The Journal of the Dermatology Nurses’ Association and the Maternity and Infant Care Database from MIDIRS are freely accessible during the month of May in celebration of Nurses’ Week (which Ovid is turning into Nurses’ Month for the purpose of this promotion).
Access requires signup for each resource; click the links above or access the links via the Promotions tab on the Ovid site.
6th May 2013
Notes: 1
I wasn’t entirely sure what the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) would look like when the long-awaited launch date of April 18 approached. The suspense is finally over: it looks great.
[…]
The DPLAs not going to be a digital version of your local public library’s collections and services – at least, not yet. It is trying to do three things right now: pull together digital assets from major national and regional digital collections into a well-organized, unified, easily searchable portal; provide digital tools and metadata that others can use to build new applications; and provide national leadership in the effort to encourage open and collective access to our shared cultural record.
Last night we mentioned that Oxford University Press will provide free access in North and South America to the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Reference to celebrate National Library Week that begins on Sunday.
Today, ProQuest announced that they’re providing complimentary access to a bunch of resources and other materials in honor of National Library Week.
I don’t know that the selected materials will be much help for reference questions, but some of them are fun to poke around in. :)
Finding free quality images is a tedious task - mainly due to copyright issues, attribution requirements, or simply lack of quality. This inspired us to create Pixabay - a repository for outstanding public domain images.
You can freely use any image from this website in digital and printed format, for personal and commercial use, without attribution requirement to the original author.
(Source: twitter.com)
The Art Works Blog (from the National Endowment for the Arts Blog) offers a brief intro to the Public Art Archive database and talks with with Rachel J. Cain, the program manager of the Public Art Archive, and Anthony Radich, the executive director of WESTAF.
This looks like a neat resource for those interested in public art installations.
Here’s a cool, easy to use, free, and potentially useful keyword searchable database developed by Michael Donohoe that you might want to share, bookmark, or catalog and add to a locally developed collection of web resources.
As you enter letters into the search box the database dynamically returns NY Times clues/answers.
The database contains 432,205 NY Times clues published in The Times from 1996-2011.
(description from INFOdocket)
“Are you tired of searching for yourself in Google Scholar, Scopus, or Academic Search Complete and finding other people who share your family name? This is a serious problem for researchers, whose reputations rest on their publication history. Many researchers are working on ways to separate the agronomist Dr. Jones from the medical Dr. Jones from the archeologist Dr. Jones. ORCID, a registry that will assign a unique ID to each author, is now live. But assigning a unique ID isn’t going to help unless EVERYONE uses that ID. Up until now, different companies and products have assigned ID numbers to their authors, but nobody else uses those numbers. That’s how authors have ended up with a Scopus ID, a ResearcherID, and a different institutional ID.”
This has great potential. Scopus has been trying to do something like this for a while, but there are problems with the algorithms they use (how an author’s location is displayed can change from article to article, for instance, which can result in duplicate author profiles) and the Scopus database certainly doesn’t include everything anyway.
It will be interesting to see whether ORCID is widely adopted or not.
Also, why is it called “ORCID”? I’m assuming we’re supposed to read it like “orchid” but I’m totally reading it as orc-i.d. Too much Tolkien on my mind, I’m guessing. :)
Work is currently underway to transition the ArchiveGrid database of archival collection descriptions from a subscription service to a free service on a new interface developed and managed by OCLC Research.
A beta version of the new interface developed by OCLC Research is available at no charge at http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/. This beta has been designed to support OCLC’s efforts to expand support for this type of data, engaging with the library/archive community as we work together to create more sustainable ways to grow the collection of data and represent it appropriately in WorldCat.
As one of the people at my library who usually ends up answering history-type questions, I’m having fun poking around the beta site. :)
Dear fellow librarians, people who are returning to education as adults are easily scared away by overly complicated messages. Think about the content, timing and delivery of your messages from your customers and potential customers perspective, not from your own perspective. If you make them feel stupid or scare them off the first time they hear about you they are unlikely to ever come back because they have plenty of other ways to get just enough information that is just good enough for their purposes. Except for the very small number who are planning to take library courses they just do not need to know what a nested Boolean search is, most especially they do not need to know it in week one of their three or four year degree.
I would say that almost everyone is scared away by overly complicated messages, especially when it comes to them needing to find information to complete a task. (There’s a reason that Google is the prominent search engine! How much simpler can you get?)
Given that library systems are rather dumb on their own, librarians have been forced to focus so much effort on absurdly long and/or specific search strategies just to make the system cough up something even remotely relevant. Which is sad and somewhat pathetic. We as a profession should be able to do better than that by now. (And why are these things being taught when the search option provided by the library doesn’t even accept them? Something is wrong there.)
(Source: twitter.com)
The author name disambiguation process compares citations with the same author name. The similarity for each citation pair is measured by examining the metadata for both citations, such as co-authors, journal, title, affiliation, abstract, MeSH terms, grants, and publication date. Citations that share like author names are divided into different groups by clustering the citations that are highly similar to each other. Citations within each group are then classified as belonging to the same author.
This should be interesting to try out… author disambiguation is a tricky business.
KraftyLibrarian raised a good point:
Since most people tend to publish in their own area of expertise this should be helpful. The only thing you have to do is make sure you account for those times where they publish outside of their usual field.
(Source: twitter.com)
Oh, look, it’s actually Thursday now! :) It’s also the last day I have this week to really get stuff done—tomorrow I’m only working a half-day and have a ref desk shift and an all-hands meeting, so I won’t have much time to focus.
- Paperwork is first on the agenda: printed expense report in order to be reimbursed for the travel cost of working in the other office yesterday (which required rebooting our massive copy/print/fax machine, which takes FOREVER), tallied up reference question stats for January and collected that sheet and my timesheets to turn in for the month, started new stat sheet for February.
- Email management: skimmed/deleted new messages, did the filing I couldn’t do yesterday. Checked email periodically throughout the day.
- Reference monthly report: evidently I’m the first person to put stuff in for the January report, so I created the file and pasted in my bits under the appropriate headings—this involves checking my calendar for committee/inter-unit work, picking a few ‘interesting’ reference questions to mention, and checking my finished tasks for things like training/prof dev items to include. January was a pretty quiet month, in retrospect.
- First check of my Twitter feed and gmail, but skipped greader for now in favor of getting something done before my 10:30a refdesk shift (it’s easy to skim feeds while on the refdesk).
- Worked on the announcement that I’ve been poking at for two days. Debating whether to present the improvements as bulleted list or group them into like-items and write a short paragraph about each group. Have now written drafts both ways and I don’t know which is preferable. [I’m probably spending way too much time on this, but it’s the first thing like this that I’ve done, so there’s a lot of agonizing time involved. :) ]
- Sent both variants (plus a detail question) to the systems guy who did the improvements for an initial critique to make sure I’ve represented things accurately.
- Two hours on the refdesk. Mostly a quiet shift, but I had one of those exceedingly well-timed interactions where a coworker and I had been discussing who was handling an email about a certain topic (I hadn’t seen it yet, so I skimmed it while we were talking) and right afterward I got a phone reference question on a very closely related topic. So I was able to use some of the information from that email to help the patron. :) Also skimmed Twitter and Tumblr during the shift.
- Did my Twitter stats wrangling for January while on the refdesk.
- Upon returning to my desk, I sent the final drafts (haha, talk about a contradiction in terms!) of that new features announcement to the systems guy and the head guy; after this they’ll send it to the entire team for review/critique.
- Responded to an opinion question about checkboxes within the system’s search results (i.e. when you select a citation, how long should that selection persist? Across pages is obvious, but what if you run a new search? Should they stay or go?).
- Read some of the articles I found on Twitter and Tumblr during my refdesk shift; added a few things to my Tumblr queue.
- Reviewed the funds summary report to see if I’m one of the subjects that is guilty of not having made any selections yet this fiscal year—looks like I’ve ordered a few books, whew, but I should find some more. Added that to my to-do list for Monday to consider when I’m reviewing the weekend notifications of new items in GOBI3. (I primarily select for library and computer science but also get item notifications for biotechnology.)
- Over lunch (which didn’t occur until nearly 2pm, haha, but that’s pretty typical for me) I added notable new Twitter followers to my masterlist. I really ought to convert the list into a database or something rather than the massively messy word doc that it is, but when I started it I don’t think I expected the library account to have so many followers. :)
- Composed and sent the Twitter summary emails; one general summary goes to most of the library staff—and provides the deadline for the next month’s tweets—then more specific summaries are sent to each of the contact people from the areas that contribute content to the account.
- Finally tackled my RSS feeds, checked in on Twitter again.
- Worked a bit on the library tweets for February; scheduled tweets for tues/wed and added a note to my calendar for Monday to check up on the tweets still awaiting approval if I haven’t gotten a response by then (need to have a response in order to go any further with the scheduling). Did as much as I could to work around the missing tweets, including tweaking a few #followfriday posts and adding them to the schedule. Verified links for the tweets I scheduled.
And that’s it for me today.
Today’s soundtrack:
Ah, Tuesday… somehow this morning I got confused and fleetingly thought it was Thursday (if only!).
- Arrive, turn on some of the patron computers (I was backup librarian for first shift again)
- Took a few minutes while the email was loading to call the vet and schedule an appointment for my tabby cat
- Throughout the day: sort through the messages in the reference email box; forwarded, answered, or assigned the questions that came in (last day of the month, so I’m almost done with my tour of duty, woo!)
- Throughout the day: sort through my email box and the Twitter account mailbox, responding, deleting, or filing messages as appropriate [oh, look, my morning meeting was cancelled! :) ]
- Briefly chased away from my desk by the vacuum cleaner (it’s easier to get out of the way than stand around awkwardly while my corner is being vacuumed)
- Deal with my Gmail account and cruise through the new listserv messages
- First check of personal Twitter feed
- Library Twitter account: update the working spreadsheet with the new mentions/retweets
- Over popcorn, ponder the request for me to write an announcement of new features we’ve added to the library-designed database search platform and look over past announcements we’ve made and the list of new features to include
- Played around with some searches to make sure I was familiar with all of the new features to be announced; emailed for clarification on a few points
- Dropped in on my Twitter feed while waiting for some things to execute on the system
- Remembered it’s the end of the month; faxed in my timesheet
- Returned to planning the schedule of tweets for February that I couldn’t finish yesterday; there are a few gaps, but I’m also waiting for 7 more to be approved by higher-ups
- Scheduled February 1-6 tweets and verified the shortened links for those tweets lead to the correct pages
- Checked on my Twitter feed and skimmed through the stuff in Google Reader and Tumblr while eating lunch
- Received response to my request for clarification about improvements—a couple will be not be included in the announcement I’m to write; also included a follow-up/opinion question in response to a related-but-not question I asked, so I spent a while longer poking around the system in order to have an informed opinion for my response
- Spent the last few minutes before my ref desk shift going over the Computers in Libraries schedule
- Staffed our reference desk for the last 2 hours of the day, which mostly involved retrieving books from the book lift, transferring phone calls to the proper person, and putting paper in copiers/printers. I also managed to do a preliminary draft of that announcement and helped a pair of regulars track down a couple of call numbers that eluded them.
Tuesday’s soundtrack:
- LSO: Verdi Requiem
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (some song titles are spoilery if you haven’t seen the movie, just fyi)
- Within Temptation: The Heart of Everything
- [no music while on desk, alas]
eReaderLookup.com is a database of ebook reader devices that has quick filtering and comparison capabilities.
This website was created to facilitate the research of ebook readers. Today it is sometimes difficult to make an informed choice based on marketing campaigns of big corporations, although there might be ereaders offering much more at the same or better price.
This site offers you facts about ereaders and allows you to easily find the devices that match your parameters. Some of the information is being obtained from device manufacturers and reviews; some is being contributed by website users.
Reblogged From ebookporn
Librarians are knocking on wood when it comes to their electronic resources. The Penguin saga is just one more example that we need a course correction in how we’re approaching this issue. The problem isn’t Penguin. They are a for-profit company and are acting in their own best interest. The problem isn’t Overdrive. They are also a for-profit company and also acting in their own best interest. The problem is we have jumped into this marketplace without knowledge and we keep expecting other companies to take care of us. We expect Overdrive (and Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan, and…) to be on our side, to make sure we are protected, when that is our job. It is our job to spend the money entrusted to us by our taxpayers. It is our job to make sure libraries and librarians are not cut out of the emerging digital marketplace. It is our job to make sure that the protections we have (First Sale Doctrine, Fair Use, etc) go forward and don’t disappear.
(Source: twitter.com)
But… by the same token that these instructors are specialists in their fields, the reference librarians are specialists in library reference. No instructor in the university knows the databases as well as the reference librarians, or the ways the citations sometimes fail to surface in one way but come back in a different way. Nobody knows the resources of the library better than the librarians, and those resources aren’t always obvious, or in the library.
(Source: lisnews.org)
