Have you checked out our new multimedia library guides? We currently have 18 guides on an array of topics from chemical engineering to copyright law. These guides are the best starting points for finding articles, books, video, news, and more in your areas of interest. Scroll through the sample guides below or browse the complete list.
You can access these guides directly from the library home page using the “Subject Guides” tab on the search box. More guides are being added on a regular basis. If you’d like to see a guide for a particular area, let us know!
By now you’ve probably noticed those little orange icons that appear on websites. And hopefully you’re using RSS to keep up to date with all your favorite websites and blogs (including this one!). But are you taking full advantage of the power of RSS feeds? Not only is RSS a great tool to stay informed about news and other interests, it can also be a real time saver when it comes to conducting research. Did you know that you can use RSS feeds to:
get alerted when new items of interest are added to the library catalog
receive table of contents updates from journals you read
get notified every time an article is added to a database that meets your search criteria
find out about new job postings in your field
Check out our brand new RSS Guide to learn how to do all of the above and more. And if you happen to think RSS stands for Really Stinky Socks, don’t fear - the guide contains a basic introduction to what RSS is and can get you up and running in no time. The guide also includes a section on Popular Feeds to get you started.
Before you read the guide and become an RSS expert, answer the quick poll below:
MIT faculty voted unanimously to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. This makes MIT the first university to commit to making its faculty’s research papers available online to the public. Though the School of Education at Stanford and several departments at Harvard have already adopted these policies, MIT is the first entire university to make this pledge.
MIT plans to create a repository to make these open access articles available online. For more details, read the full story on MIT’s The Tech.
This is great news for anyone who reads scholarly literature (and I’m guessing you do since you are reading an academic library blog). As publishers have raised subscription fees to databases over the years, library budgets have been stretched to the limit. More support for open access takes the control of scholarship from the publishers and returns it to where it belongs - the scholars.
Do you work with raw data? Do you need help finding, accessing, understanding, manipulating, collecting, sharing and preserving data?
The Data Service Studio is a new service provided by NYU libraries and ITS that provides staff, software, statistical computing, and data collection resources to support NYU research and scholarship.
The facility features a 10-seat work and instruction space where students and faculty can receive consultation and resources in statistical analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) and gain access to a variety of software for statistical, qualitative and GIS analysis (SPSS, SAS, STATA, R, ESRI GIS products, Matlab, and others).
You can drop by the Data Service Studio during their regular hours or schedule a consultation appointment.
Location
NYU Data Service Studio
6th floor, Bobst Library
70 Washington Square
Zotero (a great open source tool for managing bibliographies) recently announced the latest version of its Firefox plugin, making it even better and allowing it to compete with commercial products like RefWorks. The new features synchronize your databases between different machines and automatically backup your library data on Zotero’s servers. A number of other smaller updates are also included such as support for proxy servers and rich text notes.
IEEE publishes loads of high quality literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. An easy way to keep up to date with the latest research is to review IEEE”s Top 100 Documentspage. You can scan the citations and abstracts of the top 100 documents accessed last month.
Another great way to stay current is to view the most recently added material at the Content Updates page. Or better yet, sign up for Email Alerts or take advantage of their RSS Feeds and have new content notifications come to you!
The new SciTopics is a free, online expert-generated knowledge-sharing service for the research community that offers scientific, technical, and medical knowledge on a variety of subjects. Designed to complement the traditional peer-review process, the site allows invited experts to develop topic pages offering research summaries with the content moderated through 14 subject editors to ensure high standards and relevancy. The easy-to-use, wikilike resource aims to give authors a platform to showcase their works and to facilitate scholarly debate.
Elsevier, a leading publisher of science and health information, developed SciTopics to offer authors a faster, more informal, dynamic, and interactive ways to publish their thinking on issues and highlight their research. The newly released tool takes advantage of the speed and interactivity of sharing information on the web, but it also addresses the problems of data overload and quality and accuracy of information. [Read more →]
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) “the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society,” recently introduced a new search capability to its digital library. This new technology enables users not only to explore existing data but also to discover unexpected information that goes beyond simple query results and helps to foster more research.
The new guided navigation allows users to refine search results by keyword, people, publications, or conferences by selecting from links along the left side of the search results. Additionally, users can discover related journals, magazines, interest groups, or meetings by clicking the tabs along the top of search results.
You can access the ACM Digital Library via our web site. It contains full text of ACM magazines, journals, and proceedings, with a six-year online archive and a bibliographical reference database going back to 1985 for most ACM publications.
You may be familiar with the Web of Science database and its flagship service, the Science Citation Index. Commencing in 1960 as a series of print volumes, the Science Citation Index is a unique reference tool that has been invaluable to users, especially those in the academic community, allowing them to see which articles have cited an earlier article or an author. However the Web of Science offers much more than science citations. It also provides access to the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Humanities Citation Index. So, say for example, you are reading a great article on the last sonnets of Shakespeare, and you are interested in finding similar articles. A great way of continuing your research is by viewing the bibliography to see what prior articles were cited by the author, then by using the Humanities Citation Index to see what later articles cited the article you are reading. [Read more →]
Footnote.com archives historical documents on the web. Some items require a subscription to view, but many are free. Last week the collection was expanded with a large infusion of World War II material. The bulk of the collection comes from army enlistment records, but family and friends can contribute information. The collection also includes photographs, official reports from the period, scanned copies of original documents, and other archival records.
Although the collection is massive, those in charge of the project hope it is only a first step in engaging the hearts and minds of WW II veterans, their friends and relatives, inspiring them to contribute and preserve their memories, recollections and scanned copies of their archives before they are lost for good.
If you are interested in reading contemporary newspaper coverage of the World War II era, try ProQuest Historical Newspapers, available to NYU Poly community in the library’s database collection.
