[nabs-l] research and accomodations

Ashley Bramlett bookwormahb at earthlink.net
Mon Aug 31 02:53:29 UTC 2015


Hi all,

I asked last year about experiences with research in your academic libraries. I have some more thoughts. I said before that databases hosted by Ebsco are not very accessible. You can type in search terms, but I am not able to change the boolean operators. So I have to use the default one which is And. The boolean operators are the terms that connect your search text together. Also in Ebsco, I don’t think you can tell which items were added to your folder until you click on it.

So, I was wondering what you all do for getting your research done. How do you accommodate yourself or does the school provide any accomodations? The academic libraries I went to only provide jaws and a scanner. At the community college, where I take electives now, the printers are not accessible due to touch screens, so I use a staff member to assist me.

If I like the topic, I don’t mind research, and in fact I do  a fair amount for personal use for advocacy or for preparing music appreciation activities I volunteered to do.
In my experience, proquest and oxford university press databases are accessible. I’ve also used many online reference sources just fine such as encyclopedias. To get an overview of a person, I like Gale biography in context.
Still, many are semi accessible or not accessible using jaws, and I imagine it’s the same issues with other screen readers.
So some questions to deal with the barriers.

When you need a semi accessible database, do you use it the best you can, or what? Do you have a reader sit down with you to go through it?


Once you have articles you think are useful, how do you determine relevance? Do you read the abstract, and if it looks nice, proceed with the introduction? I’ve found abstracts generally helpful if the article has one.
Since many articles report the same info, I get confused what info was in what article! Even though I take notes with the brailleNote and write the article name on each file, its still challenging.
How do you take notes and organize material from your articles? Sighted students use highlighting, underlining, marks such as stars by important words, and index cards. I’ve never found a good substitute. I just rely on my notes, and if my notes look too long, I review them, and take condensed notes from the original notes.

Many citation management tools are not accessible.
RefWorks and Zetero are two examples of inaccessible software.
Do you use a citation management tool? If so, which one? Did you have to purchase it and what was its costs?
I have done my citations manually by typing them in.
I have gotten in a system starting my senior year of college that when I find a promising source, I create a citation for it in a Word file. I then have all my citations together after I write the paper or do whatever project I have to do for the research project. This makes it much easier to create a bibliography or reference page.
If you all write them manually as opposed to typing it in software and having the software create your citations, do you organize your citations in a particular order?
Obviously, for the final report, you format it in whatever citation style you need to use.
But, until the final product, what do you do? 

I get citations from other sources I have.
I noticed that when pulling out relevant citations for future sources, many are from the same journal or same author.
I got to thinking my source citations might be more manageable to use if I put the ones with the same journal together. IFor instance, if I find five citations from the Instrumentalist, maybe I should keep them together. After searching for the source from the citation and finding it in full text, I’d then put that citation in my reference list.

If anyone has used human readers for research, I could also use advice.
I use readers for print sources. Not everything is going to be an article. In fact, in my research topics, books seem to be pretty necessary. For instance, my paper on managing conflict had three book sources.
How do you determine the book’s relevance? I have tried the preface or introduction or chapter 1. Sometimes that works and sometimes not.
Assuming the book is relevant, do you go to its index if nothing is obviously relevant from the table of contents?
I have my readers read the contents, book jacket if it has one, and prefatory material to get a sense of the book.
But I have trouble directing my reader to relevant passages as I cannot see it to know what is relevant. Of course, I suppose sighted researchers waste time too, reading stuff that is not relevant. 
I’m wondering if I should give my readers some time, maybe five minutes, to skim over the first pages of the chapter we pick? 
They could skim or read silently much faster than reading to me. Maybe I should let them look it over  and tell me if its relevant based on what I’m looking for.
They read out loud any headings they see, but not all books have those.

Finally, how do you find relevant quotes for papers and at what stage do you write them down? That has always been hard for me to pick a short good quote and copy verbatim what I’ve heard.

Thanks.

Ashley


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