Information literacy skills & Reference software

In the coming months many students will start working on their paper or Thesis. The library has a few courses that will help you get to a good start:

1) Information search & retrieval courses:

• Check the agenda of the library website for courses presented by library professionals
• Go to the online literacy skills courses which are available 24/7 !

2) Reference software
If you are planning to use much literature it may be a good idea to use special tools to manage your references. The software not only allows you to manage your literature, it also offers automatic export and efficient formatting options to use the references you collected in your paper. Check out the agenda on the library website for courses on: Reference Manager & EndNote.The software should be available on the computers at the university.
You can also try some of the free Reference tools that are available. One of the most popular free reference tools is a plugin called Zotero.

New sources added

A few new sources have been added to the databases that are available through the VU Library website. Most of the information in these sources is Open Access. The new sources are:

• Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS))
  DANS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The DANS collection includes datasets from the Humanities, e.g. History and Archaeology, Social and Behavioural sciences, and Geospatial sciences. Data and documentation files are available for downloading free of charge for registered users (registration is free of charge). In some cases, permission from the depositor is required before you can download the datafiles.
• CBS websites
  The main website of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) is linked as a specific e-resource. Two links have now been added to specific separate CBS websites. The first of the new links goes to a website on Dutch Census Statistics (Volkstellingen). The second link goes to a website where newly digitized historical datapublications of the CBS become available.