News & Blog

The national celebration of African American History was started by Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and first celebrated as a weeklong event in February of 1926. After a half century of overwhelming popularity, the event was expanded to a full month in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

Here at UCF Libraries we believe that knowledge empowers everyone in our community and that recognizing past inequities is the only way to prevent their continuation. This is why our featured bookshelf suggestions range from celebrating outstanding African Americans to having difficult conversations about racism in American history. We are proud to present our top 20 staff suggested books in honor of Black History Month.

Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the Black History Month titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 20 books plus many, many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

Featured Bookshelf: Black History Month

Is your professor requiring the new 7th edition of APA formatting for your papers this semester? UCF Libraries is here to help with our new APA 7th edition videos (all under 4 minutes).

APA 7th Edition Part 1: Basic Formatting from UCF Libraries on Vimeo.

Also available:

APA 7th Edition Part 2: In-text Citations
APA 7th Edition Part 3: Reference List

If you want to practice your APA 7th Edition skills, test out one of our modules: Avoiding Plagiarism Using APA Style (7th Ed) and Citing Sources Using APA Style (7th Ed).

For the month of January, UCF Libraries’ featured bookshelf presents books from our Knight Reads section. Located on the 2^nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library, this featured display is just a small sample of our abundant collection of popular fiction and nonfiction reading. There are Knight Reads collections in both the John C. Hitt Library and the Rosen Library.

To see a full list of the featured titles with descriptions, click on the link below.

January Featured Bookshelf: Knight Reads

These books typically get checked out pretty quickly so if you notice that a book you want is checked out, you can always complete an ILL request so you can borrow it from another library. Check out the link below. More often than not, we also carry another copy of a Knight Reads book in our general collection so feel free to scope out the catalog as well.

How to place an ILL Request, or an Interlibrary Loan

Happy reading!

Are you looking to save time and become a better researcher? Join us online for Research Tips Tuesdays! This semester we will be offering workshops on breaking down your research topics, using articles to find other sources for your research, understanding basic stats in journal articles and apps that can help you study.

Our first session, Breaking Down Your Research Topic, will take place on January 21, 2020 10:30-11:30 AM. We will explore ways to:

• identify the core concepts related to your research topic
• use those core concepts to find supporting research
• use your topic breakdown to organize your writing

RSVP online at http://guides.ucf.edu/rtt

UCF Libraries, in partnership with the College of Graduate Studies and the Pathways to Success program, offers several graduate workshops each semester.  Check out this semester’s schedule below, and plan to attend and learn more about library research strategies, publishing options, managing sources with citation tools, apps to organize your research life, and more. Registration for the workshops is required through myUCF (Student Center → Graduate Students → Pathways to Success).

Library Research & Literature Review Strategies
What strategies are you using to conduct literature searches for your research or projects? This session highlights effective strategies to locate related sources using citation tracking and search strategies, tips to customize Google Scholar, and options to organize sources and stay updated on publications.

Please bring a laptop to follow along with the presentation. Consider also attending the related topic, Where to Publish: Finding the Right Venue to Publish Your Research that follows this session.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Thursday, 1/30/20 5:00pm-6:00pm
⋅ Tuesday, 2/25/2020 12:00pm-1:00pm

Library Research & Literature Review Strategies – Online
After registering in myUCF, you will receive an email with a link to participate in the online session.
⋅ Wednesday, 3/25/20 5:30pm-6:30pm

Where to Publish: Finding the Right Venue to Publish Your Research
How do you decide which journals are the best fit for your manuscript? Are there other potential publishing venues that might be a good fit for your research? This workshop covers criteria to consider when planning where to submit your work for publication. We will look at factors like acceptance rates, audience, indexing, cost to publish, and open access, among others. This session is part one of a two-part workshop that explores where to publish and author rights.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Thursday, 1/30/20 6:00pm-7:00pm
⋅ Tuesday, 2/25/20 1:00pm-2:00pm

Optimizing Your Online Presence
Learn more about evaluating research impacts and managing your online research profile. This session will cover citation metrics & measuring your publishing Impact. Citation metrics provide quantitative data used to evaluate the impact of a scholar’s research. Learn about methods and tools to obtain citation counts and impact data (ISI Web of Science, Google Scholar, and others), and metrics to assist scholars in identifying key journals and notable researchers in your field. The session will also discuss why it’s important to develop an online profile as a researcher, how to promote your work and connect to other researchers, using sites such as ORCID, Research Gate, Academia.edu, PIVOT, Plum Analytics, and Google Scholar.

Please bring your laptop to follow along with the presentation. Consider also attending the related topic, Author Rights: Understanding & Protecting Your Rights that follows this session.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Thursday, 2/18/20 4:00pm-5:00pm
⋅ Thursday, 3/26/20 2:00pm-3:00pm

Author Rights: Understanding & Protecting Your Rights
Learn to be a savvy author! Do you know that all rights to a work are often assigned to publishers when a manuscript is accepted? Are there other options that allow you to retain the copyright of your work? This workshop will provide an overview of general copyright and what author rights mean to you, as a researcher. We will also explore how these rights may be negotiated when publishing and how you can use your works post-publication. This session is part two of a two-part workshop that explores where to publish and author rights.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Thursday, 2/18/20 5:00pm-6:00pm
⋅ Thursday, 3/26/20 1:00pm-2:00pm

Endnote & RefWorks: Citing Made Easy!
Citation Management Tools allow you to dedicate more time to research! Join us to learn how to export citations from library databases, organize citations, generate bibliographies, and format citations in a Word document. Endnote & RefWorks can help make managing your references and formatting citations easy! Sessions will cover BOTH products.

Please bring your own laptop if you would like to follow along with the presentation.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Tuesdsy, 1/21/20 5:30pm-6:30pm
⋅ Thursday, 1/30/20 12:00pm-1:00pm

Endnote & RefWorks: Citing Made Easy! – Online Sessions
After registering in myUCF, you will receive an email with a link to participate in the online session.
⋅ Monday, 2/3/20 12:00pm-1:00pm
⋅ Wednesday, 2/18/20 6:00pm-7:00pm
⋅ Monday, 3/2/20 12:00pm-1:00pm

Presentation Skills
Does the idea of giving a presentation freak you out? I have good news and bad news. Bad news – presentations are unavoidable in your courses and in your future career path. Good news – presentation skills are something you can easily improve! This session provides tips, tricks, and ideas for how to become a better presenter. There will also be time at the end of the session for Q&A (and practice speaking to a crowd!).

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Thursday, 1/23/20 10:00am-11:00am
⋅ Tuesday, 3/17/20 1:00pm-2:00pm
⋅ Thursday, 4/9/20 10:00-am-11:00am

Presentation Skills – Online Session
After registering in myUCF, you will receive an email with a link to participate in the online session.
⋅ Tuesday, 2/11/20 12:00pm-1:00pm

Planning Poster Presentations
Planning a research poster session? Learn the basics of poster design and tips for editing free PowerPoint poster templates. This session reviews poster elements for layout, graphics, printing, and includes examples of well-designed posters.

Please bring your laptop if you would like to follow along with the presentation.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Tuesday, 2/4/20 12:00pm-1:00pm
⋅ Thursday, 3/5/20 5:30pm-6:30pm

Apps to Help Organize Your Research Life
Do you ever wonder if there is a great app out there that you are missing out on? Need help staying organized, taking notes, or need a better way to communicate with classmates over shared projects? Well look no further as this session will introduce helpful and important apps that all grad students should love and use! We will cover organization, project management, reference, and science apps that will keep you at your best while you are in grad school and beyond.

Please bring your mobile device or laptop as we test drive the apps during the presentation.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Tuesday, 1/28/20 1:00pm-2:00pm
⋅ Thursday, 2/13/20 12:00pm-1:00pm

Apps to Help Organize Your Research Life – Online Session
After registering in myUCF, you will receive an email with a link to participate in the online session.
⋅ Wednesday, 3/4/20 5:00pm-6:00pm

Introduction to Data Documentation
Join us for an introduction to data documentation and metadata. Learn basics about research data, datasets and data documentation for data sharing, re-use and long-term preservation. This session introduces best practices and recommendations for documenting research data, including types of documentation needed, appropriate data formats, kinds of materials to be collected in the research lifecycle, and especially data documentation at study level and data level. The session also includes real-world examples and a discussion of data tools for data documentation, such as NVivo for qualitative data and SPSS for quantitative data.

Graduate Student Center, Trevor Colbourn Hall, TCH 213
⋅ Monday, 2/10/20 3:00pm-4:00pm