Monthly Archives: May 2008

Library Hacks, Question of the Week, Tips for students

Can I request a book that is already checked-out?

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Yes. You can use the catalog “Request” link in order to have a checked out book returned and held for you.

Here’s how it works:

  • If the item has been checked out for at least two weeks, it will automatically be recalled for you (each borrower is guaranteed two weeks)
  • Once an item has been returned to the pickup library, you will be sent an email notification and it will be held for 10 days

All patrons are eligible to request a hold on materials currently checked out. Only Duke students, faculty and staff and TRLN patrons are eligible for recall privileges.

More details and screen-shots on Recalls and Holds can also be found on our website.

Written by Kathi Matsura

Catalog Tip, Library Hacks, Question of the Week, Tips for students

What is the LSC?

The Library Service Center (LSC) is an off-site storage facility where materials are kept at optimal environment levels to help ensure their longevity. An item located at the LSC can be retrieved when requested, but there are slightly different procedures for Duke patrons and guests:

Duke community:

  • Click on the “Request” link in the library catalog
  • After entering your Net ID/password, indicate a library location for delivery
  • An email will be sent to you when the requested materials arrive at the library

Guests:

Helpful screen shots and detailed instructions can also be found here.

Written by Kathi Matsura

Catalog Tip, Cool tools, Library Hacks

LibX updated – bug fixes and new search options

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If you’re a user of the Duke LibX browser plugin for Firefox, you should soon be getting prompted by Firefox to update the plugin. If you want it right away, go to the Tools / Add-ons menu and click “Find Updates” in the Extensions tab.

The new version is 1.2.8, and includes a couple of changes.

One is that the embedded “cues” stopped working in Amazon pages a while back, and this new version applies a fix that makes them work again. When you’re viewing a book page in Amazon, you should see the Duke Library icon next to the book’s title (looks like this: Reading Blue Devil icon – it’s a silhouette of the Reading Blue Devil weathervane on top of the von der Heyden Pavilion). If you click on the icon, it will start a search in the Duke Library Catalog to see if Duke has the book for you to check out.

The other change is the addition of the option to search the new Search TRLN system via the LibX browser bar and right-click menu. The menu item (labeled “Search Triangle Research Libraries”) will search the catalogs of Duke, NCCU, NCSU, and UNC-CH and show you results from all for universities. There’s more information on Search TRLN in this earlier post.

Places you can search using the Duke LibX browser add-on

And you can read more about all of the other things LibX can do in this earlier post about Duke LibX or on the Duke LibX download page.

If you’re a Duke LibX user, please tell us in the comments section what you like or don’t like about it, and if there are things you’d like to see changed added to it. If you’re not already using it, try it out!

Duke researchers, Library Hacks, Question of the Week

Can a book be delivered to another library?

You are referring to a system called BARD (Book/Article Delivery) which is available to Duke faculty and Duke graduate students. It allows you to request books and articles for delivery and pick-up from one Duke library to another Duke library location.

A great page with screen shots and instructions is linked above, or you can just follow these easy directions:

  1. Find the item in the library catalog
  2. Click on the item’s call number
  3. Click on the “Request” link on the far right side of the screen
  4. Fill in the requested information

Written by Kathi Matsura

Citing Sources, Cool tools, Library Hacks

Connotea — another look

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In Ted’s recent comments on connotea, he said he enjoyed it, but found that connotea was not such a great citation manager; it doesn’t always gather the metadata needed. On the connotea site, it explains that it is “specially designed for scientists and clinicians,” so it gathers bibliographic data better for some sites than others.

I agree, connotea is no substitute for a bibliographic reference manager like Endnote (to which Duke subscribes) or Refworks. I also agree that it’s “downright fun!” As a librarian, I use it as an academic networking tool, to find, track and tag resources as I come across them. It’s very handy for retrieving items on a particular topic, and for creating feeds for specific classes–I tag resources with the course name.

Ted was also concerned about messy tags. The “related tags” on the right belong to other users, who may create them however they’d like.

That’s both the beauty and the chaos of a Web 2.0 tool–everyone gets to play, and you can follow their leads, or not.

So, the short answer is: the value of connotea depends on your purpose. For a free web-based citation manager, you might like to try zotero (from an earlier LibraryHacks post):

The open-source Zotero (part 1 / part 2) is [a] Firefox extension that allows you to store, retrieve and organize your reference sources for a more streamlined citation process.

Has anyone out there done more than a first foray into zotero? Please send us your comments.

Citing Sources, Cool tools, Duke researchers, Library Hacks, Research Help

Save time! Learn EndNote!

Start your summer research with a bang by learning to use EndNote, a reference management tool that is sure to save you time and frustration. Duke faculty, students and staff may download EndNote to personal or work computers, free of charge.

Perkins Library is offering a free introductory EndNote session on Tuesday, May 27 from 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM in Bostock Library, Room 023. We’ll provide an orientation to the software, show you how to set up your personal EndNote library and then teach you to format a bibliography in a couple of keystrokes.

Interested? Register today! And stay tuned for more Intro and Advanced EndNote sessions this summer!

Catalog Tip, Library Hacks

Search TRLN: Facets for Refining Searches

We have already highlighted a couple of features of the Search TRLN Catalog, which allows users to search the combined library catalogs of Duke, UNC, NCCU and NCSU. If you missed them, see our posts on spelling correction and quotes.

Probably Search TRLN’s most innovative and powerful feature is that is it a “faceted browser” interface. After you perform an initial keyword search, you can narrow your result set by choosing one or more ‘facets’ from the menu on the left side of the screen.

Here’s an example. I am interested in Pylos, a Bronze Age archaeological site in Greece, which was also the site of a famous Classical Greek naval battle, and is today a small city that occasionally hosts academic symposia.

A keyword search for “pylos” pulls up books relevant to all of the above, but I am particularly interested in the Linear B tablets from Pylos, so I click the relevant facet under Subject:

pylos1.jpg

Many of the hits are in languages I don’t read, so I open the Language facet to narrow my search to only items in English:

pylos2.jpg

Search TRLN keeps track of the facets I have chosen, and I can broaden my search again by clicking the x to stop using one of the facets:

pylos3.jpg

Other facets available include format (book, dissertation, map…), location (at Duke?), author, year of publication, and call number range. Happy faceting!

Written by Phoebe Acheson

Catalog Tip, Library Hacks

Search TRLN Tip 2: Quotes!

Another great new feature of the Search TRLN interface for searching across the Duke, NCCU, NCSU and UNC libraries is that you can use quotation marks in the search box.

Quotes are a great tool when you know the item you want and are trying to find it. Sometimes a Keyword or Title Keyword search returns irrelevant hits – though honestly, the Search TRLN algorithm is really good: in my experimenting, I found that usually the title I want is on the first page of hits. If you have trouble finding your title, putting quotation marks around it will usually help the item you want rise to the top of the results list.

You can also use quotes to link together keywords into a phrase. Instead of searching for ‘social activism’, which gets you 1746 results, try ‘”social activism”‘, which results in only 164 hits – much easier to browse through.
quotes.jpg

Written by Phoebe Acheson