Because of a generous gift from the Telfords, we were able to purchase six new e-reference titles:
All of these are permanent additions to our collection, not subscription based, and are all cataloged in Annie.
As promised, we now have access to SciFinder Web. We will have use of the client version of SciFinder until May 1, 2009, at which time CAS will no longer recognize our software.
You will be required to register for a user account. Go to the description page, and follow the links, which will take you to a restricted registration URL to create your user account. After your account is approved, just go to https://scifinder.cas.org to start searching.
Remember that this database is restricted to ONLY Washington and Lee students and faculty. Please do not give out the registration URL to those outside of the W&L community. If you have questions, please let me know.
Just before break, I received an email from CAS announcing that W&L has been selected to switch over to a web-based version of SciFinder. This has the potential of making everyone's life much easier, since we would not need to update any software or worry about which machines on campus have the software installed. It would presumably be accessible through the library website as are our other electronic library resources. Anyone who uses it would have to create a "user account" the first time, and log in with that information each time after that.
While we are not able to run a trial for this new platform, there is a demo at http://www.cas.org/products/scifindr/sfweb/sfwebflash.html that shows you what the new product will look like and function like. From what I can tell, it has all the same features as the client-based version, with a few extra features thrown in. For more information on the product, go to http://www.cas.org/products/scifindr/sfweb/index.html .
When we switch to the web version, we should have concurrent access to both the web version and the client-based version that you use now for at least 30 days. This will make the transition a little easier. I will be scheduling several open training sessions in the coming months to acclimate you to the new product. Also, on Feb 3, at 1 p.m., I will be attending a "webinar" demonstrating the new product. If you'd like to listen in, please let me know. In the meantime, if you have questions, comments or concerns, please leave them in the comments of this post so we can all discuss this.
For those of you who use ScienceDirect often, or read Elsevier journals, this e-learning workshop is for you.
If you want to avoid a cluttered email inbox and never miss another update, using RSS feeds are the solution. Many people are afraid to get started with RSS feeds and feed readers, but once you get used to them, they are priceless. The free Elsevier workshop will show you how to use the feeds that are provided on the ScienceDirect platform to manage your current awareness services. Be sure to register quickly, they are scheduled for December 12 and 14 at 10 a.m.
I recommend you watch a very short video I created for the Tech Fair that explains what RSS is and how RSS feeds can help you. There is also an explanatory page at http://library.wlu.edu/howto/rssfeeds.asp.
For those of you using Macs, there is an interesting update to a Dashboard widget that allows you to browse the archives of well-known geophysical research journals, including those from the AGU, AMS, and EGS. JournArch now also allows you to search Google Scholar, and archived content from AGU, AMS and EGS. This widget was developed by an oceanographer at MIT, and is available for free.
Great news! We are going to start circulating bound periodicals and reference books in both Telford and Leyburn, starting today. This means that faculty, staff, and students must either use the self-checkout station or the staffed circulation desk to check out these materials instead of the notebook at the circulation desk. The check out period is for 24 hours, and your Annie account will reflect what you have checked out. Remember that only the bound periodicals will circulate this way. Faculty and staff will still be able to sign out newer, unbound periodicals using the spiral bound notebook.
As always, if you use a bound periodical but do not check it out, please DO NOT reshelve it. I know it is courteous to keep the library neat and tidy, and I appreciate the effort, but this is the only way that we know which periodicals are getting used. We keep track of what we reshelve, and these statistics are very important. You will find book trucks in the stacks where you can place bound volumes after you use them, or you could always bring them to the circulation desk.
You may recall that we have freed up some monetary resources by dropping our subscription to Web of Science in favor of Scopus. As part of the overall process of reviewing the science library's collection, it is time to think about how to enhance our collection using these monetary resources. At this point, there are two options:
On Monday, I attended the Oberlin Group meeting for science librarians at Oberlin College. I was hoping for cooler weather, but we reached 80 degrees Monday afternoon. Oh well. Here's a summary of what we discussed.
Throughout the day, open access was a prominent topic. We had Ray English, director of libraries at Oberlin and SPARC-er, open the day with a pep talk on open access, which seemed to follow us throughout the day's discussions. The first official program was on social software, called Virtual Outreach and Reference. Several librarians presented how their libraries are using IM, YouTube, and blogs to push information to users. One thing I noticed is that every single library had a prominent IM presence. Every library uses Meebo and has a common account that all librarians use, much like we use at the reference desk. They seem to be having a lot of success with IM reference, and they all have the chat box appear on the library homepage as well as other pages.
The next interesting presentation was on Scientific Literacy, which is often mistaken for information literacy. Scientific literacy goes a step beyond and uses concepts in science to enable users to interpret and analyze scientific information rather than just absorb facts. There seems to be a big problem, which I have noticed at W&L as well, with people relying on the mainstream media for their science. Often, the media misinterpret findings, or purposely skew results to fit an agenda. I mentioned that we get people in the science library looking for the "latest headline" who are disappointed when they read the original research and find that the results were drastically altered for mainstream consumption. I suggested that this be discussed more in-depth at the next meeting.
The last part of the day we talked about periodicals. I gave my presentation on our JSTOR project from ALA Midwinter, which is not news to anyone here. Another librarian talked about how her library at Trinity had dropped the Elsevier contract in favor of a "pay-per-view" model for ScienceDirect. I found this extremely interesting, considering we subscribe to journals via ScienceDirect that have very high cost per use. Her argument was that it was better to spend $90 on 3 articles than $5,000 on a year's subscription that would still only be used 3 times. When asked about browsing, my first thought was that not many folks come in to browse current periodicals. My second thought was that we need to continue to push RSS, as I think this the new version of browsing.
At the end of the day, we talked about future meetings. I would like to see an annual meeting, but that didn't seem feasible to some of the rest of the participants. (Oh, how lucky we are here at W&L!) I hope that future meetings will build on this first one, so that we don't have to catch up every time and can just get to business.
UPDATE: We are currently the only library dropping WoS in favor of Scopus. Trinity is currently thinking of doing the same, but haven't made a concrete decision, and Thomson is apparently giving them a little extra time to decide. People were shocked when I announced what we were doing, but when I mentioned that we had no backfiles and that we were getting a good deal on Scopus, they were actually jealous. Most of the schools had backfiles to at least 1960, so it was obvious that giving up WoS would be a bad move on their part.
Journal of Nature Science and Sustainable Technology is a brand new peer-reviewed journal from Nova. From the website:
There are thousands of science and engineering journals but this is the only journal promoting the approach that breaks out of the traditional path of linearizing natural phenomena and accepting research that is inherently pro-nature. This journal offers the best hope of finally emulating nature rather than deviating from it.
* Cross posted at New for Environmental Studies
Occasionally, I read something that I want to share with my colleagues, both in the library and in the science departments. Now I'll be sharing these through my Google Reader account. Just go to http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11993551707498290882 to see what I'm currently interested in. If you don't want to keep visiting this page to see if I've posted anything new, use the RSS feed in your feed aggregator.
This is also a great way to keep your departmental colleagues aware of news items, new articles and other work that you are interested in, in real time. You can "invite" others to view your shared items, or create a departmental account that all can log into. The possibilities are overwhelming!
If you'd like help getting set up with Google Reader or any other feed aggregator, or simply want to know more about RSS feeds, please let me know.