Showing posts with label databases. Show all posts
Showing posts with label databases. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

LexisNexis interface changing

Just a reminder that the LexisNexis interface is changing this month. I just checked and it's not up yet, but this announcement makes it sound like it's coming very soon.

-Lucia

The newly enhanced LexisNexis® Academic

The latest version of LexisNexis Academic
unveils enhancements – driven by student user testing – designed to make it
even easier to use:


-

Redesigned Easy Search form is the default
home page

-

Six widgets to help students conduct basic research tasks

-

Additional content added for an Environmental Studies search form

-

Navigation presents all options in a single menu

The result? Quicker access to the most commonly used content.

To learn more about the changes to LexisNexis Academic, visit our wiki… now the source of a new LexisNexis Academic Help section.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

"Linked full text" removed from EbscoHost

"Linked full text" as an option has been removed from EbscoHost. The reason being that it never worked.

It appeared as recently as last week, so it must have taken effect very recently.

Thanks to Tasha Keagan for following up on this. Please send any search anomalies (as she says) to ejournals@library.ucsc.edu; even is you have to wait it's totally worth it!

-Annette

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Alexander Street scheduled maintenance, Saturday, 10/17, 6:00 pm - 12 am


14 October 2009

Alexander Street will be doing scheduled maintenance across all collections on Saturday, October 17th from 6:00 PM TO 12:00 AM PDT.  Please be aware that you may see sporadic interruptions of up to one hour across all Alexander Street online collections on this date. In the event that downtime is prolonged for any reason, alerts will be posted to each affected collection.  Please share this information with yourcolleagues.

Contact:
Alexander Street Press
3212 Duke Street
AlexandriaVirginia 22314
USA
http://alexanderstreet.com


Jayne Dickson
CDL Information Services
California Digital Library
University of California
510.987.0550

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Array of New Digital Resources from CDL, 2009

As part of its collaborative mission and if one-time funds are available, CDL acquires digital rights in perpetuity to important scholarly resources. CDL was able to purchase perpetual rights to eight new resources with end-of-year funds in June 2009.

The resources purchased by CDL were all top priorities requested by UC bibliographer groups, particularly African Studies, Califa, English and American Literature, GILS, News, and Performing Arts. Because such decisions must be made within a short period of time, preference is generally given to resources that can be accommodated under an existing license or whose licensing terms are expected to be straightforward. All UC campuses will have access to the new resources at no additional cost in FY 2009/2010.

Following is a brief summary of the new consortial acquisitions.

CDL Acquisitions in FY 2008/2009

Archivision Digital Research Library 28,000 images of art, architecture, gardens, parks and historic or contemporary sites from all over the world. The Visual Resources group has requested Archivision as their #1 priority for a number of years. Archivision is hosted on the ARTStor platform and is now available to all UC users.

LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection Part A (1824-1979) -- Public policy starts and ends with Congressional committee hearings. In these hearings, Congressional committees assess, amend, approve or kill legislation, as well as oversee the implementation and effectiveness of previously enacted legislation falling under their jurisdiction. The LexisNexis Congressional Hearings Digital Collection forms an unparalleled documentary record of events and public policy issues faced by America, as well as the objectives and actions of Congress in dealing with these events and issues. In addition to responding to long-standing selector recommendations, this acquisition will also facilitate shared collection management initiatives for government documents.

San Francisco Chronicle , 1865-1922 (ProQuest)Founded by two brothers in 1865 when the West was still wild, the San Francisco Chronicle covers the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the Klondike gold rush, the S.F. earthquake and fire of 1906, America's entry into World War I, and the many events that shaped the San Francisco Bay region. The Historic S.F. Chronicle can be cross searched with the Historical Los Angeles Times (an earlier CDL purchase) for complete historical coverage of the State of California.

African Writers Series (ProQuest) -- The Heinemann's African Writers Series includes seminal works from the canon of African literature of the 20th century: influential stories, drama, poetry, author biographies and literary works from notable authors such as Nelson Mandela and Nadine Gordimer.

The next four resources were purchased from Alexander Street Press, an independent publisher of highly acclaimed and unique digital collections.

Latin American Women Writers – A collection of over 100,000 pages of literature by Latin American women from the colonial period in the 17th century forward to the present. Latin America and its literary culture encompass twenty diverse countries, each with its unique voice and struggle for independence after the end of colonization. The collection includes memoirs, essays and literature in the original language of the writers.

North American Theatre Online – More than 40,000 pages of critical, in-copyright reference works about authors, plays, theatres, productions, production companies, casts and related information covering the world of theatre from colonial times to the present. This reference collection includes upgrades to CDL's previously purchased Black Drama (Vol. 2 upgrade) and Twentieth Century North American Drama as well as a new resource, North American Indian Drama.

Theatre in VideoTheatre in Video contains over 250 of the world's most important 20th century plays together with over 100 video documentaries, including the BBC Shakespeare Series, delivered in streaming video. When using Theatre in Video together with North American Theatre Online, students will be able to find the complete performance of a play in streaming video, its full text, production background, reference materials and related ephemera.

Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600 to 2000 -- CDL originally purchased this award-winning collection in 2005 and we are now upgrading to the Scholar's Edition, featuring 75,000 additional pages of scholarly material about women's activism in public life since 1963.

Lastly, the remainder of CDL end-of-year funds have been used to extend the SCOPUS pilot through the end of December 2010. This will allow the CDC Scopus evaluation task force as well as individual UC libraries and research departments more time to complete their evaluation and analysis of this tool.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Problems with EBSCO on Library Commons Macs

Firefox users may see a "proxy error" message when searching EBSCO databases (e.g. Academic Search Complete, Historical Abstracts, etc) on Macs with 10.5 in the Library Commons. Usually they can get past this by reloading the page. If that's annoying they may want to use Safari for their EBSCO searching. See Fish's note below for more detail as well as news of a fix forthcoming.

Hi,

Apparently there was an issue yesterday with an EBSCO database search on one of the info commons iMacs. This is a known issue that effects certain databases. There is something buggy with firefox running on 10.5 machines. we have tried many things to work out what the problem is without success.

If you do get a browser error on firefox when doing a search you can hit reload on the page and the search usually loads fine, otherwise Safari should be used.

I am building a brand new image from scratch due to some other network related bugs - working with an apple engineer it was determined that there may have been some corrupt files on these machines. I am hopeful that the bugs and annoying quirks will be resolved once the new image is rolled out.

--
Andrew 'Fish' Phipps