PolyThinkers Pad

Whether you’re looking for your first position as a new graduate or a way to earn some cash this summer, take advantage of the library’s resources to help you land the perfect job.

The Dibner Library has books to help you with everything from choosing a career path that suits your personality to writing a stand-out resume. Here’s a sample of some of our titles:

• How to win your job search
• How to write successful cover letters
• Help! my job interview is tomorrow!: how to use the library to research an employer
• Studying engineering: a road map to a rewarding career
• Discovering your finance career

To find your perfect job, check out the employment web sites we have gathered for you on the Career & Job Opportunities Guide. And when it’s time for your interview, don’t go unprepared! Research the employer ahead of time using databases like Hoover’s or Business Source Elite. Finally, don’t forget Poly’s Career Services Department. They can offer you one-one-one career counseling and resume critiques. Happy job hunting!

Do you ever need to find quick and comprehensive statistical data on a country?  Ever interested in comparing lesser known quantitative data from two or more countries?  Have a look at the Britannica Online World Data Analyst.  “Country Snapshots” provide the basic  data on a country.  “Ranked Statistics”  lets you view the countries with the highest or lowest rank in a particular category.   “Chronological Comparisons” allows you to select one or more countries, choose a data category, and display how they compare historically in either table format or chart format.  “Current Comparisons” enable you to display the most current available data in table or chart format.    Data fields include such recognizable and high demand ones as “GNP,” “Life expectancy,” and lesser known fields like “Percent of economically active engaged in services,” and even “Roots and tubers production.”  So whether you need to do some serious research, or are just looking to indulge your curiousity, this resource is well worth your time.

When you are looking for books on a topics in a library catalog, your first attempt will probably be a keyword search. After all, that is the way you do it using a web search tool like Google, and it is natural to think that keywords would bring up the best results. A keyword search does work in the online library catalog, but with varying degrees of effectiveness depending on the topic. This is because it matches what you type in with anything in the item record, even the author’s name or the place of publication. If you are not having much luck using a keyword search, try a subject search. Books that appear under a subject category have been evaluated by someone and manually assigned to that category. Often, you have a better chance of retrieving more relevant results by using a subject search.

Interested in what a particular search option means? Just ask us.

Science and Engineering Indicators, published by the National Science Board, provides a broad base of quantitative information on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise. Indicators are data that provide information on science and engineering as it relates to education, industry, research and technology. The report is intended to contribute to an understanding of the current environment and to inform the development of future policies. The document is available online for free in PDF format.

Did you know that with just a New York state Drivers license, or a non-driver photo id, you have access to a wealth of free resources from NOVELNY? If you don’t have one of these, you can also gain access via a public library card from anywhere in New York State, or with the New York State Library Card available to all NY State residents upon request.

Searching the site is a snap. If you know the name of the magazine or journal you want, simply type it into the “Search magazines and newspapers by title” box. If you don’t know the name of a magazine, or don’t care from which available publication the information comes, use “Quick Database Search” to match your keywords with all the available resources.

The NOVEL library includes fewer resources than our own database collection or the resources of the major NYC public library systems, so it is best used as an additional avenue of information rather than as your main source.

As the new year starts, take a moment to look back at what made 2007 memorable. On Dibner Library’s best of 2007 del.icio.us links, you’ll find a compilation of end-of-the-year lists including everything from the most innovative products of the year to YouTube’s top 10 videos. The links cover news, science, technology, entertainment, books, and more.

Some highlights include:

• 10 Craziest Ways to Hack the Earth
• The Year in Pictures
• 100 Notable Books of the Year
• Top 10 Technology Videos
• Top 10 New Organisms

Can’t get enough of year-end lists? Here’s 50 more: Time Magazine’s 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007.

If you have a best of 2007 list you’d like to add to the collection, please share it with us in the comments.

Whether a professor wants you to cite high impact journals in an assignment or you are looking for a place to publish your work, knowing what “high impact” really means is an essential first step.

A journal’s impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It helps you evaluate a journal’s relative importance, especially when comparing it to others in the same field. The impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of current citations to articles published in the two previous years by the total number of articles published in the same period.

Although some in the scientific community have raised questions over the limited usefulness of the impact factor, the measure is still taken seriously by and large.

So which journals have a high impact factor? Thomson Scientific recently released a table ranking high impact journals in multidisciplinary sciences. Browse Thomson’s SCI-BYTES web site for journal rankings in a variety of disciplines, including robotics, statistics and others.

Google’s goal to “build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world” is certainly an ambitious one. But debate about Google Books persists and not everyone is eager to sign up to partner with Google (as mentioned in a previous post). So while we might be a far cry from a universal library, there is an extraordinary amount of books currently available online.

To help you navigate the ever expanding collection of online books, Dibner Library has added a Guide to Online Books to our reference links. The guide lists a number of websites that you can use to search or browse for books online. It also includes links to smaller, specialized collections offering math and science books. Remember, none of these sites are comprehensive so make sure you check more than one when searching for a specific title.

Storing and organizing your research sources can be a breeze with all the different reference management tools available today, but finding the one that will suit your needs can be challenging. Here is a brief overview of three popular options:

• CiteULike
• Connotea
• Zotero

Both CiteULike and Connotea are web based services that have similar features:

• Browser buttons easily allow you to save references
• Bibliographic information from the web page is automatically recognized
• Allows you to add tags to your own or other entries
• User interface allows you to view, search, and discover other users’ libraries
• No installation of software needed

Connotea appears to offer stronger community features whereas CiteULike is better at obtaining bibliographic information.

Zotero is another reference management option that allows you to easily store and tag references, but also offers these features:

• Integrated with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice
• Allows you to annotate entries with notes
• Stores a local copy of references in your library, enabling you to work offline
• Formatted citation export

The key difference is that Zotero is a downloadable extension for the open source web browser, Firefox. While Zotero’s ability to capture citation information outperforms the other two tools, it lacks social capabilities so you can’t share your library with others (at least not yet).

For a more thorough look at these tools and a host of others, read the comparison of reference management software article in Wikipedia.

Which reference management tool do you enjoy using (or can’t stand)? Share your experience in the comments below.

While Wikipedia may be a quick and easy way to get an overview of a topic, you can’t always rely on the accuracy of the information you find there. Anybody can add or edit information in Wikipedia, whether they are scholarly experts or didn’t pass grade school.

So why not take advantage of the reliable reference tools you have access to through the Dibner Library? The links below lead to some of our subscription resources available just for the Poly community so you must login with your last name and Poly ID number. [Read more →]