First Year Graduate Students Empowered in E-Resources and Mendeley

First year students of the School of Graduate Studies have received intensive training in e-resources and Mendeley at a seminar on campus. The seminar, held in collaboration with the Sam Jonah Library, was aimed at building the capacity of the students to be abreast of e-resources and Mendeley during their academic research. A senior Assistant Librarian, Ms. Paulina Nana Yaa Kwafoa, who took the students through searching information on the Internet, said Google, Meta Search Engine, Subject Gateway and Data bases are examples of search engines. She stressed that because there was no system of quality control in the use of search engines, students should be skillful in their research. "You need to be skillful in your research, you need to know what to look out for when using search engines because anybody at all can put anything on the internet," she advised. Mr. Kwasi Opuni Karikari, one of the resource persons who made a presentation on Mendeley, said it is a free cross-platform application (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android) that helps one to organize and manage the materials one rely on to do his research. He said Mendeley analyses users' activity to recommend new reading materials and to suggest potential contacts. He said Mendeley helps to create groups to share reference materials and work together with others and therefore, called on students to use Mendeley's word processor plugin to easily create citations for materials one have added to his library. Present at the seminar were the Vice-Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, Prof. Kamkam Boadu and the University Librarian, Mr. Clement Entsua-Mensah.