Who's your Daddy?

Busy morning! There was more searchers than neurologists looking for Britney Spears' brain! This got me to trying a few search engines and coming up with such differing results. Sally, the Boolean logic queen, has skills to tame the most unruly search engine but still gets frustrated. Ken and I had a discussion about which search engine to use and we decided that if you rely on one search engine to do your business-think again! Like Google Scholar, for instance. How do you know what resources they are pulling from? How do you know how comprehensive it is? How can you be sure that any search engine is not serving up yesterday's lunch or just corporate sites that have paid to be there? How can you trust anything you read on the internet? This left me with the thought...who's your daddy? You are! You decide what to trust by teaching yourself to look for trustworthy sites of integrity. Here's a site to start with that: Evaluating Internet Sources

Bring your own popcorn!

Lisa just hooked movie tutorials to some of our database titles in our list of databases on the library webpage. I don't know about you, but some of the databases have many elements to choose and it is bewildering to me. I have listened to the tutorials and they are illuminating. Here's what one (Academic Search Premier) looks like in the listing of the databases:

Academic Search Premier Large database of scholarly and popular journals covering variety of academic subjects; includes full-text journals back to 1985, abstracts back to 1984, peer-reviewed articles and some newspapers. Click here for a tutorial

Try it! Just click on the link and learn all about it!! Pass the popcorn!

My secret wish for cellphones in the library!

Leaping Literature!

We have a new database! It is called Literature Resource Center and is found in our database list at http://pierce.eou.edu You can search by using the author's name, by type of author (nationality, ethnicity, genre, theme, and literary movement. You can search by document type and title of a work. This is one-stop shopping for information on literature and 120,00 authors! It has timelines so that you can place an author into historical perspective, bibliographies of the author's works and about the author, reviews of their work.....it has it all! Oh, except the paper you have to write. We'll leave that to you!

Let's Be Civilized-Turn the Dang Thing to Silent!

We know you are addicted to communication devices. How do we know? The dang things go off here every day. To get into the library, patrons pass at least one sign that states library policy-"Silence your cellphone." I don't remember there being a line on the sign that says "This policy applies to everyone but you."

Let's try harder to not disturb our fellow learners! Turn them to silent when you enter. Besides, that little buzz in your pocket is pleasant!

Keep ya' posted!

EBSCO (one of our database vendors) is offering us a cool new feature! You can have the tables of contents of journals delivered to you via email. Say you are following a topic in a journal that you want to keep on top of and don't wnat to remember to look in that journal every single month or issue date. This service just lets you know,based on your keywords, that an article has been published that you need to see.

Here's how you do it:
Creating a Table of Content Alert from Ebscohost

1. Open an EBSCO Host database from the Pierce Library page. Use the first one "Academic Search Premier."
2. Click on “Sign into my EBSCOhost” link (top left.)
3. Click on “I’m a new user” link or login if you have a login already.
4. Fill out the form and submit the info.
5. Click on the “Publications” link.
6. Select the journal you would like to receive alerts of TOC in your email
7. Click on the “Journal Alert” on the right side of the screen
8. Fill out the form (Run alert time, email address, and subject) and then click
save (if you would like to setup for multiple emails then put a semicolon between each address)
9. Repeat #5-8 for each title you would like to add.

How much fun is that?

Whatta ya call that web page again?

Ever try to cite a webpage in a bibliography but have no clue what the title is? It happens a lot because web pages follow no standard protocol. Check this out...Even cats have websites http://www.mycathatesyou.com

The title is the text within the title tag when you select View/Page Source from the menu bar. That would make the title of this page as follows:

title="My Cat Hates You"

You will see this text displayed at the very top left corner of the window above the menu bar. There's more than one way to skin a...ooops! Sorry, Fluffy!

Industrious ILL!

We can't pay these people enough in my book! As a distance student, I am surviving by the graces of the ILL staff here at Pierce and at the Buley Library at my grad school, Southern Connecticut State University. I am writing a paper on Sarah Byrd Askew, an early library pioneer during the New Deal (she is fascinating!) and her writings are hard to secure and so are the reference books with biographical information. On several occasions, they have found just the article I needed!

However, sometimes I create more work for them than necessary because I cannot see the table of contents to guarantee if Sarah Askew is listed. The entire reference book comes in (some of them are huge!) for no reason. I check the table of contents and if she is not there....back to its home it goes creating a lot of work for the ILL folks for my five minutes of scanning.

Enter a solution! Google Books! Go to http://books.google.com and type in the title of the book you want to use. Try "Book Lust" as a demo if you can't think of anything. As soon as the cover of the book appears, the Table of Contents is on the top left in the navigation page. Cool? Yes. No more asking for a book through ILL without knowing if it will really help me!

Free word processor...no, really!

So, you are sitting at a computer that does not have Word installed. Bummer. You really want to start that paper but don't want to have to type it over or have some funky filter in Word interpret "It was a dark and stormy night" into "Is &t8s98y 9 808yu098u%$%$%$%$%" Or, imagine this! You have a document on your flash drive and just want to put some final touches on it and print it out. No Word--sunk deeper than whale poop.

Try Zoho Writer found at: http://www.zohowriter.com/Home.do It writes like Word, saves like Word, it's free. What's not to love????

Messka, Mooska. . .

Mouseketeer! We have new mice on the Macs in the ERC! Now, you can right-click and be able to run the contextual menus with the big dogs!