SRDS Media Solutions will experience a planned downtime affecting their online services during the winter break. Beginning at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 24, they will perform scheduled network infrastructure and security maintenance that will cause SRDS services on the web to be unavailable until Monday, Dec. 29. During the outage, they will post any updates to Twitter @SRDS. Check-in there to keep up-to-date on when everything is back up and running.
Browsing Category
Database Highlights & Trials
Genera
l Science Collection is a database of full-text of science journals. It is provided free from the state through the Electronic Library of Minnesota (ELM). I am pleased to announce that the product has become far less general and far more peer-reviewed. What was a database of mostly general science magazines has now become a database of mostly peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the sciences. When you search the results default to full text academic journals. You can narrow those results to peer-reviewed journals only, or only magazines, news and even videos.
Those of you who use IBISWorld probably use it to look up US industry information. I’m pleased to announce that IBISWorld now covers more of the world. Sure, you can still use it as your go-to for US industry information, but we’ve expanded our subscription to include
- U.S. Specialized Industry Reports
- Canada Industry Reports
- China Industry Reports
- Global Industry Research Reports
Thanks for all your patience. Our access to IBISWorld has been restored. For all of you out there looking for industry information, you shouldn’t encounter any problems now.
I’m so pleased to report that the error message of maximum number of users reached on our various Oxford University Press products has been fixed. Those of you looking for articles from the Encyclopedia of Social Work can breath a sigh of relief. It took about a week for Oxford’s tech support to fix this problem, but it’s all good now. Please let me know if you experience any problems (cjdeluca@stthomas.edu) or have any questions or comments.
There seems to be a bit of buzz around pros and cons lately. For those of you with this assignment, take a look at:
These three databases all kinda work the same way. They cover multiple sides (pros and cons) of various social issues. They offer background information, topic overviews, and pros and cons pulled from a variety of sources including primary sources, newspapers, TV & radio news transcripts and magazines.
We have several e-resources (literally thousands) published by Oxford University Press. These include:
And many, many other titles. I am sad to report that they are experiencing technical difficulties and limiting access to these resources. We are seeing an error report that reads,
The problem is, we don’t don’t have limited users. This message shouldn’t be appearing on these resources. Oxford tech support is aware of the problem and trying to fix it. It’s been over 24 hours now and they’re not sure what’s causing it. They also told us Michigan State and Yale were experiencing the same thing, so it’s certainly a big system problem.
We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience. If you want to reply to this blogpost, I can notify you when the problem is fixed. Again, we are really sorry this is happening.
From time to time I look to see what is being searched in Summon. And I’m always delighted and surprised at the breadth of topics being researched here at UST. So yesterday someone (or several people) were looking for time travel in philosophy. Hmm, interesting. I’m going to use this example to show you a shortcut in Summon for searching within a topic. Summon retrieved a number of interesting and useful results when time travel in philosophy was searched. Most were totally relevant, some were misses (i.e. a review for the film Primer with the title “Time travel, philosophy and geek chic” which describes the film).
Here’s are a few tips to move you along in Summon a little faster. When searching a topic within a discipline (in this case the topic is time travel and the discipline is philosophy), just search the topic and then limit by the discipline:
Limiting by discipline helps narrow your results. This also works well with another search I saw, transformational learning in social work. Search transformational learning and then limit to discipline social work.
And always, if you’re looking for academic articles, limit to Scholarly Research or Peer-Review. My favorite limiter has to be Reference. Using Reference as a limiter for content type finds your topic in encyclopedias and dictionaries. We have thousands of online reference materials and sometimes they end up writing your whole paper for you. Now when I say encyclopedias, I don’t mean a 2 paragraph article reminiscent of the World Book. I’m talking about a 4 page article on the Causal Approaches to the Direction of Time in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, complete with an extensive bibliography. Or the Companion to the Philosophy of Time, which starts out, “The philosophy of time has been a central area of concern for philosophers for thousands of years. It remains one of the most active areas of academic philosophy, but the study of time has never been more dynamic and interdisciplinary than now.” I imagine this book could get you pretty far in your paper.
ERIC, the major education database, published by the US government, has decided to limit its indexing and full-text to scholarly journals and reports. This means they will no longer include trade journals, newsletters or magazines that include articles that simply describe the authors’ experiences in classrooms or are news items (Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education.) We are considering adding Education Research Complete to make up for those losses. Do you feel this additional resource will be useful in your classes or for your students? (We will NOT stop our subscription to ERIC. This would serve to enhance, not replace, ERIC.)
Please contact Merrie Davidson with your comments.
Hey Chemistry Researchers!
Have you been procrastinating about getting your SciFinder account set up? Maybe the initial log-in procedure was a bit intimidating, or you just plain weren’t sure how to do it?
Well, be confused no more!
To make sure we’re all getting our research taken care of so we can relax and take full advantage of Mole Day celebrations, I just made a quick tutorial video on setting up your account. Learn how to register for an account*, and then access SciFinder via the UST Libraries website for all your amazing Chemistry needs. (You’re also more than welcome to contact me if you need or want any help figuring out how best to go about getting to the best references for your serach).
Have a great weekend!
*Note: SciFinder is for the exclusive use of UST faculty, staff and students. An UST email address must be used during registration to authenticate your account.