ScienceDirect Schedule Outage on Saturday

Heads up: ScienceDirect will be down for scheduled maintenance from 7:30 am Saturday, August 25 until early Sunday, August 26.

Improvements to the interface and user experience include the following:

Efficient and effortless access to relevant information thanks to a new design for journal article and book chapter pages as well as improved user experience for e.g. RSS feeds, image search, and many other features and functionality

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Pascal Delivers Upgrades

Due to a server replacement, PASCAL Delivers will not be available on Wednesday, January 18th until early evening.
With a new server, the slow searches and time out errors should be a thing of the past!

Previously ordered books will not be affected by this outage.

EBSCO e-books now available for download!

The former Netlibrary e-books - some 70,000+ titles - can now be downloaded to most e-reader devices or software (except for the Kindle, unfortunately).

The EBSCOhost e-books use Adobe Digital Editions digital rights management (DRM) software, which the PC/Mac versions are available here: http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/ .  From there, you can move the books from your desktop computer to a supported device.

The supported e-reader device list can be found here: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/supported-devices .

I can personally recommend the Aldiko Reader for Android.

You will need to create an EBSCOhost account, which is free and can be used across the EBSCO platform for storing journal article citations, searches, and other personal items. You do not need an ID/Password from the library to use the download feature.

We are trialing this feature until early November, but I anticipate it will become a permanent feature due to positive response.

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me or use the chat reference.

Journal Finder Maintenance

Journal Finder, our e-resource locator, will be undergoing some routine maintenance this weekend and next week.

From WT Cox, the owner of Journal Finder:

The Journal Finder server will be shut down and restarted for maintenance purposes at 1 AM EST, Saturday, July 2, 2011. There will be a short interruption, no longer than 10-15 minutes, to your Journal Finder service at that time.

We will also be performing Journal Finder maintenance on Wednesday, July 6, 2011. There should be no interruption of Journal Finder service during this time.

If you have any issues, please contact the library.

The Mandarin Ailuropoda melanoleuca

As a new fiscal year looms, we begin rolling out new e-resources and other products. We'll start off with two new, Gale-Cengage products.



First off, let's introduce PowerSpeak Languages. PowerSpeak isn't a database or typical library electronic resource. It's more of a standalone language educational tool, perfect for students getting ready to study abroad...or wanting to communicate with the international student down the hall from you.

From the publisher:

Students will find Powerspeak Languages the perfect solution for learning world languages naturally. With its variety of activities, adventure stories and rich multimedia, students will immerse themselves completely in authentic cultural customs and social trends. And because Powerspeak Languages aligns with world language curriculum and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, it’s a great resource to help students prepare for and compete in a global economy.

Students will find Powerspeak Languages the perfect solution for learning world languages naturally. With its variety of activities, adventure stories and rich multimedia, students will immerse themselves completely in authentic cultural customs and social trends. And because Powerspeak Languages aligns with world language curriculum and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, it’s a great resource to help students prepare for and compete in a global economy.

PowerSpeak comes with Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, and English as a Second Language.

Next up, is Grzimek's Animal Life is more of a traditional library resource, as it is an electronic version of the popular Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. One of the frequent suggestions on our annual student library satisfaction survey is to add more science resources. We are listening, and this is the first of hopefully several new resources to be added this year.

Anyway, here's more about Grzimek's from the publisher:

Grzimek's Animal LIfe is an image-rich, dynamic online resource that creates a true educational experience where a quick trip to find specific information can lead to the desire to explore and learn more. Users will be inspired by:

• Unequaled coverage — more than 4,000 species categorized by Amphibians, Reptiles and Birds, Fish, Insects, Mammals and Simple Aquatic Life, including information on evolution, habitat, behavior, range and more
• Authoritative, peer-reviewed content — updated regularly by a worldwide network of experts
• Ancillary topics — such as endangered species, biomes, prehistoric animals and others
• Ease of use — immersive tools like interactive range maps and an intuitive interface let users discover while also supporting serious academic research
• Media richness — thousands of photos, maps, videos, audio tracks and more
• Convenient learning tools — translation into 11 languages; ReadSpeaker text-to-speech translation; ability to download, print, bookmark, and share through popular social networking and other online applications
• Planned enhancements — curriculum correlations and tools to connect experts, educators and students

Not only will Grzimek's be useful for zoology students, but elementary education students will be able to use the ample curriculum materials for lesson planning.

Have any questions or comments? E-mail me here: trix "at" coker.edu

New E-book Collection!

Great news! We have added Springer E-books to our collection! By the end of this year, this collection will grow to over 25,000 books!

As always, e-books are a great resource that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

An advantage to the Springer E-book collection is that we have unlimited access to each title that we own: all 1200 Coker students, staff, and faculty could technically have the same book open at the same time!

There are no restrictions for printing, as most titles are opened as PDF files. Also, these files can be loaded on any mobile device without any modification or compatibility issues.

For now, search the link on the E-books link on the library homepage. We will be adding the books to our online catalog later in the semester.

New Resources

We've got a few new products to announce: two new psychology databases and campus-wide access to newspaper.

Up first, we have the additions of PsycCRITIQUES and PsycEXTRA to our stable of behavior and social science databases. Both are companion databases to our larger PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO databases.

As per the vendor's website: "PsycCRITIQUES®, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), is a database of full-text book reviews featuring current scholarly and professional books in psychology. It also publishes reviews from a psychological perspective of popular films and trade books. PsycCRITIQUES includes approximately 40,000 reviews dating back to 1956 and is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®."

Film and popular culture classes might also find PsycCRITIQUES useful.

Next up, PsycEXTRA:

"PsycEXTRA®, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), is a bibliographic and full-text companion to the scholarly PsycINFO® database. The document types included in PsycEXTRA consist of technical, annual and government reports, conference papers, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, consumer brochures and more.

This database complements PsycINFO and the other APA databases with extensive coverage of gray literature relating to psychology and the behavioral sciences; it contains around 200,000 records that are not indexed in any other APA database. Furthermore, content from the Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP) collection is expected to increase the number of records substantially. PsycEXTRA is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®."

The addition of gray literature and conference proceedings will be highly useful for all levels of psychology research.

Finally, we are adding an online campus-wide subscription to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

From their website: "The Chronicle of Higher Education is the No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators.

Based in Washington, D.C., The Chronicle has more than 70 writers, editors, and international correspondents.

Online, The Chronicle is published every weekday and is the top destination for news, advice, and jobs for people in academe. The Chronicle's Web site features the complete contents of the latest issue; daily news and advice columns; thousands of current job listings; an archive of previously published content; vibrant discussion forums; and career-building tools such as online CV management, salary databases, and more."

We will continue our print subscription to The Chronicle.

FireFox Catalog Search Add-on

I've developed a search plug-in for the Firefox web browser which will allow users to search the Coker Library catalog directly from their browser. You can download it here: Coker College Mozilla Firefox Add-on. Mozilla, the development organization behind Firefox, hasn't full tested the search plug-in yet, but we've been testing here for a couple of weeks without any problems.

Give it a try and let us know here or elsewhere how you like it.

Also, here's a little Firefox tip. The search plug-in box controls the default search engine the browser uses for highlight searches. For instance, I was reading an article about the first Xerox copying machine (think about it: easily copied documents was a huge first step in the digital age) and found the author of a book on the subject by the name of David Owen. I highlighted his name, right-clicked on it, and was given the option to search our catalog for his name:

This trick works with whatever web service you have selected in the Search Box. By default, it will be Google for most people but there are thousands to choose from. Including a Coker library catalog search.

American History in Video

We've got a new e-resource to show off, one that we think a lot of students and faculty will be excited about. American History in Video features over 5000 videos from various sources, including PBS, the History Channel, A&E, and also classic newsreels (for the time before television...!)

Students will love the transcripts that follow the video (when viewed from the AHV website) because it makes quoting the videos very easy.

Faculty will love the breadth of the collection as well as the ability to make smaller clips, perfect for showing during a lecture.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Resource Review: Credo Reference

Those Coker students that have had a library instruction class or have had one of our one credit courses (LIB 101 or 301) know we librarians really like reference resources. Reference resources, whether they come from our traditional reference section or as an e-resource, are excellent places to begin research. But why?

1. These resources provide overviews of a topic, which serve to get the researcher into the mindset of that topic or subject matter
   
2. They provide search terms and ideas to broaden or widen your research
3. Most reference resources provide a bibliography or works cited list, doing some of your research for you.

With these ideas in mind, we will be taking a look at one of our newer e-resources: Credo Reference.

Credo Reference features (at this writing) 463 separate reference books containing over 3,000,000 entries. These titles are automatically updated with newer versions (if available) and new works are added frequently.

Above is the current homepage for Credo. As you can see, the basic Search is the default search type, providing simple access to the entire collection.

The next tab over features an Image Search, perfect for art students looking for specific examples of an artist's work. There are plenty of art resources including the National Gallery of London's collection and the Bridgeman Art Library Archive (to name a very few).

Advanced Search brings you a more powerful set of search parameters, such as phrase searching, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and date range limiters.

Find a Book, miraculously, allows you to search for a specific book in the collection. Note that if you roll your mouse over a title, you will get a picture of the book cover and a brief description of the book's contents (Click on the picture to make it larger):

Concept Map is a (relatively) new way of looking at information visually. Enter a search term, and Credo will output a map of concepts and terms, with your search term usually in the middle:

Each one of those terms is a separate entry in Credo Reference, and can be previewed by holding your mouse over the phrase or term (See picture above, click to enlarge).

Concept mapping is a great information discovery tool, especially in subject areas that are either new or unfamiliar to us.

Finally, the Gadgets tool offers unique information access:

This unique tool can be dragged to any part of your screen or opened in a new window or tab to be used even after leaving Credo Reference. The Gadgets provide some of the quick answers that you would expect from Google -- except these answers come from a trusted resource.

All in all, Credo Reference offers a great range of e-reference resources that are easy to use and access.