Thursday, May 18, 2006

CRL president's report

The report of the president of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Bernard Reilly, that was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Council of Voting Members in Chicago in April is now online at http://www.crl.edu/PDF/PresReport2006.pdf. Ada-Marie Atkins Nechka was at this meeting as the University of Calgary representative and said that it was a good talk.

Monday, May 15, 2006

New Trials + alert regarding Biological Abstracts.

Go to the Trials Blog for links and additional information.

Note that the blog now has an RSS feed option.

*STKE (Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment)
Expires: June 30th

*The Literary Encyclopedia
Plans are underway to order

*Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800-1900
Are going to ask vendor for a deal on print plus electronic

*BIOSIS trial (cross database comparison)
Expires June 2nd

Let us know if you have a platform preference, otherwise it looks as though Biological Abstracts will move to the ISI platform, and we will upgrade to BIOSIS.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Factivia Tutorials

Link to the UofA's tutorials.

Upgrade to RAMBI (index to Jewish Periodicals)

The Jewish National and University Library (JNUL) is pleased to announce the upgrading of its Index to Articles on Jewish Studies (Hebrew acronym RAMBI) to Aleph-500 version 16 software.

With this upgrade, the RAMBI staff will be updating the online database on a daily basis (as opposed to weekly, until now)

This upgrade also includes the addition of a full Hebrew language searching interface.

If you have been using our recommended address:
http://libnet.ac.il/~libnet/rmb/rmb_direct.htm
this address will now lead you directly to the new version.

If you prefer to link directly to the Hebrew interface, use:
http://libnet.ac.il/~libnet/rmb/rmb_direct_heb.htm

All other addresses will be phased out in the coming days.

RAMBI currently contains almost 250,000 records. Over 8300 of these have links to fulltext versions of the articles. To bring them to the top of a results list click on the heading 'Text'. Access to the fulltext articles themselves may depend on local subscriptions.

Users who have been accessing RAMBI via z39.50 protocol (for example, users of Endnote) should note the host name, IP and port number changes at:
http://libnet.ac.il/~libnet/z39.htm
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Center for Research Libraries Newsletter

This issue is devoted to the Center's wealth of primary sources and
documentation on immigration.

CONTENTS:
Resources for Immigration Studies

Head Counts: U.S. and Foreign Census Reports

Immigration and Public Policy: An overview of CRL resources on the
subject with links to notable collections and works

Diaspora Newspapers: U.S. ethnic newspaper holdings with a link to a searchable database of titles

New ArtStor Content

Recent addition to the ARTstor Digital Library:

Cuban Heritage Collection

We are pleased to announce that the University of Miami Libraries' unique Cuban Heritage Collection is now part of the ARTstor Digital Library.

The Cuban Heritage Collection, part of the University of Miami Libraries, is the premier collection of research materials for Cuban and Cuban-American studies. It is the most comprehensive library of manuscripts, rare and contemporary books, and unique materials for the study of Cuba, its history, its people, and its culture in the island and abroad. The images provided through ARTstor represent an important, thoughtfully curated subset of the material available through the Cuban Heritage Collection. The images to be made available through ARTstor have been selected from The Manuel R. Bustamante Photograph Collection and the Cuban Postcard Collection.

The Manuel R. Bustamante Photograph Collection consists of more than 600 black and white photographs of Cuba from the early 1900s to the 1930s. Many of these images were published by New York-based Munson Steamship Line in its Cuba Review magazine. The photographs depict various aspects of the life, architecture, and culture of Havana and other Cuban towns at the turn of the 20th century.

The Cuban Postcard Collection is a collection of postcards of Cuba and the Cuban experience outside of Cuba from the early 20th century to the present. It includes photographs and artist drawn postcards and provides views of many parts of the island as well as various aspects of Cuban communities in the United States and elsewhere.

In reaching this agreement, William D. Walker, University Librarian, University of Miami, and Max Marmor, ARTstor’s Director of Collection Development, expressed their shared enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make these high quality images more broadly available for noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes. “We are delighted to make the Cuban Heritage Collection’s distinctive resources available to the larger ARTstor community. The benefits of this collaboration extend far beyond the partnership between the University of Miami Libraries and ARTstor. Students and scholars across the country will now have a unique vantage point for viewing photographs and postcards previously accessible only by visiting Miami. ARTstor’s venue provides the ideal way to study images and we are excited that others will have access to our rare resources” comments Walker. “We are especially pleased that our friends at the University of Miami Libraries have deci ded to share these wonderful collections, initially part of ARTstor’s nascent ‘hosting’ service, with the broader community of ARTstor users, ” adds Marmor. “Our hope is that other institutions for which we are hosting digital collections will similarly conclude they wish to foster the development of a rich ARTstor “network” in this manner.”

The University of Miami Libraries hold more than 2.5 million volumes and provide access to over 46,100 periodical titles. The Libraries’ Cuban Heritage Collection preserves and provides access to an extensive collection of books, periodicals, and archival materials on Cuba and the Cuban exile experience.

The contents of the Cuban Heritage Collection have, like other new elements of the ARTstor Digital Library, been integrated into the ARTstor Image Gallery. The Bustamante Collection and the Cuban Postcard Collection may be most readily searched for in ARTstor using the keywords “Bustamante collection” or “Cuban postcard collection” respectively. “Cuban heritage collection” will retrieve both source collections simultaneously.

Saturday, May 13, 2006

GOBI update

Dear GOBI Users,
This fiscal year at YBP we’ve seen a record number of GOBI users, who conducted a record number of searches, who made a record number of selections and orders on GOBI, and who made GOBI the centerpiece of their library’s workflow.

All of us at YBP would like to thank the entire community of GOBI users for the business you entrust to us, for your suggestions on how we can improve GOBI, and in general for the tremendous support for our company that you show us every day.

We would also like to say that we very much appreciate the patience of those users who have at times experienced less than optimum GOBI performance. While we are, again, gratified by the endorsement of GOBI that record levels of use show us, we have continuously needed to strengthen GOBI’s underlying architecture in order to keep up.

Over the past several months, we have made several software and hardware upgrades and in the new fiscal year, continued work on improving GOBI’s performance will be our highest development priority.

While most of our recent development work has focused on GOBI infrastructure, that is not all we have done. We will soon release a user option that will enable users to display ISBN-13 in title records.

We are also nearly finished with an upgrade to GOBI email. Email, a constantly evolving Internet activity, today includes spam email and spam filtering software, two unknowns when GOBI was developed; but now facts of life.

Local configurations sometimes lead to difficulties for users receiving GOBI email messages. Our upgrade will make delivery of GOBI messages more certain. Also, we are currently redesigning GOBI’s cart functionality, an area where in particular situations, some users experience problems.

Watch for a release within the next few months.

And, we’re pleased that so many of you are using our newest features, OpenURL, NetLibrary eBooks, and the capability to view invoices and statements online through GOBI. Each of these recent releases has been extremely well received by our community of users.

Thanks to feedback and enhancement recommendations from you, our customers, we can work at striking the right balance between infrastructure upgrades and functional improvements.

Again, thank you for using and supporting GOBI.
Regards,
Carol Roy
GOBI Product Manager

JSTOR holding updates

African Arts
Vols. 1 – 33, 1967-2000

Bulletin of Latin American Research
Vols. 1 – 14, 1981-1995

The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie
Vols. 1 – 28, 1975-2003

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Vols. 1 – 21, 1975-2000

Indonesia
Vols. 1 – 70, 1966-2000

Journal of Public Health Policy
Vols. 1 – 23, 1980-2002

Journal of Research in Music Education
Vols. 1 – 53 (Issue 2), 1953-2005

The Milbank Quarterly
Vols. 1 – 80, 1923-2002