Talking in the Library

RefWorks unavailable on January 2, 2010

Due to maintenance, RefWorks will be unavailable on January 2, 2010. They are updating their servers and getting a new IP address (that means something to somebody, I'm sure).

Right now, we're anticipating that this will go smoothly. 

However, if you'd rather be safe than sorry, you may wish to backup your RefWorks account. Here's a tutorial showing you how to do so.

Please let us know if you have problems connecting to RefWorks after the 2nd--if you don't tell us, it's likely we won't know it needs fixing. Ask a Librarian will be the best way to let us know as Sara K. Kearns, K-State's RefWorks Guru, will be out of the office (the folks at RefWorks did not clear this with her schedule.)

Remember, if you have any questions about using RefWorks, a good starting point for answers is our RefWorks Help Center.

Due to maintenance, RefWorks will be unavailable on January 2, 2010. They are updating their servers and getting a new IP address (that means something to somebody, I'm sure).

Right now, we're anticipating that this will go smoothly. 

However, if you'd rather be safe than sorry, you may wish to backup your RefWorks account. Here's a tutorial showing you how to do so.

Please let us know if you have problems connecting to RefWorks after the 2nd--if you don't tell us, it's likely we won't know it needs fixing. Ask a Librarian will be the best way to let us know as Sara K. Kearns, K-State's RefWorks Guru, will be out of the office (the folks at RefWorks did not clear this with her schedule.)

Remember, if you have any questions about using RefWorks, a good starting point for answers is our RefWorks Help Center.

Mind the Gap: What is a primary source?

Primary sources are lovely. Tim Watts, our history librarian, defines primary sources as, "Anything that has been created by a person who witnessed or experienced an event as a contemporary would be a primary source. Examples of primary sources would include letters, diaries, autobiographies, and contemporary documents such as newspaper articles, government documents, and oral histories."

My most engrossing experiences in library school involved days when I delved into the primary source documents of the Japanese-American internment and resettlement files in the National Archives. I read testimony of people who had been interned, studied photographs, and read government edicts like Executive Order 9066, the order that directed the internment of Americans of Japanese heritage.

Unfortunately, as Mary W. George discusses in her blog post: FUNQs: Won't Ask, Won't Tell, there may not be enough conversation between faculty and students about what constitutes a primary source, or how to locate them. And if students are unclear about what a primary source is, the odds of them finding these sources drop to well, just about nil.

Since K-State Libraries is rockin', we have many, many, many primary sources. For those related to K-State, you can check out our University Archives. Students in many classes across campus have already, including Dr. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow's senior history research seminar. You may also uncover primary sources in our Rare Books collections, like the swatch books in the Historic Costume and Textile Collection.

Our microforms collection houses documents like the Papers of Frederick Douglass, the Boston Symphony Orchestra Program Notes,1881-1975, and Albert Einstein's Collected Writings, 1901-1956. 

We've also been adding digitized primary source materials online, through our databases. They're easy to find, just go to the Libraries home page, click on Databases, and then choose "Primary Source" as your subject. 

My current favorite? Well, it's a tie. I'm having fun with the Historical New York Times, especially after working with a patron who recently rediscovered his wife's engagement photo from the 1960s!  But American History in Video has cool features like the ability to watch films like Ken Burn's The Civil War and then to make clips from the video to use in classes, like this one that always gives me chills, the letter from Sullivan Ballou to his wife, Sarah. (Please note, the link will only work for K-Staters.)

If you are introducing primary sources to a class, but aren't sure what resources we have available, please ask your librarian.  Students, if you're searching for primary sources, we're here for you, too! Don't waste fruitless hours, Ask a Librarian! ask your librarian, ask your professor.

Photo Credit: Two Children of the Mochida Family, with Their Parents, Awaiting Evacuation Bus, Dorothea Lange.http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/ / CC BY 2.0

New PubMed

Check it out, PubMed has a new look.

Graduating from K-State? Keep your RefWorks account.

Good news!  Thanks to the awesome folks at RefWorks, K-State graduates can retain their RefWorks accounts as long as K-State continues to subscribe to RefWorks. All of those references that you spent years saving remain yours even after we hand over your diploma.

Right now, it doesn't seem likely that the Get It button will allow you to access the full text of the articles through our databases --but, if you check out K-State Libraries' alumni page, you'll see links to free electronic journals plus a link to databases offered to all Kansas residents through the State Library of Kansas.  Some of your articles may be available through these resources. Our Interlibrary Services offers document delivery and interlibrary loan for a fee for non-university patrons (including alumni).

We're also still working on the logistics for K-State alumni who want to create new RefWorks accounts after they've left K-State. 

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me: skearns @ k-state.edu

Copyright Quickie: Showing Films in the Classroom

All hail the American Library Association!  The good folks at ALA have published a lovely explanation, with the help a few copyright experts, answering copyright concerns teachers have when they show films in classrooms. 

This is especially cool in light of a few new databases K-State Libraries offers: American History in Video, Theatre in Video, and Dance in Video.  These three databases offer streaming video of shows from the History Channel,  theatre performances (like Langston Hughe's Street Scenes), and dance performances by individuals or troupes, such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.  If you create a user account (which anyone at K-State can do), you can then create playlists or clip a pertinent scene. Then, when you are teaching a class, you can show the film or clip. 

If you are teaching an online class or want students to watch the film on their own time, you can link to the film (or your clips, or your playlist) and the students can follow that to watch the video from the database.  For example, I think people might enjoy this performance of Henry V.  I simply clicked on the little icon for a permanent URL from the Henry V page.  Then, to be sure my K-State peeps could watch it, even if they are off-campus, I swung over to Link It.  There I pasted the URL for Henry V, and Link It added some extra information to the link that will just ask off-campus users to enter their eID and password to access the database.  Then, you can share the URL, or link to it from K-State Online, with K-Staters.  Here's a brief video where I show you how to do all of that.

Students--you can do the same thing for presentations!

We also have a lot of films on VHS and DVD in our collection that can be checked out and watched.  Just search in our catalog and use the Quick Limit option (lower left side of the search screen) to limit your search to Video Recordings.

PubMed Tips

I've been helping a lot of students with PubMed lately. Huge projects deadlines are just around the corner for some of the Kinesiology classes. Here are some of the questions that I've had been asked recently that may help other people too.

Why aren't my articles in English?

The majority of the articles in PubMed are in English, but X% are in other languages. Two clues that an article is not in English are...

The article title is in [brackets]

The states the language near the source information

You can limit your search to just articles in English (or whatever language you know best) by clicking on the limits tab.

Where is the GET IT button?

If you can't find the GET IT button in PubMed, it is most likely because you went directly to their web page www.pubmed.gov. If you are a K-State student, go to the Libraries homepage-click on Databases-letter P-then PubMed. You should see the GET IT button on each article page. If you did go to the Libraries page first and still don't see GET IT,  Ask a Librarian.

None of my articles are full text!

If it seems like none of the articles you want are full text, get an Interlibrary Loan account. If we don't have it, we'll try to get it for you from another library.

If you need to have something RIGHT AWAY, go to the Limits button, then select “Limit to free full text”.

I'm saying this with my librarian face, right away mean an hour before your paper is due. By limiting to full text only, you could be eliminating the best, most perfect article, just because it is not “free” full text. We may have it in print, sitting on the self. Or we could have it through a journal we pay for. And remember, Interlibrary Loan is awesome and will work super hard to get it for you from another place. It shouldn't take more than four days to get it (and maybe sooner).

If you have any other questions about PubMed, let us know. Especially if  you know it should do something and it isn't. PubMed does weird things sometimes. If it starts acting crazy, let us know. We'll kick it or something.

Get It and Google Scholar Snafu

If you are an off-campus user of Google Scholar, and you've brilliantly download the LibX toolbar or set your Scholar Preferences to recognize K-State as your library, you may have noticed lately that the magic Get It button or link isn't always appearing.  I noticed this myself the other day when I was working from home.  It was a bit like flying that airline that always serves fresh chocolate chip cookies mid-flight on the day they forgot the cookie dough.

My workaround?  The unsung hero of the library: the Citation Linker.  Found on the databases page, the Citation Linker is handy if you already have the citation for an article.  I searched in Google Scholar and found an article I was interested in.  The Get It link didn't appear, but I did have all of the citation information for the article.  I plugged that information into the the Citation Linker and voila!  It was just like Get It!  Which makes sense because the Citation Linker is powered by Get It.

So, back to why Get It may not be appearing on the Google Scholar page for you: this is happening at a bunch of other libraries, too, so we're relieved to report that it isn't just us.  It appears that the snafu is at the Google Scholar Preferences end and is rumored to be in the process of being fixed.  We'll keep you posted when the fix (and Get It link) is in sight.

Coming July 6, Get It recommends...

I don't know about you, but I really like the way Amazon.com produces recommendations when I look at a book (or some music or shoes or a phone or...). It's pretty neat to see what people buy in addition to the item I'm looking at, even if I don't want to buy that item. All kinds of Web services offer recommendations. Netflix even held a contest for people to improve the company's movie recommendations. With all these automated suggestions floating around, have you ever wished that there could be some for your research?

Wish granted.

After you get back from your July 4th holiday weekend, the Get It menu will look just a little different. Oh, it will still take you from citation to full text, catalog search, or interlibrary loan in just a few clicks. But it will also make recommendations. Based on the article you're trying to get, Get It can suggest more articles on that same topic. It will give you a full citation and the Get It button. Like the look of one of those articles? Click the Get It button to - well - get it. You'll also be able to export those suggested article citations to RefWorks or Zotero.

How does Get It know what to recommend? The software is based on research done at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Basically, the researchers were trying to turn some of libraries' ordinary usage data into value-added services. The recommender service gathers up data from many libraries to inform its recommendations. Suppose you're researching food safety and find three or four articles really relevant to your specific topic. You might recommend those articles to a friend who's researching the same thing. Now spread that out over hundreds or thousands of food safety researchers, all of whom found the same three or ten or twenty articles clustering around that topic. In the same way that Amazon.com turns data about customer purchases into recommendations, Get It's service will turn all that food safety research into suggestions for you.

Or, if you like neat and tidy summaries, you can think of it this way:
Usage creates relationships; relationships create recommendations.

Chemical Dance Party

With due respect to my high school chemistry teacher and her Herculean efforts to help me to understand mole ratios, I think it all would have made more sense if presented like this video below.

Yes, I realize the video has nothing to do with moles and so could not have helped me with my ratio issues.  But it has created a little well of love in my heart for chemistry.  By the way, the video comes from the European Union's Marie Curie Actions, which appears to be a program designed to encourage people to enter research fields.

If you don't need a video like this to find chemistry entrancing, you will be delighted to know that K-State Libraries now provides web access to SciFinder Scholar!

 

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts offers abstracts of journal articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations. The database also provides citations for these items and for book reviews published in over 1500 national and international journals. Topics are covered from 1973 to the present and include all aspects of language study, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The Get It button is present to help you find full-text of interesting items.