Orientation to RIT Libraries & Business Resources: Undergraduate

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Last Updated: Feb 8, 2024 3:38 PM

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infoguides.rit.edu/businessorientations/undergraduate

2024 Undergraduate Orientation

Welcome to RIT!

Library Card and Online Access

Your RIT ID card is your library card for checking out print materials. Your RIT username (first part of your email address) and password are your credentials to access our online subscription databases and ebooks. All of the library electronic resources can be accessed on or off campus.

Information Resources/Databases

We make available to current RIT students, faculty and staff a robust electronic collection. This includes e-books, business databases, article databases and discovery tools. Every library varies in the resources they purchase and lease. Our business collection is shaped by questions asked, assignments in classes, and degrees offered along with available budget. We adopted e-books very early and try to buy business books in electronic format over print format. The library subscribes to Summon as its discovery layer. What is a discovery layer? It is a system that sits on top of a libraries article databases to provide searching through one interface. Great place to start when you do not know your subject databases yet. To browse all of the library business databases visit our DB Finder business listings. To browse all of the databases visit here.

Journals/Newspapers/Trade Publications

To find which periodicals we have in full text go to our A-Z Journal List. Search for the name of the periodical and the record will show the database it is in and the date range we have. If no record appears try also searching by ISSN to double check. If no record shows that means we do not have full text access as a subscription or in any of our leased databases. For articles in periodicals we do not have access to use our Information Delivery Service which is the name of our interlibrary loan service.

Interlibrary Loan aka IDS

Our interlibrary loan service is branded as IDS or Information Delivery Service. More information here.

Instruction

There is no obligatory library instruction at RIT. Some professors will invite me into their classes, but not all do. You should take advantage of the library whether or not I visit your class. Some library instruction can be found on the library YouTube channel.

Consultations

I am available for consultations in-person or via Zoom. To set up an appointment just check my calendar here https://rit.libcal.com/appointments/business to find and book a mutual day and time to meet. Also note that the button at the top right opens my contact info, LibCal booking tool, and a chat box. If I am on chat the box will say Chat With Jennifer.

Textbooks

The library does not proactively add course textbooks to our collection but professors sometimes provide a copy for Reserve (a section of the library behind Circulation housing very popular books) and faculty can also request that we buy one copy and have it placed on print reserves. Keep in mind this is a shared copy. It must be used in the building, will not include electronic supplements and will not be replaced if damaged or goes missing. Using a shared print book can be tricky if you have lots of weekly reading or homework/quizzes/tests that are in the book. If your class is using a non-textbook book as a course reading we may have it in one of our e-book databases. Most but not all e-books are cataloged in our catalog. For example our new O'Reilly for Higher Education e-book database is not yet catalogued. More on Textbooks here.

Plagiarism

Do not plagiarize. You should cite information, ideas, facts that are not your own original material. Cite items using citation styles like MLA, APA, Chicago or many more. Your professor will indicate in the syllabus which style they want or they will indicate you can chose. Librarians can help you understand how a citation style works. The rules for any style originate in a style book. We have copies of the latest APA, MLA and Chicago available. And APA and MLA make available some of the most popular items for free on the web. In most citation styles a citation includes an in-text abbreviated citation and a Works Cited full citation.

Citation Managers

You can access cloud based versions of Endnote and Refworks through them library. Access Refworks via Summon. Access Endnote via the Endnote InfoGuide. Visit the library YouTube channel for library produced training videos. The library does not purchase or offer training on desktop citation management software. The library does not recommend searching databases through citation management software due to the lack of sophisticated search options and access issues.

 

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Use of RIT resources is reserved for current RIT students, faculty and staff for academic and teaching purposes only.
Please contact your librarian with any questions.

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