Make citations in Facebook June 27, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Citing Sources, Cool tools , add a commentIn further Facebook takes over the universe (at least the parts not already claimed by Google) news, there’s a new application in Facebook called CiteMe. You enter the title of the book you want to cite, click go, and the app spits out a formatted citation in one of five styles (APA, Chicago, Harvard. MLA, or Turabian).
It uses the WorldCat library catalog to find books, so it won’t be helpful for citing journal articles. If you’re working with journal articles, you can check our Citing Sources pages for examples and do them by hand, or get started with RefWorks or EndNote, the two citation managers Duke has site licenses for, or Zotero, a free online citation manager. Lots of choices, but CiteMe is a nice little addition to the mix!
How do I get access to NetLibrary e-books? June 20, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Database Tip, Question of the Week , add a commentMost of Duke’s e-books are provided by a service called NetLibrary. The 24,000+ e-books can be viewed at the site but not downloaded, and printing is cumbersome.
You can go directly to NetLibrary and search for e-books, or find them in our catalog and click on the link into NetLibrary. Once at the NetLibrary site, you need to create a free log-in and password to access a book. You can then “check out” the book, usually for 4 hours, unless someone else is using it.
If you are off campus you will need to make sure that NetLibrary is recognizing you as a Duke user. Look for the little Duke window at the top left of the page. If it’s not there, you will need to turn on the Duke VPN if you use it, or force our EZProxy server to ask you for a Duke NetID and password. To do this, go back to the library home page and search for NetLibrary using the Databases tab. When you click the link in the results, you should get a pop-up asking for your NetID and password.
(You can also force EZProxy by right-clicking on the page and following the link when you are using the LibX plugin. Just another reason that LibX is so great!)
Duke Libraries on Film! June 18, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Life in the library , 1 comment so farI’m late to the party on this, but I recently learned that the winning film in Duke’s 2008 Froshlife first-year movie festival, Wilson’s Making the Grade, features both Lilly and Perkins Libraries. Lilly and its opinionated e-printer make an appearance at about 2:10, and Perkins and the Gothic Reading Room show up at 6:20.
Know any other appearances of the Duke Libraries on film?
RefWorks is here! June 13, 2008
Posted by Emily in : Citing Sources, Cool tools, Duke researchers, Research Help , 1 comment so farSome of you avid fans of RefWorks will be happy to hear that you may now access this online research management system FREE through Duke’s OIT.
For those of you who haven’t yet been wowed by RefWorks’ user-friendly interface and robust functionality (think Works Cited pages in seconds; in-text citations in a couple of clicks; unlimited storage space for citations and notes), take a few minutes to create a free account:
- Go to www.refworks.com/refworks from any computer on campus
- Click on Sign Up for an Individual Account
- Enter your information and click Register
You’ll find that RefWorks is fairly intuitive, but it’s worth taking a look at the Quick Start Guide or the step-by-step RefWorks tutorials when learning how to format bibliographies and import citations from databases to your account.
And if you’re off-campus, never fear: Just enter Duke’s group code RWDukeUniv.
Questions about RefWorks? Contact Emily Daly. And let us know your thoughts about Duke’s latest time-saving tool for researchers!
Academic uses for Twitter? June 10, 2008
Posted by Phoebe in : Cool tools , 3commentsA lot of the technoscenti have become coverts to Twitter in the last six months. Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows you to post 140-character snippets (via text message, web or other media) and have them read at the site, fed into your Facebook status page, or delivered in a variety of other ways. I know an office that uses Twitter instead of an old-fashioned in/out board, and Twitter got a lot of press as a result of the “revolt” at the SXSW Keynote Address.
But is Twitter relevant to academic work? I didn’t think so until I read Lenore’s blog post about using Twitter at a blogger’s meetup, and her musings:
Despite the high quality of both the planned and unplanned sessions, the best part, by far, was meeting other Twitter users. It was a tremendous amount of fun observing and participating in conversations during the actual sessions while also tweeting about what the presenter was trying to convey. …
I was effectively live blogging or taking notes on what I considered to be the main points of each session and others who were attending the conference or following along from a remote location, could see them using twemes.com or hashtags.org.
And then I found a series of posts at AcademHack discussing using Twitter in the classroom. This is from the faculty perspective – but certainly a study group of students could work together to take collaborative notes in a lecture using hashtags. What do you think, faculty, and students?
