Timesaver=Lifesaver March 30, 2009
Posted by Kyla in : Citing Sources, Cool tools , add a comment
It’s the one little line in your assignment that can lead to hours of work:
Format your paper in APA (or MLA, or Chicago, or Turabian…)
Inserting correct citations and a properly formatted bibliography used to involve complicated manuals, memorization of arcane facts about space placement after a period, and a lot of hair pulling. Kudos to those who want to keep citing by hand…but for those who don’t, it’s….
REFWORKS to the RESCUE!
We’re kicking off a whole week of RefWorks training, which will run between March 30th to April 3rd, to introduce you to your new best citation friend.
What is RefWorks? It’s a web-based program that collects all your research and references in one handy spot, search and select them, and automatically generates citations and bibliography in whatever style your Professor is asking for.
In other words, RefWorks is a Lifesaver!
Drop by and learn more all week:
Mon. March 30: Bryan Center 12-2 pm
Tue. March 31: Lilly Library 1-3 pm
Wed. April 1st: Perkins Library 1-3 pm
Thu. April 2nd: East Campus Marketplace 12-2
Fri. April 3rd: Bryan Center Plaza 12-2 pm
Catalog (Beta) Improvements! March 24, 2009
Posted by Debra in : Catalog Tip, Research Help , 1 comment so farThere were three significant enhancements and three minor enhancement and/or fixes made to the Catalog (BETA)interface in the past two months, and we also have some additional updates about upcoming features to the system. If you have any concerns or questions about the Catalog (BETA)catalog interface, please send us a message via the feedback form.
UPDATES
Hold/recall requests can now be placed from within the Catalog (BETA) interface. You no longer have to jump to the Classic Catalog to place hold-requests and you will only need to sign-in once per session to place as many hold-requests as you like.
“My Reserves,” Tab. This tab provides you with listings of your current reserves materials. The tab requires you to sign on to see its contents, and only provides you with your course reserves information. This is a strong departure from the “classic” catalog’s “reserves” tab in that it doesn’t require you to remember (and correctly spell) your course numbers/instructors/titles, and provides total course reserves information on a single page. We are hopeful that this approach will provide dramatically improved functionality.
The system now uses an enhanced login process, with auto-logout timing for all users. You can log in using either your NetID or your library card number from a single log-in screen that defaults to using your NetID when available. All users’ sessions are also now timed so that they will end after a certain period of inactivity (currently, a half-hour of inactivity for logged-in patrons, an hour for non-logged-in users). Unlike the Classic Catalog, the auto-logout feature does not refresh the browser page and steal the computer’s focus; instead, the system performs the logout in the background when a user next tries to access the system.
Implemented Google Analytics for browsing statistics (completed February 4, 2009). Since early February 2009, all web traffic in the integrated search environment (Endeca, Metalib, etc.) has been logged by the Google Analytics tool for future analysis.
Syndetics book-cover-images now served up via the “Limelight” network (completed March 5, 2009). Implemented appropriate URL changes to provide Syndetics cover-images through Syndetics’ Content Delivery Network (Limelight); hopefully this will increase cover-image display/response rates as the cache-system gets progressively more data. Note that this does not affect the response speed (or failure rates) of other Syndetics enriched content, such as Summaries, Table of contents, First Chapters, etc.
Catalog interface no longer errors out when going directly from a results-list page to a full-record page (which was not part of the results-list) and then trying to search again on the unchanged terms and index that produced the original results-list.
DIACRITICS
There is good and bad news on the diacritics front. On the negative side, after extensive testing of the thesaurus-based solution in Catalog (BETA)version 6.x, the Search TRLN Operations Committee ultimately came to the conclusion that even the performance enhancements in the newer version of Catalog (BETA)were not sufficient to mitigate the performance problems introduced by using a custom-built thesaurus to provide full diacritics-searching support.
On the positive side, additional extensive testing on a “normalization” strategy appears to provide a stable, performance solution to the long-standing issue of diacritics-searching support. Even better, this solution works on the existing version of Catalog (BETA), which means that a solution is not tied to upgrading Catalog (BETA)on the Search TRLN servers.
Currently, there is no specific date set for implementing the solution, but it is likely to take place in early April 2009. At that time we can hope to say with assurance (really!) that the Endeca-based catalog can handle diacritics searches. Thanks to every one for their patience in this important aspect of the system.
UPCOMING PLANS FOR THE INTERFACE
Incorporation of “My Library Card” functionality into the interface
Incorporation of “shopping cart”-like features in the interface so that you can manage multiple catalog (or article) records at once
Doodle: Easy Scheduling March 23, 2009
Posted by Nathaniel in : Cool tools , add a comment
Imagine: You have to organize a group meeting with several people who have busy schedules.
Person A: I can’t meet on Wednesday, can you meet Thursday?
Person B: I can’t meet on Thursday, can you meet Friday?
Person C: Ughhhh…there has got to be a better way to organize meetings!
Try Doodle. Doodle is an online tool that makes it easy to schedule group meetings and other appointments. Doodle is simple, quick, free and requires no registration.
You can also use Doodle…
Mendeley: Manage, Share & Discover Research March 19, 2009
Posted by Hannah in : Cool tools, Duke researchers , 4commentsGot a pile of PDFs on your computer? Turn your research documents into your own personal digital library with Mendeley–a new tool for organizing and sharing research.
Mendeley has a downloadable (free!) desktop software component, as well as a web-based component (Mendeley Web). Mendeley Web allows you to sync your library of PDFs, so that you can access them while you are away from your computer. Mendeley Web also serves as a social networking tool for connecting with researchers in your field.
When adding PDFs to Mendeley’s desktop client, Mendeley extracts the metadata (author, title, publication info, etc.) and creates a record for each PDF that you add to your Mendeley library. In addition to storing your PDFs, you can use the tool to add annotations and tags.
How does Mendeley differ from a tool like Zotero? In a nutshell, Mendeley grabs citation info from a PDF, whereas Zotero grabs citation info from webpages. Many reviewers note that the Mendeley’s sharing and collaboration features are superior to other tools, including tools like Zotero. Reviewers also pointed out another notable difference in the development philosophies of these tools…Zotero is ‘open source’ (developers are sharing the code, so that many people can contribute). Whereas, Mendeley is currently a closed, commercial product.
Note: Mendeley is still in ‘Beta’, which means its developers are still tweaking the tool!
You can have a look at the features here: http://www.mendeley.com/tour
Tweet Tweet! AskRef’s Twitter Feed! March 3, 2009
Posted by Tiffany in : Cool tools, Life in the library, Tips for students , add a commentAre you all-a-twitter about Twitter? So are we!
If you have questions, you can go to the reference desk or IM, email and text librarians. But what if you just want some general updates on library happenings? What if you’re curious about some of the fascinating questions we are asked each day? How do you get that kind of information?
Why, from Twitter of course! If you’re already glued to Twitter, then you can follow us now! While you can post anything you want to your account, we try to keep it interesting.
Our updates range from tips on ways to use our services (like texting a librarian if you’re in the movable stacks and they are stuck) to highlighting important days (two weeks ago we celebrated W.E.B. Du Bois’s birthday on Twitter by including a link to some of his works in our collection). Sometimes librarians are pretty hip, so we Tweeted about our Full Frame Film Archive for those of you who couldn’t get enough of the Oscars last week.
And sometimes…sometimes we get questions that are just awesome. So we will Tweet them to give you something to think about. You want an example? “Where can I find information about spontaneous cataracts in dogs and monkeys?” So, yeah. You’re interested.
Find us by searching for ‘askref’ or just click here.If you have yet to enter the Twitterverse, you can check out these frequently asked questions to see what it’s all about!
