hispanic communities and how we are serving their needs.

Heather Ogilvie
Bay County Public Library

Heather Ogilvie is the Outreach Librarian for Bay County Public Library in Panama City, Florida. She specializes in nontraditional library services, using community partnerships to create innovative solutions for underserved populations. Ms. Ogilvie was the recipient of the 2020 American Library Association’s Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity for her work in Florida Panhandle after the aftermath of Hurricane Michael a Category 5 storm. Despite adversity, Ms. Ogilvie was able to serve outreach sites by helping to rebuild personal libraries destroyed in the storm and other materials to assist in community recovery.

Brigitte Martinez
Orange County Library System

Brigitte Martinez is the Assistant Manager for Marketing and Public Relations at the Orange County Library System. She studied Biology at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, in Santurce Puerto Rico.
Ms. Martinez’s job is to inform and educate Central Florida’s multicultural community by holding events, opportunities and programs that the Orange County Library offers. These services help improve lives.

Cristy Moran
Broward College

Cristy Moran is a faculty librarian at Broward College, an institution which serves a predominantly minority population, including a 38% Latinx student body. She is a critical librarian, a lifelong South Floridian, and Hispanic-American of Cuban heritage.

Are you working on planning your mixed mode or online courses for fall and thinking about incorporating library instruction? We have several options available, including both synchronous and asynchronous sessions. We can tailor the sessions to your particular course and research assignments.

If your class is meeting synchronously through Zoom, your librarian can hold a live session for you and your students demonstrating search techniques and highlighting relevant library resources.

If your class is being held asynchronously, we can create recorded sessions or other customized learning objects to include in your Webcourse modules. We also have our Information Literacy Modules, which cover a range of research and citation topics, that can be assigned to your students.

Contact your subject librarian to find out more information about our services and to schedule your library sessions for the coming semester.  

Do you have students in your class who you think would benefit from a one-on-one research appointment with a librarian? While UCF Libraries continues to offer research assistance virtually for general reference inquiries through our Ask Us service, we also offer virtual research appointments for those seeking an extended, personalized service for more complex questions.

Students can meet with their subject librarian to discuss their particular research questions and challenges. In these sessions, librarians can guide students through sample searches using their topics, recommend resources to explore, suggest possible keywords, and more.

To schedule an appointment, students simply need to fill out the “Schedule an Appointment” form online and provide their contact information and some information about their research project. Then a librarian will contact the student to schedule the day, time, and format for the virtual session. We encourage you to let your students know about this helpful service.

With all the wonderful and not-so-wonderful research resources available to students, it can be difficult for them to select good sources. Don’t you wish there was a resource you could give students to help them find quality information? Well, our library research guides can help. These guides are created by knowledgeable and helpful subject librarians. In the research guides, the librarians highlight all types of resources from our library collection, including books, ebooks, databases, periodicals, as well as open access materials and trusted internet sites. Students can browse the research guides by subject or also by course name and number.

You can also easily make these research guides available in your Canvas course sites. Just make sure that the “Research Guide” tool is enabled in your Canvas navigation toolbar. The research guide for your subject area will automatically show up there. If you would like a different research guide included, or if you would like a customized research guide created for your course, please contact your subject librarian.