iLibrarian Blog

Have a look at the latest posts from "iLibrarian Blog". Direct link is also available under "Useful Blogs". This blog is one of my favourites, as it provides very useful tips to new and exciting developments over the web.

* 10 Gmail Tips and Time-Savers

* State of America’s Libraries 2008 The ALA has published the 2008 State of America’s Libraries report. (Click on Academic Libraries)

* Seven Ways to Get the Most from Your RSS Reader

* Why do people participate in social applications?

* CIL2008 Presentations
CIL 2008 presentations (Computers in Libraries conference 7-9 April )(http://www.infotoday.com/CIL2008/0

Keep an eye on Slideshare for more:
Transparency, Planning & Change: See-Through Libraries - Michael Stephens and Michael Casey
Technology Training for Library Staff: Creativity Works! - Sarah Houghton-Jan Harnessing New Data Visualization Tools - Darlene Fichter

SAOUG Conference: 3-5 June 2008

Most of you have heard that the SAOUG conference will be on 3-5 June 2008. The registration is now on. Visit http://www.saoug.org.za/ to register and view the prelimenary details of papers and workshops.

The keynote speakers are:

* Derek Law - Head of the Information Resources Directorate, University of Strathclyde.

* Geoff Hoy - Geoff has been associated with UCT libraries for many years, and is now involved with TENET, the tertiary education network which is used by all tertiary academic institutions in South Africa.

* Christof Appel - Christof has presented in the UK, USA, Dubai and South Africa. He has wowed audiences with his entertaining and thought provoking business presentations.

The following workshops will be presented on 3rd of June:

- EVIDENCE-BASED LIBRARY AND INFORMATION PRACTICE (EBLIP): The Basics: What, Why, How, Who and Where

- Practical Presentation Skills for trainers

- THE DEEP END: PLANNING A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR YOURSELF

These are some of the papers that will be presented on 4-5th June:

- Changing Users: Have They or Should we?

- Training End Users in the Mining Industry

- The Training Monster

- Changing Roles of Libraries and Librarians with Emphasis on the Technology (Working Title)

- Getting Executive Buy-In: The Value of Technology Demonstrators

- Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater: A Case Study Regarding a News Alerting Service in the Engineering Industry

- Establishing an Online Reference Service

- Life after Graduation Day: The Reality of the Information Industry

- The Institutional Repository Toolbox: How to Successfully Implement an Institutional Repository

- Databases, Institutional Repositories (IR) and Organizational Workflows

- Establishing a Knowledge Commons at the CSIR

- African Journal OnLine: The Journey towards African Learning Translating into African Development

- Digital Scholarship and the Role of the University Library

Other interesting initiative is: ROUND TABLE DISCUSSSION BOX LUNCHES. The topics are:
- Patent Searching Support Group (Facilitator: Louise Mitchell)
- End User Training: Best Practice
- Institutional Repositories
- EBLIP (Evidence Based Library and Information Practice)
- Life after Graduation: the Gap between Theory and Practice
- Mentoring
- Library 2.0

The social event:

Wednesday evening – 4th June : 17:00 – 22:30

Barnyard, Menlyn Shopping Mall for the following show: The Musical tribute to the King – Elvis Presley. “Put on your Blue Suede Shoes, get ready to Shake Rattle and Roll because this show promises to rock both young and old in true Elvis spirit.”

As a member of the SAOUG committee, I hope you will come and have an experience of a lifetime.

UKSG Serials-eNews

Some of the topics in the UKSG Searials-eNews in the latest, 18 April 2008 Newsletter are:

UKSG Conference, 7-9 April 2008 (official webpage: http://www.uksg.org.uk/events/conference08)

Catch up with what has been going on at the UKSG 2008 conference via Serials-eNews, the UKSG website and blog. Main reports of plenaries are on the blog, available via the hyperlinks in the introductions. This issue covers the six plenary sessions, with links to reports and comment on the conference blog. You can read about one of the breakout sessions, and others will be featured in the next couple of issues.

In Plenary Session 3, three speakers covered different aspects of usage data and user behaviour. David Nicholas posed the question that we are still working as if content is king, when we should be looking at the consumer as king - their behaviour is very different depending on who they are. Access is no longer the outcome - we need to go beyond making sure that access is easy and quick, rather we should be profiling behaviours in order to find best practice and see what works and what does not. This point was picked up by Ian Bannerman in his presentation which urged caution about the current state of, and reliance on, usage statistics and his concerns about the proposed usage factor work.......Herbert van der Sompel (LANL) gave an excellent presentation on the work they are doing in the MESUR project - a systematic effort to define, validate and cross-validate a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact by creating a semantic model of the scholarly communication process.

The focus of Plenary Session 4 was firmly on the challenges of large-scale digitisation in the third plenary.

The Plenary Session 5 addressed innovation and the challenges that confront us when technology enables new behaviours that require business models adapt to trends. Geoffrey Bilder at CrossRef highlighted the potential for the web to function as a database, linking related items such as an author on Amazon and a concept on Wikipedia. Peter Murray-Rust on the faculty at the University of Cambridge pointed out the issues inherent when publishers attempt to package data sets as if they were print journals.

Other NEWS:

* CrossRef and Plagiarism detection service

CrossRef and iParadigms, LLC are launching the CrossCheck service to which can be used to help verify the originality of scholarly content. Following the recent pilot of CrossCheck, the service is scheduled to go live in June. For more detail, read Key issue by Amy Brand, Director of Business and Product Development, CrossRef, in the March issue of Serials.

* CAB eBooks goes live

CAB International's (CABI) book collection can now be purchased digitally with the launch of CAB eBooks. By developing its own web-based portal, CABI can now provide customers with digital copies of its publications dating from 2000 to 2008. More than 140 titles in the applied life sciences are now available in the front-file collection (2005 - 2008), growing to 200 titles by the end of 2008. In addition, CAB eBooks is fully integrated with CAB Abstracts, the online bibliographic database. Each chapter is indexed and abstracted individually to ensure that specific slices of information can be easily retrieved. The e-books are available as a complete package or in six separate subject collections: agriculture; animal and veterinary sciences; environmental sciences; human health, food, and nutrition; leisure and tourism; and plant sciences.

* OCLC releases EZproxy 5.0

OCLC has released a new version of EZproxy, the software solution for serving library users remotely, that offers new features. More than 2,500 institutions in over 60 countries have purchased EZproxy software to provide libraries a solution for authenticating remote user access to licensed databases

* The Library of Congress Experience

The Library of Congress has launched a new project called the Library of Congress Experience, putting more exclusive Library of Congress content online and making material accessible in new ways, both in person and online. Touchscreen kiosks giving access to the digitised content are situated throughout the halls of the Library of Congress for visitors to use. This new content is also available online. To use the 'Interactives' online, it is necessary to download a free version of Silverlight, the Microsoft technology that enables the zooming and other exploratory activities. A companion website features the same interactive exhibitions with additional educational resources that teachers and librarians can use with young people.

Click on the TITLE to view the newsletter

Bates latest InfoTips: April 2008

I have received yesterday this April Newsletter alert from Mary Ellen Bates/Bates Information Service. This is what tips for searching she gave:

Yahoo:

"In an act of faith that Yahoo! will survive its possible absorption into The Borg, otherwise known as Microsoft, I'll mention one interesting Yahoo! search tip. If you enclose your search terms in [square brackets], you will only retrieve pages that have those words in that order. Mind you, this isn't a phrase search -- those two words may be anywhere in the page, but the first term must appear before the second. So, for example, the search [subprime crisis] will retrieve pages with "subprime mortgage crisis", "subprime lending crisis" "the subprime mortgage industry is in crisis right now" and so on. It will not retrieve "there is a crisis in subprime mortgages", however".

Conference Tagging

"I mentioned Technorati.com in my March 2008 InfoTip, but I had one of those epiphanies today and thought up another use for this blog-search tool. When bloggers attend a professional conference, they often talk about the sessions they find particularly noteworthy. In fact, they will sometimes transcribe the speaker's PowerPoint presentation along with their own thoughts. Conference organizers are now encouraging bloggers to use a standard tag to identify blog posts about the conference, so that anyone can search for blogs about that conference. What that means is, if you can identify the appropriate tag, you can search for all blogs with that conference tag, and get at least a sense of the key themes and most thought-provoking sessions. See, for example, the blog entries that were tagged with CIL2008, the agreed-upon tag for the Computers in Libraries conference"

Click on the TITLE to read more about this and the previous Bates Newsletters.

Scirus.com Updates

Scirus.com New Interface

For those of you who are still not familiar with Scirus.com - this is the Best Science & Technology Search Engine, an Elsevier product.

The Scirus development team worked closely with Elsevier's User-Centered Design Group to create a new user interface design. The clean, refreshed interface will enable you to find the precise scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data you need more quickly and easily than ever before.

One of the main aims of the re-design was to take powerful, but less frequently used features from the Scirus Advanced Search page and make them more accessible as post-search refinement options. This change will give Scirus users the power of Advanced Search, without the complexity, in a single click.

Features of the re-design include:
* Visibility: More search results are immediately visible ''above the fold'', by improving the use of screen real estate
* Intuitiveness: Highly appreciated features are moved to areas of the screen most suitable for the human eye, following accepted HCI guidelines
* Exposure: The full range of content sources is further exposed and highlighted through the use of new navigator functionality
* Ease of use: Batch selection of items for export, print or saving has been greatly simplified

Scirus Topic Pages continue to grow
Scirus Topic Pages is a freely accessible wiki-like platform where topic experts, upon invitation, create synopses of the state of research around particular topics and also recommend links to relevant reading material. The Scirus search index complements these recommendations by suggesting relevant articles and web pages based on topic-title keyword analysis.
Examples of the latest Topic Pages include:

- "Obesity and the Brain" by Dr. Angelo Del Parigi

- "Laboratory determination of Listeria monocytogenes virulence" by Dr. Dongyou Liu
After implementing the Editorial Policy for the management of the Scirus Topic Pages platform in January, the Scirus team has now finalized a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt the information on the Topic Pages freely for non-commercial purposes. Both the Editorial Policy and the licence can be viewed from links at the bottom of the Scirus Topic Pages homepage.

ScienceDirect Database News: March/April 2008

Read about the latest on ScienceDirect Database:

* New functionality added to ScienceDirect to meet researchers' needs!

New to ScienceDirect are features that make the platform more user friendly and deliver better, clearer results in fewer clicks.

Preview tabs

Researchers like to quickly evaluate articles before reading them. They will find preview tabs that provide quick access to the important article assessment components: the abstract, figures/tables and references. These tabs are on the results page, the Table of Contents page and the Article page.

Reference information

Before researchers have to scroll to the foot of articles to view reference information, which hinders reading.
Now it is possible for researchers to view reference information within the body of a paper when their cursor moves over a reference marker.

Article Toolbox

Once a researcher has evaluated and read an article, they often want to email it to their peers. A new article toolbox brings together all of the article-related functionality including "Cited By", "E-mail Article", "Save as Citation Alert", "Citation Feed", "Export Citation", Add to My Quick Links", "Add 2Collab" , etc., into one easy-to-find location. Researchers can now take further action quickly and easily with little extra effort.

New Navigation options

Looking for something specific? A new navigation pane on the left of the screen will make that easier by allowing you to refine results using four filters: “content type”; “source title”, “date” and “topics”. By enabling filtering you will be able to refine your search results without having to return to the search form.

Ratings

Researchers are interested to know how other experts rate articles they read. Due to be launched in phases over the coming months, the integration of article comments and ratings from Elsevier's social collaboration site, 2collab enables researchers to evaluate papers according to colleague-driven comments and ratings of articles right on the article page.

For more information visit the ScienceDirect Info site.

* New Major Reference Works available on ScienceDirect

New and available Reference Works visit theScienceDirect Info site.

ScinceDirect database have received a number of new functionality since 2007 and I would like to say that all of them brought an improved look and feel. ScienceDirect has been updated with the latest technological innovation to help researchers find the information quickly and successfully.

Enjoy the latest improved features. Tell us how you feel about them. Make a comment.

Elsevier: Library Connect Seminar in SA

Elsevier is delighted to announce the upcoming Library Connect Seminars in South Africa!

When: Wednesday, 29th October, 2008: Pretoria

The programme will include:

- International speakers as well as Elsevier participants to discuss issues of concern for information specialists.

- You will also hear about new developments of ScienceDirect and Scopus.

Start of programme: 10.00 am
End of programme: 17.00 pm
Audience: Library staff
The One-day participation fee including lunch and refreshments are free of charge!

We will send you the invitation with the Agenda and the registration form in order to secure your attendance at a later date. Your Elsevier team look forward very much to welcome you.

Free Databases @ EbscoHost

While reading through UKSG Serials E-News in early April, I found that EbscoHost offers three free databases. After contacting Ebsco representatives, we have these databases ADDED to the UJ Library EbscoHost list (find them at the end of the list).
* GreenFile
GreenFILE offers well-researched but accessible information covering all aspects of human impact on the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles include content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done on each level to minimize negative impact. Topics covered include global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. GreenFILE is multidisciplinary by nature and draws on the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology.The database provides indexing and abstracts for approximately 295,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,600 records.
* Teacher Reference Center
Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 270 of the most popular teacher and administrator journals and magazines to assist professional educators.
* Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA)
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts,(LISTA) indexes more than 690 periodicals, plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s. It is EBSCO Publishing’s intention to provide access to LISTA on a continual basis at http://www.libraryresearch.com/.

DO YOU KNOW!
EbscoHost have added some new options for searching. If you are either in the Basic or Advanced Search Screens, you can select from the option "Specific Databases" a SUBJECT group databases to search:
- General/News databases
- Computer Science/Engineering Databases
- Earth/Environmental Databases
- Health Sciences Databases
- Life Sciences Databases
- EJS E-Journals

EbscoHost 2.0: New Interface comming in July 2008

This post is just an alert about the upcoming next generation EbscoHost user interface in July 2008. According to information from their website the new interface is " based upon results gathered from extensive user testing. EBSCOhost 2.0 offers a clean new look and feel, for a technologically sophisticated, yet familiar search experience, with the built-in flexibility to provide individual user customization options".
Click on the post TITLE for details and screen shots on the functionality of the redesign. Click on any of the icons and see what is coming soon:
- Basic Search Screen 2.0
- Advanced Search Screen 2.0
- Result List 2.0
- Branding 2.0
- My EbscoHost 2.0
- Image Quick View 2.0
- Visual Search 2.0
- Improved Bibliographic Functionality
Click on the link to view the new User Guide and relevant FAQ:

http://0-support.ebsco.com.ujlink.uj.ac.za/ebscohost2/

Open Science Directory: New Open Access Initiative for Developing Countries

EBSCO has recently joined forces with Hasselt University Library, Belgium, and the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange programme of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO to develop a global Open Science Directory which is available via the Internet at no charge. The Open Science Directory provides developing regions with a comprehensive search tool for all open access and special programme journal titles. The Open Science Directory offers immediate access to approximately 13,000 scientific journal titles, with an objective of 20,000 titles midway through development.
Access to scientific literature is very important for the scientific work in developing countries. As a result of different projects a large collection of e-journals is now available for researchers in developing countries. The number of Open Access Journals is growing steadily as we can see in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). Major UNO organizations like WHO, FAO and UNEP have their specific programs for the scientific institutions in low-income countries. Finally a lot of universities, institutes and other organizations are supporting access programs. The most important are INASP, eIFL and eJDS.
The Open Science Directory is creating a unique access point to all the journals contained in the different programs.
Searching Options:
* From the home page, click on Open Science Directory
* The Portal is an A-to-Z journals list ( as in UJ A-to-Z)
* You can either search directly for specific journals
OR
* Select - Journal Collections - to view all Providers of the Journals, with links to the title lists
* Select - Subjects - to view the journals per specific subject area
* Select - Search - to view the Advanced search screen
* Select - Custom Google Search - to search either Scholar Google (academic articles) or Google Custom Search (Search in: DOAJ - OpenDOAR - HINARI - OARE - AGORA - INASP - eJDS - Ingenta Connect)
* Select - Links - to have access to journals portals, useful websites to different organisations
* Select - About the Site - to view more information about this site
Once you access the journal of interest, there is an option to search within this journal for articles.
I hope you will find this Open Science Directory very useful.

New interface @ JSTOR

Welcome to the new JSTOR interface!

From the first sight I looked at the new JSTOR website I loved it. It is wonderful that JSTOR finally took under consideration the users needs. To make it easy to use, more tools and capabilities for users have been integrated. Now, with just one click you can have the full-text article.
I have looked at the training presentation from JSTOR and these are some of the TIPS on what is new and how to do a successful searching. One new feature to consider using is MyJSTOR. It will help you personalise your searches and export citations to RefWorks or EndNote (see below for more information).

Home page features:
• Basic search box
• News & Notices
• Links to translated information
• Menu bar, Login, Help, and Contact Us list

SEARCHING
Basic search interface:
• Searches all full-text data for articles
• Search can be limited by discipline
• Select a recent search option
• Search for links to recent content outside of JSTOR by checking the box
Advanced search:
• Enter multiple terms/keywords
• Select to search in full-text, article title, author, caption, or abstract options
• Select AND, OR, NOT, or Near 5, Near 10 and Near 25 words

• Limit to type (article, review, editorial & other), publication date range, language (8 options), limit to specific journal title, or discipline(s) - you can select more than one discipline.

Article search results:

• Click on "Page of first match" to read the article first page, Click on "Article information" to view the article bibliographic information, the References list & articles citing this article, if you need to view the full-article Click on "PDF" option.

• Option "Go to page" of search results to navigate ahead
• Search results can be displayed: 10, 25, 50 and 100 per page
Images in JSTOR tab:
•Search is run again on image captions
•Page thumbnail is a link to that page
Search: Refining Article Results
•Enter term in box and select to “search within these results” or "modify" the search strategy.
•Results can be sort by relevance or publication date (oldest to newest; newest to oldest)
Search: Results: Viewing Article
•The search terms are highlighted
•Available buttons for going back to search results, previous result, and next result
•Link to view list of page with search term(s)

BROWSE
Browse (provide exact year coverage, for each options)
- by Discipline (Disciplines are listed alphabetically)
- by Title (Jump to the required journal title)
- by Publisher. You can find the following information:
• Journals listed under Publisher’s names
• The Publisher name is a link to information about the publisher, contact details and which journals are covered in JSTOR
• The Journal title is a link to the information and to browse the journal content
Browse: Navigation: List of all Volumes
• Journal information
• Box to search within this journal
• Issue thumbnail imageBrowse: Navigation: Volumes/Issues List
• Box to search within this journal
• Issue thumbnail image
Browse: Navigation: Issue Table of Contents
• Box to search within this journal
• Issue thumbnail image
• Check boxes to save citations
• Article information and PDF
• Stable URL for linking

Article Navigation: Page view:
• Citation at top of page
• Buttons to save citation, see article information, and retrieve PDF file
• Side bars to flip to next or previous page
• Links to run relevant searches within JSTOR - other articles by that author AND Scholar Google - related articles, articles citing this article, articles by that author
Article Navigation: Print or Download PDF
• JSTOR cover page with citation and links
• Print or save using PDF reader software (Adobe shown)

MyJSTOR
Citation Management: Login to MyJSTOR
• To save citations, login to MyJSTOR first
MyJSTOR Registration
To register:
• Enter required information
• Check the box to accept the JSTOR Terms and Conditions (you won’t be prompted again)
• Citations will be saved for as long as the account is kept
Citation Management: Sort Citations
• Select from date saved or publication date sort options
Citation Management: Export Citations
To export citations:
• Check the box next to the citations to be exported
• Click the “Export article citations” button
Chose export option:
• E-mail
• BibTex file
• Directly export into RefWorks, EndNote, ProCite, or Reference Manager
• Printer-friendly version

For help access Tutorials and MyJSTOR Help.
Any remarks on this new interface are welcomed.
Just Click on "Comments" under this post and type your notes.

Copyright Blog @UJ

Good news!
We have in the Library another blogger. Our Copyright officer Thapelo Mashishi has created a Copyright blog: http://copyrightuj.blogspot.com/. As he says in his welcome note "this publication will provide UJ academic staff with copyright information as it relates to the University and educational environment in general". Good luck Thapelo.

Direct link to the blog is available under "UJ Librarians Blogs"