Research Page

 

ONLINE RESOURCES ACCESSIBLE VIA UK LIBRARY HOMEPAGE: www.uky.edu/Libraries

·      Academic Search Premier through UK Library – This database offers news magazine articles as well as scholarly journal articles about a variety of topics.  It is *great* for look at “big-picture” issues raised by your investigation.  Note that you will be search on these general issues—i.e. “outsourcing and information technology”—because this is a national database that is looking at issues on a larger scale.  

o  On the UK Library home page, go to the upper left hand corner and open the drop-down box for “Selected Databases.” 

o  Find “Academic Search Premier” and click on it.

o  Enter keywords in the search fields.  Note that you can:

§  Limit your results. You can limit your searches to:

o  citations with Full Text

o  articles from Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals

o  to results from a particular publication

o  to articles published during a specified date range, eg. January 2004-April 2007

·      Expand your results. You can expand your results by:

o  brainstorming multiple search strategies, like “public parks and teens,” “parks and safety,” “public parks and role in community”

o  using broader search terms, like changing “college students” to “students”

o  use “or” searches to include additional search terms, like “feminism” OR “women’s rights”

·      Be sure to look at the “Narrow Results by Subject” for more focused research!

·      Print, Save, Mail your results; add to your Folder

o  From any Full Record you can click to print, email, or save a record or even a complete article. 

o  You can email articles to yourself with complete MLA citations! 

 

·      Lexington Herald-Leader through UK Library – If you utilize the database on the UK library website, you can get full-text of all articles post-1983 for free.  DO NOT PAY FOR ARTICLES VIA GOOGLE!  You don’t need to, as long as you learn how to use the library.

o  On the UK Library home page, go to the upper left hand corner and open the drop-down box for “Selected Databases.” 

o  Find “Lexington Herald-Leader” and click on it.  (Note that you can access ANY worldwide newspaper via the “Access World News” database.  Given that you are all exploring local places, I think it’s in your best interest to only search the local paper, UNLESS you want some larger national context for your issue.)

o  Enter your search terms in the field.  Note that you can specify whether you want to search the whole article or just the title/lead paragraph, which might help if you are getting lots of results that don’t deal specifically with your topic.  You can also limit the dates which you search.  Try *many* combinations of search terms!  Don’t give up if you don’t get something right away.  Be creative.

 

 

GENERAL INTERNET RESOURCES

·      Google – for place websites, general information, blogs

·      Kentucky.com - for Lexington Herald-Leader (local newspaper) articles about your place.   Recent articles are up for free, but you will have to PAY for archived articles on this site.  See below for how to get articles for FREE via the UK library database.

·      Lexington Public Library Local History Index – Offers local newspaper coverage about Lexington places.  Articles date back into the 1800s!  But articles not available on-line.  Copy the citation information (Newspaper title, date, article title, author, page #) and take to a librarian in Periodicals (2nd floor) for pre-1983 articles.  Post 1983 articles will be available via library database.

·      Lexington History Museum – especially useful for race-related Lexington history and Keeneland, given that there are currently exhibits at the museum on both topics. 

 

UK – SPECIFIC INTERNET RESOURCES

·      UK website – you may find background information about UK-specific locales here

·      University Archives – great for history of UK-specific locales.  This site provides links to a Chronology of the History of UK, brief historical accounts of UK, the Board of Trustees Online Archive, the Oral History Program, etc.  Check it out.

·      Kentucky Kernel – student newspaper is good for articles about UK or Lexington places.  Normally this is a fabulous resource, but I have been very disappointed to learn that, because they are transferring their old archives to their new web site, the Kernel only has articles available online from Feb 2007 – today.  If you are interested in researching your topic via the Kernel prior to this time period, I suggest talking to Deirdre Scaggs at the University archives or going to the Kentucky Kernel office itself.  I’m completely bummed about this development, but there’s nothing we can do about it.