Module 3 Unit 2

Good morning everyone. My name is Karol Larsen, I’m a librarian. I’d like to welcome you on behalf of the library and myself and to show you round the collections of books and periodicals the library owns to back up your studies/ learning. Past experience has shown that students starting the course sometimes have difficulty using the library. So I’d like to give you some tips for using periodicals.

As you know magazines and journals are called periodicals because they are published on a regular or "periodic" basis. Periodicals are usually separated into two major groups: popular and scholarly. Let us focus mainly on Scholarly journals and popular science magazines.

As far as journals and magazines are important sources for up-to-date information in all disciplines, many of the assignments for your courses may ask you to use specific sources or types of sources such as popular magazine articles or scholarly or professional journal articles. With a periodical collection as large and diverse as in our university, it is often difficult to distinguish between the various levels of scholarship found in the collection. So if you are able to recognize the differences between a popular and scholarly source, you can focus your research to retrieve only the type of articles you need.

Let me start by describing scholarly journals. Well, scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look. They are usually sponsored by an academic or professional organization. Therefore the main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world. That’s why the audience is students, scholars and researchers and the language of a scholarly journal uses specialized vocabulary of the discipline. The papers in scholarly journals are always written by the experts in particular fields.

Another distinct feature of professional journals is that they also contain many graphs and charts but a few exciting pictures or advertisements. Moreover, long and in-depth articles, bibliographies and references as well as abstracts are also typical for this kind of periodicals. Besides, they are usually published on a quarterly (winter, spring, summer, autumn) basis.

A good example of a scholarly journal is Science, Nature, American Mathematical Society, Physical Review Letters, etc.

There is also another type of periodicals for so called news and general interest in science such as National Geographic, New York Times or Scientific American as well as Discover, New Scientist and Popular Science and so on.

These periodicals may be quite attractive in appearance, although some are in a newspaper format. They are often highly visual with a lot of advertisements, colour, photos, graphics and drawings. In contrast to scholarly journals popular science magazines report on research as news items. They also contain feature stories, editorials and short articles with no bibliographies or references. In fact, a member of the editorial staff, a scholar or a freelance writer, not a subject expert, may write articles in this type of periodicals. The language of these publications is suitable to any educated audience who are not necessarily specialists in a particular area of research but have interest and a certain level of intelligence. News and general interest periodicals hardly ever cite sources.

They are generally published by commercial enterprises or individuals, and occasionally by specific professional organizations. The main purpose of periodicals in this category is to provide information, in a general manner, to a broad audience.

And now let us turn to Web Voyage and I’ll give you some tips on how you can navigate through it …