Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Historical Abstracts and AH&L upgrades in beta

FYI, the beta includes these new features:

* the means to search both America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts at once if your institution subscribes to both databases
* the means to easily limit by one of five most-often-occurring languages from the Basic search screen
* the means to automatically expand all results (in Display Options) or to expand by group (in results display)
* the means to easily print a single record from search results
* catalog linking support for Historical Abstracts Book entries
* the means to save searches to a personal profile
* time period searches that accept single years and spans of years
* faster searching with quoted phrases and asterisk wildcards

The site beta - located at http://serials.abc-clio.com/beta/ - is available to you for testing from now until the week of 19 June (at which time the site will go live).

Who's Who in American Art

Dear Valued Customer,
I am happy to inform you that, starting Monday, June 5th, a subscription to Marquis Who’s Who on the Web will include our complete database of Who’s Who in American Art biographies – over 14,000 important men and women in today’s art world, plus notable artists from the past.

Who’s Who in American Art joins the recent addition of Who’s Who in American History as valuable additions to our online database – included FREE-OF-CHARGE – with comprehensive biographical information that is unavailable anywhere else.

The most significant changes and improvements to the database you will see include

A separate search screen for Who’s Who in American Art has been added allowing you to search for artists and other professionals by name, gender, birth year and place, keyword, and specific media such as “watercolor painters” and “stone sculptors”. Due to the unique nature of these biographies they are not included in the main database at this time.

Easy navigation to the American History and American Art databases – when you login, the main search screen opens allowing you to search among our complete database of over 1.3 million biographies (including the American History biographies). Links with supporting graphics appear on the left side to direct researchers to the American History and American Art databases

Checkbox for Current Biographies – we’ve placed a checkbox beside the name search fields on the main search screen allowing you to limit your search to living people whose biographies have been recently updated or appeared in one of our recent print volumes.

What's up with Factiva

Here is the vendor's reply to our question about folders.

Hi Dani and Helen - Factiva is an interesting beast, in that all clients get the same user interface, but depending on what market you're in, you get different content. You've already discovered that with CanWest Newspapers. Since Factiva.com is a company that focuses most of its efforts on corporate and legal clients, it leaves us in academic libraries with challenges.

The Track Folders were originally designed for corporate environments. In these environments everyone has their own account or every group or team shares an account. They are their own administrator(s) and set up account defaults and options. The Track Folders are then personalized for every account, which in most cases is an individual or small work team.

In an academic environment, the university shares one account by using the appropriate number of simultaneous users. All simultaneous users see the same thing because they share one account. That account in managed by an administrator.

Generally, in shared environments like your own, I have seen track folders set up that address common issues on campus. The only way to get around this is - broadcast the admin account access and password (not feasible) or have a second account set up that is used by the reference staff and one that is used by the students. I don't believe either are a good option.

Nature launches new look home page

On Wednesday 7th June, a new page design will launch at www.nature.com. The new design applies only to the nature.com home page which offers navigation to all online content and services from Nature Publishing Group.
The nature.com home page offers clear access to NPG content published in many formats: journals, podcasts, databases, webfeeds and blogs. Visit nature.com to get quick access to news headlines, view today’s most popular searches or browse publications by subject area.
The nature.com home page also provides links to information about NPG for librarians, authors and other user groups. Be sure to visit the new Launch pad to learn about cutting-edge developments at nature.com as we experiment with new ways of maximising the web as a scientific communication medium.

Emerald now allows marking

Hi there!

I wanted to let you know that the Marked List feature on Emerald is now available for use without having to set up an individual Profile.

After searching you are now able to add articles to a Session Marked List by ticking the box on the right hand side of the title and then have a choice whether you want to save the list or use for a single session.

I hope you will agree that this feature will help a number of users in your organisation.
If you have any training needs, just let me know!

Best wishes

Carol

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Upgrade to Books@Ovid

Dear Books@Ovid customer:
At Ovid, we're always listening to our customers and thinking of new ways to create products and services that make search and discovery faster and easier for you and your users.

That's why we're pleased to inform you about important navigation and usability enhancements to Books@Ovid, which we are scheduled to begin implementing on Monday, May 22, with all customers upgraded by May 30, 2006.

Get higher ranked results when search terms appear in chapter titles and headers

Use the Quick Search feature to get results fast from the browse books page

Instantly return to browse books from search results

Limit searches to a single book on the main search page

View terms searched using the natural language lexicon and view highlighted search terms on the results page (requires additional setup; please contact your Technical Support representative)

Precisely identify your location within the full text-the closest heading in the Table of Contents is now highlighted and the "crumb-trail" is always refreshed (Table of Contents now syncs with index selections, too!)

Easily print sections and subsections within chapters using PrintPreview to output text along with the book and chapter identifying information Download a detailed overview-including screen shots-of these important new Books@Ovid features.

Highlight Important Content Administrators can feature popular books or chapters directly on the Ovid main menu screen. Providing fast access to frequently used book content, such as Nursing Care Plans or Martindale's, into the user's search workflow ensures increased use of important content.

Need Training Resources? Sign up for Books@Ovid "Train-the-Trainer" sessions, convenient web-based demonstrations to learn how to help your users get the most out of Books@Ovid.

Regards,
Ovid Technologies

Institute of Physics Newsletter

Dear Librarian,
Issue 7 of Librarian Insider, IOP's newsletter for librarians, is now available. To view the issue, please visit the Librarians' page of our website at librarian.iop.org or link directly to the pdf at http://ej.iop.org/pdf/insider/insider.pdf

In the latest issue you can:
* Read about our recent seminar tour of South African institutions
* Enter our competition - guess an image to win an IOP bag of treats
* Discover ideas and promotions which have worked successfully at other
libraries in our 'Marketing Your Library' feature
* Request your copies of this issue's complimentary promotional postcards and
posters