The new look of the search interface for articles and databases went live this morning.

The functionality of the interface is almost exactly the same as the old site:

1. a quick keyword search for articles (searching top article databases including ProQuest and Academic OneFile)
2. an advanced article search that allows author and title keywords and allows you to choose a list of top databases for your subject (Arts and Humanities, Government, Life Sciences, etc.)
3. search for an article database by name, or browse an A-Z list of all our databases
4. browse for a database by your subject or discipline

The E-journals interface is unchanged; the new look debuted this summer.

Our first tip:
Why log in? I asked the developers and they explained that there’s no real need to log in if you are using the interface from a campus computer, but if you are off-campus, logging in gives you the full access to the databases through EZ-Proxy.

How do you like the new look and feel? Have you discovered any tips or time-savers to make this interface work for you? We’re just getting comfortable with it ourselves, so we’d love a chance to learn from you!

Written by Phoebe Acheson

I hope many of you are reading my words right now thanks to an RSS feed – you’ve subscribed to this blog through Bloglines or Google Reader or your choice of aggregator. We make the RSS feed of the blog available in DukePass and it may soon be appearing on the Duke Libraries home page. You can add it to your Facebook page using the application FlogBlog.

RSS feeds can do a lot more than just allow you to spend hours procrastinating from your research by reading blogs that other people write as a form of procrastination. Many providers of article databases now allow you to set up repeated searches (often called “alerts”) that will deliver articles relevant to your work via an RSS feed. You can set up a search that sends all new articles from the most relevant journals in your field (a do-it-yourself table of contents service), or all new articles written on a topic, using a keyword search or subject heading.

The University of Wisconsin Library has set up a guide to databases that offer alert services – some of them only have traditional email alerts, which generally require you to register, but RSS feeds are noted when available, and they seem to be an increasingly popular offering. If you’re not sure what vendor provides your favorite database, look up the database in our finder, and click the “i” link for information. The vendor will be noted.

For an example, The Shifted Librarian raves about EBSCO databases’ newly revised RSS feed services – one click of a bright orange link gets you a url for the search that you can drop into your RSS feed tool. EBSCO databases at Duke include Academic Search Premiere, ATLA, ERIC, MLA, PsycINFO, and many others.

Some Gale databases have recently added the same feature: see the RSS4lib blog post for a screenshot. Academic Onefile (until recently called InfoTrac Onefile) is the biggest Gale database at Duke that has this enabled.

Automating searches for new articles in your field is a great way to keep up with what’s new – and RSS delivers it directly to you. Do you have another RSS feed research tip to share? Leave a comment!

Written by Phoebe Acheson

It’s back to school time, and that means faculty and instructors all over campus (and sometimes all over the world) are putting books on reserve, setting up e-reserves through the library, and linking from their Blackboard sites to online articles that we have access to through our subscription databases. Perkins Reference and CIT staff have been getting a lot of questions about how to find stable URLs for these articles, so we made up a web page to help: http://library.duke.edu/research/help/databases/stableurl.html

Please Ask a Librarian if your question isn’t answered there!

Written by Phoebe Acheson

I was reading the Thingology Blog (by Tim Spaulding, creator of Librarything) and ran across this aside

***I particularly recall how one of my professors tended never to know the *titles* of books she’d recommended to me. She’d say “that new book on Athenian demes by so-and-so.” The authors were all colleagues and friends of hers. … It didn’t help that the titles in academics are often bland affairs, “aiming higher” than their obscure topic in the hope of appealing to a broader audience—”Art, Difference and Culture” subtitled, “16th-century non-guild stonemasons in Malta,” etc.

I recall so vividly the same sensation from my days as an undergraduate and beginning graduate student. You end up with half-remembered titles, badly-spelled (or no) names, and a vague idea that this is all VERY IMPORTANT. Many of us are too shy to simply email the professor and ask for clarification. So where do you go from there?

For books, the place to start is WorldCat. WorldCat is a database – look for it under Popular Databases or search our database finder. It’s the world’s online catalog – it has everything in Duke’s catalog, and everything in UNC’s, and everything in the Charlotte Public Library’s, and everything in Harvard’s – you get the idea. It’s by no means perfect as a universal catalog, but it’s pretty good. Among its many uses:

1. Checking to see that you have a good citation. If searching in Duke’s catalog doesn’t find you a book, maybe it’s not that we don’t have it; maybe you’ve got it a little bit wrong. Check on it by checking WorldCat. If nobody has it, well, maybe that author’s name isn’t really Gnarl after all.

2. Starting to look for books on a topic when you don’t want to limit yourself to just what Duke owns. If your research project is a big one, and you have time to request materials through Interlibrary Loan, why not cast the net wide as you begin? Do a keyword or subject search in WorldCat, not just Duke’s catalog. We can’t own everything! If we do own it, WorldCat will tell you so, and provide the Get It @ Duke link.

Written by Phoebe Acheson