Research Guides: Information Literacy Tutorials: Home

Introduction

The interactive tutorials on this page can help you navigate the Waidner-Spahr Library's website and learn the basics of library research. Most tutorials take about 5 - 10 minutes to complete. They combine visual instruction, narration, and interactive quizzes to provide you with the opportunity to learn at your own pace, to review material learned in class, or to complete homework and research assignments.

Closed captioning is provided for all video tutorials. To enable it, click the button in the video player. Please note: our tutorials work best in Chrome. If the audio or closed captions don't work when you start the tutorial, pause the tutorial for a few seconds, then press play, or try reloading the tutorial. This should fix the problem.

If you experience technical difficulties or have any questions about these tutorials, please email ask@dickinson.libanswers.com.

Information Literacy Tutorials

Finding a Journal Article From a Citation Sometimes you may need to find a journal article when all you have is the article’s citation. This tutorial will help you get the full text of the article. Many academic journal articles are not available for free on the Internet. You must use the Waidner-Spahr Library’s web page to access journals through our secure subscription services.
Choosing a Database The Waidner-Spahr Library provides more than 400 databases for research. All together, they contain millions of articles and other sources on innumerable topics. How do you choose the most relevant databases for your research?
Distinguishing Among Source Types When starting research for a paper or other project, it is important for you to be able to identify the types of sources you discover. Recognizing a source type will help you determine what kind of information you are likely to gain from the source, and how much time you will need to spend analyzing the source, relative to other types. This tutorial will teach you how to identify different types of sources.
Choosing Search Terms As wonderful as library databases are, the results they give you depend on what you type into the search box. The better your choice of search terms, or keywords, the better your results. This tutorial will introduce you to several methods to help you develop better search terms for your research.
Evaluating Sources In order to make a strong argument, you need to know how to choose relevant sources. This tutorial provides guidance for selecting the best source for a specific assignment or goal and explains how to evaluate a source based on some important attributes.
How to Use the Get It Button When searching for articles in Jumpstart or another library database, there may not be a full text option (such as a PDF) available. However, the article may still be available to you through a journal subscription from Dickinson’s library. This tutorial will explain how to use the button to locate the full text of the article, if it is available at Dickinson library.
How to Renew Library Materials Online This tutorial demonstrates how to renew library materials online using the library website.
Citing Sources
Citation Searching
Evaluating Sources Tips
Finding Images and Visual Literacy
Using LaTeX