Reference at Newman Library

After sitting through a 30-minute presentation from Serials Solutions about the new release of 360 Search, I learned that  starting in mid to late December we should have the ability to do a few new things with Bearcat (which is powered by 360 Search) that weren’t possible before or that were harder to do before:

• connect more databases to Bearcat that we couldn’t before
• control (to a limited extent, I think) how individual databases are searched
• customize subject clusters of databases ourselves (instead of having to send request to Serials Solutions asking them to do it for us)

Does anyone have any thoughts about how we might approach roving reference now that the rows of computers on the 2nd floor extend far back into areas that are equally populated by students poring over books at tables and cubicles? Before we had the new computers, you could safely walk by the rows of computers and announce, “Does anyone need help?” to nobody in particular. Now if you do that too far back on the 2nd floor, I wonder if the folks who aren’t on computers but are studying or reading might find it annoying to have someone like me asking aloud if anyone needs help. Maybe we can just rove these areas in the back silently?

Several bloggers have detailed nicely the ill-advised changes the APA made this year to its citation guidelines for journal articles. The posts by Catherine Pellegrino and Barbara Fister effectively detail why it is a bad idea to require people to have to track down a DOI for an article they want to cite and why it is an even worse idea to ask people to include the journal publisher’s URL even if the version of the article you used was one in a database (JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, etc.)

From what I’ve read online, there are some faculty members at other institutions who are asking their students to follow the more sensible guidelines in the previous edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the 5th) instead of the rules in the latest one (the 6th). Should we have conversations with our faculty about the challenges of holding students to the confusing new rules in the 6th edition?

I noticed recently that WorldCat.org can generate an RSS feed of new books for a particular library. This feed shows you books whose records have recently been added to WorldCat.

Here’s what the feed looks like for the Newman Library. If you add that feed to a feed reader (such as the Google Reader), you can get nice updates sent to you automatically.

Due to some work on the servers, it may be necessary to reboot your PC if you can’t access the library’s web site.

The planned maintenance on the proxy server is complete.

I haven’t received confirmation from Systems yet, but it seems like the proxy server may be down right now. I’ve reported it in the Newman Helpdesk system (ticket # 3561).

Confluence, the new wiki software we are using for the Reference Wiki, offers you a way to get a daily email message listing the pages that have been edited or added that day. If there are no changes or new pages on a day, then there will be no email sent out. This is a great way to keep tabs on any changing content in the wiki. It is worth mentioning that if there are any major changes in the wiki, a blog post here announcing it is also a good idea (as might be the case if a service or policy is added or revised).

Here is a video with instructions on how to log in to the wiki and set up the email notification option. (FYI, there are two buttons for launching the video: the one on the left allows you to view the video in a small window and the one on the right with the four arrows will use the full screen to show you the video, which may make it easier to see what’s going on.)

If you want to change the password to log into the blog, just follow the instructions in this video.

A few people have asked me lately how they could subscribe to the QuestionPoint mailing list. Postings to this list are pretty light; its main use is for up to the minute status updates on the stability of the service and news about restarts of the software when it is acting up (which has been too frequent lately).

Quoting from the QuestionPoint-L web page on the OCLC site, here’s how to subscribe:

All QuestionPoint users associated with an active QuestionPoint account are welcome to subscribe to this list.

This list is only for QuestionPoint members so please do not submit a subscription request unless you have a QuestionPoint ID number.

To request a subscription, send an e-mail message to David Leslie at leslied@oclc.org with the subject of “QuestionPoint list request”.

In the body of your message, include:

• Your name
• E-mail address
• Library name
• Your QuestionPoint logon ID number

Once we activate your subscription, you receive two e-mail messages:

• A confirmation of your subscription, with information about sending a message to the list, options for receiving a message, and removing yourself from the list. Save this cofirmation so you can refer to it later if needed.
• Usage guidelines for the list.

The list archives can be found on the Subscriber’s Corner page.