Moss Landing Marine Laboratory
Research Library Assignment
As we have seen during our field trip to MLML, there are many interesting things
being studied at the lab, encompassing just about every area of marine science, both
biological and physical. We also spent time in the research library and began to
understand the specialized nature of the collection and the unique resource it provided to
those who use it.
There are many different types of library resources out there which you can utilize
for class projects, research, etc, but it is important to realize what you can and can’t get to
online. Most electronic journal holdings don’t go back more that 10 years, and you need
to typically be accessing the article from an institution that pays large sums of money to
have total access to the material. Even if you can’t get to the full article, you can usually
get the table of contents and often even the summary (or abstract) of the article. You can
visit the MLML/MBARI library to look at their holdings, but you wont necessarily have
access to the full text.
http://mlmllibrary.mlml.calstate.edu/
Google scholar (www.scholar.google.com) is also a good source for searching for
scholarly articles, but again, you wont be able to get full text of them unless MPC
subscribes to them. But it can be a great (and free) way to search for things. One
problem is that you don’t know what journals/sources Google is searching, so it is hard to
know how complete the results will be. But in general they are pretty good and worth a
try.
However, at MPC we have access to specialized search tools with many very
good journal which offer full-text articles online.
From the MPC Library websiteClick on “Reference Databases” and then select “EBSCOHost”. On the next page, select
“General.”
Then select “Academic Search Premier”- this is the best MPC resource for peer
reviewed scientific information.
On the next page, notice the two boxes that can delimit the search to Scholarly, peer
reviewed sources and to those records that have Full Text available. You can select both
and everything you get back will have full text, but you will miss a lot of. So, I
recommend selecting “Scholarly, peer reviewed” and then after you have done your
search and found things you want, research with the “full text” selected and see what you
can get online.
What if you find some great article but MPC doesn’t subscribe and you can’t get the full
text? No problem! The library can get a copy of the article or book for you though InterLibrary Loan (ILL). You can request anything from the reference librarian through ILL
and it will be here for you in around a week or less! It is a great service!
Research Library Assignment:
You will choose a specific topic of interest to you that you learned about during the tour
of the marine lab. This could be either biological (fish otoliths, intertidal algae, etc.) or
physical (Iron fertilization, currents in MB, etc). You will:
1. Describe and summarize your topic and what you remember/know about it
already.
2. Formulate three questions that you would like to research to better understand
your topic.
3. Find five articles (minimum) from scholarly, peer reviewed journals that help
answer your questions.
4. Provide the full citation for the five-plus articles and details to how you found it
(what database/service, etc).
5. Get the full text of at least two of the articles and write a one paragraph summary
of the main points of each.