Three Cheers for our new Catalog!

The University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library is proud to present…

Our new catalog!!

Okay, technically it’s not really a new catalog – our Library catalog still includes all of the books, e-books, videos, and periodicals you know and love.  But it does have a shiny new interface that we hope will make it easier for our students and faculty to discover new resources.

New features of the catalog include…

• A Tag Cloud that you can use to find resources on similar topics (you can even add your own tags if you like!)
• A “Refine By…” tool to help you narrow down your search results to exactly what you need for your research
• An “Articles and More” tool that will help you extend your search to find articles from some of our databases
• A “Recently Added” box to show you what’s new on any given topic

Interested? Try out a search by going to the Library’s homepage.  Type in the box, and hit the big orange arrow.

Don’t like what you see? You can still use the “classic” catalog interface – just look under the Library Catalogs menu and click on the first link for Our Classic Catalog.

Need Journal Articles from 1865?

Then JSTOR is a database you want to try.

If you are looking for journal articles from as far back as 1865, this database will provide them for you, and in .PDF full-text format too. Here’s how you would run a search for your topic, in order to find articles about that topic, which were written in bygone days:

• Select JSTOR on our A-Z List of Databases.
• The way to narrow your search to find journal articles from a specific time period is to place a check-mark in the box next to “Article” under “Limit To: Type:” and then to put the range of years you are looking for in the “Limit To: Date Range:” fields. So, for example, if I want journal articles on my topic from the years 1865-1940, I will check off “Articles” and then put “From: 1865″ and “To: 1940.”
• Then, type your search topic into the Advanced Search field at the top of the page. Keep in mind that your topic may have been called by a different name back in the 1800s!
• Then click “Search,” look for article titles that cover what you need, click into them to read the abstracts (summaries) as needed, and select the .PDF option for viewing, printing and saving the articles for your research.

Remember, if you’re working from home or your dorm, make sure you first sign into My.Scranton.edu, and then select “A-Z Database Listing” from inside the Library tab. This way, when you eventually get to JSTOR, the database will recognize you as a student, and it will let you access the full-text .PDF of the articles you need.

Ever wonder what was being written about, say, librarians, in the late 1800s-early 1900s? Go give the search a try to find out!* There is one very interesting article from 1929 about a study of ways that librarians cultivated “wholesome reading interests” back then (“Methods Employed to Stimulate Interests in Reading. I” by William F. Rasche, from The School Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 1929), pp. 29-36) — very interesting indeed.

*So, okay, I know most of you probably don’t care about librarians and our fascinating history as public figures in the community… Ahem. But! Whatever your research interest is (for instance, I know there’s an assignment going around about researching the same social issue in 3 different historical time periods) JSTOR is a great place to start in your search for old journal articles on the topic.

Project MUSE now on our Facebook page

Exciting news! The article database Project MUSE has now designed an application for Facebook. “The University of Scranton Weinberg Memorial Library” (found here) has just added the Project MUSE search box to our FB Page, which means you can search for articles right from inside Facebook. I just tested it out, and it definitely works, allowing you to open the full-text .PDF’s of articles in your results list.

There’s a possibility if you use the search box from home, you’ll be prompted for your My.Scranton username and password — but just type these in and you should have access to the full-text articles in this database.

This is a step in the direction of giving you guys full article searching and access capabilities from right inside Facebook, which is our ultimate goal.

So, give it a try! And if you hit a dead end, or for some reason you aren’t able to access the full-text of articles in your results list, definitely let us know (leave a Wall comment or post in the discussion forums on our FB page) so we can fix the problem.

Just for fun: try running a search for “Pittsburgh Steelers” (I know, such a scholarly topic :-P ) and yinz should check out the .PDF of the 2nd hit in the results list! (And I’m not even a Pittsburgh native — just an adoring Steelers fan who laments their loss to Philly tonight. *sigh*)

Google is all about Chrome

The buzz in the tech world this week is all about Chrome, Google’s new browser.  The browser industry has long been dominated by Internet Explorer (with bits of the market being taken up by Firefox, Safari, and Opera), but rumor has it that Google’s new product might take over.

You can learn about Chrome’s features in a new Google graphic “novel,” and there are also plenty of reviews being published (here’s one from Wired).

I’m downloading Chrome as I type – I’m anxious to see if it can win my heart from Firefox.  It will also be interesting to see if, when, and how Chrome might start to infiltrate The University of Scranton — where the preferred browser is currently Internet Explorer.   If you spot any Chrome users on campus, let us know!

March of the New Librarians…

Hello there! My name is Donna Mazziotti*, and I’m yet another of your new librarians here at the U. Although I’ve been around since last March, I figured this is a great place to tell you a little more about myself. You’ll usually find me on the 2nd floor at the Reference Desk in the late afternoons and evenings, Sundays through Thursdays.

This is me:

Donna M. -- Your Friendly, Neighborhood Reference Librarian

So, what would you like to know about me? I hail originally from Elmsford, NY (right next to White Plains, NY, which is just north of NYC). I went to undergrad at NYU, where I majored in Drama and English. Any theatre or literature geeks out there will find in me a kindred spirit! Then I went to Library School at Long Island University, where they turned me into a Searching-Junkie. This means if you have a really tricky question about how to search for information about a topic, I won’t rest (literally) until we find something useful on it. In some circles, the fact that I enjoy this endeavor makes me a geek… But that’s okay, because I have way too much fun doing it, so I can say sincerely that I look forward to meeting you soon and helping you tackle those tricky research questions!!

See you at the ref desk…

*Not to be confused with Donna Ramos, our esteemed cataloging librarian.