Reference Librarians' Page

I have completed a few preliminary video guides and created a page for you to view them on.

http://staff.knox.edu/hstaffor/help.html

Please leave comments on here or email me your feedback. Thank you.

As mentioned at the last reference meeting, I would like to begin working on video guides/tutorials for the library website. Please post suggestions/questions/re-wording to the two areas below.

1. Topics. In this section, please add suggestions for guide topics. Here is what I’ve come up with so far, and I’ve grouped them according to what categories they might fall under. The “-” indicates where the hyperlink to the guide would be.

I was thinking the page could be titled “Help! How do I….”

Find Books?

Using the Knox Online Catalog

-Find a book when you know the Title or Author

-Find a book on a particular subject

-Advanced Searches

-Understanding Library of Congress call numbers

-Using I-Share

-Using WorldCat

Find Articles?

-Selecting a database

-General Tips for searching databases

-Find Full Text articles

-Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost

-JSTOR

-LexisNexis

-Find Journals Online?

-Find Course Reserves?

Get things the Knox Library doesn’t have?

-Articles via the ILLiad Service

-Books via I-Share

Start my Research?

-Developing a Topic

-Reference Books

-Search Strategies (synonyms, AND/OR/NOT, subject words, etc.)

Renew items I have checked out?

-Items from the Knox Library or I-Share
-Items from other libraries (ILLiad)

-Find Images?

-Find Films?

-Find Newspapers?

-Find Primary Sources?

-Use Google Scholar effectively?

-Use Google Books  to find library materials?

-Use Wikipedia effectively?

-Find images, music and videos to use for your projects?

2. Please rate which guides you think should be done first. My choices would be: Finding Books, Finding Articles and Getting things the Knox Library doesn’t have.

You may have already noticed this… The SFX A-Z list and the SFX menu now show related objects for serial titles. This means that previous titles and things like “continued by” and “continues in part” and the like will show up in the A-Z list and the menu.

You can see an example if you look in the A-Z list for the title Mississippi Valley Historical Review. Look at the end to see the line “Continued by: The Journal of American History”. (The only odd thing is that the “Continued by” part is hotlinked, not the title itself. I’ll work on trying to change this.)

A different example: Look up Missouri Botanical Garden bulletin in the A-Z list. You’ll see that this title is not hotlinked because we don’t actually have online content for this title. But, if you click on the “Continues in part” link to the previous title, you’ll see that we do have online content for the earlier title. I think it’s somewhat misleading to have the titles in the list that we don’t actually have online access to; an inexperienced user has to look carefully to figure out that we don’t have online content. Prior to this new feature, if a title was in the list, then we had access to it. I cannot turn off only part of this related content feature, so this becomes a user-education issue, I think.

Scott mentioned that he would like to see a Google search link on the SFX menu, probably located at the end after the Library catalog and ILL links. What do you all think of this?

I came across this example of an academic library using a blog to solicit and respond to suggestions from patrons. The responses are very well done and, to me, it looks like a useful way to engage students and promote library services. We could do something like that here. What do you all think?

There’s a service available called LibGuides and I think we should seriously considering subscribing to it. The cost is $899.00 per year plus an optional $60 per year domain hosting fee (so that we can have the knox.edu domain associated with it). This service allows librarians to easily create guides to resources based on subject or course or whatever. The service’s premise is that it’s based on web 2.0 features–it integrates with Facebook, allows for tag clouds, chat widgets, etc. I think the attractive thing for us is that you don’t have to have any skills or training in web design or html/css or anything to get a page up and running in a short period of time. I encourage you to visit the site and check out the real-life examples from libraries using LibGuides. There’s also a video demo on the site that you can look at.

My handout for teaching/learning EndNote is here.

I have a separate handout for exporting references from a database and importing them into EndNote here.

When you search the library catalog and find a record, it is often desirable to send that link to someone else via email, or put that link on a web page to point patrons to a specific resource. However, when you have the record in view, if you simply copy and paste the URL from the address bar, the URL will not work—it is not a durable, stable URL.

Method 1
To create a durable, stable URL to a catalog record in Voyager, follow these steps.

1. Perform the search you want in WebVoyage. Go to the full bib page for the record.

2. Click on the button at the top for the staff (MARC) view.

3. Make a note of the bib record number found in the MARC record view, which is located in the 001 field:

4. Replace the xxxxx (bib#) in the following search URL (in bold) with the bib# for the record you want.

http://i-share.carli.illinois.edu/knx/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=xxxxx&v1=1&DB=local

Method 2
To create a durable, stable URL for a search that brings up a list of records in Voyager, follow these steps.

1. Perform a search to get a list of records.

2. Copy the URL the system builds and paste it into a text editor, such as Notepad.

3. Remove from that URL the &PID=##, &SEQ=##, and &HIST=## parameters. In the example search below, the characters in the boxes should be removed.

Note: For course reserve searches, you must also remove from the URL any &xxx=any parameters (&INST=any, &DEPT=Any, &CRSE=Any, or &SECT=Any).

4. Add to that URL the &DB=local parameter. The final URL will look like this:

The CARLI web site has more documentation on constructing URLs.

Hello Everyone,

Resource Shelf has a posting today about adding any Search Engine to the Firefox Search bar. The link to the post is here.(The Resource Shelf post also links to directions for adding the Search Engines).

Here is the direct link to Mozilla’s add-on page. The add-on is called “Add to Search Bar”:

After installing the add-on, I added the Library Catalog to my Search Engine.

Directions for adding the catalog search (in case you are interested): From the library home page:

1. Change the Quick Search drop-down choice to Any Word Anywhere.

2. Right click inside the search box.

3. Left click the option “Add to Search Bar…”

4. Change the title (optional)

5. Click OK.

I tried it a couple times and it worked fine!

Because we are in the process of decommissioning the librarydb server, we had to move the location where scans from the Xerox are put. The scans now go to Departments on NAS in a folder called Library_Scans. I have revised the scanning instructions on our web site to reflect this new location.

Scanning to this folder is available from the Xerox on second floor, the color Xerox and the Xerox in tech services (all of these also scan to email). The Xerox in SMC outside the library will scan to email only.