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!
Welcome Back! Another school year, another chance for a fresh start. Taking the time to start the semester right can pave the way to academic achievement throughout the year. A great way to kick off a successful semester is by becoming familiar with all the library has to offer. Whether you’re a freshman or returning student, do yourself a favor by reviewing the Getting Started Guide. Students who take advantage of library resources generally get better grades (unlike students who use facebook!).
One of the things you should take care of the first week of school is getting the textbooks you need. Refer to our Where to Buy Textbooks Guide or you can take advantage of the library’s course reserve system.
Here’s a roundup of more useful tips and tools for you to check out:
In an effort to entice readers to purchase new books by an author, writers, publishers and e-book sellers like Amazon are offering some of an author’s older books as a free download.
The hope is that if a reader likes one book by an author, he may be willing to purchase others. There is some evidence that this is working. Many readers have written that they would not even have known of an author if his work had not been released as a free download. As we learn in, The latest craze: Free e-books offerings, Some readers have even been known to purchase additional books by an author just to support them.
However, publishers and authors are worried about the same thing. Will users become so accustomed to downloading free books that they are no longer willing to purchase a book? After finishing a book by an author, will that reader continue on by making a purchase of another work by the same author, or just move on to another free title? One author laments that there are so many free books that a reader can fill his Kindle with them and not ever have to pay for reading material.
If you’re traveling over summer break and want to keep up with your reading, there’s no need to fill up your suitcase with books. You can a find a wide variety of technical books, textbooks and novels online.
To help you navigate the ever expanding collection of electronic books, check out our E-books Guide. It lists a number of library databases that include full text e-books as well as public websites you can use to search for free e-books. Depending on the formats available, you can read e-books on your lap top, PDA, iPhone, or e-book reader. Kindles are cool, but pricey; there are open source e-book readers worth checking out.
Then again, if you are heading to the beach, nothing beats a worn-in paperback…
For those of us interested in digital archives of world cultural treasures, there is new reason to rejoice: a new entry has appeared in the growing list of online sites available to view such material. The World Digital Library, a website in seven languages featuring works from a dozen countries, was launched at UNESCO’s headquarters on Tuesday. The library hosts digital reproductions of many rare and unique kind works. Its main purpose is to spotlight hard to reach, fragile written works, but it also includes early multimedia from the electronic age: film, audio and photographs.
One of the major advantages of the online archive is that it groups together copies of items that are on the same subjects but whose originals may be in widely different locations. As with many other digital archives, for now the collection is relatively small, but it is expected to greatly expand as more organizations from different countries come on board. Read the full story from the Associated Press in Humanity’s Earliest Written Works Go Online by AP. For more posts on digital archives click the Humanities and Social Sciences category on PolyThinkers Pad. Also, don’t forget to take advantage of the vast collection of archival material available to the NYU Poly community via the library’s online databases in the Subject Guides: Humanities and Social Science section.
Conducting research, teaching, finding funding, writing a thesis… balancing all the demands of graduate school can be a challenge. Lucky for today’s grad students there is GradShare -an online graduate student community where you ask questions and get answers about anything affecting graduate students.
You begin by selecting an academic discipline, then explore different aspects of graduate life. Post questions that you can’t ask your advisor or peers. Questions covered range from how to manage references and approach professors, to how to stay motivated and balance school and family. No question is too big or small.
There is also an Expert Advice section that offers help on common problems from experienced advisors and practitioners.
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.
Open Source fans rejoice - Open Source Living is here. It’s a huge new directory of open source software and offers a forum for discussions about open source products as well as other OS-related issues.
From the site:
“Through a simple, elegant and efficient presentation of resources and information, OS Living aims to highlight small and large OSS projects, to inform and raise awareness to OS ethics, and to reinforce the credibility of OSS as a viable alternative to corporate funded, closed source software.”
As a community-driven site, it continues to expand with more and more resources daily.
Europeana, a digital archive combining the collections of libraries and museums, officially went online November 20, 2008, then crashed the next day due to its popularity. It has been back online in beta form for quite some time now, but it is still not in optimal shape to efficiently serve all the people who wish to use it. What makes it so popular? It is a digital collection of European culture. Audio, video, text and image files, including famous paintings and significant documents, can all be found in this multimedia gallery. All works will be copyright free and available for download. The European commission has set a goal of putting ten million items online by 2010.
Europeana is meant to be a pan-European depository, though the collection is currently dominated by works of French origin. A similar offering of US cultural works is housed in the Library of Congress’ American Memory.
For links to other free archives of classic texts and cultural treasures, see Dibner Library’s web resource page on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Also see Dibner Library’s Humanities bundle on Delicious.
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 →]
