Connect with the Campus Library!

Your library just got a new set of exciting e-sources for you to explore!  Here they are:

Encyclopedia Judaica, an encyclopedia of the Jewish people and their faith, Judaism.

Encyclopedia of Small Business, a source for detailed articles and overviews of all the key information needs of small business users, including financing, financial planning, business plan creation, market analysis, sales strategy, tax planning and more.

Encyclopedia of Everyday Law, a publication covering important statutes and cases, including historical background, profiles of various U.S. laws and regulations, and details of how laws and regulations vary from state to state.

How to get to them? On our library web page, under Articles & More: Databases, select Encyclopedias and other sources.  That’s it!  From there you may select any of these or other electronic encyclopedia we have available for you!  What a wealth of information!

Do you know what wikis are?  According to Wikipedia, the king of all wikis, a wiki is usually a collaborative website which can be edited by anyone with access to it!

Wikis have many applications, including sharing of knowledge within organizations or communities with specific interests. You can find a wiki on just about any subject!  Just try a search on Wetpaint or wiki.com to look for subject-specific wikis.

You want to build your own wiki?  PeanutButterWiki, Wetpaint, and Wikia are some of the most popular free wiki services that allow you to create your own wiki community. Teachers, you can try to set up a wiki for the courses you teach! For more information on such services, you may see Wikipedia’s List of wiki farms.

Our library recently purchased a list of new e-sources to help students access reliable information from the comfort of their home! These electronic titles are listed through our library homepage, under “Articles & More: Databases,” “Encyclopedias and other sources.“

My favorite? Try Opposing Viewpoints, a great database to use for controversial social issues. Offers viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, academic journal and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, podcasts, and more! Just take the time to dig into this amazing wealth of information!

Just finished playing with a nifty little application that helps you create online forms, Wufoo!  This is a really easy to use tool for putting together forms in different formats such as single line text, multiple choice, checkboxes, drop down menus, etc. Free registration allows you to create up to three forms for 100 user/participant entries per month and to receive up to three reports for your collected data.  Payed upgrades give you access to more options. 

So, check WooFoo next time you plan to build a survey, put together a workshop registration form, a wedding invitation, or even an inventory of your music or DVD collection!

Despite the ongoing controversy on the reliability of projects such as Wikipedia, a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than a third of American adult internet users (36%) use this citizen-generated online encyclopedia on a regular basis.  It’s perhaps ironic that despite efforts to discourage college students from using it as a serious research tool, the same study reports that Wikipedia’s popularity is particularly strong among the well-educated! 

An interesting article by Larry Sanger, “On the New Politics of Knowledge,” points to the merits and pitfalls of the new collaborative web environment responsible for the creation of resources such as Wikipedia and what we consider common knowledge.  Sanger, with a Ph.D. in philosophy and one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, argues that the democratization of knowledge as a product of contributions by the general public has indeed allowed a wider representation of different perspectives and a more efficient way to generate accurate information under the watchful eyes of multiple contributors.  On the other hand, he also contends that collaborative projects such a Wikipedia need an additional layer of oversight to add credibility and depth, and to confirm what the expert opinion is on different topics. Wikipedia’s stand that the word of the crowd is to be trusted as a product of collective effort, indiscriminate of the contributors’ levels of expertise, is flawed, says Sanger. Wisdom and knowledge need to be appreciated as more than social constructs of an undifferentiated, anonymous crowd of contributors. 

To provide a practical application to his arguments and counter issues of reliability of projects such as Wikipedia, Sanger last month launched a new collaborative venture, Citizendium, as the credible alternative to Wikipedia.  Citizendium’s web site includes only articles that carry the names of their authors along with a “seal of approval” from experts that oversee such contributions. Still in its early stages of development and relatively small in its content (as of April 30, there were 1,700 articles), Citizendium is yet another experiment in the world wide web of information that tries to assert itself for its credibility and usefulness.  However, only time will tell if Citizendium develops a distinct enough appeal to draw users away from Wikipedia to what it claims to be most important, a more authoritative contribution to the creation of common knowledge.  For the time being, it’s worth keeping an eye on its potential competitive edge to the much more popular, albeit controversial, Wikipedia!

Unless you took our post about feed readers to heart and are reading this blog through another interface you have probably noticed the Flickr photos on the right. Maybe you’ve even clicked the “more photos” link that leads to the campus library’s Flickr photo pool.

Flickr describes itself as an “online photo management and sharing application” designed to “help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them” and “enable new ways of organizing photos.” It could be described as an online photo album, but it’s much more than that. Not only can you use Flickr to share and organize your own photos, you can use it to find other people who share your interests. Find a Flickr group. Leave a comment for a friend or ask a total stranger a question. Find a picture available under a Creative Commons license to illustrate a PowerPoint or blog post. Browse the Flickr world map for photos of a place you’ve never been.

So, if you haven’t already, meet the folks who work in the library. Join the Campus Library Flickr group and post your own photos of the library, or just check out all the photos tagged “campuslibrary” for inspiration. We’d love to see the library through your eyes.

So, let’s say you want to find a particular journal in the Campus Library…and you really want to see if it is available in full text electronic format.  There’s a bunch of ways to do this, but the fastest way might be to use the E-Journals link on the Campus Library webpage.

Once you are at the E-Journals page, you’ll see two links:

    COCC Library electronic journal collection :  browse or search this list for e-journals available to current COCC students, faculty and staff as well as to OSU Cascades students and other patrons from within the Campus Library.

    OSU Libraries electronic journal collection : browse or search this list for e-journals available to current OSU Cascades students, faculty and staff as well as to local (COCC students and others) patrons from within the Campus Library. 

OK…any patron (including folks from the community) can use either link from within the Campus Library building. 

Additionally, if you’re a COCC staff or student, you may access the COCC electronic journal collection from home. 

If you’re a OSU-Cascades staff or student, you may access the OSU electronic journal collection from home.

Now, here’s two fabulous things:

1) Each library’s e-journal link lists every full text electronic journal contained in ALL the databases and e-journal collections owned by that library.  COCC’s e-journal link will lead you to ALL of the full text electronic journals appearing in any of the databases and electronic journal collections owned by COCC.  Ditto for OSU. 

Isn’t that neat-o?  You don’t have to search a zillion different databases for that one full text electronic journal!

2) Once you get to the full text electronic journal, you can search by specific volume, issue and date (if you have a particular citation) OR search by subject term or keyword WITHIN that particular electronic journal.

So, let’s try it.  I need to find an article in Journal of Mammology.  I’m doing this from home as a COCC staff person, so I am hoping to find this journal in a full text, electronic format.  I go to the Library homepage and look for that link E-Journals.  I click on the link.  Since I am a COCC person, I then click on  COCC Library electronic journal collection.

I get a basic search form and type in my JOURNAL title:
Journal of Mammology.

I retrieve these results:

Journal of mammalogy  (0022-2372)

Isn’t that cool?  The results tell me which database or collection has the Journal of Mammalogy full text and for which dates. 

I click on the link that gives me the dates that I need…that leads me to a list of links for each volume/issue of the journal.  I either check tables of contents of each issue (if I’m just browsing) or I click on the particular volume/issue that matches my citation (if I’m looking for a specific article).  Each article in the table of contents has a link for full text. 

If the journal is listed for an Ebsco database or a JSTOR collection, you can do some keyword searching within that particular journal as well–just look for a link that says something like search within this publication.

Go ahead–try it out!  Oh, and remember, if you don’t have a particular journal title in mind, and just need to find journal articles from any journal on a topic…you go to the Articles & more: Databases link from the Campus Library webpage, right?

Thanks for coming to check out ConXn, the Campus Library’s new blog!

Great, you’re probably thinking…I like to keep up with what’s happening on campus, but this is one more thing to remember to read….

Enter the feed reader!

A feed reader (also sometimes called an aggregator) is a program that allows you to read all the blogs you like in one convenient place. Maybe you already have some blogs you like to read, blogs like InsideHigherEd, The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog, or even the Freakonomics Blog. With a feed reader, rather than checking each blog to see if new information has been posted you can check a single website and see which of your favorite blogs have been updated since the last time you logged in. You can save favorite posts as well as email them to someone else.

Most blogs use something called “RSS” (generally said to stand for “really simple syndication”) to make the content of the blog available in other places. Feed readers are programs designed to automatically check the RSS feeds of blogs you select to see if there’s anything new available. If there is, the feed reader allows you to read the new content right from the reader–no need to check multiple websites.

In addition to blog feeds, you may be able to read the tables of contents for your favorite journals or even find out when new, relevant articles are added to your favorite databases–rss feeds are popping up everywhere!

Wondering how to get started? First you’ll need to sign up for a (free) feed reader subscription. There are plenty of options out there, but here are a few suggestions. I use Bloglines, a free web-based feed reader, with no complaints. Google is in the game with the Google Reader, and NewsGator offers another popular reader.

Once you have your reader set up, you’ll need to add some feeds! Of course you’ll want to start with ConXn–you’ll find the link to our feed to the right.

Once you start looking for feeds, you’ll notice them everywhere–often you’ll see the little orange icon shown here, but sometimes you’ll just see a link to “feeds” or even “atom” (a form of rss feed). Whatever it’s called, it will make your online life a little easier!