We can assist you at the Reference Desk in the Library, please don’t hesitate to ask.

http://ask.consortiumlibrary.org/

Come by, call, email, or chat with us online.

Credo Reference can help…. Credo is a research database that provides access to background material: handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and also links to other research databases. Credo is even included in QuickSearch.

Credo covers every major subject, offering more than 560 highly-regarded titles from over 80 publishers

Are you working on a paper or project and need to create a bibliography and manage your citations or references?  Use RefWorks, a bibliographic citation management tool.  It’s available under Research Help on the Library’s website.

On the RefWorks login page, you can find a link to our How to Guide for using RefWorks.  On this page you can find tutorials and information about downloading the write-n-cite  and the RefGrab-It tools that you will need to fully utilize all of RefWorks.

As always, if you have questions or need help Ask-a-Librarian.

Do you need to find information about how to do a writing assignment such as creating an annotated bibliography, doing a literature review, writing a business plan, or writing a book review?  If so there is a How to Guides section on the Library’s website.  It’s under Research Help.  The guide is called Writing Assignments.

Librarians at the Reference Desk can also help you with finding sources of information that you can use for these projects, such as research articles, citations, books, and literature review articles.  Just Ask-A-Librarian either at the first floor reference desk (next to the pendulum) or online.

For help in writing the actual assignment, there is a Writing Center on campus in the Learning Resources Center, they have tutors who can help with writing assignments.

If you can’t make it to the Writing Center, there is an online service called Live Homework Help.

Credo Reference  can help….  Credo is a research database that provides access to background material:  handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and also links to other research databases.  Credo is even included in QuickSearch.

Credo covers every major subject, offering more than 560 highly-regarded titles from over 80 publishers

Do you have an assignment that requires scholarly articles for a paper or a project?  There are several ways to find those.  On the Library’s website you can search within QuickSearch and choose the journal articles radio buttons, or you can use the links to the subjects or databases.

If you need assistance don’t hesitate to Ask-a-Librarian.

From Ralph Courtney:

Subject: 150 Years On – brief followup

September 18th, 2012

NPR thought it would be interesting to find Alexander Gardner’s exact camera locations at Antietam and to duplicate his compositions with the same kind of wet plate camera; here’s the link if interested:

ttp://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/09/17/161266475/same-camera-different-century-capturing-civil-war-sites-150-years-later

While not mentioned in the NPR story, William Frassanito made a pioneering effort in the 1970′s to identify camera positions at some significant Civil War battlefields; some of them were very difficult to locate, but he largely succeeded and took photographs (albeit not wet plate!) from the same positions to compare what differences the passage of over a century might have made.  We have his 

‘Antietam : the photographic legacy of America’s bloodiest day’ 

at E474.65 F7 in the General Collection; he also wrote about camera positions in a book on Gettysburg (not in our library catalog) and in one called:

Grant and Lee : the Virginia campaigns, 1864-1865 

available at Loussac at 973.738 FRASSAN

And for those who may be intrigued by wet plate photography, no one has ever described either it or family portrait photography better than Lewis Carroll in his poem ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’ – he changed the poem a little over time, so after reading the first verse that ends with 

‘Mystic, awful was the process.’

scroll to the bottom to read, under the heading ‘Verses added later…’ just how mystic and awful the process was, and then scroll back up to finish the poem.  Here’s the link:

ttp://people.virginia.edu/~ds8s/carroll/hia.html

Enjoy.

–Ralph

Refworks is a tool that helps you manage citations for your research and writing.  It allows you to create bibliographies for your papers easily in the appropriate citation style for your assignment.  If you need help using this tool, there are multiple ways to receive help: the reference desk librarians, the refworks support email, online tutorials and webinars.  You can find links to all of this from the Refworks page on the library’s website.

If you have a project to get started for a class, there are several ways to start. You can ask for help at the reference desk. You can search in QuickSearch on the front page of the Library’s website. There are research guides by subject. Or you can go to the How To Guides under Help with Research.

Greetings from the Consortium Library Reference Department. We want everyone to know that you can stop by the reference desk and get help with research projects. You can also contact us online via our Ask-a-Librarian page on the Library’s website.