Have data on a 3.5 floppy you need off?

With progress comes change and in the Library that means that the new computers recently installed do not have 3.5 inch floppy drives. If you still have data on an old 3.5 don’t despair! There are still several computers that have them installed. All of the Adaptive technology computers (those with the large 21″ monitors - two on each floor), four at the Reference Desk and the Electronic Information Center (EIC) Student Assistance desk. These aforementioned computers also have the necessary software to allow you to print documents and they also will allow you to transfer the data to another media such as a USB or Thumbdrive. If you have any questions check with the EIC Student Worker or at the Reference desk.

AL

New interface for two History databases

Two key history databases, America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts, are now hosted by another vendor, Ebsco Publishing.

As well as all the standard search functionality, the Ebsco interface will include key features such as Historical Period and cited reference searching. You may create an account to save records and searches and create search alerts that will be e-mailed to you.

View the new interfaces here:
America: History and Life (Ebsco version),
also see the Database Guide.

Historical Abstracts (Ebsco version),
also see the Database Guide.

Having Trouble with a Library Printer?

If you are working on an upper floor of the library and have trouble with a computer or printer, use the Library Help Phone to let us know. The wall telephone in the elevator lobby allows you to get help with security or general information, computer or photocopier problems, or help locating a book.

We often don’t know a printer problem exists until someone tells us. We’re counting on you to keep us informed!

Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) now available

The Walker Library has aquired the History and Geography, and Literature and Languages subject areas of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

This substantial collection of over 47,000 books will be indispensable to researchers of history and literature.

“Eighteenth Century Collections Online captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. As the eighteenth century opened, the expiration of the strict controls that previously existed over printing, coupled with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in the proliferation of printing operations across the country—and in turn, created an explosion of literacy. For the first time, a large segment of the population was exposed to a vast array of printed material. Social and economic criticism flourished; theories on man and society were set forth and debated.

A variety of materials is included—from books and broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons to printed ephemera—with works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century. A centerpiece of this collection is the complete works of twenty-eight major eighteenth-century authors including Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, Alexander Pope, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Swift. ” (Gale database guide)

EndNote Web

Citations getting out of hand? Where is the printout of the article you found last week? Is your brain too overloaded to alphabetize your list of works cited? Is your car on its last legs?

EndNote Web can solve three of these problems, and it’s now available on our Databases A-Z page. Start by signing up for an account; references may be downloaded or exported from another database as a file and then imported into your EndNote Web account. References can also be collected directly from ISI Web of Knowledge databases or created manually.

Manage your references by organizing them into folders that may be shared with other registered users. Create a list of works cited by formatting and saving select items.

Find help online by refering to the EndNote Web support center page, and good luck about the car. At least if it breaks down you won’t have to worry about parking.

New Printers

Nine new HP 9040 Laser Printers have been installed in the Library. They replace the HP 9000 and 4200 printers that were purchased roughly three years ago. Each new printer has a total paper tray capacity of about 2500 sheets of paper. While the new printers are faster, quiter, they will still get a lot more usage than their predecessors. If at all possible, please limit your printing to the bare necessities. Print double sided and limit your copies if possible. You can also help by printing powerpoint slides as handouts. Print 3 or 6 per page and always select “Print in pure black and white.”

Chronicle of Higher Education is now online!

The Walker Library has made available campus-wide access to the Chronicle of Higher Education online. It can be accessed through the library’s Databases A-Z, online catalog (Voyager), or Journal Locator.

If you are off campus, remote access is available using your Pipeline account. The subscription includes the current issue and archived issues back to Sept. 1989, which can be both searched and browsed. Additional resources are also available on the Chronicle’s website, including the Chronicle Almanac and the Chronicle Review.

MTSU English professor wins ALA book award

MTSU English professor Carl Ostrowski has won the American Library Association’s Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award for his monograph Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783-1861.



Dr. Ostrowski previously won the ALA’s Donald G. Davis Article Award for his article, “James Alfred Pearce and the Question of a National Library in Antebellum America,” in Libraries & Culture, Vol. 35, No. 2, Spring 2000.

Special Software

The library has loaded six special use software programs onto several of our computers. The software and computers are:

Scott and Shakespeare computers have:

Index Islamicus

Social Work Reference Library

English Short Title Catalog

MediaMark

Choices 3

In addition the following six computers have SciFinder Scholar 2007 loaded on them:

Sinclair, Smith, Sophocles, Stevenson, Stoker, and Tan

New Computers in the Library

Last week, 226 student access computers in the library were replaced with new Dell GX-745 computers. These computers were funded through the Technology Access Fees every student pays. These new computers are equipped with 17″ LCD monitors and 2Gb of memory. Since the computer sits in a cradle behind the monitor, access to the headphone jack and to the 4 USB ports is greatly simplified. There are two USB ports on the front of the computer, and two more on the left side of the monitor. These computers feature standard Microsoft Office applications, along with both MS Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox web browsers.

Login is achieved using your Campus Pipeline userID and password.

One thing to be aware of is that there are no floppy drives on these computers. We have been recommending against using floppy disks for some time now because they simply are not reliable, and in today’s graphics intensive environment, floppy disks just don’t have the capacity to hold enough data to be worthwhile. USB-based memory sticks, or “thumb” drives are much more reliable and hold hundreds of times the data.

Is printing really FREE?

New students are often pleasantly surprised that they can print materials in the library for “free.” But that’s not exactly true. Here is what our systems librarian, David Robinson, has to say on the subject:

“Contrary to popular belief … printing in University labs is not ‘free’. Printing is subsidized by a portion of a $100 Technology Access Fee (TAF) that each student pays each semester. The TAF helps to fund the lab, but does not cover everything. About 35% of the cost of printing comes out of the Library’s budget. That means, that your decision to print that Powerpoint presentation, rather than viewing it online, may be the factor that prevents the Library from buying a book that can be used over and over again. Last year, over 6,500,000 pages were printed in the Library. Something to think about.”

Please print wisely. It’s an economic and environmental issue.

D2L courses affected by network upgrades

Any courses using D2L will be inaccessible until 5:00 pm due to statewide network upgrades.

LexisNexis Academic Redesign

LexisNexis Academic just completeda major redesign, and Walker
Library will be switching to the new interface the week of August 20. LexisNexis Academic provides full-text documents from over 6,000 news, business, and legal publications. It includes broadcast transcripts from major television and radio networks, company and country profiles, and the Tennessee Code Annotated. The new default “Easy Search” screen is set to search major U.S. and world publications for the past 2 years.

Please phone the reference desk at 615-898-2817 (option 3) or use our e-mail a Librarian form if you have questions about the new interface or have trouble finding something you are used to finding in LexisNexis.

- Kristen

Article Linker

Starting today, we are trying out a more direct way to connect to full text articles. The Article Linker link in the databases will connect directly to the full-text article whenever there is an article level link available in Article Linker. There is a white bar above the full-text article that will connect to the Article Linker page for that article. The white bar says, “Missing article? Need more sources? Get additional resources related to this.”

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When there is only a journal level link or full text is not available, the Article Linker link will take you to the Article Linker page for that article, as before.

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Try it out by going to this article in Academic Search Premeir: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=25935119&site=ehost-live. Click on the ‘Find Fulltext’ link, and you will be connectd directly to the full text. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions regarding this change.

Printer and Internet Problems 8/13

Due to systems upgrades, the library print networks and internet connections may be down at various times during the day. We regret the inconvenience.

Life, Death, Sex and E-books

We have an e-book collection called NetLibrary. Last I heard, we have over 50,000 books available online, but I wanted to see how much that number has grown since I last checked. The most direct way to find out would be to contact someone in Collection Management here in the library, but I decided to try to hack it out myself by doing a full-text search. All books should contain at least one instance of words like “a,” “the,” “of,” “or,” “for,” but NetLibrary considers these “junk words” and won’t search on them alone. So I tried others.

How many books contain other common words?

Man: 47,146
Woman: 36,346
Life: 54,256
Death: 44,728
Sex: 29,746
Love: 40,318
Hate: 21,118
Cat: 18,456
Dog: 24,680
Eat: 30,675
Starve: 6,113
Republican: 14,236
Democrat: 7,369

As the “Life” search shows, there are at least 54,256 books in the NetLibrary online book collection. What can you find?

– Amy

Now online: Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print

We are now subscribing to Mental Measurements Yearbook and Tests in Print online.

According to the database help guide, ”the MMY series contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. All MMY entries contain descriptive information (e.g., test purpose, publisher, pricing) and edited review(s) written by leading content area experts. To be included in the MMY, a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new or revised since it last appeared in the series.”

The Tests in Print help guide states that it is a “comprehensive bibliography to all known commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides vital information to users including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, price, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s). A score index permits users to identify what is being measured by each test. Tests in Print is directly linked to the critical, candid test reviews published in the Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY) series. Users can research current test information from the TIP series and continue their search to all available test reviews published in the MMY series. Tests in Print is an indispensable reference for professionals in areas such as education, psychology, business, as well as those interested in the critical issues of tests and testing.”

Business database trials

There are trials to five (count ‘em - five) business databases up on the Database Trials page.

Please take a look if you have a need for company, industry, market, or marketing information; and please fill out the Database Trial Evaluation form if you would like to provide feedback.

Whose Story Gets Told? Human Rights and the Power of Records

On June 19th at 6:00 pm in the State Farm Lecture Hall of the BAS, there will be a panel discussion regarding the accuracy of historical records.

See more information at The Record online, “Human Rights“

International Folkfest at MTSU

Enjoy International Music and Dance!!

International Folkfest Comes to MTSU
FREE PERFORMANCES IN FRONT OF THE MTSU LIBRARY AT 1:30 PM DAILY

Tuesday, June 12th - Italy - Italian dancers at DNJ

Wednesday, June 13th - The Netherlands - Netherlands dancers

Thursday, June 14th - India - Indian Dancers

www.mboro-international-Folkfest.org

MTSU registers with Google Scholar

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) Our Google registration is automatically available if you are working on an MTSU computer or a personal computer logged into the campus network. If you are working from off campus you will need to set “Scholar Preferences” from a link at the right of the search box. Search for and select Middle Tennessee State University as your preferred library. Open Worldcat should also be selected. When using Google Scholar you will find that many of the items returned will provide a link to “Fulltext @ MTSU.” That will take you into our Article Linker tool to connect to one of our subscribed databases. Please remember that the articles and other materials that you find by this pathway are paid for by MTSU. Google is only providing the indexing. You also need to remember that many of our subscribed databases are not indexed by Google (and they don’t reveal which are). If you’re not finding what you need, you will probably have better luck using our Research Guides by Subject to find the best tools.

Some returns in Google Scholar will be for books instead of online documents. For those returns you will see a link below the citation for “Library search.” If Walker Library owns the book we will be the first library listed, followed by other libraries that are near by, such as Vanderbilt or Nashville Public Library. If we don’t own the book you will see a link for “Request through ILL” at the top of the page. This will allow you to submit a request to Walker Library’s Interlibrary Loan service.

Try it and let us know how you like it.

New: Blackwell journals online

Walker Library recently added more than 700 new fulltext electronic journals to its collection through a subscription to collections from Blackwell Publishing: the Humanities and Social Sciences and Science, Technology and Medicine collections. Many of these are published by Blackwell on behalf of leading professional and scholarly societies.

Browse journals in your discipline.

Logging on to computers

Starting today, you will need to log in to use public computers in the library. If you are a student, staff, or faculty member, you may log in using your Pipeline username and password. If you are a guest, or if you do not have a Pipeline account, you may obtain a guest password from the Service Desk on the first floor of the library.

Special Library Hours — exams and summer

The library will be open extended hours through exams week, and then we will be on limited hours until the beginning of the Summer sessions. Summer session hours are also a bit different than Spring and Fall hours. Please see the Library Hours page for details.

Podcast — Learn Mandarin Chinese

Haven’t you always wanted to know how to buy real estate or talk to your hairdresser in Mandarin? With Serge Melnyk’s free podcasts, you can learn to do that and so much more. There are 63 lessons so far, with more to come.

While the podcasts are free and downloadable, Melnyk does charge for worksheets and transcripts.

Chinese Lessons with Serge Melnyk

Equal Pay Day

On average, women still only earn 77% of what men earn. For women of color, the gap is even greater. To recognize this inequality, today has been declared Equal Pay Day.

Visit the following websites to learn more about the wage gap and how you can avoid losing out as you move from college to the working world.

(And guys, this affects you, too. If you marry a woman, don’t you want her to be bringing in as much money as possible? Wouldn’t you like for your daughters to be able to put you in the best possible nursing home when the time comes?)

National Committee on Pay Equity
WAGE (Women are Getting Even)
“Over her lifetime, a woman will lose between $700,000 and $2 million. DON’T LET THAT HAPPEN TO YOU.”
– from Getting EVEN by Evelyn Murphy, author, founder, and President of the WAGE Project, Inc.

Apply for summer work in the library

The library is currently taking applications for student positions in the library for the summer months. Positions are available in a number of departments in the building. To qualify, you must be enrolled for at least one class during the summer sessions or show evidence that you are enrolled for the fall semester. If hired in the summer, you will be eligible to continue working in the fall.

To apply, print and complete our online application form (http://library.mtsu.edu/administration/StdApp.pdf) and return it to the service desk near the front doors of the library.

If you have questions, call Joanne Minnick at 898-2612.

Several Database Trials

Go to the Database Trialspage to access several database trials available now. Subject include education, business, literature, and colleges & careers.

Databases currently undergoing trials are:

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Through May 27th - CQ Press

CQ Weekly - Congressional Quarterly’s magazine on government, commerce, and politics.

Political Reference Suite - integrates many of CQ Press’s reference titles on government and politics.

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Through May 23th- Gale database trials

Demographics Now for Libraries: National w/ Expenditure Data - demographic information including income, housing, race, age, education, consumer expenditures and more.

RDS Business & Industry - content from over 1000 trade and industry publications, regional, national and international newspapers, business dailies and newsletters.

Litfinder - access poems, plays, speeches, short stories and more.

Gale Virtual Reference Library - Xrefer Unlimited - See below for description.

Educator’s Reference Complete - more than 450 full-text academic journals, hundreds of full-text reports, and many reference sources.


Small Business Resource Center - combination of periodicals and reference content.Testing & Education Reference Center with Career Module - in-depth information on colleges and universities, graduate and professional programs, distance learning, corporate training, available scholarships and awards, preparatory entrance tests and much more.

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Through 5/31/2007 - Gale Digital Collection

Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1945 - fully text-searchable British government documents from the National Archives of the UK, a linked Chronology of World War II, cine film from the Imperial War Museum London and newly commissioned thematic essays to create a primary-source research environment for students, teachers and researchers

Eighteenth Century Collections Online - access the digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century. With full-text searching of approximately 26 million pages, the product allows researchers new methods of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.

Testaments to the Holocaust - this digital resource offers the unique collection of eyewitness accounts from the World’s oldest Holocaust museum, founded by Alfred Wiener as the “Jewish Central Information Office” in 1939. The collection offers fully searchable personal accounts of life in Nazi Germany, along with photographs, propaganda materials such as school text books, limited circulation publications and rare serials in a uniquely flexible format.

Iraq, 1914-1974: The Middle East Online, Series 2 - an essential contemporary resource for the understanding of modern Iraq, using primary source documents from The National Archives of the UK, this online fully searchable collection of British Government files covers the period from the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the creation of the new state, to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974. General Editor: Dr Charles Tripp, SOAS, University of London.

Arab-Israeli Relations, 1917-1970: The Middle East Online, Series 1 - offers a wide range of original source material, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through to the Black September war of 1970-1. These materials - letters, minutes, reports, maps - are selected by Dr. Eugene Rogan, Director of the Middle East Centre, University of Oxford - from primary source documents at the National Archives, London.

The Making of the Modern World: Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850 - provides digital facsimile images on every page of 61,000 works of literature on economic and business published from 1450 through 1850. Full-text searching on more than 12 million pages provides researchers unparalleled access to this vast collection of material on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport.

The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926 - provides digital images on every page of 22,000 legal treatises on US and British law published from 1800 through 1926. Full-text searching on more than 10 million pages provides researchers access to critical legal history in ways not previously possible.

Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers - With digital facsimile images of both full pages and clipped articles for hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers and advanced searching capabilities, researchers will be able to research history in ways previously unavailable. For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.

Northern Ireland: A Divided Community, 1921-1972 Cabinet Papers of the Stormont Administration - the Stormont Administration ran Northern Ireland as a province of the UK from 1921-72. This digital resource offers full-text searching of facsimile images of the complete record of Stormont from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, along with new interpretative essays and resources. “CAB 4″ represents a unique record of “how government actually works” through turbulent and often violent times.

Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 - based on Joseph Sabin’s landmark bibliography, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900’s. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere.

U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978 - containing nearly 11 million pages of records and briefs brought before the U.S. Supreme Court in the period 1832-1978, this product provides an essential primary source tool for the study of all aspects of American history as well as the U.S. judicial system.

The Times Digital Archive 1785 – 1985 - Researchers can search through the complete digital edition of The Times (London), using keyword searching and hit-term highlighting to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching.

Women, War and Society, 1914-1918 - from the Imperial War Museum, London: a ground-breaking fully text-searchable mixed media archive - press-cuttings, minutes, reports, correspondence and photographs - accompanied by newly commissioned themed essays for researchers and students new to digital primary source historical documents. Use this archival collection to research every aspect of British women’s war effort.

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Through May 20th- Xreferplus - an online reference source

Xreferplus is an online reference service featuring 234 full-text reference titles with over 2 million entries from 50 publishers. Includes interactive features such as dynamic table functionality for world, state, and county statistics, an interactive world atlas, and our critically-acclaimed concept map. Xrefer also features over 66,000 images, over 180,000 audio pronunciations, and a citation formatter in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats. See the Xreferplus title list and the Xreferplus Trial Guide for more information.

Save paper– print double-sided

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that the printers in the library had been set to automatically print on both sides of the page. After the last upgrade, we lost this setting, but you can help us out by setting this up yourself each time you print.

To print double-sided, do this:

Print>Preferences>Print on Both Sides

Thanks.

Printing is not actually “free”

On Friday, our systems librarian, David Robinson, posted this comment to a blog post about conserving printer paper. He made some very good points, so I wanted to put it in its own post:

“Contrary to popular belief, and as mistakenly stated in the blog above, printing in University labs is not “free”. Printing is subsidized by a portion of a $100 Technology Access Fee (TAF) that each student pays each semester. The TAF helps to fund the lab, but does not cover everything. About 35% of the cost of printing comes out of the Library’s budget. That means, that your decision to print that Powerpoint presentation, rather than viewing it online, may be the factor that prevents the Library from buying a book that can be used over and over again. Last year, over 6,500,000 pages were printed in the Library. Something to think about.”

Tips for Conserving Paper

Printing is free on this campus, and while that is a great bonus to students, it should be done wisely. We’ve already told you this week how much paper is used just in the library in one year. You’ve also seen how much paper is left on the printers in one week.

You can take advantage of free printing while conserving paper at the same time:

Double-sided printouts: the library printers are automatically set to print double-sided, but many people leave these printouts on the machine, preferring single-sided printouts. If you are not required to use single-sided pages for class, leave this setting on. If you need a single-sided printout, change the setting before you print: File>Print>Properties>Print on Both Sides (uncheck this) .

Use Print Preview : Make sure your printout will look like you expect it to. Some websites need to be printed in Landscape orientation so that words are not cut off. Go to File>Print Preview to see what you’re going to get.

Don’t print everything in the print queue: When you look at the print jobs displayed on the touch screens, ask yourself “do I need all of this?” You may have printed some documents twice, or maybe you went back and made a change to something and printed again. Also, there may be print jobs left from the last person who used the computer. Look at the time stamps and the number of pages on the jobs to determine which you really need.

Email or save articles instead of printing: If you’re not sure whether or not you’re going to need an article later, save it to your flash drive or email it to yourself. You can always print it later if you need to. Most of the article databases, and many websites, allow you to email or save an article.

6,347,650 = ? miles

There were 6,347,650 pages printed in the library last year.

Laid end to end, 6.3 million pages would stretch 1100 miles, or approximately the driving distance from Murfreesboro to Taos, NM.

Also, it takes 755 trees to make 6.3 million pieces of printer paper.

New Book by Pippa Holloway (History faculty)

Holloway, Pippa. Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
View Voyager Catalog Record

In the first half of the twentieth century, white elites who dominated Virginia politics sought to increase state control over African Americans and lower-class whites, whom they saw as oversexed and lacking sexual self-restraint. In order to reaffirm the existing political and social order, white politicians legalized eugenic sterilization, increased state efforts to control venereal disease and prostitution, cracked down on interracial marriage, and enacted statewide movie censorship. Providing a detailed picture of the interaction of sexuality, politics, and public policy, Pippa Holloway explores how these measures were passed and enforced.

If you are an MTSU faculty member and have recently published a book, please let us know.

What is Article Linker?

If you’ve been around for a while, you may be familiar with the Linkfinder utility available in the article databases, which allows you to see if an article is available online or in the library. We are making a switch to a new linking utility called Article Linker. (Article Linker icon goes here)

Article Linkfilnder works in much the same way that Linkfinder does. If the article is available online in one or more databases, you will be presented with a link to the article. If the article is not available online, you may see a link to the Walker Library Print Collection. This means that the article is available in print in the library periodicals collection.(image of Article linker example goes here) Please stop by the Reference Desk if you need help finding an article.

Special Collections Exhibits

There are two exhibits in Special Collections on the 4th floor through Summer 2007: Recent Acquisitions in the Early Tennessee Imprints Collection and Making Music: Selected works from the Dimensional and Artists’ Books Collection

Think before you print. Double-sided, or not?

Many thousands of pieces of printer paper are left in the recycle bins each month. This hurts the library budget and the environment.

It often appears that people are tossing away the double-sided printouts. If you DON’T want to print double-sided, do this:

1. Go to File>Print

2. Click on the Properties button.

3. Uncheck the box that says “Print on Both Sides.”

The blog is back.

After a month long hiatus, the Library Blog is back, new and improved. Please check back frequently for information about new services and resources.