August 2014 Volume 7 Issue 1

 

Welcome back - we wish you an exciting and productive semester!  The library and the liaison librarians are here to support your students AND you, the faculty and staff.  Ask us about resources for teaching, such as our Information Literacy Tool Kits and resources for research, such as choosing the best journals to publish in, copyright, author's contracts, tracking the impact of your publications, setting up alerts to follow your research interests in the literature or on the web, IPFW's scholarly repository Opus and the assistance we can offer in entering your publications and more.  We're here to help! 

 

The librarians at Helmke Library are committed to teaching students how to find, evaluate, and use information.  Google and Wikipedia have their place in the search process, but we believe that scholarly information is more appropriate for most of our students' inquiries.

This semester we are pleased to introduce Express Search, a new tool to help IPFW discover scholarly information.  Express Search searches our entire catalog, our journals, and most of our databases - all from a single search box. 

By default, every result can be accessed immediately online or found in Helmke Library.  Users can limit their results to books, ebooks, journal articles, peer-reviewed items, or specific publications, among other options.  Book results include a direct link into IUCAT for those who prefer to use our Request Delivery service, and every journal result includes access to the FIND IT button and our Document Delivery service.  Every results page also includes immediate access to Helmke Library staff through an "Ask Us" chat box, as well as a direct link into our Topic Guides.

Your subject librarian is available to teach you and your students about the benefits and limitations of Express Search.  While it is a very convenient tool, it will not replace the many library databases that provide sophisticated, precise searching.  It is still critical for upper-level students to learn about specialized research tools in their field of study.  Don't hesitate to call your librarian for individual, departmental, or class instruction sessions.  We're here to help! 

 

Complete the Picture - An IPFW 50th Anniversary Event, Sunday, October 12, 2014

 

 

 

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The IPFW Communicator digital collection of IPFW's weekly spanning 1969 through 2009-2010, and earlier student publications pre-dating The Communicator, has been downloaded over 65,000 times in the last three years.  The most downloaded issue to date is the October 29, 2003 edition.  It's hard to guess why, could it be the lengthy article on The Haunting Truth of the IPFW Campus concerning the Indiana Ghost Tracker's investigation into the haunted Studio Theatre?  The collection is a cooperative effort of IPSN, Inc., Walter E. Helmke Library, and IPFW alumnus David Donovan.

These websites have been reviewed by Choice, the major reviewing source for academic libraries. Associate Librarian Sue Skekloff selected these for this month's column:

Indiana Authors and Their Books "provides educators, researchers, and general readers in Indiana or elsewhere with a reference tool drawing from unique state resources, linking biographical sketches of famous Hoosier authors to full-text books.  The encyclopedia's content covers almost 175 years of Indiana's literary history (1816-1980).  The site offers some 7,000 author entries, with biographical sketches and bibliographies, that link to selected monographs from the bibliographies encoded so far (about 400 digitized titles to date).  Other title searches route to external services such as Google Books and IUCAT, Indiana University's online library catalog, to facilitate access. Included are authors with national reputations from Indiana's first 100 years, such as Theodore Dreiser, Gene Stratton-Porter, Kurt Vonnegut, and Booth Tarkington, along with others born, raised, or educated in Indiana or who lived in the state for a major portion of their lives." --E. L. Bagley, Agnes Scott College. Copyright 2013 American Library Association

Open Humanities Press "is an online, open-access publishing collective aimed at providing exposure to and dissemination of interdisciplinary books and journals devoted to critical thought.  All material published via OHP is open access, and a board of international scholars provides editorial oversight across the content life-cycle process... OHP journals and books represent a spectrum of content including philosophic thought, networked media, climate change, economics, theory, history, commentary, and more...Full text may be downloaded directly from the website as PDF files or via a linked website...Faculty may also be interested in the publishing opportunities for themselves or for their graduate students." --J. Porciello, Cornell University.  Copyright 2014 American Library Association

Pew Research Global Attitudes Project provides public opinion surveys and dataset analyses about attitudes and trends concerning important global topics, especially those impacting the US. Survey topics include a wide range of issues, including foreign affairs, national security, terrorism, the global image of the US, and globalization and trade. This website is well designed; narrative analyses and graphical data (e.g., bar graphs, charts, longitudinal displays, and pie charts) are presented on nearly every page... Select video summaries are integrated throughout the site...--C. E. Geck, independent scholar.  Copyright 2014 American Library Association

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