[nabs-l] research techniques and databases

[sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca]

Hi Ashley,
Sometimes databases have both pdf and html or sometimes txt files of  
articles, but pdf is by far the most common. Luckily, adobe and JAWS  
have both improved enough that usually the two work well together and  
pdf's aren't the horror they once were. If you have a recent version  
of JAWS and a recent version of acrobat then you should be okay. There  
is an option in adobe acrobat to set up accessibility options. I can't  
remember how to access it but I'm pretty sure it's there somewhere. As  
far as the accessibility of databases, I've used scholar's portal and  
some of the publishers's websites (Wiley for example) but I don't know  
about your specific requests.
I hope it goes well,
Sarah


Quoting Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>:

> Hi all,
>
> This is sort of a school question but also one for life.  We have to  
>  research on the job so it won't go away.
> Since there's new people on the list, maybe some new ideas will come about.
>
> I graduated with a BA in liberal studies, studying social science   
> and communication.  I'm getting an internship  and research has come  
>  up.  I will help them research crime prevention and bullying and   
> maybe other things; I'm working for the National crime prevention   
> Council.
>
>
> Although I survived research and writing papers, it was something I   
> disliked; it was time consuming and frustrating.  My school had   
> online databases but I still used hard copy sources in addition to   
> online.  Some info just wasn't electronic.  Due to problems like the  
>  inability to skim with jaws for key things, image PDFs and paper   
> sources, I used readers mainly.  I directed them to skim for certain  
>  key points.  We read abstracts in journals or table of contents if  
> a  book to see if it was relevant.  Then we picked out the actual   
> sections and read them.
> I researched on my own through the internet as well.
> I wonder what I can do if anything to do research better.  I need to  
>  be more independent with it since I do not have a reader on the  
> job.   That's too bad because they can skim well where as with jaws  
> you  can only go by paragraph to get a sense of the document.
> My questions are:
> 1. Which databases did you find accessible?  Is PSYCH Info accessible?
> 2. How do you use those PDF files?  What can you do in Openbook to   
> access them?
> Many full text articles were PDF rendering them inaccessible without  
>  using a scanner.
> 3. In databases with PDFs, do you find an option for a HTML link   
> wich is a text link?  When searching google.com they have PDF files   
> as HTML as well.
> 4. What do you do to determine if an article is relevant?  So far I   
> thought of reading the abstract and/or intro.  Sometimes I read   
> entire articles only to find them not as useful as I thought they   
> would be based on the intro.
> 5. Is googlescholar.com accessible?
>
> Thanks.
> Ashley
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