Friday, December 21, 2007

Reference Road Trip to Idaho Falls

Reference Road Trip to Idaho Falls

November 30 2007

This was a fun and interesting trip. I was particularly fascinated by the INL technical Library. They have reports and other material that aren’t cataloged or referenced, but if you have the clearance you can talk to the librarians and further your research using those documents. I enjoyed touring both the University Library Center and the EITC Library also. I believe my colleagues have better described the details of this trip.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

A rant, not necessarily coherent: Thompson Gale

Thompson Gale are the tricksiest publisher's of databases I know. It's one thing to market a subset of a database as a separate database. It's another to sell two databases with different names and the exact same contents.

I couldn't believe it when I pulled up the title lists for Business & Company ASAP and General Business ASAP and the title lists were EXACTLY THE FREAKING SAME.

I emailed the company rep earlier this week asking what the differences were. I haven't heard back yet. I wonder what they're going to tell me. Maybe there's something different, but when I searched one and then the other they returned EXACTLY THE SAME FREAKING RESULTS. ARRRGH. SOoo frustrating.


The other piece about marketing a subset? Well when the state rebid the contract there was a big list of databases that were very subject specific which looked nifty. We looked at them and they were great. Come to find out each one is just a subset of full-text journals that are indexed in the larger Academic OneFile. My guess is that they were and are in the Expanded Academic database (Also searched by OneFile). When you search OneFile, you are searching most of the Gale databases that the state purchased. That's cool as long as the databases have different contents. OneFile searches both of those business databases that are EXACTLY THE FREAKING SAME.

Here's a list of those subset full-text databases

InfoTrac Agriculture Collection
InfoTrac Business Economics and Theory
InfoTrac Communication & Mass Media
InfoTrac Criminal Justice
InfoTrac Diversity Studies
InfoTrac Educators
InfoTrac Environmental Issues & Policy
InfoTrac Garden, Landscape & Horticulture
InfoTrac General Science
InfoTrac GLBT Life and Issues
InfoTrac Information Science & Library Issues
InfoTrac Insurance & Liability Collection
InfoTrac Nursing and Allied Health Collection
Infotrac Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine Collection
InfoTrac Pop Culture Collection
InfoTrac Psychology Collection
InfoTrac Religion & Philosophy
InfoTrac Tourism, Hospitality & Leisure
InfoTrac US History
InfoTrac Vocation, Careers & Technical Education
InfoTrac War & Terrorism
InfoTrac World History

It is nifty to be able to search a subset of full text journals on a specific topic. I actually LIKE this feature. BUT, when I was evaluating the package as proposed by Gale to the state, I did not know that they were subsets of a larger database. It is the marketing tactic of making us think there was more content, more databases, more access that I despise. Misleading, complicated rant, rant, rant, rant.

I should say that it was clear that they were all searched using Academic Onefile. But that is true of many other diverse databases such as Informe a Spanish language collection and LegalTrac a premier legal research database. What was not clear was the fact that they (the little fulltext dbases) were subsets of stuff already indexed.

Academic Onefile is a supersearch engine that will eventually (hopefully) search any and all Thompson Gale products purchased. Although, now that I look at the website, it does say that

"Academic OneFile is the premier source for peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources. With extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects, Academic OneFile is both authoritative and comprehensive. With millions of articles available in both PDF and HTML full-text with no restrictions, researchers are able to find accurate information quickly. Includes full-text coverage of the New York Times back to 1995. Updated daily."

Does this mean it has it's own content or is it just describing the affiliated content found in Expanded Academic and other databases.

See what I mean about misleading marketing. I can't trust them that there is original content. Not after looking at the title lists for both Business and Company ASAP and General Business File ASAP.

I sure hope the state dumps this group and goes with someone else next time around.

Jenny

Friday, October 05, 2007

Bibliographic Software

Endnote
Buy it, install on specific computer
Import from databases - yes
Import from web - no

Endnote Web
Free, web access, can install toolbar for IE or Firefox
Import or "capture" feature works sporadically to capture single references

Refworks
Web access only
Refgrabit captures information identified by ISBN, PMID, DOI

Zotero
Free, Firefox addon, only via specific browser
Capture from website easy

CiteULike
Free, web access
Import using bibtext or capture from web site or some databases]

Susan Swetnam - Carnegie Public Libraries - Lunch

Lunch with Susan Swetnam “Role of Women’s Clubs in establishing Idaho’s Carnegie Public Libraries”

This was a very interesting lunch presentation. She discussed how Intermountain West Carnegie libraries used different types of marketing schema to bring the library to life in their community.
  1. Growth, capitalism, show we're an up and coming community with great economic prospects (promoted by Chambers of Commerce and business people)
  2. Family values, we're emphasizing family values and providing good clean activities (promoted by religious groups)
  3. Educating against repression (promoted by non-religious groups)
  4. Women's Clubs used different words, but in seemed that they were raising the educational and prestige tone of the community.
I can't wait to buy her book once she publishes it!

Joy on the Job - day two

Fun is one way to bring joy to work

  1. gain perspective
  2. check belief system (the sun rises)
  3. solutions
    1. win win
    2. talk it out
    3. ask for what you need
  4. Stress strengths instead of warring with weaknesses
  5. Neutral space for problem solving
  6. discover joy of great teamwork
    1. Create hall of shame to showcase what didn’t work. This celebrates the creative process and the need for trying
  7. don’t be a parent at the office
    1. you cannot delegate standing up for yourself
  8. Get advanced training
    1. You are the CEO of your life
  9. develop a sound support system
  10. humor at work is good
  11. enjoy work/life balance
  12. develop inner harmony
  13. sleep, eat right, workout
    1. look for mood foods and power foods
Surrender what can’t be changed
Go with the flow
Call on the curious witness
Acknowledge feelings
It will tell when agonizing/fretting over something I have no control over or business about.

What are important employee motivations and morale boosters?
• Valuable contributions by sharing personal gifts, skills and talents
• Respect & fair treatment
• Pay linked to performance
• Rewarding relationships
• Create flow state, discover how to generate it in self
Not boring, not too difficult
Challenges that help learn and grow
• Develop employee strengths
• Flexible hours and other work conditions
• Encourage healthy self expression
• Support the culture
• Feedback, coaching and mentoring
• Adequate resources
• Opportunities for growth & advancement

Effective communication techniques
• Shut up and listen
• Ask: what do you want

Meaningful conflict
• Agree that disagreements are inevitable. No personal attacks
• Difficult people
Hold boundaries, don’t fight back
When personally attacked ask ‘could you please repeat that
4 / 2 breathing
Clench and release frustration

For more info see http://www.joyonthejob.info/

Joy on the Job - day two

Fun is one way to bring joy to work

1. gain perspective
2. check belief system (the sun rises)
3. solutions
a. win win
b. talk it out
c. ask for what you need
4. Stress strengths instead of warring with weaknesses
5. Neutral space for problem solving
6. discover joy of great teamwork
a. Create hall of shame to showcase what didn’t work. This celebrates the creative process and the need for trying
7. don’t be a parent at the office
a. you cannot delegate standing up for yourself
8. Get advanced training
a. You are the CEO of your life
9. develop a sound support system
10. humor at work is good
11. enjoy work/life balance
12. develop inner harmony
13. sleep, eat right, workout
a. look for mood foods and power foods

Surrender what can’t be changed
Go with the flow
Call on the curious witness
Acknowledge feelings
It will tell when agonizing/fretting over something I have no control over or business about.

What are important employee motivations and morale boosters?
• Valuable contributions by sharing personal gifts, skills and talents
• Respect & fair treatment
• Pay linked to performance
• Rewarding relationships
• Create flow state, discover how to generate it in self
o Not boring, not too difficult
o Challenges that help learn and grow
• Develop employee strengths
• Flexible hours and other work conditions
• Encourage healthy self expression
• Support the culture
• Feedback, coaching and mentoring
• Adequate resources
• Opportunities for growth & advancement

Effective communication techniques
• Shut up and listen
• Ask: what do you want

Meaningful conflict
• Agree that disagreements are inevitable. No personal attacks
• Difficult people
o Hold boundaries, don’t fight back
o When personally attacked ask ‘could you please repeat that
o 4 / 2 breathing
o Clench and release frustration

For more info see http://www.joyonthejob.info/

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Podcasting - day one

Making some Noise: Podcasting & the Power of RSS

Why RSS?
1. Better consumers of information
2. creating content for users

Student Life blog for institution (hcc central) push rss feeds from library into webct, student life blogs etc…

Articles relevant to course content funneled to own pages

askaninja.com
[Podcasting is a factory for making apple pies for whales]

Library’s are recording book talks, story time, newbooks, blurb reading, local history. Participatory web

To podcast you will need sound reducing microphone headset.

Look for podsafe music

RSS building tools:
• Rss to javascript: http://www.rss-to-javascript.com
• Feed2JS: http://feed2js.org
• Feed Digest: http://www.feeddigest.com/

RSS enabled blog:
Blogger.com
Wordpress.com

Podcasting Tools

• podcasting creation
o studio.odeo.com (free use website)
o audacity.soruceforge.net (free download, don’t forget the LAME mpe encoder download)

This was a fabulous session by Shell Drumm a dynamic speaker with an easygoing style. It was a fun, interesting and informative session!!

But I Didn’t Even Like History - Lunch with author Kirby Larson

Kirby Larson is the author of Hattie Big Sky "a young adult novel she wrote inspired by her great-grandmother, Hattie Inez Brooks Wright, who homesteaded by herself in eastern Montana as a young woman."
http://www.kirbylarson.com/bio.html

A lively speaker who talked about her history, the writing process and her books.

Delightful.

GIS and Libraries - day one

How GIS technology can assist in planning for services in your little corner of the world.

Brief history of mapping technology,

Fascinating demonstration of different web uses of GIS and layers

Websites:
http://nationalmap.gov
http://www.census.gov/main/www/access.html
http://www.insideidaho.org
http://www.compassidaho.org/prodserv/mapgis-data.htm
http://www.cityofboise.org/after3
http://www.giscafe.com
http://gis.idaho.gov/idaholibraries
http://www.geolib.org/PLGDB.cfm
http://www.geolib.org/pdf/MLSGeoMarketSize.pdf
http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer06articles/colorado-state.html
http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/1/1/3/

Keynote Speaker ILA - day one

Keynote Speaker: Reaching out to your users with technology

  • 90% of those under 35 use Instant messaging, text messaging
  • 90% of college students have cell phones.
  • Ball state university has a mobile phone formatted web presence
  • Digitizing collections, teaching community and helping them digitize their family photos, diaries etc…
  • Check out http://www.yourhub.com/NextGen a participatory webnewspaper site that has 4th – 8th graders as reporters and commentators.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

LiLI Training: Gale: Part 2

Gale Virtual Reference Library
(Ebooks)

We own the content and is maintained by Idaho Commission of Libraries, if contract ends, we'd continue to own the content.

Title list of books that the state has purchased or what we have purchased (based on authentication)

The State List Includes:
Beacham's Guide to the Endangered Species of North America , 6v, 2000
Biology , 4v, 2002
Encyclopedia of Small Business , 2nd Ed., 2v, 2002
Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine , 2nd Ed., 4v, 2005
Gale Encyclopedia of Cancer , 2nd Ed., 2v, 2006
Gale Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders , 2nd Ed., 2v, 2005
Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine , 3rd Ed., 5v, 2006
Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America , 2nd Ed., 3v, 2000
Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History , 2v, 1999
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture , 5v, 2000
World of Earth Science , 2v, 2003

Browse the books by clicking on the "Show All" link at the bottom left of the search
screen.

Click on the title of the book to browse the book.

The Idaho Commission for Libraries may be purchasing a few more books for this
collection.

Marc records can be added to your catalog.
Health & Wellness Resource Center, includes books, journals, pamphlets (not archived, but
replaced as newer is released) ... Has Alternative Health Encyclopedia. Created for consumer use.

Business and Company Resource Center
Search by Company using name or ticker symbol
Search by Industry using word, NAICS or SIC code
Search articles by keyword

In a company search result:
There are links to articles on the left bar after a search is executed
There are tabs above with links to history, short financials, industry and more

In an industry search results in datamonitor reports

The company search from the tiny greenish bar allows narrowing of the search to industry code, product, and/or location

lots more to look at...

LiLI Training: Gale: Part 1

Interesting...

http://www.gale.com (database title lists available, training info, usermanuals)

The path for help
-> technical & training
-> browse by product tab
-> technical & training resources
-> product name
---->

Fun thing: Searching for California Crops in Yahoo. Check out the link about
California's Velcro Crop

Why is the link to the gale databases from the alpha list going into power search, instead
of the list of databases?

Gale Power Search option
Right now this is the default from our "Gale Databases" on the Alphabetical list. Use
the "Change Databases" link on the upper right to get to the list.

It should be noted that Academic Onefile and/or Infotrac Onefile include these
"powerpack" databases in toto:
InfoTrac Environmental Issues & Policy
InfoTrac Criminal Justice
InfoTrac General Science
InfoTrac GLBT Life & Issues
InfoTrac Information Science & Library Issues
InfoTrac Insurance & Liability Collection
InfoTrac Tourism, Hospitality & Leisure
InfoTrac Careers & Technical Edition
InfoTrac Communication & Mass Media
InfoTrac US History
InfoTrac World History
InfoTrac Educators
InfoTrac War & Terrorism
InfoTrac Diversity Studies
InfoTrac Pop Culture Collection
InfoTrac Psychology Collection
InfoTrac Religion & Philosophy
InfoTrac Garden, Landscape & Horticulture
Military & Intelligence Databases
InfoTrac Business Economics and Theory
InfoTrac Agriculture Colection
InfoTrac Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Collection
InfoTrac Nursing and Allied Health Collection

Use the subject search option to narrow by subject and sub subject

From a list of results you can click on the mid blue bar and link Expand/Limit which will
open a list of options that you can limit or expand the current search.

Bookmarking a marked list of citations (or storing the url in some other way) will
retrieve the exact result list in useable form.

Bookmarking from the search screen (not from a marked list) will retrieve and self update
the search. (Do not set a date range or an end date. The begin date can be set.)

Use InfoMark to email the stable URL

LiLI Training: Proquest

1. eLibrary Curriculum Edition
Everything is full-text
1500+ full-text magazine titles
170+ full-text newspapers
(includes French and Spanish language titles)
170 transcript sources (e.g. 60 minutes or Good Morning America)
Requires Apple Quicktime plugin

Additional features:
multiple result list sorting
email articles
spell checker
create temporary bibliography with "my list" (does not have a portal function)
bookcart

Can change the default through the admin interface to boolean instead of the natural language search

Each icon of type (news, books, pictures, etc.) is clickable and results in a list of sources

Use the topic search to browse content, including websites. This is the only way to access the editor reviewed and selected websites. This is also a tab near the top.

Another tab is Reference and provides thesaurus, encyclopedia, dictionary and other reference resources.

Bookcarts can be created to provide permanent access to selected resources on a topic. Must be done through admin

The database is a mini-library of full text resources for all subject areas for everyone from kindergarten to university students. There are academic and peer reviewed journals in the database, along with overviews of subject areas. This is a good "encyclopedia" type resource. Where we used to go the home encyclopedia for answer now we can begin with eLibrary Curriculum Edition.

2. eLibrary Elementary Edition
Similar search interface is that the source list is pared down to a subset of the eLibrary Curriculumn Edition
75 magazines

(Can we create direct links to 3. & 4. right now they are only linked from the eLibrary Curriculum Edition)

When searching from eLibrary watch the results tabs. Results can come from #3 & #4 and are displayed only via the tabs "Literature" and "History".

3. ProQuest Learning: Literature
180,000 Searchable works
Author pages
- biography
- criticism
- bibliography
- reference resources
persistent links

Needs either RealMedia Player or Windows Media Player to view or listen to multimedia files

Knowledge Notes Study Guides
100+ plot overviews and notes

4. HISTORY STUDY CENTER
500+ Study Units
65 history guides
371 historical journals
dynamic maps e.g. show battles

Study units include editor selected websites.

Online training is available check out: http://www.proquestk12.com/

LiLI Training: Ebsco

Very interesting presentation on three databases 1. Auto Repair Reference Center, 2. Book Collectoin: Nonfiction, and 3. Book Index with Reviews.

1. Auto Repair
Oldest coverage is for the Kaiser Jeep or Volkswagon Bug (1945-1967)
In 1967 domestic car coverage begins using Chiltons info
In 2004 and moving into the present car information is coming from Delphi
In 2004 added wiring diagrams from Valley Forge

Weakness: keyword searching

2. Book Collection: Nonfiction
Treating books like journals (chapter indexing)...
Marc records are available (*856* field) for these items
Image collection items are from the Getty Image Collection

3. Book Index with Reviews
While music and videos are included in their own sections, they do not include reviews, but only include publication info.

Popularity ranking is from Baker and Taylor sales to whomever--mostly libraries)

I need to look at #3 more closely. We ran out of time.