Books 24×7

Check out the latest ebook subscription by the library.  Books 24×7 provides many books and manuals on all topics related to computers.  Need to learn about HTML?  XML?  CSS?  How about if you just want a Dummies Guide to Word?  Books 24×7 will help out.

Since new books are added to 24×7 all of the time, you will always find books that deal with the latest software or standard.  Let us know what you think.

Grove Music Online

The library now has an online subscription to Grove Music Online.  This work starts with the definitive Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and adds much additional content.  This publisher description provides a good overview of the content included in this subscription:

Grove Music Online has been the leading online resource for music research since its inception in 2001, a glorious compendium of music scholarship offering the full texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd Edition (2001), as well as all subsequent updates and emendations. Including 50,000 signed articles and 28,000 biographies contributed by over 6,000 scholars from around the world, Grove Music Online is the unsurpassed authority on all aspects of music.

Now the cornerstone of Oxford Music Online, a subscription to Grove Music Online also includes The Oxford Companion to Music (2002), which offers more than 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres; The Oxford Dictionary of Music, Second Edition, Revised (2006) will similarly supplement Grove’s more extensive coverage with content geared toward undergraduates and general users. In addition, a robust, new linking program features improved and expanded links to sound examples via partnerships with Classical Music Library and DRAM, as well as links to the RILM database of music bibliography. Grove Music Online articles also feature biographical linking to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for mutual subscribers to both, and a host of tools and resources, including timelines and topical guides.

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, has been widely acclaimed as an indispensable resource and a classic reference. For the 2001 Second Edition, every one of the first edition’s 22,500 articles was reviewed and revised, with thousands of articles expanded. Previously neglected or under-represented areas were examined, explored, and explained. Movements and topics once deemed too controversial or too far from the mainstream were added along with extensive, authoritative contributions on non-Western music.
• The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Second Edition, edited by Barry Kernfeld, is the largest, most comprehensive and accurate reference work on jazz ever published, putting the world of jazz at your fingertips. With articles on every aspect of the field, from jazz groups, composers and arrangers to instruments, terms, record labels and venues, it is the ideal companion for scholars and enthusiasts in this rapidly growing field.
• The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie, is unsurpassed in its scope and quality, with contributions from over 1,300 of the world’s leading critics and scholars. A remarkable 11,000 articles, all fully cross-referenced, create a work that has become established as the essential opera reference. Indeed, every aspect of this varied art form is covered: composers, conductors, directors, performers, librettists, literary sources, cities and countries, operatic historians, and opera genres and terminology.

Do You Wikipedia?

“Wikipedia is the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“Wikipedia is completely unreliable and should be kept far away from students.”

This pretty much sums up the two extremes of thought regarding Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. I will try to write this post without exposing my own bias on the subject. (Can you see my poker face?)

Just the facts

• Wikipedia began in March 2000.
• As of March 2008, it has approximately 10 million articles in 253 languages. (For purposes of comparison, the 2007 Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,700 articles.)
• Registered Wikipedia users can create new articles, but anyone can edit existing articles (e.g. they can be edited anonymously).
• Wikipedia uses vandal-repair bots to scan the site and to repair malicious changes to entries, but it also relies on its community of people, Wikipedians, to do the same.

The Controversy

• Since there is no peer-review process to validate the information, many people simply stay away from Wikipedia, viewing the site as unreliable.
• Michael Gorman, the controversial past-president of the American Library Association, condemned Wikipedia (and Google), stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are “the intel­lectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything.”
• Wikipedia is becoming a common sources for journalists, academics, lawyers, and students.

Just for Laughs

• The Onion – the satirical print and online newspaper (if you haven’t read it, you are missing a weekly chortle) – published an article titled, Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.
• Michael Scott of the TV show The Office (if you don’t watch The Office, you are missing a prolonged weekly chortle) says, Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

So how do you deal with Wikipedia? I’d like to know what you think and if you use it either on a personal level or for research and work.

[Oh, BTW, when I wrote the phrase "since sliced bread" above, it got me wondering where that phrase came from. According to Wikipedia, this phrase became popular when Wonder Bread first mass-marketed sliced bread in the 1930s, touting their innovation.]

Let’s Debate

if:book A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book is a good place to go to find challenging discussions of how the book might best be imagined in an online, networked world. A recent post highlights a new feature from the New York Times, which provides archived access to the recent Democratic presidential debate.

While the debate, obviously, is not a book, the Times web tool exemplifies a powerful way of presenting video, text, and navigation tools within a browser window — functions that could be well suited to some books. The debate is feature with a video clip of the debate, a linked transcript, and an index to subjects covered.

This is one of those tools that immediately struck me as very cool and very useful. It is extremely intuitive to use and thus elegant in design. Let’s hope it find wider application.

Links

• if:book blog entry
• New York Times debate presentation

Journal Alerts in EBSCOhost

EBSCOhost is the host interface for many of the library’s database subscriptions, including Academic Search Premier, ERIC, PsycINFO, PsycArticles, and the MLA Bibliography. If you’d like to be notified when new issues of journals of interest are added to EBSCOhost, you can easily set up journal alerts. Once set, you will be alerted by email (or an RSS feed) when new issues are available.

For step-by-step instructions on setting up journal alerts in EBSCOhost, please look at the Powerpoint presentation (created by Michael Daly, fall 2007 Neil Hellman Library intern).

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)

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.)

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.

Quick Access to NYT, TU

Perhaps you love the clean, intuitive, easy-to-use interface of Lexis Nexis.  If so, you will be the first person I have ever met to feel this way.  Across the library world, mention Lexis Nexis and you will most likely be met with a sigh (or a scream).

Well, here (thanks to Electronic Resource Librarian Peter Osterhoudt) is a small attempt to redress the clunky, five-clicks-to-a-source Lexis Nexis system.  Use the links below to go directly to a Lexis Nexis search screen, limited to articles from The New York Times and Times Union (Albany) respectively.  Add these links as bookmarks on your browser.  You’ll never be more than one click away again.

Link to The New York Times (Coverage in Lexis Nexis from June 1, 1980 to the present):
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=6742

Link to The Times Union (Coverage in Lexis Nexis from January 1, 1994 to the present):
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=145225