ACLS Humanities E-Books

Check out the latest newsletter from the American Council of Learned Societies. This provides some information on new additions to their e-book package (available through the library’s catalog or the ACLS web site) and highlights some new titles.

Journal Alerts – Project Muse

This is the first of a series of posts that will provide information and tips for setting up journal alerts in the library’s subscription databases. Keeping up with the literature in your field has never been easier, and with these journal alerts you can request that email be sent to you whenever new issues of your selected journals are loaded online.

While the process is a bit different for each database service (EBSCOhost, Project Muse, ACS…), the steps are very similar:

1. Create a personal user account (which is free of charge)
2. Select the journal(s) you’d like to be alerted for
3. Create the alert

We have created short Powerpoint files that walk you through the steps for those database services that offer journal alerts. The advantage of Powerpoint is that we can provide screen shots for each step and show you what you will see.

Link: How to Create Journal Alerts in Project Muse
(Powerpoint presentation created by Michael Daly, University of Albany library intern, fall 2007)

Digitization Wars

As a follow up to my previous post about open access, I highlight the recent decision by a group of New England libraries to choose the Open Content Alliance as their partner in digitizing their book collections. This is a direct defeat for both Google and Microsoft, who were courting this library group for inclusion in their own, individual book digitization projects.

All of us who are interested in the broadest access and continued access to information applaud this decision. As the New York Times states, this decision

suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

Here are some links that you may find interesting:

• New York Times story on this decision
• Open Content Alliance home
• Google Book Search
• Windows Live Book Search

Open Access

The Open Access movement has attracted the interest of many in higher education — as well as, presumably, those involved with corporate media. The idea of open access is quite simple and expresses a certain idealism about how information can be free and flow unimpeded. What is slightly amazing is that this form of idealism has not been quashed at birth, but appears to be experiencing some success.

[If you’d like a more detail on Open Access, please see Open Access Overview, put together by Peter Suber, an important figure in the OA movement.]

While the initial push for open access was aimed at peer-reviewed research articles, the movement has broadened to include longer texts. While we would normally think of calling these longer texts ebooks, I have become convinced that this term serves to limit our thinking about how longer texts can be developed in the web environment. (Think of the term that was originally applied to automobiles – horseless carriages – to understand where I am coming from.)

I direct you to a few sites that provide working models of what open access can achieve:

Directory of Open Access Journals
926 journals that are scholarly and free
Note that the Neil Hellman Library includes these OA journals in its comprehensive listing of full-text journals available. If one of these journals is indexed in a database we subscribe to, you will find a link that takes you to the article.
http://www.doaj.org/

Comment Press
An initiative from the Institute of The Future of the Book, Comment Press is a effort to provide tools and a platform for authors who want to create texts that comply with open access guidelines and allow for interaction between readers and authors.
Examples of Comment Press texts:

• Comment Press: A WordPress Theme for Social Texts
• The Effect of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Law and Policy

Creative Commons
Tools for authors wishing to “mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.”
http://creativecommons.org/

Federated Searching Available

Our trial to Serials Solutions federated search tool is now available.  See my previous post for background or try out a search here.

(Note: at this time the federated search works only if you are on campus.)

Booker Prize Awarded

Last night, the 2007 Booker Prize was awarded to Anne Enright for her novel The Gathering.   Every review I have read about this novel describes it as bleak.  Indeed one review calls the book “distinctive” in its “exhilarating bleakness.”

Enright herself acknowledges that the book is the equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.  Nontheless, it is described as powerful novel that is well worth the investment.

•  See the announcement on the Booker Prize site.
• Check out reviews on Amazon.

Encyclopedia Sets

Here is an offer to dedicated readers of this blog.

The library is removing three older encyclopedia sets from its collection. If you would like to purchase a set for $20 free, be the first to contact me at this email address and it will be yours.

Here is what is available:

• Colliers Encyclopedia, 1991 (24 volumes) TAKEN….
  
• Academic American Encyclopedia, 1988 (21 volumes) TAKEN…
  
• Encyclopedia Americana, 1990 (30 volumes, NOTE: volume 13 is missing) TAKEN…
  

Please indicate which set you are interested in. (One set per person.) You must be able to come to the library to pick up the encyclopedias.

Federated Searching

Within the next month, the library will offer federated searching on a trial basis. This may lead many to ask a logical question, What is federated searching?

A quick web search for the meaning of federate brings back a useful idea: to federate is to enter into a league for a common purpose. In our case the common purpose is to find journal articles and the league is the universe of subscription-based and free databases.

Put simply, federated searching provides a single search interface to a number of predetermined databases. For example, users could search for articles on READING and AUTISM from a single search box and retrieve results from ERIC, PsycLit, Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Project Muse, and the International Reading Association.

There is both an upside and downside to federated searching. The upside, from my perspective, is quite significant: uncovering information from underutilized sources that would be untapped otherwise. Given the investment the college and library have made in providing access to subscription-based databases, any resource that can maximize their use is welcome.

The downside of federated searching is that it can never be as powerful as searching one database directly. Special search features, such as a limit on population in PsycLit, are not available in a federated search. The common fields (title, author, subject, abstract) will be searched only.

Let this post serve as a teaser for what is to come. Once our trial is set up and available, I will provide additional information. In the meantime, check out these links for more:

What is federated searching?

The truth about federated searching.

The Top Ten Lists

I am the kind of person who likes lists.  Why?

1.  They provide a sense of organization
2.   They are easy to read
3.   And so on….

For those of you who are like me and enjoy a tasty list from time to time, here is a list of library items ranked by how often they have been checked out at the Circulation Desk.  Data goes back to the start of our current library system in 2001.

Most Popular Library Items for Check-Out

1. Laptop computer (19,267 times)
2. Laptop computer (17,609)
3. Study room key (1,698)
4. Laptop computer (1,368)
5. Study room key (1,069)
6. Study room key (664)
7. Study room key (611)
8. Study room key (580)
9. Study room key (511)
10. Headphones (498)

Okay, not too exciting.  And it proves what we already know: providing laptop computers for students to use in the library has been very popular from the beginning.  What books, however, are the top ten circulators?

Most Popular Library Books for Check-Out

1. T-Factor Fat Gram Counter (271)
2. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World (198)
3. Secondary Mathematics Instruction (187)
4. Very Hungry Caterpillar (184)
5. Where the Wild Things Are (152)
6. Today I Feel Silly & Other Moods That Make My Day (146)
7. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (130)
8. Smoky Night (126)
9. Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become (123)
10. Frank the Fish Gets His Wish (118)

Much more interesting and very eclectic.  This represents, I surmise, books that are used as reserve readings for classes and popular children’s books used in lesson planning.  (These children’s books, by the way, are housed in the Curriculum Library on the second floor of the Lally Building.)

Frequency North Comes to the Library

The third season of Frequency North begins with David Lehman visiting the Neil Hellman Library on Thursday, October 4 at 7:30 P.M. Lehman is a poet and literary critic; he is also known for beginning an annual series titled Best American Poetry.

POSTSCRIPT – THANKS TO ALL WHO ATTENDED: Despite my worries that the space in the library would not be large enough and noise would create problems, the poetry reading went smoothly. Approximately sixty people heard Mr. Lehman read from his body of poetry, including some from his collections in which he wrote “a poem a day.” He graciously stayed afterwards to chat with those in attendance and signed books (including the seven recently acquired Lehman books for the library collection).

For the many New York Mets fans out there, let me conclude this post with a short excerpt from Lehman’s October 9 poem in his book The Evening Sun:

It’s a great day for New York
thanks to Todd Pratt of the Mets
whose tenth inning homer beat Arizona
so now the Mets will face Atlanta
for the pennant…