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