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- Ask A Librarian
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Marge Peters . (630) 942-2337 . petersm@cod.edu
FIND A TOPIC
Think about what interests you -- an issue in your personal life, a disease that runs in your family, a topic in the news.
MEDLINEplus
Provides access to 700 health topics, medical encyclopedias and dictionaries, and links to self-help groups, clinical trials, preformulated PubMed searches, lists of hospitals and physicians health and information in Spanish and other languages
http://medlineplus.gov/
Healthfinder
The U.S. government's directory of authoritative health information including links to online journals, medical dictionaries, and prevention and self-care information
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
MayoClinic.com
Easy-to-understand information on health and medical topics, all reviewed for accuracy by Mayo Clinic experts. (A service of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research)
http://www.mayoclinic.com/
USE BOOKS AND VIDEOS
Click on COD Library Catalog (http://lrc.cod.edu)
Do a SUBJECT search on your topic.
Both books and audiovisual materials will be listed in the catalog.
GOOD REFERENCE WORKS!
Gale Encyclopedias: (See links below for ebook versions)
RESEARCH YOUR TOPIC IN MAGAZINES, JOURNALS AND NEWSPAPERS
Click on Article Databases.
Use these databases:
Each of these databases has a slightly different way of searching . Most allow you to limit to ONLY full text articles, only scholarly journal articles, and to a particular time frame.
SEARCH ENGINES AND DIRECTORIES
Link to Debra Kakuk-Smith's list of Consumer Health Internet Sites. http://www.cod.edu/library/libweb/Kakuk/Consumer_Health/consumerwebsites.htm
Yahoo is an example of a human-indexed directory of the internet, along with search engine features Health sources can be found at http://dir.yahoo.com/Health
Search engines , such as Google, or bing, or Ask.com match key words. See links from Library Home Page. Most programs only require the entry of all terms wanted--it only returns pages that include all of your search terms. For a better search, use quotation marks ("....") around phrases: "West Nile Virus" and choose domains that tend to have better quality information by adding site:.gov or site:.edu to your search term.
Evaluate health websites carefully: Link to Tips on finding and evaluating health sites: http://www.cod.edu/library/libweb/Kakuk/consumer_health.htm#fi
SEARCH FOR STREAMING VIDEO
Use Google's advanced video search: http://video.google.com/videoadvancedsearch Enter words or a phrase to search. Click a choice for Language (English) and Duration (Short < 4 minutes probably best).
Go to Yahoo at http://video.yahoo.com. Enter term(s)you want presented in video. Be sure to watch the timing --some of these streaming videos are over one hour in length.
Go to Blinkx at http://www.blinkx.com and type in term(s) you wish to match. Click on the thumbnail of videos you wish to see. Sometimes ads precede the content if on an advertiser-sponsored channel (Fox and others). YouTube videos may load slowly, if at all.
