Learning at the Library

Library Resources for the Klingenstein Heads of Schools Program By: Allen Foresta

This virtual handout is intended as an overview of library resources and services of particular relevance for students in the Klingenstein Heads of Schools Program.  The resources, primarily electronic and accessible on and off campus, have been selected as ones supporting the objectives of the program, i.e., to help independent school heads “to commit to philosophical ideals that guide the best of education while strengthening skills, defining vision and building stronger schools through rigorous study and interaction with colleagues.”  This blog post also includes a section describing research consultation and assistance services and options for document retrieval and delivery available to all members of the Teachers College community.

Library Resources

Online Catalogs

Periodical Indexes

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

E-Collections (Text, Images, Sound)

Handbooks of Research

Reviews of Research

Citation Indexes

Tests and Measurements

Statistical Resources

Federated Search Engines

Digital Archives

Library Services and Publications

All students, faculty, and researchers also have access to a number of important library services and publications provided to support and facilitate research and study in their particular programs and disciplines.

Library of Congress Subject Headings are the official subject terms prescribed by the Library of Congress for the cataloging of books and are in use in essentially all academic libraries. To find works pertaining to the administration of independent schools and related topics, it may be useful to use some of the subject terms listed below when searching the online catalogs of libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University, and other institutions.

• Educational leadership
• Elementary school principals
• High school principals
• High schools — Administration
• Middle school principals
• Private schools [Use for Independent schools]
• School administrators
• School improvement programs
• School management and organization [Use for Educational administration]
• School principals
• School supervision
• Teacher principal relationships

EDUCAT – The most definitive record of the holdings of the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, including books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.

• See our library’s video tutorial on searching EDUCAT.

CLIO – The union catalog of Columbia University Libraries (exclusive of the libraries of Teachers College, the Columbia Law School, and Jewish Theological Seminary), providing the most definitive record of individual libraries’ holdings of books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.

• See our library’s video tutorial on searching CLIO.
• See also Columbia University Libraries’ video tutorials on CLIO search protocols and other features and functions:

• • CLIO: Find Books by Title, Author, Subject
  • CLIO: Guided Keyword Searching
  • CLIO: Placing a Recall Request
  • CLIO: Requesting Books Through Borrow Direct
  • CLIO: Requesting Offsite Items for Viewing Online

WorldCat – The union catalog of the contents of over 10,000 libraries worldwide, providing the means to do exhaustive searching by author, title, subject, and numerous other criteria and to find locations for specific items in libraries nearby and elsewhere.

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Periodical Indexes

Academic Search Premier – A multidisciplinary database providing full text for more than 4,600 journals, including nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles.  PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals.  See also Academic Search Complete, a scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals.  The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887.

Business Full Text – Provides indexing and abstracting of articles from over 800 English-language business magazines and trade and research journals, plus the full text of selected periodicals.

Business Source Complete – Provides full text for over 10,000 scholarly business journals and other sources, including more than 1,150 peer-reviewed business publications, and more than 350 of the top scholarly journals dating as far back as 1922.   Coverage includes educational administration, management, and leadership and related topics.

Education Full Text – Provides comprehensive coverage of an international range of English-language periodicals, monographs, and yearbooks. Indexing coverage begins June 1983; abstracts are included beginning spring 1994; full text of some journals is available beginning in January 1996.

Education Index Retro – Provides cover-to-cover indexing for an international range of English-language periodicals and yearbooks; coverage from 1929 through mid-1983.

Education Research Complete – Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 2,100 journals, as well as full text for more than 1,200 journals, and includes full text for nearly 500 books and monographs.

ERIC – Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to educational-related periodical literature, ERIC (which stands for Educational Resources Information Center) provides coverage of conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books, and monographs.  In addition to this version, made available via the CSA Illumina platform, also accessible via the U.S. government ERIC site, through Ebsco ERIC, and via ProQuest ERIC on the Columbia University Libraries website.

Index to Legal Periodicals and Books – Covers the contents of over 1,025 international legal periodicals and law books,  providing coverage of scholarly articles, symposia, jurisdictional surveys, court decisions, legislation, books, book reviews, and more.

Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective – Indexes the contents of over 750 legal periodicals published in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand published between 1908 and 1981.

PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) – Contains citations to journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, “gray literature,” research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, and Internet resources pertaining to public affairs and public policy issues.

Professional Development Collection – Designed for professional educators, this database provides a highly specialized collection of nearly 520 high-quality education journals, including more than 350 peer-reviewed titles. The database also contains more than 200 educational reports.

ProQuest – Provides broad multidisciplinary coverage of scholarly  journals, newspapers, dissertations, and other types of publications; for international coverage and access to full texts of dissertations only, search Digital Dissertations, a subset of ProQuest.

PsycINFO – Covers the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences.

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Print Resources

Encyclopedia of Educational Leadership and Administration (2006)

Encyclopedia of Educational Research (1992)

E-Resources

Encyclopedia of Education (2nd Edition) – The 2003 version of the classic resource in education and related fields.

Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology – An overview  for students, researchers, and professionals in the areas of psychology, business, management, and human resources, providing state-of-the-art research and ready-to-use facts.

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences – This key reference work comprises 4,000 articles, commissioned by 52 Section Editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes.

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E-Collections (Text, Images, Sound, Etc.)

Ebrary – Online books across a range of subject areas; searchable, under All Subjects, by Education, Law, Political Science,  Social Sciences, etc. and various sub-topics, and by author, title, and other criteria.

Emerald Management Xtra 150 – Contains articles from over 175 management journals, complete with full text archives back to 1994 and abstracts back to 1989. Covers the major management disciplines,  including strategy, leadership, library and information management, marketing, and human resource management.

LexisNexis Academic – An interdisciplinary, full-text database of over 18,000 sources including newspapers, journals, wire services, newsletters, company reports and SEC filings, case law, government documents, transcripts of broadcasts, and selected reference works.

National Bureau of Economics Research – Contains the full-text of working papers from the NBER, which covers four areas of empirical research: developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, assessing the effects of public policies on the U.S. economy, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposals.

PsycARTICLES – A full-text database of journals published by the American Psychological Association and other publishers in subject areas such as applied psychology, health, theory, research, social/personality, and more.

PsycBOOKS – A full text database of books published by the American Psychological Association, classic books, and entries from the Encyclopedia of Psychology.

PsycCRITIQUES – Full-text reviews of current books and some popular films, videos, and software, as well as comparative reviews of books in the field of psychology.

PsycEXTRA – A gray literature database comprised of material written for professionals and disseminated outside of peer-reviewed journals; documents include newsletters, magazines, newspapers, technical and annual reports, government reports, consumer brochures, and more.

SAGE Education Full-Text Collection – A subset of Sage Journals Online, provides access to and advanced searching of the full text of 36 education-related journals.

SAGE Psychology Full-Text Collection – Provides access to the full text of 34 psychology-related journals from SAGE Publications.

Westlaw Campus Research (accessible on campus only) – Contents include cases from the courts of all 50 states and the Federal courts; statutes from all 50 states and Federal statutes published in the United States Code Annotated; Federal regulations published in the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations; American Law Reports, a publication containing attorney-written articles that summarize and analyze case law on a particular legal issue; and American Jurisprudence 2d, a comprehensive encyclopedia of state and federal law.

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Handbooks of Research

Print Resources

Educational Leadership:  A Reference Handbook (2002)

Handbook of Research on Educational Administration (1999)

Handbook of Research on School Supervision (1998)

International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (1996)

International Handbook on the Preparation and Development of School Leaders (2008)

E-Resources

Blackwell Reference Online – Provides full-text access to reference works in the social sciences and humanities; see research handbooks and companions in Business and Management and other subject areas.

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Reviews of Research

Annual Reviews – Reviews of topics in social sciences and other disciplines published as annual journals; see series for Economics, Law and Social Science, Political Science, and others.

Review of Educational Research – A publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the RER publishes quarterly critical, integrative reviews of research literature bearing on education, including conceptualizations, interpretations, and syntheses of scholarly work.

Review of Research in Education - A publication of the American Educational Research Association, the RRE provides an annual overview and descriptive analysis of selected topics of relevant research literature through critical and synthesizing essays.

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Citation Indexes

Scopus – Abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze, and visualize research.

• See a video tutorial from Columbia University Libraries at Using Citation Analysis Tools in Scopus.

Web of Science - Comprising the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science Citation Index Expanded, this database supports searching by topic, author, or publication name, and is also a major means for doing cited reference searching, to find articles that cite a person’s work.

• See a video tutorial from Columbia University Libraries at Using Citation Analysis Tools in Web of Science.

Google Scholar – Provides the means to search by author or publication title, and indicates and provides links to works that have cited the documents retrieved.

• See our library’s Citation Indexes video tutorial on citation searching via the Web of Science and Google Scholar.

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Tests and Measurements

Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI) – Information on approximately 15,000 measurement instruments (i.e. questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, coding schemes, rating scales, etc.) in the fields of health and psychosocial sciences.

Mental Measurements Yearbook (Ovid) – Produced by the Buros Institute, this database contains extensive information about and reviews of English-language, commercially available, standardized tests covering educational skills, personality, vocational aptitude, psychology, and related areas, as included in the printed Mental Measurements Yearbooks.

For further information on access to actual tests, measurements, instruments, scales, etc., see our Knowledge Database entry at http://library.tc.columbia.edu/kb/idx.php/0/196/article/.

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Statistical Resources

For information on access to statistical resources of various kinds, see our Knowledge Database entry at http://library.tc.columbia.edu/kb/idx.php/0/198/article/.

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Federated Search Engines

Find Articles (via Columbia University Libraries) – To search multiple periodical indexes simultaneously within a variety of subjects and disciplinary subcategories.

• See our library’s Find Articles video tutorial.

Super Search (via Gottesman Libraries) – To search some or all of our periodical indexes, plus EDUCAT and CLIO, simultaneously for books, journal articles, reports, dissertations, etc.

• See our library’s Super Search video tutorial.

Google Scholar – Provides the means to search for scholarly research across many disciplines and sources:   articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.

• See our library’s Google Scholar video tutorial.

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Digital Archives

Academic Commons – Columbia University’s online repository, where current faculty, students, and staff can deposit the results of their scholarly work and research.

PocketKnowledge – The social archive of Teachers College, including unpublished manuscripts and archives from the library’s collections, documents from other departments and administrative offices College-wide, and the work of TC students, faculty, and researchers.

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Library Services and Publications

Ask a Librarian a Question – To explore a variety of kinds of research support: enlist basic library assistance via our 24/7 online chat service; submit an email reference query to librarians onsite; request a research consultation with a Gottesman librarian; review frequently asked questions via the library’s Knowledge Database.

E-Reserves – Provides online access to digital course readings, including e-journal articles and book chapters, as well as call numbers for physical course reserves materials (books, DVDs, videos, etc.).

Document Delivery – Interlibrary services for the retrieval of content (books, book chapters, journal articles, etc.) not available through the Gottesman or Columbia University Libraries.

Borrow Direct – Enables Columbia University and TC students, faculty, and staff with library borrowing privileges and active e-mail accounts to borrow books directly from the libraries of Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University; beginning in Summer 2011, select libraries of Harvard University and the libraries of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will join the Borrow Direct partnership. There is a 6-week loan period, plus one 6-week renewal, subject to possible recall by the lending library.

Learning at the Library – The Gottesman Libraries’ blog via the Pressible platform, including content in many topical areas contributed by library staff members.

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