Matt Dilworth | Library Blog - Indiana University East

Matt Dilworth

Legal Research with Nexis Uni

criminal justice, law, reference databases September 21, 2020 Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research mdilwort

With major cases coming in front of the Supreme Court, laws – and possible judicial changes to them – are often in the news. How laws change or are reapplied in the court system is a significant point of scholarly interest, and an exceptional database for exploring the law is Nexis Uni (formerly called Lexis Nexis Academic). Nexis Uni contains a lot of different types of material – news articles, law reviews, even corporate information – but its main strength lies in legal studies. It is not as valuable for ‘code’ law (statutes passed by a legislature, which are typically straightforward, albeit very lengthy and archaically worded – amounting to lists of ‘don’t do this, or you will be fined … Continued

Learning About Daily Life

good information, history, reference databases August 24, 2020 Library Resources, Matt Dilworth mdilwort

Cultures, customs, and routines have been as diverse in the past as they are today. But for a long-past civilization, there is no longer a means of direct intercultural communication to learn about it. Still, knowledge of the inner workings of a society and culture are vital to many types of researchers. Greenwood Press’s database Daily Life Through History offers a unique exploration of these questions, shedding insight on what life was like in any given era or part of the globe; not just for the elites, but also for those of more modest estate – what was it like obtaining necessities, like bread; or to what degree people were free to move about and make life choices such as … Continued

How to Master Research

good information, reference databases, Research, scholarly resources August 17, 2020 Library Resources, Library Services, Matt Dilworth, Research, Website mdilwort

You can become a research expert and the librarians at the IU East Campus Library are here to help! Doing library research may seem quite complex at first. How do you distinguish what the scholarly sources are, and where to find them? What about ‘primary’ sources? The interface of a library research database can look more complicated than you are used to. However, in order to get better information for academic work, you need better tools. You need to know where to look, how to choose the words you will search with, what syntax to use, how to exclude information you don’t want, and how to critically evaluate what you get back. The library has created a multidisciplinary guide to … Continued

Raiding the Corporate Info

business, reference databases, Research July 20, 2020 Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research mdilwort

When thinking about research, we often think about searching for discrete, published items – books, journal articles, videos. But some information is quite different, and some is fluid and ever-changing. One area where this is the case is corporate research, whether examining a specific company or looking into a whole sector of the national or global economy. As businesses change and adapt and merge and re-strategize, the information about them fluctuates constantly, and researchers of any kind – investors, academics, etc. – need tools which keep up with the changes. For an individual company, stock prices, corporate strategies, and financials are likely to be major points of interest. Mergent Online or Hoover’s Company Records are solid databases for this – search by … Continued

Living in Interesting Times

history, oral history, primary sources July 13, 2020 Library Resources, Matt Dilworth, Research mdilwort

Do you keep a diary? In times of crisis, firsthand, contemporaneous accounts are among the most valuable to the historians of later decades. We call these ‘primary’ sources – those created by the people who lived the events that are described. Letters and diaries have long been fertile sources for understanding history, and the blogs and emails of today will likely inform the historians of tomorrow. While our times can seem unprecedented, calamities of various sorts have always shaped the eras they happened in. The Influenza pandemic of 1918, commonly called the Spanish Flu, is often held up as a comparison to today’s struggle with the COVID-19 coronavirus. Studying how people survived previous crises and catastrophes; and the lived experience … Continued