PHYS 7

Spring 2005

Prof. Mary Hudson

This research guide will help you get started in doing independent research on topics in Space Politics.
Books, government documents, maps, magazines, journals, web sites and other materials in all the Dartmouth College libraries can be found by using the Dartmouth Library Catalog. The Catalog will give you the call numbers and locations of these items.

Individual articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers are not included in the Catalog. Therefore, it is necessary to use indexes in order to find journal articles. (See the list of indexes in section C.)

Contents

A. BACKGROUND INFORMATION FROM REFERENCE SOURCES

Encyclopedias, handbooks and dictionaries provide an overview of a topic and short definitions of terms and ideas. They often contain references to other books and articles which can be used for further research.

Selected examples are:

Chronological Encyclopedia of Discoveries in Space

Lists launches and landings chronologically, as well as missions and satellites by name, subject and nation. Kresge Ref. QB/500.262/Z56/2000 Dictionary of space

Definitions of terms regarding space flight, short descriptions of missions. Kresge Ref. QB/497/P57/1986 The extraterrestrial encyclopedia : an alphabetical reference to all life in the universe

Descriptions of extraterrestrial bodies. Kresge Ref. QB/54/D365/2000

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
(available online as AccessScience)

Short explanations with illustrations
Kept up-to-date with annual yearbooks.

Print: Kresge Ref. Q121 .M3
Web: http://www.accessscience.com/index.aspx Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists

Short articles with pictures of contemporary scientists Kresge Reference Q141 .N73 Space Almanac

Descriptions of missions, with personnel and anecdotes. Kresge Ref. QB500 .C87 1992 Who's who in space

Includes biographies of NASA astronauts, cosmonauts, Shuttle payload specialists, and has bibliographic references. Feldberg Ref. TL/788.5/C37/1999

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B. MAGAZINES and JOURNALS

Magazine articles are a good source of news reports on subjects of current interest. Journal articles provide in-depth information. The library has many electronic journals which are listed in the Online Catalog. See also the Kresge/Cook Libraries web site: Journals: Print & Electronic.
Two useful journal collections which you find by using indexes like WilsonWeb or may want to search as separate databases are:
JSTOR, an archive of full runs up to the last five years of complete journals in select subject areas, including General Science.
ProQuest Direct, a collection of more current journal articles that does not always contain the full text nor the pictures and illustrations.

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C. FINDING JOURNAL, MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES USING INDEXES:

Indexes help you locate articles of interest in journals, magazines and newspapers. In most indexes you can search by specific subject, author, title and the journal or magazine name. Some indexes cover hundreds of journals and many subjects, while others cover a narrow subject or many years of a single journal. Selected ones relevant to the topic of space exploration are listed here.

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D. SUBJECT HEADINGS IN THE LIBRARY CATALOG

Search the Dartmouth library catalog at http://libcat.dartmouth.edu/, or link to it from the Library's home page. Use the catalog to locate books, journals, and other items in the collections of all the Dartmouth libraries. Search by subject (using Library of Congress subject headings) or keywords; you can also search by author, or by title.

Biographical Materials:

Search as a Subject the person's name for individual biographies.

example: Glenn, John

To bring together all biographies of members of a profession perform a subject search using the profession name and the term biography. There may also be geographical subdivisions, if appropriate.

examples: Astronauts--Biography
Astronauts--United States--Biography

The History of a Topic:

The word history may appear as a subheading, along with the main subject heading

examples:
SUBJECT Space Flight--History
SUBJECT Manned Space Flight--History
SUBJECT Outer Space--Exploration--History
SUBJECT Space Race--History

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E. WEB RESOURCES

WWW Search Engines

There are many valuable sources of information in government sponsored Web sites. Always evaluate the source of your information before you use it in a paper, particularly if it is a non-reviewed or non-refereed Web site.

Many documents on space flight are producted by govenment agencies or are congressional records. Try Dartmouth's new cross search system for government documents called the Dartmouth College Government Information Portal.

Always cite your Web sources as you would cite printed resources!
Go to the following site to find descriptions and evaluations of search engines:

"Internet Searching"
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~feldberg/guides/search_internet.shtml

"Testing the Surf: Criteria for Evaluating Internet Information Resources"
http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pr/v8/n3/smit8n3.html

Annotated guides to selected Internet resources. Browse by topic headings, or search.

Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://www.lii.org/
A searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 8,600 Internet resources.

The Scout Report Archives
http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/
A searchable and browseable collection of over seven years' worth of critical
annotations of selected Internet sites, mailing lists, and other online resources.

Selected Web sites with background and current information on space flights

NASA site

Shuttle Mission Archive

Kennedy Space Center

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Human Space Flight

Clementine Mission

Galileo Mission

Images from the Cassini spacecraftvoyage near Jupiter on its way to Saturn currently.

Historical material about Apollo 11 from NASA, including timelines of lunar exploration.

Astrogeology site from the United States Geological Survey gives a lot of information on extraterrestrial objects.

Names and locations of extraterrestrial features, and origins of those names, are at this USGS site Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

F. CITING YOUR SOURCES and MANAGING YOUR REFERENCES TO THESE SOURCES

The Dartmouth Writing Program provides an online resources page for students to help you with all aspects of composition.

The Student Center for Research, Writing & Information Technology (RWIT) trains student tutors to assist with paper topics, research assignments and multimedia projects.

Style guides provide accepted standards to follow when preparing research papers for publication. Sources is the Dartmouth College general guide to citing sources, and contains required reading about plagiarism and when, and how, to cite material you are using for a paper or presentation.

Reference management programs allow you to build a personal database of your references to articles, books, websites - any information source - and then easily create bibliographies and reference lists using any particular style, without having to retype or reformat. See this overview of reference management programs widely used at Dartmouth.

RefWorks
RefWorks is a web-based reference management program that allows users to create their own personal database of references by importing references from online article databases. RefWorks makes it easy to search, sort, and cite these references in writing papers and then to automatically format the paper and the bibliography. To get started with RefWorks, go to http://www.refworks.com and click on the "User Login" button on the menu bar. Then click on the "Sign up for an Individual Account" link and fill out the form. RefWorks in-context help, or the online tutorial, will guide you through the basics. See the overview for details on importing citations from various article databases into RefWorks.

G. GETTING ITEMS NOT AVAILABLE AT DARTMOUTH

BORROW DIRECT: Delivers books from the combined library catalogs of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale within 4 business days.

Please fill out the DartDoc Form for documents that are in Storage or that are not in the Dartmouth Library system (Interlibrary Loan requests). See the Document Delivery webpage for more details on these services.

You can also use the Request Selected Item feature of the Library Catalog to request books or articles from Storage.

H. MAP, HOURS, ASSISTANCE

For assistance with any part of your research project please contact:

Noah Lowenstein, Physical Sciences Librarian, 6-9958

Ann Perbohner , Physical Sciences Librarian, 6-3845
Jane Quigley, Head, Physical Sciences Library, 6-3564

Map of the libraries, Library Hours

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