My Essay is Due on Monday! Some Calming Words ...

So you've got an essay deadline fast approaching? Are you cool, calm and collected? Or does your head feel as though it's about to explode?!

These suggestions might help you:-
 

1.  If you can't make it in to the library, then electronic resources are your friend.  Your best friend.
2. If you are having difficulty with e-resources or referencing, you could maybe try watching these short videoclips:- https://whittakerlive.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/two-videoclips-learn-about-rcs-e.html
3. To use CataloguePlus, remember to click the Search Catalogue Plus button first.
4. To use e-resources offsite, remember you need to identify RCS from a list of institutions before you enter your own login.
5. For more assistance please email library@rcs.ac.uk and your enquiry will be forwarded to the most appropriate team-member.
6. Have you got a good introduction and conclusion? Have you answered the question? Do your paragraphs follow on logically?
7. A quick 15 minute break away from your computer or a walk round the block won't find you more information, but it will enable you to take a deep breath and think more calmly.
8. If you're really stuck, take a notebook and write a diary entry to yourself: "I'm stuck because ...", "I still need to address the question of ....", "I need to make sure I link x to y ...."  Writing down what the problem is, will help you clarify it.

Two Videoclips - Learn About RCS E-Resources and Referencing

• Get to Grips with E Journals and E Books
• Bibliographic Software - Karen explains Mendeley

No-one would deny that libraries pay a key role in supporting learning.  So last year, Karen did a PG Cert project to find out whether students felt they needed more support in getting the most out of our library and information provision.


Particularly for distance learners, more dependent on electronic resources than most full-time students, it seemed that accessing e-journals and e-books was sometimes a frustrating exercise, so that was one topic crying out for extra instruction.  

So, too, was the whole business of referencing, or citation.  (They're the same thing. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise!)  The RCS Effective Learning team is happy to help.  But so, too are your ever-present Performing Arts Librarians!

Karen produced two trial videoclips, and tested them on the whole cohort of students taking our distance-learning PG Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, or Masters in Education.

We wanted to share them with you, but circumstances meant we couldn't.  For a start, we introduced a new library system with "Catalogue Plus" offering vastly improved access to electronic resources.  Suddenly Karen's first videoclip had become obsolete!  Secondly, one of the referencing software packages that Karen had been recommending, made major changes to user subscriptions.  She can no longer recommend it.

To cut a long story short - she has made new videoclips to replace the project trial ones.  They only take a few minutes to watch, and if you need more information, please do visit the library portal pages, or get in touch with the library staff.  Don't suffer in silence - just ask!

• Get to Grips with E Journals and E Books
• Bibliographic Software - Karen explains Mendeley

Bibliographic Software - Karen explains Mendeley

We've blogged about bibliographic software before, but Karen has just put together a five-minute video to introduce Mendeley, which is the one she uses herself.  View it here.

And to back this up, you might like to look at our earlier blogpost:-

• Imagine Your References Sorted 

 

RefMe becomes Cite This For Me (but doesn't work for me)

Do you use bibliographic referencing ("citation") software?  We do! We've tried various brands.  Many students fell in love with RefMe as an easy tool for saving your references and inserting them into essays and assignments.  We had some reservations, but in terms of ease of use, it had a lot going for it.  So we were interested to learn that the bibliographic referencing tool, RefMe has now become CiteThisForMe. 

• If you had a RefMe account, you can carry it across to CiteThisForMe.  You may or may not find that the bibliographies you transfer across, have expired.  (Mine were still there on my phone app, but not on the web version. Very strange!) 
•  If you're making a new account, however, it's a tad more confusing.  Your registration is incomplete unless you sign up for Premium membership - with attached cost. 
• Even more worrying - if you're a non-Premium user with a free account, your references are only saved for a week - really, not much use at all!
• Meanwhile, if you download the app, you can't login with your newly half-created free account.  (You can if you've got a transferred-across account from RefMe. That's confusing too.)

 It might be better to give up and go for Mendeley or Zotero.  Seriously! 

Imagine Your References Sorted and Cited - How Good Would That Feel?

"Please Use the Harvard Style ..."

What do you need for your essay?

• Have you been recommended to use the Harvard style of referencing, with an in-text reference matched with a bibliography at the end?  Eg, "McGonnigal (2016) asserts that all pigs are capable of flying ..."
• Or do you need footnotes with full details at the bottom of the page? 
• Or endnotes at the end of the essay?  

 Visit our Portal for information about what Harvard referencing should look like.  Ask a librarian, or get in touch with our Effective Learning Support team.  Or take a look at Anglia Ruskin University's helpful website.

Referencing (bibliographic, citation) software

Using referencing (also called 'bibliographic' or 'citation') software makes sure all your references are consistent and have the right information, so that your teachers can follow what you've been reading and where you're quoting from.  The RCS generally asks for the Harvard style.

The Performing Arts Librarians often tell people about referencing software.  There are various free versions available (and others that you have to subscribe to).  Basically, they all have two main functions - collecting and sorting your references, and then formatting them to insert into your writing.

Now, you don't have to use referencing software.  It's helpful and effective, but it's perfectly possible to do your references without it. However, if you're completely turned off by having to quote references in the right order with appropriate punctuation and all the relevant details, then referencing software will definitely make things easier for you.  And if you embed referencing software into your Word programme, then you can choose whichever form output you like.  You might need different formats for different purposes - Harvard here, but some other referencing style for a journal article, for example.

Alternatively, you might like using this kind of software just for keeping track of what you've been reading.
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Find Quick Intros on YouTube!

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What are your options?

The four most frequently mentioned sites are Mendeley and Zotero, Endnote and Cite This for Me (formerly RefME).  We recommend Mendeley or Zotero - but you can learn more about each one here:-

• Mendeley (free, very usable, excellent if you use different devices at different times and need to synch across them) - take a look at Get Started With Mendeley (5 minute YouTube). Follow up with Referencing in Microsoft Word with Mendeley Desktop, but this takes 15 minutes).  
• Zotero (great, but not quite as transferable across devices as Mendeley).  Here's a YouTube Tour of Zotero.  It's really good if you need to cite a wide variety of references.
• Endnote (We don't subscribe, but our doctoral students can access it at the University of St Andrews)  And you can get a free trial, so if you're curious, maybe watch this YouTube video - How to Use EndNote in 5 Minutes (Windows) or other videos on the Endnote training page.
• Cite This For Me (formerly RefMe) is not recommended, because the free version only lets you keep your references for a week. If you're curious, then here's a 6-minute YouTube video on How to Use Cite This for Me, from Plymouth College of Art.

Day in the Life of a Music Librarian

Well .. half a day, really.  So, what do you imagine music librarians get up to?  

E-RESOURCES: ACCESS
This afternoon saw a quick question about our students accessing online resources from outside the Conservatoire - and a quick answer.  RCS staff and students need to go to our Library web-pages, click on the appropriate e-resources link, and then pick their chosen e-resource (or e-book, or e-journal).  Use Shibboleth institutional access from there - pick the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, then your usual RCS login.  We don't use Athens - so avoid anything mentioning it.

REFERENCING
Then came two two individual consultations about Karen's favourite things.  First, a fairly in-depth discussion about saving citations, then using the Harvard referencing style, and creating a bibliography.  The Whittaker Library has guidelines about Harvard referencing on our part of the RCS Portal.  (Find them here.  If you need more, just Google "Harvard Referencing", and you'll find plenty of other guides!)

If you're referencing a lot of non-standard formats, the best advice is to find an example for something approximately close to your reference, then tweak the example to fit your purposes, making sure the author's name and date of the source are listed first.  If you're referencing something online, then you'll need to give a hyperlink, and also the date you accessed the item.  All this is in our guide.

E-RESOURCES: RESEARCH

The next query was back to e-resources again, but this time about content rather than access.  We talked about finding info about specific musical works.  Naxos sleeve notes are useful.  JSTOR can be useful, too. Oxford Music Online is better for facts about the works' composition dates, opus numbers, where they stand in the composers' output, etc, but may not necessarily give you anything in-depth about individual works.  

So, having delved briefly into online resources, we also looked at CD and vinyl sleeve notes - plenty more info in that direction!  And good old Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music.  It may be old, but could be a good starting place.

When a Reference leads to a Book not a Job Offer

RefMe saves your references!

 If you write essays or other assignments, you'll have been told to make sure you cite your references;
in other words, you must say which author you're quoting from.  (Some people talk about references, some about citations.  Same thing.)

There are many ways of citing your references - basically, they're different ways of formating your references so that they all give the necessary bibliographical information in a prescribed way.  Here at RCS, we use the Harvard referencing style.  (Click here to find a page about it. You'll have to be an RCS student or staff member to access this page.)

It's very handy to automate the procedure a bit, by using referencing software.  There are a number of free apps available.  RefMe is one of the latest, and probably the simplest.

How to use it?  Sign up here. https://www.refme.com

1. If you're citing books, go to your library catalogue or a website like Amazon or Copac.  
2. Highlight and copy the title of the book you've quoted from, and make a mental note of the date the book was published.
3. Tell RefMe that you're creating a reference.
4. Tell RefMe you're listing a book.  A search box will appear.
5. Copy and paste the book title in.
6. Choose your book from the list of results that will appear - make sure the date is right. Click on it.
7. Bingo! Your first reference.
8. Once you've got all your references listed, you can export it various ways, eg as a Word document.  That can be copied and pasted at the end of your essay.

RefMe - Keep Track of your Reading

Calm Your Inner Geek!

People might talk to you about Referencing, or Citations.  It all sounds a bit obscure, doesn't it?

It's not hard, really.  You need to keep note of what you've read, if you are going to 'reference' or 'cite' it later.  (You might also to keep a list of things you mean to read later, so you don't lose track of those interesting titles...)

There are various apps out there.  RefMe is the new kid on the block, but it's quite easy to use and seems to do the job, so you may like to take a look at it.

Anything that saves you racking your brains or rifling through notepads later, has to be a good thing, right?

• Preview of the latest RefMe pages
• RefMe homepage

We'll tell you about some other resources another day!

Referencing Just Got Easier!

RefME - Have You Discovered It Yet?

We all have our favourite apps when it comes to regularly-performed tasks like referencing.  Karen swears by Mendeley.  Others use Zotero - both are freeware.  (Some institutions offer institutional  access to EndNote, which saves you money.)  Diigo is great freeware for saving hyperlinks to the cloud.

So why try another?  Well, we read a review of RefME in the Times Higher Education magazine, and it looks impressively simple.  Most of us just want to keep a list of what we've read, and a way of pulling it into whatever we're writing, whether for footnotes, endnotes or a bibliography.

That's what RefME does.  Find your book via the search box, and save it.  Exporting couldn't be simpler - it provides a box of text for you to copy and paste into your paper, in a wide range of formats.

•  RefME
• THE review of RefME by Chris Havergal

How To Cite References, Chicago Style

Our RCS music students are encouraged to develop a consistent citation style, such as the Chicago (also called Turabian) style. This means that if you quote from a book or article, you put a footnote number after the quotation, and the details go in the footnote at the bottom of the page.

Here's a useful summary shared with us by Dr Peter Argondizza. He sourced it from the University of Wisconsin at Madison:-

A Guide to Chicago or Turabian Documentation Style / The Writing Centre, University of Wisconsin

 Our BMus third year students are working on essays about Stravinksy and Beethoven.  Here's a quote from a book about Stravinsky, followed by the footnote telling you where the quote comes from.  (The book itself is actually here, waiting to be labelled and shelved in the Whittaker Library, so watch those shelves!):-

"His initial impulse was to reproduce the sound of a Russian peasant band" 1

 ____________________________________________________

1   Pieter C. Van den Toorn and John McGuinness, Stravinsky and the Russian period: Sound and legacy of a musical idiom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 75

How do you cite a Tweet?

There is a correct way, as The Modern Language Association explains.  (This newspaper article, by Alexis C. Madrigal for The Atlantic, was tweeted to Whittaker by research-support guru The Thesis Whisperer.)