Meriam Library News

The Meriam Library has been given trial access to Thomson Scientific's Web of Science. Databases included in the trial are Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. These databases provide indexing and abstracting for several thousand academic and technical journals, with coverage beginning in 1975. Web of Science databases provide cited reference searching, which allows users to find articles that reference any particular article. We will have trial access to Web of Science through June 30, 2008.

Next time you go to the Library Catalog you will see that there is a new drop down menu to the right of the search box. Now that our periodical and newspaper titles are included in the Library Catalog (many thanks to Marc Langston for all his work on this), we have added five search options to the main OPAC search page to give users a faster and easier way to limit their searches without having to navigate the Advanced Search page.
The five options are:

View Entire Collection - This is the current default. Searches will bring up all resources, regardless of collection or format.

Books - Searches books in the main, folio, popular, thesis, juvenile, curriculum, and special collections. Government documents are excluded.

Journals/Newspapers - Searches print and electronic journals and newspapers.

Online Resources - Searches resources that are online only or that have a link to an online version. Electronic journal and newspaper titles are excluded.

Videos/DVDs - Searches videos and DVDs.

The Journals/Newspapers limit provides an easy way for users to access our current periodicals collection by title, as well as many of our older periodicals that were never included in the Periodicals List. Because of this, we will be discontinuing the Periodicals List before the end of the year. At that point all journal/magazine/newspaper (aka periodicals) access will be through the Library Catalog.

Contributed by Sarah Blakeslee

Images by TheTrident and AJC1, used under the Creative Commons license.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that Blackboard Vista has released a Facebook application to alert students when something changes on a Blackboard course Web page. From The Chronicle's article:

Students eagerly spend hours on Facebook, where they socialize and communicate with friends. But they're often far less excited about logging into Blackboard, the course-management system used at hundreds of colleges, where they participate in required class discussions and check when their next test is scheduled. So Blackboard has created a Facebook application for students that brings their academic information into the social-networking site.

For privacy and security reasons, the Facebook application does not actually pull academic data from Blackboard onto a user's Facebook page, said Karen Gage, vice president for product strategy at Blackboard, in an interview on Tuesday. Instead, it pushes a notification to Facebook users when something is new on their course Web pages, such as when one of the user's professors has posted grades. Then the student has to log into Blackboard to see the grade itself.

What do you think about an application like this? A useful tool? Or would you rather not think about academics at all when you log into Facebook? And more specifically, is this something you would be interested in seeing integrated into or disconnected from CSU, Chico's Blackboard system?

Contributed by Aaron Bowen