Google Scholar, Internet Archive, and ebooks @ Fondren

Today a post for local consumption!

Internet Archive

Fondren Library has been quite busy with putting material into the Internet Archive. In collaboration with the Rice University Centennial Celebration committee, materials which tell the story of Rice University from the opening in 1912. Materials include:

• The General Announcements–a view of each academic year’s course offereings, departments, and faculty members
• First 20 years of The Campanile
• Selection of Rice University Report of the President
• Rare Books from the Woodson.18th Century British Plays digitized for a Rice Course taught this Fall
• A walking tour of Rice University

All texts have multiple formats, including PDF, Kindle and EPUB formats.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Note: Not all of these digitized items are noted in the library catalog yet; however, you will find them listed in the Digital Scholarship Archive.

Online Books

Fondren Library has been busy arranging  for access to more and more ebooks. By December 2011 you will see a marked increase in ebooks when you search the library catalog. Searching for ebooks is easier than ever in our library catalog. Go to the advanced search screen, and then choose the last option on the top: other searches. This will give you ebooks in the pull-down menu.

Here are some of the collections we have had for a while, but do get updated:

Safari Computer Books: great resource for programmers and IT professionals. Our subscription includes access to 130 titles, and 2 simultaneous users. Please remember to log out! Includes books from O-Reilly, Que, and Adobe Press. Titles in the collection do change, based on usage and requests.

Springer: we have strong ebook holdings in mathematics, physics, and statistics. You can search in the library catalog for titles, or go directly to Springer.

• Physics
• Mathematics ex: Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
• Use the advanced search button to limit to “books” to find only books

If you are on a mobile:

• Connexions EPub
  Download open access books from Connexions. Particularly strong in textbooks and curriculum material – instructions at http://cnx.org/help/viewing/epub-help
• Google Books  
  
  Search for books (defaults to ‘free books’ you can view completely).
• Project Gutenberg
  Download the free application to your device
• WorldCat Mobile
  Search for library materials and a library near you. Download the free application to your device

Not all of our ebooks allow for downloading, but those that do require that you download and install free ereader software.

Many mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers use Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) to download and read our downloadable ebooks.  (See the full list of supported portable devices for ADE – as the Kindle uses a very different file format, the Kindle will not currently work with our downloadable ebooks.)

iPhone, iTouch and iPad users will need to explore other options to download and read, as ADE doesn’t currently work with these devices.  One suggested reader that works with our book format is the BlueFire Reader app

Android phone users may want to try the Aldiko reader app or the txtr ebook reader app

Google Scholar

A brief tutorial for optimizing Google Scholar for Fondren Library resources is available on YouTube.Have you set your Preferences on Google Scholar? Doing this takes a moment, and allows Google to better help link you through to the fulltext of articles.

Google Scholar often will take you directly to the fulltext by clicking on an article title. Sometimes, however, the article is available from multiple sources – Fondren may have the article available at a source other than the one listed in Google Scholar.
Instructions:

• Go to Scholar Preferences
• look for the section marked “Library Links” and use the search box to find the entries for Rice University, Fondren Library (there are several – chose all of them for the best results)
• Save your preferences and return to searching

You now will be able to Click on either “Check Fondren Holdings” or “Fulltext @ Fondren” to see if the article is available from another Fondren database than the one listed in Google Scholar.

All that being said, another easier way to optimize Google to access Fondren resources is just to follow this link:  http://library.rice.edu/collections/eresources/google-scholar-rice-university

The setting applied in Scholar Preferences is cookie dependent, so if you clear your browser cache or use a different computer, you have to remember to apply the setting again.

GoogleBooks

Using Google Book Search, you can find extraordinary classic books, such as:

* Ferriar’s The Bibliomania
* A futurist from 1881′s 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
* Aesop’s Fables
* Shakespeare’s Hamlet
* Abbott’s Flatland
* Hugo’s Marion De Lorme
* Dunant’s Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
* Bolívar’s Proclamas
* Dante’s Inferno

There are an amazing amount of magazines in Google,  Popular Science, New York Magazine, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Tips on searching from the Google Blog, ” Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you’ll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword “Magazine” on the search snippet.”

See more titles at the Official Google Blog!

Just for Fun! Free Popular Journals: Free popular journals: One of our academic journal databases, LexisNexis Academic, has a large number of popular and consumer journals. For example, you can find Consumer Reports, full text, from 1988 to the present. Organic Gardening  is available from 1984 to current issue in Academic Search Complete. Sports Illustrated is available, full text, from 1992 to the present.

Hathi Trust is another good source of digitized material.

Libguides

Fondren Library has been hard at work doing new Libguides: one stop for finding resources about a certain topic. Study Abroad is the latest one. Also, take a look at Mobile Resources, Astronomy, and Rice Ph.D. Students & Post Docs. We are working on a new one for Student Leadership resources. Have an idea for one? Let me know!

OneSearch

Fondren Library has a new search and discovery tool called OneSearch.  It is available at http://search.library.rice.edu/

It keeps getting better and better! It includes 50 of our most popular databases, including MathSciNet, Scopus, Web of Science, and JSTOR. It also includes the library catalog. So, what this means is, that you can do a search in the box, and the results returned will include journal articles from those databases, as well as, books that Fondren library owns. It also has some enhanced features, such as the ability to save and share lists of books, write and publish your own reviews of books. In addition, it does search GoogleBooks, and if we own a book, the results from GoogleBooks will give some access, either partial or full-text, depending on what the publisher has allowed. We want to know what you think about it! Give feedback at: http://bit.ly/Txu3p Also, see a guide at: http://bit.ly/fOXz0

New version of Sakai course management software in planning phase

Fondren Library, Rice University, has been actively increasing our participation in our activities in Sakai at Rice. In the Spring, we tested out a "librarian role" to mixed success.

Earlier this week, we participated in a planning meeting with Sakai developers. Along with librarians from other institutions, and programmers, the design phase is underway!

This is an exciting time for Sakai–planning, testing, and "persona"
development will lead to a complete overall of Sakai.

It will incorporate a ton of Web.0 tools, including the ability of
students to post comments on articles, and will allow faculty, while
"surfing" the literature, to bookmark an article and easily add it in to
the Sakai site without uploading the file.

Fondren Library is actively participating  in the Sakai planning process. I encourage you to be a part of the process!

One of the core design principle books being used is: About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and Dave Cronin. At Rice, I have added this to our Safari bookshelf.

The demo for Sakai 3 is at:
http://sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/89473b2c-31dd-4261-9823-c31a79e55532

A white paper is located at:
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/SAKDEV/Sakai+3;jsessionid=E3DB09CD1CAA97E8BEC35A8A68BCCC12

Dealing with Information Overload….or how do I keep up with all of those RSS feeds…

I taught a demo class on Pageflakes to an Experimental Physics class today: Assignment Page: http://www.pageflakes.com/dkolah/24549111
Demo Page: http://www.pageflakes.com/dkolah/25240862

It was a great way to start the conversation about incorporating web2.0 tools into your everyday scientific life. Many of the students use Facebook, but they aren't using it to collaborate with any of their science mentors or publishers, etc. Of course, you have to be careful to "clean up" your profile, but I think it is a wonderful collaborative tool.
The students had a couple of great questions. One was, "How do you know that you aren't missing articles in the RSS feeds." This is, of course, a downside to Pageflakes–you can't mark an article as read which you can do with some of the other readers. But, as I see it, the strength of Pageflakes is the collaborative part–really sharing your page with the community, whatever community that is, and maybe having text boxes where readers can leave comments, etc. I think if you are using Pageflakes to entirely keep up with your literature reading, you might, indeed, miss something. Better to set up your RSS feeds in a different way. http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/27/sink-or-swim-managing-rss-feeds-better-groups recommends a folder system. Perhaps, even better, is simply to do a full-out literature review at certain periods, and scan the results of those. I'm thinking a search in Scopus, archive.org, and Inspec, for example. Anyway, this is something that I'm going to think about for a few days. That is the great thing about teaching a class–the students always push your knowledge!! Thanks!

Engineering Village Training tips/new features

There are several great new features available in Engineering Village. You can search through Compendex and Inspec in this platform–a great resource for applied engineering information, and  patents.

Engineering Village Link (for Rice University):

http://www.engineeringvillage2.org
HELP pages

New Features:

• Tagging & Collaboration 2collab(collaborative tagging)
• RSS & Customized Alerting  http://www.ei.org/eiupdate/02_whats_new/
•  Blog this: link from a blog to a record of interest–blog this button in record…
  Once published, the title will link to record

I encourage you to set up a user account in this database. This allows you to save your searches, and some additional features. Also the RSS features make it easy for you to stay on top of the literature.

There is a new search technique in this database: FACETS searching. Some quick tips:
If you get too many results:

• limit by field, check thesaurus, turn autostemming off, truncate with care, use facets

If you don't get enough results:

• check thesaruus, link via Ei main headings, autostemming, grab a few good articles, then follow their subject terms. Click on circle i to see more information about the term (when introduced, classification)

You can now do record tagging, and make it public or private–there is a lot of possiblity in this: you could tag things with "My Institution," or create groups to share tags. Make them public, or keep them private.

Additionally, there is an

• Ask a Librarian feature…these go to Linda Hall Library
• Ask an Engineer…10 senior engineers

If you would like customized training on this database email me at dkolah at rice.edu