Doing Research in Information Management: A Guide

The University of Washington Libraries contains a wealth of information to support research in the field of information management. This brief guide introduces you to major access tools to assist you in locating materials relevant to your research.

Connecting to UW Libraries Databases from off-campus

To take advantage of the many resources provided by the Libraries for your research, you will need to be able to connect to the Libraries from your home or office. Although the UW Libraries Catalog can be accessed by anyone, most of the research databases are available only to UW students, faculty, and staff under licensing agreements with publishers. It is necessary for you to be "authenticated" as a UW student in order to use the licensed resources from an off-campus location.

In order to connect to the databases from home, you will need to use the UW Libraries Proxy server. You will login to the proxy server with your UW NetID. For more information on connecting from off-campus, see http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/connect.html. The proxy server connection appears on almost all Libraries websites, on the upper right side:

Getting Started

Begin your research by familiarzing yourself with the available resources. The UW Libraries Website, designed to be the entree to information held by the UW Libraries and beyond, provides access to the Libraries Catalog, journal article databases, full-text resources, electronic journals, and web resources. Background sources such as encyclopedias and handbooks can often provide context for your topic. One resource is the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (UW restricted), which includes broad articles on such topics as knowledge management, competitive intelligence, and computer-mediated communication systems.

Finding Journal Articles

Journal literature is a major form of scholarly communication in the area of information management. The databases below can be used to identify articles on your topic. This selective list certainly does not include all pertinent databases; to check out other possible resources, see the link to Resources by Subject on the UW Libraries Website . UW restricted = these databases are contractually restricted to University of Washington faculty, students, and staff, or to persons physically present in the University Libraries. In most cases, this restriction is enforced by the vendor with an IP address check; requests originating from computers on the University of Washington network (including the DialIP modem pool) are considered valid, as are those coming from an off campus computer that is using the UW Libraries proxy server. See above information on Connecting to UW Libraries Databases from home for instructions on connecting to the proxy server. On this page is a link to instructions for creating proxy bookmarket. This is very useful when searching non-UW sources, such as Google Scholar, which have links to what we own but need a UW NetID login through the proxy to access.

ABI/INFORM Global - UW restricted. Indexes articles in the fields of management, marketing, economics, human resources, finance, taxation, and computers.

ABI/INFORM trade & industry - UW restricted. Trades and industries such as telecommunications, computing, transportation, building and construction, petrochemicals, etc.

Forrester Research - UW restricted. Provides reports on the effects of technology change on businesses, consumers, and society, and analyzes such technology areas as new media, computing, software, networking, telecommunications, and the Internet.

INSPEC - UW restricted. Indexes and abstracts serials, conference proceedings, standards and reports in the physical sciences, electrical engineering & computer science.

IEEE Xplore - UW restricted. Provides full-text access to IEEE transactions, IEEE and IEE journals, magazines, and conference proceedings published since 1988, and all current IEEE standards; brings additional search and access features to IEEE/IEE electronic library users.

ACM digital library - UW restricted. Citations and full-text of Association for Computing Machinery articles from journals, magazines, and conference proceedings.

ANTE, Abstracts in new technologies and engineering - UW restricted. An abstracting and indexing service monitoring approximately 350 academic and trade publications from the U.K. and the U.S.; coverage includes information technology and computing, electronics, biotechnology, medical technology, as well as engineering (including construction, electrical and chemical engineering).

Web of Science Citation Indexes - UW restricted Provides general and cited reference searching of the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes from 1980 to the present. Cited reference searching enables you to find articles from journals that have cited a book, patent, or another article. Through a cited reference search, you can discover how a known idea or innovation has been confirmed, applied, improved, extended or corrected.

Library Literature - UW restricted. Covers more than 200 library and information-science periodicals published internationally, and more than 600 books per year. Online version covers December 1984 to the present and includes full-text for selected periodicals. Published in the U.S. and focuses on indexing U.S. library-related publications.

Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) - UW restricted. Covers journals in library and information science. Online access covers 1969 to the present. Also available in print at Suzzallo Reference Stacks at Z671 L58. Coverage began in 1950 (title was called Library Science Abstracts, located in the Suzzallo/Allen Stacks at Z671 L6155). Published in the U.K. and focuses on indexing U.K. library-related publications.

Some of the databases contain the full text of the journal articles, or link out to the full text. If you find a journal reference to which there is not a link, check the UW Libraries Catalog to find out if the Libraries subscribes to the journal and in what format(s).

Finding Magazine and Newspaper Articles

You may want to search for articles in more general or popular sources that discuss trends having to do with the field of information studies or current issues not yet fully addressed in the research literature. Databases, many of which contain full-text, include: Expanded Academic Index, ProQuest, Lexis-Nexis (also known as Academic Universe), and Washington State Newsstand.

Other Research Resources

Statistical Universe - UW restricted. Index to statistics published in commercial, international and U.S. government publications, with statistical tables in GIF and, in many cases, Excel, format.

Congressional Universe - UW restricted. Coverage of U.S. legislative publications - hearings, bills, regulations, etc.

Using the UW Libraries Catalog

The UW Libraries Catalog lists the books, periodicals, and many government publications owned by the UW Libraries. Books can be searched in the catalogs by subject, keyword, author, and title. The Libraries is experimenting with a new catalog interface, designed to enhance the discovery to delivery process. Created by OCLC, this Search the UW Libraries and Beyond searches the UW Libraries catalog, Summit, and libraries around the world in a single step, and presents request options.

Borrowing Books and Journals

While you are in residence on the UW campus, you can borrow books (and journals that circulate) from the UW Seattle, UW Bothell, or UW Tacoma libraries. The loan period for most books is one quarter. Books can be renewed online by going to the Libraries webpage and connecting to Your Library Account.

If you are near the UW Seattle, Tacoma, or Bothell campus libraries, you can request books through the Libraries catalog Request/Place Hold function and have them sent to any UW library for pick-up.

Through Summit, the shared catalog of the Orbis Cascade Alliance (academic libraries in Washington and Oregon), you can request books in the collections of the members, as well as the UW Libraries, directly and pick them up at any of the member libraries.

UW students also have in-person borrowing privileges at the Orbis Cascade Alliance member libraries. For information on members and services, see http://libweb.uoregon.edu/orbis/.


 Interlibrary Loan supplies materials not owned by the UW Libraries to current UW students. (For those students near an Orbis-Cascade library, items that can be requested through Summit will not be borrowed through ILL ). Books or articles from journals owned by the UW Libraries can be shipped to your home address for a separate fee. However, journal articles requested through ILL can often be delivered to you via email. For more information on Interlibrary Loan services and fees, see http://www.lib.washington.edu/ill/

Selected Services

 

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