Library Hacks » Cool tools

Wrangle your resources

Ciara Healy — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:43:53 +0000

Get wise: citation managers are time-savers!

“I read an article about that a while ago. No – wait. I cited it in a paper… What was the title again? The author’s name started with a J, I think.”

Perkins-Bostock Library offers a series of workshops for Zotero, RefWorks and EndNote. If you’d like to sign up, please do so here. Some of the benefits of these citation managers include storage of .pdfs or links to .pdfs, organization of citations and exporting bibliographies according to a variety of styles. Each of these programs also allows you to cite your references while you compose your research papers.

If you are trying to decide which workshop to take, ask your favorite professor what she or he uses to manage their citations. (In general, Zotero is used by researchers in the humanities, and EndNote is preferred by scientists and social scientists.) Keeping your research organized is smart and will be beneficial to you when it comes time to write your senior thesis, study abroad or write your graduate school applications.

Alerts!

Ciara Healy — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:38:54 +0000

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!

- Audiobooks from Recorded Books Incorporated via NC Live

Duke Libraries will be offering a great selection of downloadable audiobooks later this month, according to NC Live:
“On Monday, September 19th, NC LIVE will disable the MyiLibrary Audio Books platform from use. Beginning September 19th, you will no longer be able to access or download audio books via the MyiLibrary service.” Instead, a new audio book provider and platform – Recorded Books One Click service – will be available later this fall. The new Recorded Books platform will be an improvement with regard to download and searching capabilities.

- Information set free!

JSTOR announced today it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This Early Journal Content includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. To learn more and to watch a video tutorial on how to access Early Journal Content, click here.

NEW databases:

- DRAM – Database of Recorded American Music
From the DRAM website : “DRAM is a not-for-profit resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. Continuing in the tradition of DRAM’s sister company New World Records, one of DRAM’s primary focuses is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings that have been neglected by the commercial marketplace, recordings that may otherwise become lost or forgotten.

Currently DRAM’s collection contains more than 3,000 albums worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 26 independent labels, and we are continually working to add more content. The basis for the current collection is the diverse catalogue of American music recordings by New World Records. From folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and beyond, New World has served composers, artists, students and the general public since its inception in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.” (Quote source and more information from DRAM.)
Contact librarian: Laura Williams
Subject Categories: Arts & Humanities – Music

- Naxos Video Library
From the Naxos Video Library: “more than 250 full-length videos of concerts, operas, ballets, and documentaries from prestigious performing arts labels such as Arthaus Musik, Dacapo, Dynamic, EuroArts, H‰nssler Classic, Medici Arts, Naxos, Opus Arte and TDK. Featuring performances from legendary artists including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Martha Argerich, Gerald Finley, and celebrated conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev and many more, videos are available to stream at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps(high quality) and the service is compatible with both PC and Mac computers.”

Functions and features:

Conductor Simon Rattle

Ability to stream videos at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps (high quality) resolutions
Create custom clips, which can be edited and added to individual playlists
Access to pre-defined video chapters, as well as individual arias and scene breaks of operas
Subtitles in up to 5 languages
The ability to follow along with scrolling libretto text
View video as Full Screen, 2/3 Screen or 1/4 Screen
Advanced search functionality, including the ability to search by category, role, composer, artist, production, personnel, work venue or festival (Quote source and more information)

Contact librarian: Laura Williams

Subject Categories: Arts and Humanities, Music, Film/Video; Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video

- Political Science Complete (PSC)
From EBSCO: “PSC contains full text for more than 530 journals, and indexing and abstracts for over 2,900 titles, (including top-ranked scholarly journals), many of which are unique to the product. PSC has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse.” Topical coverage includes : Comparative politics,Humanitarian issues, International relations, Law and legislation, Non-governmental organizations, Political theory” ( Quote source, title list and more.)

What do librarians think? This database received a “Highly Recommended” rating in a 2010 issue of Choice, the American Library Association’s review magazine.
Contact librarian: Catherine Shreve
Subject Categories: Social Sciences – Political Science

- IPA Source (Transcriptions and Literal Translations of Songs and Arias)
From the IPA site: “Online since 2003, IPA Source is the web’s largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Now with over 5598 texts including 955 aria texts! Using the dropdown menus, search for titles by composer, poet, title, opera aria, or Latin text.” Tip: This resource requires the Aodbe Acrobat reader. (Quote source)

Subject Categories: Arts and Humanities – Music

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.

Learning to love the “QuickSearch” tab

Ciara Healy — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:45:02 +0000

Here is a great way to use the QuickSearch tab found on the front page of Duke Libraries webpage. Because searches in that tab search a lot – journal databases, the catalog (books), and more, it is a great place to start. In particular, it is a great way to follow up on an article or post of general interest because QuickSearch tab allows you to find most everything on a particular topic. You can get a comprehensive view in one spot.

In this example, we can follow up on an NPR story that was posted and re-posted on Facebook. In the NPR story, psychologists performed a series of experiments on inattentional blindness arising from a police brutality case from the mid-1990′s. This is a great example for Quick Search because it covers academic research, a formal psychological theory, a book about the police trial and a current event found in newspapers.

Image source: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Fence-Dick-Lehr/?isbn=9780061894022

In our first search – a search for officer “Kenneth Conley” – Quick Search returns over 200 hits, mostly newspaper articles. A search for “inattentional blindness” returns almost one thousand hits, most of which come from scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Vision or Consciousness and Cognition. (The psychologist’s study, published in the journal iPerception is also available through the QuickSearch tab.) You can also use the Quick Search tab to search for Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr’s book on the Conley case. A search for “Dick Lehr” also returns over a thousand hits, but the very first one is Lehr’s book The Fence, which is about the Conley case. You can also immediately see that The Fence is in the collection at Perkins/Bostock!

The QuickSearch tab makes it easy to find more about various aspects of the original story with a few searches, zeroing in on what aspects interest you.

Zotero + WordPress = Zotpress

Ciara Healy — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:40:23 +0000

This in just yesterday from Zotero’s blog: “A new third-party plugin called Zotpress is now available. It runs on WordPress, the open source platform widely used for personal, professional and course websites and blogs. Zotpress was created by community member Katie Seaborn, and it allows you to pull and organize items from your or another Zotero library into your WordPress site. The plugin harnesses the power of Zotero’s server API by grabbing library data dynamically and presenting it outside Zotero.

So why would you use it? Zotpress is great for scholars or job hunters who want to easily organize their CVs or resumes on their personal websites. Teachers can use it as well to present bibliographies to students. Or, if you just want to share some stuff you’ve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zotero’s mission by offering a new and easy interface to share your data freely with the world.”

This is great timing for Duke, because Duke WordPress was just updated to version 3.1.2 earlier this week. For members of the Duke community using WordPress for classes, group projects or multimedia presentations, you can now easily show your scholarly side, using Zotpress. For more information about Duke WordPress, contact the OIT Help Desk, and for more information about Zotpress, ask Ciara Healy, support librarian for Zotero.

Alerts!

Ciara Healy — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:40:30 +0000

This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!

Database Upgrade -

On Wednesday, 1 June 2011, IEEE will implement an upgrade to the IEEE Xplore digital library. There is no scheduled downtime during this upgrade.

Specific improvements with this upgrade include

One of the largest technical and scientific associations in Europe – VDE VERLAG (VDE) - integrates VDE’s conference proceedings into IEEE Xplore. This includes 3,100 VDE conference papers from 20+ annual conference titles, with 1,000 new articles being added every year.
Sort search results by “Most Cited”: This upgrade includes a new feature to IEEE Xplore that will allow you to sort your search results by “Most Cited”. Also, you will also see the article’s citation count in the article metadata. Find articles of high impact quickly with this new feature.
Quickly and easily perform your search in IEEE Xplore and also see further relevant results from scitopia.org based on your search terms. Sciptopia.org provides a federated search of content from 15 leading scholarly society publishers in science and technology.
eBooks – a dedicated web page has been created for eBooks OPAC that includes both the HTML persistent link list as well as the Excel versions and Customers with OpenURL activated on their account will now find OpenURL links next to eBook chapters. (IEEE information for this post provided by IEEE.)

Change Over Time

From the University of Pennsylvania press, “Change Over Time is a new, semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Themes will be examined at all scales, from the global and regional to the microscopic and material.”
This journal can be readily accessed through Duke’s ProjectMUSE database subscription. (Journal description provided from ProjectMUSE.) Here is a link to the journal’s web page, with information on the Spring & Fall 2012 calls for papers.

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama and Fiction

“The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish. The three major components deliver approximately 200 novels and many hundreds of short stories; 20,000 pages of poetry; and more than 450 plays… Social historians will find much of value in Latino Literature…Authors are indexed for national heritage, gender, birth and death dates, literary movement, occupation, and more.” (Description excerpted from longer description provided by Alexander Street Press.) Free, browse-only access provided here, by Alexander Street Press.

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.

Articles Search Gets Upgrade

Karen Jean Hunt — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:03:33 +0000

New Articles Tab Tip

When you return from Spring Break, the articles search from the library homepage will look a little different. There will be no changes to the look of the homepage or the Articles tab, but your search results will reveal an improved system for finding articles.

The big improvements will be speed and a more comprehensive search. The new system creates a single index (like Google), which allows for much faster searching–results will display in around 2 seconds. The new system also includes much more content, searching over 90 percent of our journal subscriptions, giving users access to a much larger (if not complete) slice of Duke Libraries’ resources.

When searching from the Duke University Libraries’ homepage, you’ll be searching only for journal articles (the “Content Type” box on the left will be checked Journal Article.) Any subsequent search from the results page will search across all content types, adding books, newspaper articles, etc. You may search across all Duke Libraries collections simultaneously, but there may be times when you want to see only books, only journal articles, etc. You have complete control over this–-simply check the appropriate box under “Content Type.”

We are excited about this new search tool and welcome your feedback as you begin to use it.

Contact / For more information

Michael Peper
michael.peper@duke.edu

Practice GRE, MCAT, LSAT, and GMAT tests from the library!

Meghan Gamsby — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:32:32 +0000

Are you thinking about going on in school? Do you want to get some practice in before taking your GRE, MCAT, GMAT, or LSAT? Well the library can help! We have a database called Learning Express Library that can help. Once you get into the database, create a free account so that you can keep track of your results. Then click on College Students in the menu on the left. Then choose Graduate School Entrance Exams Preparation. Choose the test you want and get started!

Get started here!

Peace Corps turns 50 – March 1, 2011

Karen Jean Hunt — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:19:39 +0000

To honor the 50th anniversary, we would like to showcase four Returned Peace Corps Volunteers currently working in the Perkins Library:

Michael Peper

Michael Peper, Librarian for Math and Physics
Benin
Education (TEFL)
2003-2005

Kimberly Burhop-Service

Kimberley Burhop-Service, Manager, Library Human Resources
Gabon
Education
1993-1995

Jean Ferguson, Head, Research and Reference Services
Poland
Education
1991-1993

Karen Jean Hunt (left)

Karen Jean Hunt, Librarian for African Studies and African American Studies
Kenya
Education
1986-1988

Zotero has some new features

Ciara Healy — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:52:59 +0000

Are you an EndNote or RefWorks user? Many people on Duke’s campus are. There is an open source alternative, however that you might want to check out. Starting out as a Firefox browser plug-in, Zotero let users capture any bibliographic information they came across while on the internet. With a click, you could capture and store bibliographic references from Amazon, Google Book or anywhere else. You could also organize your references in folders, search your folders and generate works cited pages.

Now Zotero has a stand alone option (in beta) that works with Google Chrome AND Safari. Granted, this makes Zotero have pretty much the same features as EndNote and RefWorks in that all three now have web based and desktop solutions for citation management.

What makes Zotero competitive? Try it and find out. Duke Libraries now offers some support for Zotero users, similar to the help you can get with RefWorks and EndNote, as well as upcoming instruction opportunities.

For more information on Zotero’s latest standalone option, click here. To find out more about Zotero support within the Duke community, contact librarian Ciara Healy at Perkins Library.

Written by Ciara M. Healy

African American Research Database Trials

Karen Jean Hunt — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:32:29 +0000

Resources Currently Open for Testing by Duke University Affiliates

Go to: Database Trials

20th Century African American Poetry:
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove 2011-02-28

African American Biographical Database:
The African American Biographical Database (AABD) brings together in one resource the biographies of thousands of African Americans, many not to be found in any other reference source. These biographical sketches have been carefully assembled from biographical dictionaries and other sources. This extraordinary collection contains extended narratives of African American … 2011-02-27

Black Abolitionist Papers:
This collection documents the efforts of African American activists in their international effort to abolish slavery in the United States. Covering the period 1830-1865, the 15,000-item collection records the full impact of African American efforts to oppose slavery by displaying the writings and publications of the activists themselves. 2011-02-28