The University of St. Thomas
News, Events and Musings from the UST Libraries

Posts Tagged ‘database’

Featured Librarian: Linda Hulbert

By: Laura Hansen

Published on: Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

It’s time to feature another UST Librarian! Linda Hulbert wears many hats around UST Libraries; as both a subject liaison and the Associate Director of Collection Management and Services, she oversees quite a few resources.  Let’s see what she has to say about her favorites…

  1. What departments are you a liaison for? Political science and General
  2. What resource – in your topic area – do you think is the coolest?
    OK!  I love The New York Times Historical.
  3. What’s one cool thing that resource can do?
    I don’t know that it’s the best resource for my students who work in the area – but I do know that it is so cool to have current events and see when the first time certain terms were used – like suicide bomber.  I love the fact that you can look at how the country was looking at events contemporaneously – like the Civil War.  For my political science research, I also really like the papers in CQ Researcher.

Getting to know Linda: 

HNYT

  • What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?
    Anything with chocolate, fudge, and caramel
  • Who is your favorite author?
    I have to many: William Styron for Sophie’s Choice; Graham Greene for Quiet American; Maeve Binchy for wonderful warm fiction; Elizabeth George – Lynley mysteries;  Rushdie – Enchantress of Florence.
  • Do you prefer the Minnesota Twins or the St Paul Saints?
    Neither. Baseball, meh – now let’s talk about the Packers!
  • Is there something random about you that you’d like us to know?
    I have a one year old grandson, and one on the way – so fun!

Linda can be contacted for research assistance or classroom sessions by email, or by phone at (651) 962-5016.  See more information about her on the library website.

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events, Political Science, Services | No Comments »

Featured Librarian: Marianne Hageman

By: Laura Hansen

Published on: Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Welcome to new series here on the blog: the Featured Librarian!Marianne

We figured it would be fun for everyone to know who we are and, along the way, learn a bit about what we love about the place we work.  First up is Marianne Hageman, a business librarian who works mainly on the St Paul campus.

Here are some answers she gave in a recent interview:

  1. What departments are you a liaison for?
    I’m a liaison librarian for business, specializing in (but not limited to) marketing resources. I’m also liaison for the advertising and PR side of COJO.
  2. What resource – in your topic area – do you think is the coolest?
    That’s hard, since we have so many cool resources. But I’ll give a huzzah to MRI+ Mediamark Reporter, the demographics database.
  3. What’s one cool thing that resource can do?
    MRI+ can give you information on who buys what, and then ties that to different characteristics, including what magazines people read and the kinds of television programs they watch. There’s a separate section for teen data, and it’s pretty cool (or creepy, depending on how you look at it) to see what teens like to eat for breakfast.
  4. Who is your favorite author?
    I can’t limit it to just one! A favorite author from childhood is Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the “Anne of Green Gables” books and so much more. She’s a great comfort read. A favorite British author, recently deceased, is Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote “Howl’s Moving Castle” (made into a film by Hayao Miyazaki (it’s a great film, but the book is better.) A favorite Minnesota author is Lois McMaster Bujold; I’m working on reading all of her books this year. If you ask me tomorrow, I might have a different list.

Marianne can be contacted for research assistance or classroom sessions by email, or by phone at (651) 962-5404.  See more information about her, and schedule a research consultation, on the library website.

Posted in Business & Economics, Database Highlights & Trials, Services | No Comments »

Bible dictionaries

By: Carolyn DeLuca

Published on: Friday, September 30th, 2011

It’s that time of year (or semester) where we get a lot of requests for Bible dictionaries. If you are in the library, the librarian can point out where in the reference room you can find a multitude of them. But if you are at home, or in your dorm, or on the bus, or, or (you get my drift) you can still use UST libraries’ Bible dictionaries. We have the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible and the Oxford Annotated Bible Dictionary – this one is in the Oxford Biblical Studies resource.  To get to the Oxford Annotated Bible, go to Oxford Biblical Studies, click BROWSE and then BROWSE BIBLE TEXTS:

OxfordAnnotatedBible

You’ll see several Bible texts, but the Annotated Bible should be the first listed.

OxfordAnnotatedBible2

Just using the Oxford Biblical Studies resource itself can probably answer a lot of questions you may have. It’s a pretty robust, in-depth source on the Bible.

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials | No Comments »

UST Libraries to cancel subscription to Kompass

By: Andrea Hudson

Published on: Friday, March 11th, 2011

The libraries first subscribed to Kompass in 2004 and at the time it was the only resource that provided international company and industry information. Since that time the libraries have acquired other databases that provide the same type of information, most notably Euromonitor Global Market Information Database and OneSource Global Business Browserwhich contains data from Kompass and other international company sources. While Kompass is not an expensive product, especially compared to other business databases, the business librarians felt the information in Kompass is readily available in other sources and the money needed to pay for Kompass would be better used on other products.

Therefore, we will be cancelling the title and it will disappear on March 31st. Please send your comments and concerns to Andrea Koeppe 2-4674 or arhudson@stthomas.edu

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events, Uncategorized | No Comments »

What’s new… Proquest

By: Carolyn DeLuca

Published on: Thursday, January 27th, 2011

While you were away in January skiing in Switzerland or snorkeling in Aruba or slaving away 50 hours a week at your dad’s company to pay for next semester, we at the library have been coming up with a lot of new things.  I’ll spend the next few blog posts revealing the new and the fancy.

First and foremost was a change of look and function in over 30 library databases.  You may be familiar with the brand Proquest.  It used to look like this:  proquest

Or maybe you were used to using CSA which looked like this:

csa

But now if you do a search in

They will now look like this:

proquest2

The big deal isn’t so much how it looks, but how it works.  Now when you get results in a Proquest database, you’lproquest3l be able to do a ton of new things. You can combine several (or all) Proquest databases to search them only once. This would be great for all the sociology/social science databases.  Another thing you can do is limit by source type.  Let’s say you only want scholarly journals on a topic.  Boom!  Limited to only scholarly journals with the click of a mouse.  Some of the best new features come in the form of MY RESEARCH.

No sign-up needed.

Without an account you can…

  • View your selected items
  • Create a bibliography
  • View and combine your recent searches
  • Print, email and save items
  • Export to a citation management tool

Learn more…

Save it for later.

With an account you can…

  • Save articles, images and searches
  • Organize your research with folders
  • Add tags and create lists to share
  • Set ProQuest preferences
  • Manage your alerts and RSS feeds

Sign in or Create an account

Hey RefWorks fans!

Connecting accounts is easy…

Add items to RefWorks with a single click. You can connect your account to My Research during sign-up or any time after. When you do, have your RefWorks login information ready.

Learn more…

That’s the first of 3 installments of what’s new with library databases.  I’m sure you’re just on the EDGE of your seat waiting to hear what else we did.

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials | No Comments »

Free, direct mobile access to Chronicle of Higher Education now available

By: Julie Kimlinger

Published on: Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Do you want access to the Chronicle of Higher Education from your mobile communication device? Want to skip the library login process for gaining access? The Chronicle of Higher Education now provides direct and mobile service to its content (UST Libraries is covering the extra fee for this) in addition to campuswide access through the library website.

Any current UST faculty, staff or student who has or creates a free Chronicle account with their “@stthomas.edu” address now will be able to do the following:

  1. Access premium content posted at Chronicle.com from any location
  2. Access premium content from one’s smart phone
  3. Sign up for free e-newsletters such as Academe Today and the new Global Edition
  4. Sign up for job alerts
  5. Participate in Chronicle forums
  6. Comment on Chronicle articles
  7. E-mail Chronicle content to colleagues

All that is required is a free Chronicle account, which can be created by going to Chronicle.com and clicking on the “create” link at the top, right-hand side of the page.

Posted in News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library | No Comments »

Research Guides Re-imagined

By: John Heintz

Published on: Monday, September 13th, 2010

Not sure how you can find those “peer-reviewed” articles your prof wants you to use in that research paper?  Don’t know where to find the definition of “heteroscedasticity” for that econometrics assignment? Trying to trace the first usage of ’Google’ as a verb? Wondering how the heck you’re supposed to find books on ‘Cosmopolitanism and the geopolitics of feminist rhetoric’?

Try the Libraries’ Research Guides!!

The Research Guides, accessible from the library home page or via this direct link are authored by our liaison librarians and will give you specific suggestions of appropriate sources (e.g. scholarly library subscription databases, book catalogs, vetted free web sites, etc.) by format, subtopic, etc. This summer, we completely rebuilt this portion of our website, using a new software product called Libguides.  The new system offers a number of advantages over the old web pages, including:

  • Tabbed layout for understandable organization and easy navigation (see screen shot below)
  • More engaging visual layout, easier integration of images, audio and video content
  • More dynamic content with automatically updated lists of new books, feeds of relevant news and article content, etc.
  • Easy access to your librarian’s contact info for follow-up, plus integrated chat reference service
  • Ability for users to comment on and rate the resources
  • Ability to be notified if changes are made to a guide

libguides_screenshot

 

Note to faculty members:

Many professors have linked to our old web pages on their Blackboard or other course web sites: if you have done so, please update them by finding the appropriate links from the subject listings.  You may also want to review our web page that demonstrates how to link a Research Guide to a Blackboard course.

Instructors wishing to have a new guide created to address research assignments in their specific courses, or who would like resources added to an existing guide should contact their Liaison Librarian for assistance.

Posted in Libraries, New Materials, News & Events | No Comments »

Summon

By: Carolyn DeLuca

Published on: Monday, September 6th, 2010

Just in time for the fall, a whole new approach to doing library research.  UST Libraries is now offering Summon – a new discovery tool that allows you to search many (but not all) library resources the same way you search the free web. Think of it as a Google-like approach to the libraries’ resources.

Summon is a rich, bibliographic searching tool that retrieves content from most, but not all, of the library resources.  Your results will return such varied media as:

audiovideobookscore

journaldissertationconfebook

If the item isn’t available in full-text in Summon, it links you to the full-text (or tells you where the paper copy is on the shelves) through the Get it button.

It works by indexing content from thousands of publishers.  Then it retrieves results from publishers with whom we have agreements.  Summon doesn’t index content from all publishers, nor do we have agreements with all publishers.  So in many cases you’ll still want to use subject-specific databases to find more info.  But when you don’t know where to start, Summon is a good place.

Here’s an example of beginning my research on water as a human right.

summonscreenshot1

Your results are retrieved in ranked order.  If your keyword shows up in the title of the article, it ranks highest.  The ranking  order continues with  abstract, metadata, and finally full-text.  The full-text is available by clicking on the title and you can save records to export to email or Refworks.  Like Google, you’ll get many, many results because Summon indexes articles, books, and book chapters, as well as library catalog records.  However, don’t get overwhelmed, there are several excellent limiting options.

summonscreenshot2

Give it a try – go on, you know you want to.  I’m curious to know what you think about Summon so please feel free to comment.

Posted in Database Highlights & Trials | No Comments »

New database of full text Decision Science journals

By: Andrea Hudson

Published on: Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Published by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, Informs PubsOnline is a database of 12 full text management journals that contains articles which focus on decision sciences, information systems, and supply chain management. It may be smaller than other business article databases, but this specialized collection of operations research journals contains articles that can complement articles found in more general management databases. Users can conduct author or keyword searches and can choose to search in multiple or single selected journals. The full text extends back to 2001 and the articles include all table and graphs and references with some links to other full text articles.

Posted in Business & Economics, Uncategorized | No Comments »