Library staff have created a variety of videos to help you use our services.
These range from the Welcome video we offer to new users, to specific help with searching for information and how to use subject specific online databases to find journal articles.
To view the videos on this page in full screen, click on full screen in the bottom right hand corner.
Looking down the new list of results, we can see that they are all eBooks with full text online.
If you haven’t done so previously, you will be asked to log in using your network ID and your password.
This will bring back a list of all the pages where your term occurs and you simply click the page number to be taken directly to that page. Your search term will be highlighted.
This video will demonstrate how to find and use electronic journals, also known as e-journals.
Once you are familiar with e-journals you will find that they are an easily accessed source of quality information and up-to-date research.
To check if a particular journal is available electronically through Manchester Met, from the homepage of the library website click on the ejournals A-Z link.
You can browse ejournals, by title, by clicking on the A-Z letters here or just type in the journal title here.
In this example, you’re looking for a journal called ‘organizational research methods’, simply type this in to the search box, and click search. If you’re not sure of the exact journal title, you can change the search settings here and add keywords, or parts of the title that you do know. Your results will contain details of, and links to, one or possibly more databases where you can access the journal.
In this case, we can accessorganizational research methods via SAGE.
Pay particular attention to the date range.
Click on the name of the database, SAGE Management, to access the journal. You will then be redirected to Manchester Met Library’s log in page where you will need to enter your student ID and password in order to access electronic resources.
You will then leave the Manchester Met Library website and be taken through to the journal homepage.
Here you can either browse through the archive in All Issues, or run keyword searches for articles of interest. For more help and information please ask a member of staff in the Library or visit the Library website.
This video will demonstrate how to use Google scholar and Find it. Google scholar is a search engine that allows you to find scholarly literature such as dissertations, articles, abstracts and books.
Find It! is a service that gives you the opportunity to see if you can access a certain text via Manchester Met Library.
It is possible to use Find It! within Google Scholar in order to let you know which of your Scholar search results you might be able to access via Manchester Met Library. Find it! Links will appear next to certain search results.
Please note: The presence of a Find It! link by a search result is not always a guarantee that MMU has access to the full text.
If you are using Google Scholar on campus, with a university network PC, Find It! has already been activated with Google Scholar.
Find It at MMU Library links will appear next to search results if MMU provides access to a specific article.
You can access Google Scholar via the URL at the top of the screen.
Find it! Is automatically enabled with Google Scholar on MMU PCs. If you would like to use Find It! with Google Scholar off-campus, you have to configure this yourself. From the Google Scholar homepage click on the three horizontal lines at the top of the page, then click on settings.
Next, Click on library links.
Type Manchester Metropoiltan in the search box, click the search button and then tick MMU in the results list. You can then click save and you will be returned to the Google Scholar homepage. Your PC is now enabled to use Find it! With Google Scholar.
Type in your search terms, for example University plagiarism, and click search
On the results page, scroll down until you find an article you would like to see as full text:
If the article has a Find It at MMU Library link to the side of it , you now have the opportunity to use Find It! to see if the text is available via MMU. Click on this link.
Click full text online
You will be redirected to the publisher’s website. Click on the PDF link to access the full text of the article.
For more help and information please ask a member of staff in the library or visit the library website.
Google is by far the most popular search engine on the internet. You are probably familiar with its basic search function. Yet, most of us are unaware of the advanced search function offered by Google. Google’s advanced search allows users to have more control over their searches and in this video; we will look at how it can be used to retrieve better results.
For example, when researching a topic like TECHNOLOGY BASED LEARNING you may have trouble finding relevant information. The first thing to do is enter your keywords into the basic search and click enter.
By just using these key words, Google has found over 110 million results. Not all of these results may be suitable sources of information to use for an assignment. Therefore, I am going to use the advanced search function to see if I can get results that are more relevant. On a Desktop PC or Laptop, the advanced search link is easily accessible via the box in the top right hand corner with a cog on it. By clicking on this, you will find several search settings including the link to the advanced search.
If you are using a mobile or tablet to carry out your search, the way you access the google advanced search menu is slightly different. There is no cog. Instead scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see the settings button. After clicking on this you will see the advanced search link.
Google advanced search allows you to narrow down and refine your search. In this instance, one tool that works particularly well is the site or domain function. This will limit the search to results from a certain domain. This field is excellent when required to use information from government (.gov.uk) and educational (.ac.uk) sites. In this case, we are going to search using .gov.uk. The final field I am going to use is the “file type”; this limits the search to a particular type of document. By limiting this field to “Adobe Acrobat PDF”, I should only get PDFs in my results, which is the most common format for published documents. Now when I click the advanced search button I will see a big difference in the results found.
As you can see, the results have narrowed down from over 110 million to just under 70,000 and my results only contain links straight to PDFs, which are all from the government.uk websites. You can improve your search further by customising the results to within a certain timeframe. Firstly click on search tools and a drop down menu will appear. Next, select the anytime dropdown and then custom range
As it is usually best to search for up to date research for assignments, I can customise the date range to search for information published within the past five years, to do this I will enter 2011 in the from box and then select Go.
My results now range from information published on the internet from the 1st of January 2011 up to the present date.
For more help and information please ask a member of staff in the library or visit the library website.
This video will inform you how to locate statistical resources via the Library website. From the statistics web page, there are several links to freely available statistical resources. These include . . .
The CIA World Factbook which provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transport, military, and transnational issues for 267 countries.
Eurostat, which is the statistical office of the European Union and provides information on general and regional themes; economy and finance, population and social conditions, industry, trade, agriculture, transport, environment and science across the EU.
The Office for national statistics which provides UK data on all aspects of Agriculture and the Environment, Business and Energy, Children education and skills, crime and justice, economy, government, health and social care, the labour market, people and places, population and travel and transport.
And several other resources are linked to on this page including The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s statistics site, UK social trends and regional trends, and the UK data service.
Each of these statistical resources are quite simple to use and generally have the option to search by country, . . . Or by theme Or by keyword . . .
In addition to the resources listed on the Library’s Statistical Information page, you may also be able to locate some statistical content via the Library’s subscribed subject databases….
These are available by clicking on the ‘Databases A-Z’ link from the Library home page.
For more help and information, please ask a member of staff in the library or visit the library website.