What’s New at the GSU Zach S. Henderson Library

The Microfiche Digitization Project has been adding ERIC Documents from the microfiche collection to the open-access (free) ERIC database.  (If you’re not familiar with ERIC, an education database, here’s a description of what you’ll find there.)  They’ve now completed 55% of the project, with almost 192,000 documents now available.  More details are here.  A tip on how you might be able to help with the remaining 45% is here, and you can contribute your own research here.

ERIC is available free to the public at this site.  We also have two additional interfaces to choose from, available to the GSU community and campus visitors via GALILEO:  EBSCOhost and FirstSearch.

Treaties in Force is prepared by the Department of State for the purpose of providing information on treaties and other international agreements to which the United States has become a party and which are carried on the records of the Department of State as being in force as of its stated publication date, January 1, 2009.

A paper edition of this government document is forthcoming and will be available for checkout at call number S 9.14:

In the meantime, you may access the electronic edition of Treaties in Force, presented in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, which allows text searches and printing of individual pages or the entire document. It is available here: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/122713.pdf

Brought to you by Government Documents Librarian, Lori Lester.

Want to be an informed citizen? Ready for an easier way to keep up? Now you can read about everything that is going on in Congress more easily than ever before. Don’t settle for what the media reports. See the Congressional Record Daily Digest for yourself using THOMAS’s new RSS feed.

The Daily Digest is now available as the first RSS feed from THOMAS
(http://thomas.loc.gov/home/rss/dd.xml).

Recommended to you by Government Documents Librarian, Lori Lester.

(Wondering what RSS is and how to use it?  Click here.)

The 3rd edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing was published in 2008.  We have 3 copies available in Henderson Library.  Soon we will also have the new MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th edition).

For the scoop on what’s new in MLA style, click here.

**Update:  Lisa Smith, Information Services Librarian, adds this tip:

Easybib.com offers free formatting for MLA style. For $8.99/year, the service will format APA and Chicago.

Easybib also offers free, pdf quick guides for APA, MLA, and Chicago at http://www.easybib.com/librarians

(Thanks, Lisa!)

As we had announced, yesterday we held the launch party for EagleSpace and the Waddie Welcome Archive.  A roomful of people, many of them students, were here to learn more about Mr. Welcome and the collection of murals and other hand-painted signs representing Savannah community artwork.  The exhibit on the first floor of Henderson Library includes some actual signs, as well as photographs of others and accompanying explanations.

So what is EagleSpace, you ask?  Some of you are already familiar with the idea of institutional repositories, which are free online archives (see some frequently asked questions about IR’s here).  EagleSpace, which uses the DSpace software, is Georgia Southern’s new repository.  Now, in our soft launch, you can access EagleSpace at http://eaglespace.georgiasouthern.edu (the main URL will stay the same, although the links to the individual collections & items might change soon with a new server).  Try searching for “waddie welcome” and then browsing the collection by title to see the images.  (There are more images being added, so keep an eye on it!)  EagleSpace is Georgia Southern’s component of a statewide project, the GALILEO Knowledge Repository, or GKR, which is in its early stages.  (Sneak a peek here!)  The repository can be used to archive, and make freely accessible, our electronic theses and dissertations, faculty publications, multimedia files, etc., in order to provide seamless access to the digital intellectual product of the University System of Georgia.

Stay tuned for future developments, including discussion forums here on the Georgia Southern campus.

Check out this new resource from the US Government Printing Office (GPO):  Federal Digital System (FDsys)

Click here for the announcement, including a video clip, from the Public Printer of the United States.

According to Lori Lester, our Government Documents Librarian, “This database will gradually replace GPOAccess. For the time being, we will use both.”

In the present economic climate, which has seen library budgets decrease, and South Carolina’s PASCAL (their counterpart to Georgia’s GALILEO) lose 90% of its funding, one thing remains steady:  the rising prices of periodical subscriptions and electronic resource licenses.  For the rundown, including tables with periodical costs by discipline, please visit this link to Library Journal’s annual Periodicals Price Survey.

Come join us to celebrate Henderson Library’s newest acquisition!

The Waddie Welcome Archive is a photographic archive of hand-painted African American signs from Savannah, Georgia. The archive will be housed in Special Collections at Georgia Southern and online with the new EagleSpace database.

Authors and photographers Tom Kohler and Susan Earl will be present to talk about their photographs and their book Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community. An exhibit accompanies the talk. Refreshments served.

Thursday, April 30, 4 PM

Library Exhibition Room, 1st floor

(through the main entrance and up the stairs past the main desk,

returning to the first floor from inside the security gates)

Contact: Robert Batchelor, batchelo@georgiasouthern.edu

As the Zach S. Henderson Library continues with our library budget review,  with assistance from faculty campuswide, we need to know about resources that we should add to our wish list, pending availability of funding.  We invite you to try out the databases below, to which we have access during this free trial and evaluation period.  Each of these databases is also listed in GALILEO during the trial.  Please tell us what you think, by contacting one of our Subject Specialist Librarians, or Jonathan Harwell, Collection Development & Assessment Librarian, at jharwell@georgiasouthern.edu

Art Museum Image Gallery provides images & related multimedia gathered from collections of museums around the world.  Our trial access is through May 31.

Children’s Core Collection provides information about fiction & nonfiction works, story collections, picture books & magazines recommended for readers from preschool through sixth grade.  Our trial access is through May 31.

Cinema Image Gallery includes still images, links to film reviews & other articles about titles, links to biographies of the stars of film & TV, portrait photography, & more.  Our trial access is through May 31.

OmniFile Full Text Mega provides the full text of articles from over 1,750 publications, and article abstracts & indexing from over 3,500 publications, in a variety of subject areas.  Our trial access is through May 31.

R2 Library is a collection of electronic books available for individual purchase, in the areas of allied health, medicine, and nursing.  Our trial access is through May 21.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 First-Year Experience Awards!  Henderson Library would also like to recognize one of the nominees for the Faculty Outstanding First-Year Advocate Award, and point you to some online tutorials for first-year students, which are useful in locating, evaluating, and citing research sources while avoiding plagiarism.

Kudos to Ms. Lisa Smith, Information Services Librarian, for being nominated for this award by another faculty member involved with the First-Year Experience. The two worked together on the FYE task force, and Lisa’s hard work and dedication were justifiably commended.  In addition to presentations that Lisa has done on the FYE work, she has been an excellent campus representative for the library in her work in this area, and has dedicated considerable time and effort to collaborating with colleagues across campus in creating several information literacy modules, which are used by almost all FYE professors at Georgia Southern.

Here are links to the tutorials, which now reside on the Henderson Library’s “Information Literacy page” at http://library.georgiasouthern.edu/libref/literacy.html
(Click on #4 Henderson Library Information Literacy Tutorials):

Evaluating Information Overview

(5 minutes, 23 seconds)

Currency

(2:01)

Relevancy

(3:16)

Authority

(5:34)

Accuracy

(3:10)

Purpose

(4:09)

Avoiding Plagiarism

(4:04)

Citing Sources

(5:59)

Great job, Lisa!  (And thanks to Lori Lester for supplying the story!)

Find your very own Subject Specialist Librarian here!