Talking in the Library

May I suggest the Statistical Abstract of the United States?

Hello to everyone who is searching for historical numbers about the United States, like, say, women in the workforce.  I think you will be delighted with this annual publication, Statistical Abstract of the United States.  We have access to editions going back to volume 1, 1878.  Clicking on the Get It button from the link above will let you link out to the 2009 edition.  Click on Earlier Editions to access, yes, earlier editions!

This should qualify as a "library resource" as it is a book that has been scanned as a pdf and posted online by the publisher (in this case, the U.S. Census Bureau).

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.

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.

Grad Student Library Day--Guaranteed Research Methods

Grad students--ride that energy wave of first week good intentions this Friday, August 28th, by attending Grad Student Library Day.  Library Day is your opportunity to learn all about finding full text dissertations, storing and citing sources with RefWorks, or finding and using images, sound, and film for your research--or for your classes if you are teaching. But wait, there's more: business, legal, or congressional research, Google, Interlibrary Loan and Get It, plus a Hale tour and overview of very handy tools.

Library Day is designed like a conference with 50-minute concurrent sessions.  To relieve any scheduling conflicts for you, we're repeating the morning sessions in the afternoon.  Come for one session, two sessions, or stay for the whole day.Since your research pulls from many fields, we've developed sessions that feature multi-disciplinary resources and methods.

We held a Faculty Library Day before the semester started and I made a promise to them that I will also make to grad students.  I will guarantee that any session you attend will provide you with one tool, trick, or resource that will save you hours (at least) in the future.  If it doesn't, contact me and I will treat you to your non-alcoholic beverage of choice (skearns @ ksu.edu).

If you can't make this Friday, we have a joint Faculty/Grad Library Day scheduled for Monday, October 5th--the student holiday.  See the schedule and sign up for this Friday or October 5th.  Hope to see you there!

Faculty Library Day: It's all about you

We miss you.  Now that we've made it so easy for you to research online, we don't get to see faculty, staff, and researchers the way we used to. To resolve that, we decided to hold a Faculty Library Day: a day all about you and your research.  Library Day is designed like a conference with 50-minute concurrent sessions.  To relieve any scheduling conflicts for you, we're repeating the morning sessions in the afternoon.  Come for one session, two sessions, or stay for the whole day.

Since your research pulls from many fields, we've developed sessions that feature multi-disciplinary resources and methods.  I may be biased, but I will guarantee that any session you attend will provide you with one tool, trick, or resource that will save you hours (at least) in the future.  If it doesn't, contact me and I will treat you to your non-alcoholic beverage of choice (skearns @ ksu.edu).

Our first ever Faculty Library Day is Monday, August 17.  Check out the schedule and sign up for any sessions that strike your fancy.  It is all free, of course.  If you have new colleagues, this is a great orientation to the Libraries--particularly the Library Tour and Tools session.  Remember, it's always cool to be a library pusher.

If Monday doesn't work for you, we're holding a joint Faculty/Grad Library Day on Monday, October 5  (that's the student holiday)--bring your research team!  The schedule is the same, and you can sign up now.

Looking out for your grad students?  We're holding a Grad Student Library Day on Friday, August 28th.  They can sign up now, too!

I'm graduating ... and I'm leery of the interwebs, can I take the Libraries with me?

We're librarians, do we strike you as being the cold-hearted, throw-you-out-into-the-information-wilderness-without-even-a- Swiss-Army-knife types? Of course we're not. 

Graduates retain their online access and checkout privileges until the beginning of the next semester. If you are one of the lucky ones graduating this Friday or Saturday, you'll still be able to search and whatnot until the fall semester begins. If you are graduating in December, the timing isn't as fantabulous. You'll still retain your searching and checkout privileges until the next semester starts, unfortunately the next semester starts just a few weeks later in January.

So then do we chuck you, alone and defenseless, into the series of tubes?  Of course not. We've pulled together the resources that you can use post-graduation on our Alumni Services and Real World Research pages. If you stretch the analogy, these pages are your information Swiss Army knife because they are chock full of useful research tools.

We offer:

• free and open access journals
• databases from the State Library of Kansas (including some old favorites like Expanded Academic and Business & Company Resource Center)
• alumni or non-university user library cards (so you can still check us out)
• links to free research tools (Yahoo! Finance and Internet Archive are just two)

As we continue to discover free and/or open access resources, we'll add them to these pages. Why?  Because we like you.

Image credit: My old Swiss Army knife #01 by Luca Passoni on Flickr.

Fact checking your zombies

After my Pride and Prejudice and Zombies post, a friend told me I had to read a BBC report about swine flu zombies.  The article explained that the hearts of some swine flu victims victims restarted up to two hours after death and the victims then exhibited violent behavior, essentially making them zombies. I didn't want to believe it.  Mostly because of the "that is so wrong and it freaks me out" factor.  I asked a friend who likes medical news stories, the gorier and freakier the better, to look at it first to see if I could handle it. (That's what friends are for: the good times, the bad times, the gory medical news.)  I was assured that I could handle the report and followed this link: http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm .... and yes, I thought, "That's an odd URL for a BBC report."

As you can see, it looks an awful lot like the BBC website. Apart from the paragraphs reporting "zombism" (is that a word?) it reads like a BBC news article. But the URL still bugged me.  And honestly, zombies?  So I decided to see if I could back up and locate the article from the BBC site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ .  Hey. look at that, the BBC URL actually has the letters "bbc" in it, none of that "bouncewith.me" stuff.  Scanning the news pages unearthed no articles about swine flu zombies.  A search for "zombism" also drew a blank.  "Zombies" revealed articles about hacked computers, music, and movies.  Still no luck with the living dead.

Meanwhile, the friend who sent me the link was also snooping around.  She went to Snopes.com.  Snopes is all about busting (or confirming) the urban and suburban myths.  They declared the swine flu zombie report is....false.

All of this searching and fact checking took about three minutes.  Which is only a drop in the bucket of time when you consider the hours of mockery that will be directed at the person who first sent us this report.  Moral of the story: if it sounds too good, too bizarre, too whatever to be true ... check it out.

Welcome Expository Writing Students!

We need a catchy name for this time of year, when we host all of the Expository Writing classes in Hale Library's Hemisphere Room.*  My caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, so I have absolutely no witty and memorable, yet not dorky, ideas. Feel free to chime in with your own.

Well, funky name or no, we hope you enjoy your induction into Library Land.  If you want to find all of the cool resources we showed you during class, head on over to K-State Online.  When you log in, look for Research Help @ K-State Libraries.  It should show up as one of your classes (unless you hid it.)  The first page you see is standard K-State Online, but click on the link Click Here for Research Help @ K-State Libraries!  That takes you to the fancy page.  If you look to the right, you'll see there's a link just for Expos Students.  Yes, just for you.  Check it out.  Use it.  Tell us what you think.

*The Hemisphere is on the 5th floor, if you're looking, by the way.

Preservation Faux Pas

So, there are two million books in the Libraries, and we can only keep them all in good shape with your help. How can you help? A good first step would be to enjoy this video created by local film auteur Dan Ireton and starring your favorite students from the Circulation Desk.

Citing Lexiles in APA style--help answer our stumper

I learned a new word yesterday: Lexiles.  Lexiles, I've learned, involve assessing a student's reading level and assigning it a numeric value and assessing a book's reading level and assigning it a value.  Then, like Garanimals*, teachers can match the student to a book.

I had to learn about Lexiles on the fast-track yesterday because I was answering a question about them over IM. The question was how to include a book's Lexile in the APA citation.  That stumped me, it stumped my APA style guide, it stumped our Education librarian, Marcia Stockham.  It's what we in the library biz call, yes, a stumper. 

Marcia wondered if perhaps it wasn't in the citation that the Lexile needed to be provided, but in an annotation to the citation.  But we're not sure.  If you know the answer to this, could you please share with one and all via our comments below?  Many thanks and good things showered down upon you.

A follow-up question wasn't a stumper, but I wasn't able to learn the answer before the person asking the question signed-off: how to find a book's Lexile.  Marcia directed me to the database: Children's Literature Comprehensive Database.  You can search by a variety of reading metrics, including Lexile, or search for a book and, in many cases, find its Lexile number.  You can also do this search from the Lexile web site. 

*Second thing I learned, how to spell Garanimals!  Grranimals is wrong.  I blame this prior ignorance on the fact that my parents did not love me enough to clothe me in Garanimals and instead forced me to match my own clothes.  It was a hard-knock life.