Reference & Collections Blog

Taylor & Francis Journals Online -- Access now available

Purchased through CRKN Phase 2, we now have access to Taylor and Francis Journals online.
Description:
Full text access to +1,100 journals in the sciences (STM) and social sciences and humanities (SSH).
Coverage: January 1997 forwards.
Platform: Access to the journals is on the Informaworld platform.

Historical Abstracts training - you're invited

Tomorrow – Thursday, March 1
4pm – Room 130

We’re going to check out all of the new features of Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life (now combined), including advanced features, linkages to ejournal collections and the catalogue, and more.

Lots of this will be old hat for many of you, but if you’d like a tour of the shiny newness, join us!

RefWorks

Last week when I was helping a student with a RefWorks problem, I realized that he was exporting references using the link available on the GODOT page - i.e. the "Where Can I Get this" link. When he used the downloaded citation in REfWorks to create his bibliography the citations where created with lots of errors! For instance, the title was appearing in caps and the authors names were appearing first name and then last name.

When we redid the export according to the instructions in our handouts, the citations appeared correctly.

Has anyone had this problem reported before? I am going to test this function with the other databases. But I am leaning towards asking Nancy to remove the Export to RefWorks button in the GODOT page.

Comments welcome!

Noise

We received a letter from a student complaining that we're too noisy in the Reference area. I know I'm guilty of this so I'm not surprised by the student's complaint. However, I've let the student know that the reference area is a working area and that we are not deliberately going out of our way to be loud, but that often we are helping students or providing tours and that some noise is to be expected. Feel free to remind students about the silent study areas on other floors and there's always a laptop if students want to take a computer there as well. Thanks! Tracie

CSA Databases

All the CSA database are down today. I have sent a problem report off to Lisa.

Wikipedia banned

Today's NY Times has an article on how the History Department at
Middlebury College has banned the use of wikipedia as a citable source.
Here's the link, login may be required.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

-- Lon Mendelsohn
==============================================
Prof. Loren D. Mendelsohn
Chief, Science/Engineering Library
City College of New York
New York, New York 10031
Voice: (212) 650-8244 FAX: (212) 650-7626
E-mail: LMEND at CCNY.CUNY.EDU

Elsevier & Arms Sales

This from Royal Society of Medicine www site (dated 20 February, 2007) may be of interest. From http://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/pr234.htm

Lancet publishers condemned over promotion of arms
Reed Elsevier, the publisher of The Lancet, has today been condemned by a former editor of the British Medical Journal for its involvement in the promotion of arms sales.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Richard Smith urges scientists and academics to publish their research and findings elsewhere.

“Reed Elsevier is one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific and medical journals and the finest of its journals is the Lancet, the leading global health journal,” said Dr Smith.

“Indeed, The Lancet has been receiving much attention from the Pentagon for its important articles showing that death rates in Iraq are far above those admitted by the United States government and yet its publishers promote arms fairs.

“The blatant hypocrisy doesn’t end there either. Reed Elsevier runs arms fairs through its subsidiary Reed Exhibitions in Britain, the United States, the Middle East, Brazil, Germany, and Taiwan which is the same subsidiary that runs Lancet conferences, including the forthcoming one in Asia.”

Dr Smith describes how The Lancet itself has: “told us how the fairs have in the past included cluster bombs, which are especially dangerous to civilians because they fail to explode and create minefields. Last year’s fair in the US included torture equipment sold by Security Equipment Corporation who use the grotesque slogan ‘Making grown men cry since 1975’.”

Dr Smith argues the best way of appealing to Reed Elsevier is by threatening its business. He writes:

“What might be the actions of the editors, authors, and readers of not only The Lancet but also the other 2000 medical and scientific journals published by Reed Elsevier? Alone they might achieve little, but together they might force the company to change, not by appealing to its non-existent conscience but through threatening its business.

“It is the scientific and medical part of Reed Elsevier that is the most profitable: in 2005 its sales totalled £1436 million, or 28% of total Reed Elsevier sales, and its profits were £449 million, or 37% of the company’s total profits.

“The scientific and medical part of the business is so profitable because of the extraordinary value of the science it publishes. This is where Reed Elsevier is vulnerable-were those researchers to go elsewhere, the company would promptly pull out of arms exhibitions. And, of course, those researchers might leave and never return.”

Dr Kamran Abbasi, editor of the JRSM, added: “The editors of The Lancet have in the past taken a brave stance against Reed Elsevier’s involvement in promoting arms sales. But it seems that larger profits matter more to the company than its reputation among the scientific community. It is unlikely that the editorial team of The Lancet will be able to change Reed Elsevier’s behaviour alone. The wider scientific community that it relies on to make those profits, however, can form a powerful lobby.”

[ends]

Reed-Elsevier’s hypocrisy in selling arms and health [PDF 37k]

Notes:

Richard Smith worked for the BMJ for 25 years. He was Editor of the BMJ and Chief Executive of the BMJ Publishing Group from 1991 to 2004. Dr Smith is now Chief Executive of United Healthcare Europe.

‘Reed-Elsevier’s hypocrisy in selling arms and health’ by R Smith is published in the March 2007 issue (Vol. 100) of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

JRSM is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. It has been published continuously since 1809. Its Editor is Dr Kamran Abbasi.

A copy of the article is available free at www.jrsm.org.uk

Times Digital Archive -- purchased

Description:
The Times Digital Archive is a full-image online archive of every page published by The Times [London] from 1785-1985. The text within the images is fully searchable at the article level. Users can easily search news articles, obituaries, advertising and classifieds — virtually everything that appeared in the newspaper. Results are displayed at the article level and users may view the article — or the full page upon which it appeared.

Platform: InfoTrac (GALE)

For more information including a guided tour and PDF navigation help sheets see: http://www.gale.com/Times/

Interesting "text similarity" biomedical search engine

" eTBLAST is a unique search engine for searching biomedical literature. Our service is very different from PubMed. While PubMed searches for "keywords", our search engine lets you input an entire paragraph and returns MEDLINE abstracts that are similar to it. This is something like PubMed's "Related Articles" feature, only better because it runs on your unique set of interests. For example, input the abstract of an unpublished paper or a grant proposal into our engine, and with the touch of a button you'll be able to find every abstract in MEDLINE dealing with your topic. No more guessing whether your set of keywords has found all the right papers. No more sorting through hundreds of papers you don't care about to find the handful you were looking for--our search engine does it for you.

When most people use PubMed to search MEDLINE they pick one or two keywords to describe their topic, then browse through a long list of results. When they find a paper that looks interesting they click on its "Related Articles", in hopes of finding more papers like that one. If they find another relevant paper, they explore it's related articles--and so on. This process of culling long lists of documents by hand makes literature searching tedious and time consuming. We make it easier for you by providing better results the first time, and then allowing you to automatically combine the papers you care about for a second round. Our "Iterate" feature allows you to checkmark the abstracts you found interesting in the first round and combine them all to create a new query. It's like rolling several Related Articles lists into one."

Go to http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/index.shtml for more information.

GLBT Life database renamed

Recently, EBSCO has made the decision to rename the GLBT Life database to LGBT Life. This name change is in response to customer feedback. The acronym ‘LGBT’ has become the more widely used and accepted descriptor for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

There is a redirect to LGBT for people looking for the database under the GLBT heading.

Open Worldcat - Cite this item

I just noticed this. I'm not sure if it has been here all along. Anyway, users can click on "Cite this item" to see various citation formats.

Termium Plus

Termium Plus (from the Translation Bureau of Canada) allows only a limited number of simultaneous sign-ons, via a "Launch" button below the password area. This week a few of us have encountered situations where it appears that a password is the only way to access the db.
What is really is happening is .... too many users. Just wait a 10 minutes or so and try the "Launch" button again.

ESL Assignment

I've left a copy of the questions (and answers) that a group of ESL students will be working on in the assignment binder.

If you have any questions about it please let me know.

Introducing the book

watch the video

This is a short Norwegian TV sketch (with English subtitles) about a
medieval monastery converting from scrolls to books. The monk
Ansgar has just called helpdesk...Quite funny!

McMaster University library, online at Second Life

Virtual transformation
by Ron Albertson, in the the Hamilton Spectator, Feb 8, 2007.

read this article

Monitor resolution

FYI from John Durno --

A minor and temporary tweak has been made to the permissions for regular
IC users. The policy that disables access to the monitor settings has
been disabled, which means that users now have the ability to adjust the
monitor resolution, colour quality, etc on the IC machines.

The reason this change has been made is to accommodate a film crew that
will be working in the IC on Saturday morning, before the library opens.
They require the ability to change monitor resolutions of some of the
computers that will be featured in their film.

The resolution settings will be locked down again next week.

Using a blog to post patron suggestions

The U. of Chicago Blog, Maroon Opinions, "lists suggestions for and answers
from the University of Chicago Library":

go to Maroon Opinions Blog>

Note : It doesn't allow direct posting -- patrons have to fill out a
"suggestion form" -- but it's an interesting model of what you can do
with a blog in the area of patron response.

web 2.0 and web ethics

Amazing short film to explain Web 2.0 - it's brilliant.

http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2007/02/07/think_library_20_as_you_watch_this.html

Watch to the end to see some of the ramifications of web 2.0 detailed in a thought provoking sort of way.

ALSO: this short article on the ethics of search engines was fascinating:
http://ethics.sandiego/edu/lmh/op-ed/google/googleethics.asp

Discussion around this article also made me wonder whether we opted in to the new Voyager upgrade that retains circ records - anybody know?

New Engineering Village Release

New Engineering Village Release

Overview of the new features and functionalities available with our February 14th product release.
The new and enhanced functionalities include:

1. Tags & Groups: a new feature enabling you to collaborate with colleagues and peers using tagged records and creating groups.

2. An improved and highly enhanced eBooks search featuring faceted results, hits highlights,and the ability to search REFEREX Engineering with other databases on Engineering Village.

3. A new, interactive help file featuring search capabilities, index and printing options in different formats.

Remember that we access COMPENDEX, INSPEC and GEOBASE via Engineering Village.

APA manual

FYI -- The bound copy of the APA manual at Ready Ref. is falling apart and has been sent to the bindery. The other bound copy in Reference stacks has also gone to the bindery for the same reason. There remains 1 paperback copy in Ready Ref. that seems to be holding up.

Canadian Public Policy Collection

The ebrary reader required by this collection, is installed on all Info commons machines in Internet Explorer only. I've asked systems to install the ebrary reader in Firefox as well. This will be done when the new systems person starts...which I think will be soon. Stay tuned.

Reference desk staff assignment of hours

The assignment of hours for reference desk staff has been posted to the intra.

Subject/Research guides

I like the look of McGill's Research guides. Go to http://www.health.library.mcgill.ca/research/sguides/aboriginal.cfm to view.

New WOST class scheduled

To address the needs of students in Dr Lee's Women's Studies Class, who were assigned participation in the basic instruction sessions, I have scheduled one last chance for them - Thursday, Feb 8 at 3pm in room 080.

Students can sign up on Events Manager as usual, and I've asked Dr Lee to promote this with her students...

Thanks,
t

custom google search embedded in r. guide

A librarian at Hong Kong university created a custom research guide for academic content in Philosophy, and provided me with the code I used to embed that search box in my research guide - it is so cool. As these custom google searches are now popping up all over the place, no doubt there is one (or more) for every subject area - in this case, the guy used the custom google search to replace a web directory that he was tired of maintaining. Brilliant!

QuestionPoint blog now open...

From the Librarian in Black blog: http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack

The QuestionPoint Blog, the place all participating librarians are supposed to look for information, but didn't because the darn thing was password-protected and couldn't be fed into an RSS reader, is now finally open for all to read and password-free. Here's the blog and here's the feed. If your library uses QuestionPoint, especially if you're monitoring the service, it's a good idea to subscribe.

found via Stephen Francoeur at Digital Reference