Newsletter for Reference Student Assistants

We have a couple of databases that are special -- that is, there are special instructions on how to access them. In general someone will ask you for a password. Then just remember this: GO TO MANUAL.

1. USA Trade Online

This is a gov docs database with only 2 "seats" for users. The two designated computers for this are in the gov docs room, facing South. There is a shortcut to the database on the desk top. You need a password, which is in the big black Reference manual (next to your student manual), as well as the Gov Docs manual, which is on the same shelf. DO NOT GIVE THE PASSWORD TO THE PATRON. Log the patron in yourself using the password.

Note: If these two computers are in use, politely tell one of the patrons they must move. Gov docs users are always given priority at the computers in the gov docs room.



2. NTIS / DARTS

Maybe you remember an old blog post about this database. It also requires a password that you are not to give to the patron. Log them in yourself. For this database, the patron can use any computer in the Reference or Gov Docs rooms.

This password, along with many more, is also in the big black Reference Manual.

Any Questions? Please ask!

Have you ever wished you could search all the databases at once?
Well, you can!

If you've visited Ignacio's webpage lately, you might have noticed something called Research Pro. This is where you can search multiple databases at once.

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I did a search in all the databases for: film AND gender

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What do the results mean?

The first database to report back was America History and Life, so that's the results I view immediately.

As you can see, I got results from all the databases -- some more than others: 1627 hits in ATLA Religion, and 436 in OneFile.

Research Pro is most valuable in giving you an overview of the best places to search -- i.e. the places you will get the most results in the discipline you desire. If you find a particular database is providing rich information, you may want to exit Research Pro and enter that database to search it directly.

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WARNING: Sometimes your results will be skewed because of an overlap of terms. For example, the word "film" will bring up hits in various databases about movies; in scientific databases it will bring up hits about the film scientists use to view tiny organisms with microscopes.

Research Pro also has an advanced option search, which you can use to further define your search.

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Besides doing a keyword search, you can also search by title, author and subject. This is handy if a patron wants to find all the articles written by a certain person or if s/he can't remember where they found an article but has the title.

PLEASE NOTE:

1. Research Pro does not work in Safari (I know, totally lame)
2. If you select no group of databases to search from the advanced search screen, Research Pro defaults to a yucky group we're trying to eliminate -- this yucky group displays Google Image results first because Google is the fastest responding database. We don't want that there, so hopefully it will be removed soon.

Check it out and tell me how you can use this tool in your own research or helping patrons. Do you think it's cool? Or another pain in the butt?

Hi everyone!





We recently added a new databases to our robust holdings: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

This database is awesome in many ways:

• All of the content is scanned images of every page of every English book published from 1473 - 1700. Where EEBO leaves off, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) picks up (ECCO has scanned images of every English book published in the 1700s).

• It is useful not only for English majors and scholars looking for the original editions of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but also people researching Philosophy, History, Politics, Cartography, Medicine, Technology, and many other disciplines

• It is a rich resource for original illustrations, maps, portraits, musical scores, tables, and more-- for example, you can find a map of Jerusalem circa 1677, or a portrait of Shakespeare from 1632.

• Its search interface is very usable and has many options for narrowing and refining a search

• And more!

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Now let's look at some examples from the database interface



This is the advanced search screen. As you can see, there are many options. This is where you can limit to specific dates, search by author, title, keyword and more, limit to a specific kind of illustration (portrait, map, etc.), and more.

A mention worthy tool on this page is the "variant spelling" box at the very top. This is handy because the English language was not what it is now before 1700. They spelled things differently and inconsistently back then, like "alchymie" or "alchimy" for "alchemy."


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This is a sample results page:
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Thumbnail view:
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Single page image view:
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Who do you think you'll suggest this resource to?
Will you be able to use this resource in your own research?

Hello everyone!

I come bearing access to a new database: NTIS / DARTS, which is a collection of downloadable government documents. It is on the A - Z list of databases.

This database is ONLY available in Gleeson Library, and it requires a special log-in. If someone asks to use the database, log them in yourselves. DO NOT GIVE OUT THE PASSWORD.

The password is located in the Reference Department binder above the key cabinet. It's in the section "Passwords."

About NTIS / DARTS:

This database is a collaboration between NTIS and the Government Printing Office (GPO) and was designed specifically for depository libraries. The DARTS database from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) provides access to approximately 240,000 full text documents dating from 1964 to 2000. The database includes documents from the Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), and NTIS. The documents in the NTIS collection are the products of many different Federal agencies and include both agency and contract studies. Some of the major subject areas covered in this database are as follows: physics, environmental pollution and control, nuclear science and technology, medicine and biology, energy, chemistry, materials science, natural resources and earth sciences, computers and information theory.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Hi, all!

This entry brings you news about a hot new database: ScienceDirect, which comes from the company Elsevier.

ScienceDirect is a database that provides information (journal articles, books, etc.) on the sciences: chemistry, biology, physics, in addition to the social sciences and health sciences (e.g. nursing).

At this point two things are happening with ScienceDirect:

1) Right now we have a trial to the majority of the full text available through ScienceDirect. Since it is a trial, it is temporary. This still means you can use it to help people find the full text of articles they're looking for. If you execute a search in Google Scholar or Medline, for example, an link will appear beside the results. Clicking on this link will take you to the full text available through our trial. Please note: this method only works for people on campus. For off-campus access to the trial, use the link below.

The trial version gives access to tons of titles only from 1995 - present.

2) We are migrating some of our paper journal subscriptions to the electronic version via ScienceDirect. This is a permanent move, which is very different from the trial. In this case, you primarily use ScienceDirect when linked from Journal Finder.

For example:

Journal of Emergency Nursing



In this way ScienceDirect is used primarily as a collection of electronic journals (compared, for example, to the collection of paper journals on the second floor). It follows, then, that this should not be your first stop when beginning a search.

A Review:

Examples of Databases that act as a Full-Text Electronic Collection of Journals
(Not preferred for beginning searches; usually used when linked from Journal Finder)

ScienceDirect
ProjectMuse
JSTOR
Blackwell Synergy
Ovid

Examples of Citation Indexing Databases
(a good place to begin a search; usually no full text available)

Sociology Abstracts
ComAbstracts
PubMed (Medline)

Examples of Databases that do both
(a.k.a. your favorites!)

ProQuest
InfoTrac
Wilson OmniFile

Links:

On campus:

http://www.sciencedirect.com

Off campus:

http://0-www.sciencedirect.com.ignacio.usfca.edu/
(prompts for authentication)

( Click here for examples and screen shots )

Welcome back and happy New Year!

This entry brings information about a couple of new databases we now subscribe to, Computing Reviews and Safari Books Online. These two resources are aimed at those studying computer science.

To be honest, computer science majors don't come into the library very often (they usually do Google searches that turn up equally handy results), but if they do, here's the skinny on our two new CS resources.

Computing Reviews

Computing Reviews is a database that provides full text reviews of things published in the computer science field. It is a way for specialists and generalists to keep tabs on what's going on in the computing field today. Computing Reviews is a relatively unbiased source of reviews. Since a lot of the books they are reviewing probably come from specific vendors or companies, it's good to have a third party review their content to see if it's generally useful.

How to search:

The Computing Reviews interface is not like the traditional database default search interface. Most of the default interface's content is taken from Today's Issue, which includes the Editor's Pick, a quote, reviews of articles and reviews of books.




Once you have your results, you can sort them by:
• Media Type (Journals, Proceedings, Divisible Books, Whole Books, Other)
• Relevancy, Title, Author, Publisher, Published Date, Reviewer, or Date Reviewed
• Descending/Ascending Order

Safari Books Online

Safari Books Online is pretty awesome. It provides the full-text of many computer science-related books, including the O'Rielly Books (a gold standard for programing language guides (C++, Java, Perl, etc), program guides (Excel, Photoshop, etc), and operating system guides (Unix, Windows, etc), among others) and books published by Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, Adobe Press, and Microsoft Press, just to name a few. It also has some articles that are full-text!

How to search:
• Safari Books Online does not have an advanced search option, but once you complete a regular (simple) search, there are many options for sorting and narrowing your results
• The interface is pretty straightforward, yet it is customizable. You can hide (or display) the book covers, and you can hide (or display) the navigation frame on the left
• Once you have identified a book and have clicked on the title, either click "START READING ONLINE", or browse to a chapter by using the navigation frame on the left



In my opinion, Computing Reviews is not what you would want to initially use to get a CS major started on his/her research. Direct them to Safari Books Online to get them started.

If you have some time on your hands, try this out: browse (or search for) reviews of books in Computing Reviews, then once you find a good review, read the book at Safari Books Online! Or you could do it vice versa, by first finding an interesting book at Safari Books Online, then read the review of it to get an outside opinion on its usability or credibility.

Hey-- who knows! Maybe even you guys can get something out of Safari Books Online. Next time that Powerpoint presentation is stumping you or you feel the winds of Photoshop blowing your way, connect to Safari Books Online and see if there isn't something there that might help you out, too!

You guys have probably seen the isles and isles Contemporary Authors series takes up in our Reference Stacks. This series, published by Thompson Gale, is very helpful for English majors and people doing research on literature.



As you know, the drawback is that people have to actually come to the library to look at and photocopy these! With the way things are going, this stuff should just be on the internet, right?

Well, it is!

Contemporary Authors, as well as many other research titles, are available through the Gale Virtual Reference Library, which is very browse-worthy, and through the Literature Resource Center.

For this reason we are discontinuing our paper subscription to Contemporary Authors. So for the most current volumes, please refer to the databases instead of the shelf!

Worst case scenario: a patron comes up to you while there is no librarian in sight and asks, "How can I find key ratios and the ethnic make-up of the board members of these 5 companies? Some are public and some are not."

You want to run away screaming, "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"

Well, I can help you with one thing: you can no longer find business information in Hoover's database, one that is commonly requested from business students, because we are discontinuing our subscription to it.

The decision to discontinue our subscription was influenced by a few factors:

1. They were not allowing remote access to the database even though we were paying for it
2. It is equally possible to get the same information in our other business databases, such as ABI Inform Global, Business and Company Resource Center, and Mergent Online, just to name a few.


To close this one, remember if you ever feel intimidated by business questions, or any other type of research question, you can request extra training on that topic/database/etc. Just let Kelci know!

Over the summer we added another interdisciplinary database to sit along side ProQuest, InfoTrac, and LexisNexis on the Library's homepage. It is...

Wilson OmniFile!

This database is mentionworthy because it gathers information from many of the other Wilson databases and puts it all in one convenient spot. So now you can use OmniFile to search

* Education Full Text
* General Science Full Text
* Humanities Full Text
* Readers' Guide Full Text
* Social Sciences Full Text
* Wilson Business Full Text
* Applied Science & Technology Full Text
* Art Full Text
* Biological & Agricultural Index Full Text
* Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text
* Library Literature & Information Science Full Text

all at once!

Give it a try and tell me what you think!

As usual, let Kelci know if you desire training for this specific database.

At the conclusion of this past Spring Semester, we implemented the new interface for InfoTrac. It looks like this:








One of the great features of the new interface is the tabs that divide search results into categories: Academic Journals, Magazines, Reference, News, Multimedia, and Other Databases.

A new hand-out that explains how to use the new interface will be available soon.

Click here to try out the database right now!

Please let Kelci know if you desire to receive training on this database.