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:
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.
If you are on a mobile:
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.
