September/October 2007

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May/June 2007

• Library News Bites
• New Books
• Web Sites of Interest

Library News Bites

Link to FullText/Find Full Text

Link to Full Text and Find Full Text are terms now popping up in most of the databases and in Google Scholar and Scirus to help you find the full text of an article.  Go ahead and click on the link and read the screen that pops up.  It might tell you the article is not available OR it might give you a link to the actual article.  In any case, it will help you find whether or not an article you are looking at is available in full-text without having to go through Ejournals. 

Zotero

Have you heard about Zotero?  It is a bibliographic reference and notes software program that runs in the Mozilla browser.  It works similar to EndNote or Reference Manager, by helping you organize your references as you do your research.  The software automatically recognizes references on your screen and captures them through a simple keyboard click. A online tutorial about the software can be found at http://www.zotero.org/videos/tour/zotero_tour.htm. 

Scholar and Scirus

Scholar and Scirus are two online search engines focusing mostly on the sciences.  It is a mystery what publishers Scholar indexes, but Scirus is associated with Elsevier.  Both do a good job of bringing up relevant scholarly information on a variety of topics.  Best of all when you are off-campus, you do not have to log-in to conduct a search.  Even better, you can import the citations found in both Scholar and Scirus into the Zotero software discussed above.  To learn more about Google Scholar, please watch the following video found at http://liblearn.osu.edu/movies/google_scholar.htm.  It provides a great introduction to searching with Scholar.

Selected New Books

Title	Author	Call Number
Design-Inspired Innovation	Utterback, James et al	TS171.D465 2006
The gecko's foot : bio-inspiration : engineering new materials from nature	Forbes, Peter	T173.8.F63 2006
Transforming the twentieth century : technical innovations and their consequences	Smil, Vaclav	T173.8.S6155 2006

Web Sites of Interest

Innovations Report
http://www.innovations-report.com/

The Innovations Report is described on their site as “the forum for science, industry and economy that promotes innovation dynamics, networking of innovation and performance potentials.” It is certainly a momentous project, and with over 6700 content partners from across the globe, they certainly do an admirable job of bringing together research results and interesting studies in one site. Visitors can search the entire contents of the site, or they can also peruse a list of thematic reports, including communication media, earth sciences, information technology, and traffic logistics. Within each report, visitors can view headlines for each topic, and they can opt to click through to get to the entire news report, working paper, or presentation. While the site doesn’t appear to have RSS feeds, visitors can email items of interest along to colleagues. Overall, it’s a great way to keep abreast of developments in different fields, and it is worth noting that the site is also available in German. [KMG]

Faculty Innovation Center: Resources [pdf, Macromedia Flash Player]
http://www.fic.engr.utexas.edu/resources/index.cfm

The University of Texas’s College of Engineering is committed to continual improvement of their undergraduate curriculum and they have created the Faculty Innovation Center in part to work on this process. Along with the work they do in the classrooms at the University of Texas, they also provide a number of tremendously useful online materials that are relevant to both those involved in engineering education and those who teach all manner of college courses. These resources are divided into several sections here, including “Teaching and Learning”, “Teaching with Technology”, and “Distance Learning”. All told, there are over eighty resources here, including a worksheet on developing effective lectures, a “best practices” overview for videoconferencing, and a guide to using student feedback. [KMG]

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2006.  http://scout.wisc.edu/

 

Comments or suggestions for the newsletter are welcome and appreciated.
Please reply to:

JaNae Kinikin, Science Librarian
Stewart Library                  
(801) 626-6093
jkinikin@weber.edu