Library Connection: Distance Education

PSA - Scopus, ScienceDirect Scheduled Outage Saturday, April 4

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:46:00 +0000

...Enjoy your Saturday afternoon/evening instead!
Local times for the outage are 3 p.m. - midnight

Email from Elsevier:

On Saturday, 4 April, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and 2collab will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately nine hours starting at 10:00 p.m. UTC/GMT (6:00 p.m. EDT).

We apologize for the inconvenience,
Regards,
The Elsevier Team.

PSA - ProQuest Maintenance, Feb 21

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:39:00 +0000

From ProQuest:

Dear ProQuest Customer,

The next ProQuest® platform maintenance window will be on February 21, 2009. A twelve (12) hour maintenance window will take place for infrastructure maintenance. The window will begin Saturday, February 21, 2009, at 22:00 Eastern Standard Time to Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 10:00 Eastern Standard Time.

The following products will be unavailable during these windows:

ProQuest platform products, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (traditional and graphical K12 interface), American Periodicals Series
Chadwyck-Healey products housed in the US (all products with domain names ending with chadwyck.com)
CSA platform products such as CSA Illustrata: Natural Sciences, CSA Sociological Abstracts
COS/RefWorks

Maintenance window schedule:

Mountain Standard Time: Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 20:00 for twelve (12) hours

Other databases affected include:

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

New Ebrary interface

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:38:00 +0000

If you click through to an ebrary book from our catalogue you'll notice that it looks a bit different. Ebrary changed to a slightly new interface. The ebrary reader that takes notes and remembers your bookmarks is still there, but you'll need to click on the ebrary Reader button to view the book in the reader.

They have a good 11 minute Flash video tutorial on its new features here:
http://www.responsetrack.net/lnk/ebrary/1875311/?14RAW043REF

Holiday Readers!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:13:00 +0000

The university is closed December 25, 2008 to January 1, 2009, inclusive. Any requests made after Monday, December 22 will not be posted until January 2, 2009. So, please make your requests in the next few days...or just take the week off and enjoy the holidays!

New Location for Interlibrary Loan Pickup & Appointments/Visiting

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:06:00 +0000

Beginning today, all interlibrary loans in the MacKimmie Library will be available for pick up at the MacKimmie Library Circulation Desk on the first floor. This change extends the hours during which interlibrary loans can be picked up to all hours that the MacKimmie Circulation Desk is open. (See Circulation Desk Hours:
http://library.ucalgary.ca/mackimmie-library-
circulation-department)

If library users have questions about the status of interlibrary loans, they should continue to phone 403-220-5967 or come to the Document Delivery Services Office on the 2nd floor of the Library Tower (MLT 213) to consult with DDS Staff. Their hours are 9AM to 4:30PM, Monday through Friday.

ILL book returns can be returned to either the MacKimmie Circulation Desk on the first floor or to the Document Delivery Services book drop on the second floor of the Library Tower.

Appointments/Visiting
The previous announcement probably doesn't affect you unless you are a Distance Student who occasionally likes to come in to pick up your books. However, if you're in town and want to drop by to see us, that's when the announcement is relevant. Our office is right behind the Document Delivery Desk and since it is no longer staffed, it's best to give us a call at 403-220-8449 or 403-220-3726 to let us know you're coming. There will be a sign at that desk reminding you to call, but if we know you're coming, we will wait for you and let you into the office.

Document Delivery Forms Out of Commission this Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:18:00 +0000

If you would like to order any materials from us this weekend, please email your requests to the libcon email address instead. Remember to include your name, student number and current address.

****
The DDS/Interlibrary Loan Forms will be unavailable from 4:00 pm Friday July 18th and will remain down and unavailable until after the Relais Version 2008 software upgrade (taking place starting noon on Monday). They should be available Monday July 21st late in the day or Tuesday July 22nd. We apologize for this down time but this is going to be a very complicated upgrade.
****

Faculty Technology Days

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:12:00 +0000

For those of you who can make it on to campus:

Faculty Technology Days: Teaching and Learning with Technology
May 6-8, 2008
www.ucalgary.ca/ftd

Libraries and Cultural Resources, the Teaching and Learning Centre and Information Technologies are pleased to present the annual Faculty Technology Days: Teaching and Learning with Technology, May 6-8, 2008.

This year a real highlight is our keynote session on May 6 which will focus on Social Networking and the Academy. Ryerson University has brought issues of ‘good' and 'bad’ use of social networking to the fore. Where do you stand? A panel of experts on social networking as a communication and learning tool will discuss the pros and cons of social networking in the academy. How useful a tool is this method of communication? How do the students perceive the value of virtual communication, vs. how do faculty see it? What are the issues? Please come and join in the discussion.

All sessions are free to Faculty and Graduate Students, including lunch on the day(s) you attend any session.

Registration ends May 1, 2008

Research sessions of interest:

* Being an effective research assistant
* Beyond the ivory tower – disseminating your research
* Copyright in the digital age
* Support for your thesis - a three part session on starting, researching and writing
your thesis
* EndNote and Refworks bibliographic software
* Taylor Family Digital Library update

Resources:

* Current Awareness Services for Environment and Energy Research
* World of citations, citation analysis and citation tracking
* Your stock portfolio: tips from the business library

Instructional technology:

* Classroom technology: Bio-Informatics Computer lab
* Facilitating Group work using Blackboard
* Getting Feedback from Students
* Rediscovering Smartboards for classroom instruction
* Using e-journals and e-portfolios in a professional faculty
* Weblogs as personal repositories
* Blackboard essentials

Software:

* Drupal to build websites
* Digitizing your collection
* Getting started with Breeze
* Oracle Calendar
* Office 2007
* PeopleSoft PER

Phone registration: 220-8895
Online registration: http://www.ucalgary.ca/ftd/sessions (if your email is not recognized, ignore the error message and click the "continue" button.)

Update on Scopus' Document Download Manager - Publishers Covered

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:33:00 +0000

In February, I mentioned that Scopus' Document Download Manager feature wasn't as complete as our SFX coverage
(http://libraryconnectionucalgary.blogspot.com/2008/
02/new-feature-in-scopus.html)

Last week I heard back from Scopus, and it turns out that right now, the feature is only available for 25 publishers. Scopus is expanding this list, but here are the publishers for now:

Elsevier (incl. Harcourt Health imprints, Academic Press, Pergamon; excl. Masson)
Springer (incl. Kluwer)
Blackwell (separate from Wiley)
IEEE
Wiley (separate from Blackwell)
Lippincott Williams and Wilkins (LWW)
Taylor and Francis (T&F)
Nature Publishing Group (NPG)
Oxford University Press
American Physical Society (APS)
American Institute of Physics
Karger
Institute of Physics (IOP)
Sage
Cambridge University Press
Biomed Central
International Union of Crystallography
University of Chicago Press
ACM
Berkeley
Asian Network for Scientific Info.
EDP/European Physical Society
Humana
AAAS
Masson (separate from Elsevier)
University of California Press
APA

SFX Down Saturday Night

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:01:00 +0000

SFX will be down this Saturday night, April 5, from 6 PM - 1 AM.

BUT, you can still access full-text journal articles by looking up the journal title in our journal catalogue
(http://seter.lib.ucalgary.ca/uhtbin/cgisirsi/0/0/0/38/2/X/BLASTOFF).
Or, just declare Saturday night a no-research night!

DO try this at home...Search multiple databases from one search box

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:14:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to search more than one database at a time?
Well, the Library is now running a trial of a product that does just that: Serials Solutions' Federated Search product, 360 Search. It can be accessed via the link at the top of the Research Databases page:
(http://library.ucalgary.ca/researchdatabases/index.php). The trial runs until April 10.

Here's how it works:
On the default screen, you'll see categories. Each category covers several databases. How will you know which databases? Just click on the category.
Once you've chosen your category (or you can search all categories), enter your search.
Results are summarized on the left by topic and database. On the right, the first few results are displayed. If there are a lot of results, you can ask it to bring back the "rest" of your results. The results also tell you which database they came from.

The categories, FYI:
General:
Academic Search Premier - Provides coverage of many academic areas of study, including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.
CPI.Q. - Canadian and international periodicals, with emphasis on mainstream and academic titles
University of Calgary ContentDM
University of Calgary Dspace
Wilson OmniFile: Full Text Mega Edition - Multi-disciplinary database providing the complete content from six of Wilson's full-text databases: Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Humanities Full Text, Readers' Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, and Wilson Business Full Text. Full-text articles from five additional databases are also included: Applied Science & Technology Full Text, Art Full Text, Biological & Agricultural Index Plus, Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text, and Library Literature & Information Science Full Text.

Social Sciences:
JSTOR - A multi-disciplinary collection of backfile journal runs
MLA International Bibliography - The MLA international bibliography (MLAIB) is a classified listing and subject index of scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1921.
PsycINFO (Ovid) - Covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines. PsycINFO's coverage is worldwide, and includes references and abstracts to journal articles in more than 20 languages, and to book chapters and books in the English language
Sage Sociology - covers such subjects as Childhood, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Sociology, Consumer Culture, Classical Sociology, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Leisure Studies, Social Theory, Sociology of Sport, and Sociology of Work and Employment (Labor Studies).

Business:
Business Source Premier - Covers over 7,800 scholarly business journals in fields that include management, economics, finance, accounting, and international business.
Factiva - Provides worldwide full text coverage of local and regional newspapers, trade publications, business newswires, press release wires, media transcripts, news photos, business-rich Web sites, investment analyst reports, market research reports, country and regional profiles, company profiles, historical market data.

Science
Biosis Previews - BIOSIS Previews combines the content of both Biological Abstracts and Biological Abstracts/RRM (Reports, Reviews, Meetings), thus providing comprehensive coverage of nearly 5,500 life science journals as well as 1,500 items from international meetings, review articles, books, book chapters, patents, and software reviews.
Compendex - Comprehensive interdisciplinary engineering database covering journal articles, technical reports, and conference papers and proceedings over the entire spectrum of engineering.
IEEE Electronic Library Online - Access to IEEE transactions, journals, magazines and conference proceedings, to IEE journals and conference proceedings, and to current IEEE standards.
Web of Science - References in all subject areas from Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index

Note: This product will not run reliably on Mozilla - you'll likely find that you must use Firefox or Internet Explorer.

And: please send comments/feedback using the link on the trial page!

PSA-UCIT Scheduled Outage Including BLACKBOARD, Elluminate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:44:00 +0000

From IT:

There will be a UCIT Scheduled Outage to upgrade network connections and perform required system maintenance from: Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 0001hrs (midnight) to Sunday, March 23, 2008 - 0001hrs (midnight).

All Services will be impacted, including Blackboard, Peoplesoft, Elluminate, e-Mail/Web-Mail and DTP File Service. Although we have booked the outage for 24 hours, we will do our best to minimize the downtime and systems may return to service earlier.

A message will be posted as an announcement in Blackboard on Thursday, March 20, 2008 in all courses.

Please visit our Service Status page at: http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/status to view the Scheduled Outages calendar and to see timely and informational messages from UCIT's Operation Production Control unit.

New Users of the Interlibrary Loan Form

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:53:00 +0000

Earlier this week, the library started a new delivery method for Interlibrary Loan items (basically, getting you articles and book chapters that our library doesn't have.)

This is a new thing, and it seems to have confused our Interlibrary Loan Web form: It seems that if you haven't used our online request forms ever before, you are going to have problems...new users get stuck in an endless loop.

SO....
New users need to contact Document Delivery Services before they can use the web request form:

For MacKimmie or Law Libraries: phone 220-5967 or email illomack@ucalgary.ca

For the Health Sciences Library: phone 220-7419 or email meddoc@ucalgary.ca

Users who have made at least one request before March 10 should have no problem using the web request form.

Post-to-Web is Here! Huzzah!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:13:00 +0000

As of today, almost all (see note below*) Interlibrary Loan articles and book chapters requested via our online request forms (http://neter.lib.ucalgary.ca/DDS/jsp/dds.jsp) will be sent via "post-to-web."

What does this mean?
You will get an email with a link in it. Click on the link, et voila! A pdf appears and you can print your article.

Remember:
You have to use our online request form:
http://neter.lib.ucalgary.ca/DDS/jsp/dds.jsp
If you send a request to our libcon@ucalgary email address, we won't be able to fill it via post-to-request.

For more information:
http://library.ucalgary.ca/services/interlibraryloan/posttoweb.php

This is brand-new, so let us know if you encounter anything weird, or if you have any comments: libcon@ucalgary.ca

*Lastly, if you request an article/book chapter that is only available to us in print (e.g. for some reason the lending library can't email a copy to us), Library Connection will send you the documents via Canada Post.

PSA - Systems Outage March 22 (Easter Sunday) - and Website recommedation for similar announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:27:00 +0000

There will be a UCIT Scheduled Outage to upgrade network connections and perform required system maintenance from: Saturday, March 22, 2008 - 0001hrs (midnight) to Sunday, March 23, 2008 - 0001hrs (midnight).

Library services and websites should be available during this time, with the exception of LANDRU.

Services that will be unavailable include:
Blackboard, Peoplesoft, Elluminate, and e-Mail/Web-Mail.

Also, UCIT has a helpful webpage that lists the next five scheduled systems outages and other news:
www.ucalgary.ca/it/status

Break JSTOR! (Tues., Mar. 4)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:15:00 +0000

(This is from an email to our Serials Librarian, from JSTOR)

In preparation for launching the new JSTOR platform, we invite you to help us try to reach maximum capacity on the servers that deliver the preview of the new JSTOR. We want to ensure that the new platform will perform under extreme usage conditions.

What to do: Sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 EST (1-2pm "Calgary time") on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, please access the JSTOR Preview site
(http://preview.jstor.org) and search and browse as you normally would in JSTOR. We would appreciate even a few minutes of your time during this hour.

JSTOR Developers will be monitoring the performance of the preview site, so you may simply enter and exit at your convenience.

As always, we value your use of JSTOR. This test will help to ensure that the new platform when launched will deliver the performance you expect.

Best regards,

Sherry Aschenbrenner
Director, JSTOR User Services

New Database-Education Research Complete

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:20:00 +0000

Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education, and testing. Education Research Complete provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,820 journals, as well as full text for more than 900 journals, and includes full text for more than 71 books and monographs, and for numerous education-related conference papers.

Access it via our Research Databases page or directly at:
http://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca:2048/login?url=
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=ehh

New Feature in Scopus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:25:00 +0000

Tired of saving pdfs from databases individually to your hard drive?

Well, Scopus has come up with a new "Document Download Manager" that lets you save pdfs (from Scopus) en masse. More info is on their Web page at:
http://www.info.scopus.com/february_08/

There's no mention of bibliographic management software like EndNote, RefWorks, etc., so one probably can't save directly to them, but this is a pretty big improvement nonetheless.

I am trying it out as I type. It's chugging in the background and it seems a bit slow - I selected three articles. An interesting thing is that even though the article is not available full-text in Scopus, the Manager will find a pdf copy anyway, and download it to your hard drive. This must be the relationship with "QUOSA" that the news release mentions. How does this compare with what SFX finds? Well, it doesn't seem to be as complete as SFX. This means that if Scopus' Document Download Manager doesn't download a pdf, that pdf could still be available in another database for download. Darn.

Access Scopus through the UofC via our Research Databases list, or:
http://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca:2048/login?url=http://www.scopus.com

PeopleSoft Outage - and IT Service Status Page

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:02:00 +0000

Just got this late last week:

Scheduled PeopleSoft Outage
There will be a scheduled PeopleSoft outage taking place from Saturday, March 1st at 8 am until Monday, March 3rd at 8am due to a Peopletools upgrade. All PeopleSoft modules will be affected.

Peopletools is a ‘behind the scenes’ software, and there will be minor changes visible to some users once the upgrade has been completed. More information on these changes will be communicated via email and posted on the PS and IT websites as it becomes available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience with this necessary scheduled update.

IT Service Status Page
What I discovered, however, is that IT has a page that posts its next 5 scheduled outages:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/status
Plus, the page links to IT's other status page that tells you whether their mail, web, etc., servers are up/down.

Basement of the Library Tower Flooded, and Fallout

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:46:00 +0000

Even though many of you who are reading this are Distance Students, I thought I should let you know that the Basement of our Library Tower is flooded...something about a burst pressure valve.

Anyway, no one is allowed down there and some of the current periodicals have been moved to 11LT:
HD 9560.1 .S73
to
JA1 .C65

We hope to have it back open on Wednesday some time, once the carpet has dried out.

The other thing resulting from this was that last night, our connection to IT was severed, which cut off our access to just about all things library (Web pages, catalogue, research databases...)

So, our Public Services & Systems Librarian and crew have created this Web page, which sits on an entirely different server than the Library's other resources. It lists access to our catalogue, the e-journal list, and all of our research databases:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/all.html

Brief Campus Network & Internet Outage on Tuesday Morning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:44:00 +0000

Users may experience an interruption to Campus Network and Campus Internet connectivity from 06:30 to 08:30 on Tuesday February 12,2008 for system maintenance.

New FAQ database

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:06:00 +0000

The Library has a new FAQ page. Answers are categorized and searchable. A screencast of the FAQs is available here:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/LCR_Web/videos/1/

The actual FAQs are available:
http://library.ucalgary.ca/frequentlyaskedquestions/faqs/