New materials lists for items cataloged in November 2012, have been posted.

Newman Library has completed a very successful textbook pilot during the fall semester. We pulled over 1,000 textbooks from our collection and placed them on reserve for student use in two-hour time blocks. This service has been very popular and in the first month we had over 2,000 checkouts! We would like to expand our textbook reserves and are asking for your help. At the beginning of each semester, if you have an extra copy of the textbook or can obtain a copy from your publisher please consider placing the textbook on reserve at Newman Library.

The Newman circulation desk now has a bicycle repair kit, containing wrenches, tire levers, a multi-tool, tube patch kits, a bike pump, and contact information for local bike shops for more extensive repairs. Included QR codes will connect your smart phone to online tutorials and videos. Additional repair kits are available at the Squires and War Memorial Gym information desks.

New materials lists for items cataloged in October 2012, have been posted.

EndNote is a software product that allows researchers to save and organize results of database searches or lists of bibliographic references. The university has a site license for EndNote that allows students, faculty, and staff to download and install the program. A web-based product called EndNote Web is also available. Windows and Mac versions are now available. An EndNote app for the iPad is due for release in the fall.

The University Libraries have added ten new journals as part of an extended trial that will run through the end of 2013. These are from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. a company well-known for publishing basic and translational research in such areas as biotechnology, biomedicine, and clinical medicine. 

New materials lists for items cataloged in September 2012, have been posted.

EndNote version X6 for Windows is now available to download (see right sidebar). The Mac update is expected later this year.

Mergent's Events Data provides on-going updated information on stock-splits, mergers, tender offers, partial/full calls, and name changes in almost real time. You can research 10 years of corporate actions, dividends, fixed income, and unit investment trust data.

New materials lists for items cataloged in August 2012, have been posted.

The University Libraries provides many services to faculty at Virginia Tech. In addition to the services already covered in our Faculty Week posts, here are several more that you could find useful.

Designing library research assignments for undergraduates can be a complex process. Many instructors make assumptions about their students: experience in doing research projects in high school or freshman year, familiarity in using online search tools, knowledge of potential sources like newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, and an understanding of how knowledge is organized. Instead, students come from a wide variety of backgrounds and may have had little or no exposure to the research process.

Faculty have several options to have library materials delivered (not to mention the enormous amount of materials available online in your office, classroom, home, or travelling).

The library provides a range of services to support distance education students taking classes at a remote site or through an online class and to faculty who work outside Blacksburg (Graduate Centers, Extension offices, ARECs, Equine Medical Center, etc.). We strive to give these remote users a similar experience to our Blacksburg patrons.

A wealth of academic information and data is published every day. Keeping up with all these new publications can be a daunting task.At one time, librarians regularly flipped through new journal issues, comparing contents against index cards submitted by faculty listing areas of interest and typing up bibliographies of potential matches. Now alerting services (also called current awareness services) can provide such lists automatically. Alerts can be sent from publishers, article-indexing databases, or third parties that combines these sources.

Course Reserves are a means to set aside materials for a class in the library branch of your choice (Newman, Art + Architecture, NVC Resource Center, or Vet Med). These materials can have a limited loan period (1 week, 2 days, 2 hours) to ensure access during the time they are on reserve. Materials can include library-owned books, videos, and other items, photocopies, or your personal copies of books and videos. 

The library carries some textbooks, either as part of the regular collection or in Reserve if placed there by faculty. Using the list of textbooks at the University Bookstore site, you can search Addison, the library catalog, to see if any are available for check out.

Note that the library owning a copy of your textbook does not mean you can avoid purchasing your own copy. Textbooks kept on reserve will have a short check out period: two weeks or two days for most books. Textbooks in the regular collection will commonly be recalled by other students in your class, also shortening the length of time you can have an item checked out.

Faculty and GTAs can link to library resources for their course sites in Scholar, the university's Course Management System. Typical places to add these links include the Forums, Resources, and Syllabus tools. The procedure for adding links to each of the tools is detailed below. Scholar users should use Persistent links whenever possible to ensure ongoing access. The proxied version of the link should always be used to ensure access for off-campus students is possible.

New materials lists for items cataloged in July 2012, have been posted.

The   Reaxys database requires logging in with an individual login and password. Users with existing logins will have to re-register via the registration link at Reaxys . Use your VT email address. You will receive a new Registration ID that you should validate. This will give you access to Reaxys and all other Elsevier applications that you have a right to access.

We now have additional equipment that can be checked out from the main Circulation Desk on the second floor of Newman Library: MacBook Air laptops, PICO Pocket Projectors, Blu-ray player, DVD players, and VHS players.

Four additional languages (Filipino, Latin, Polish, and Vietnamese) have been added to the Language Resource Center, plus an additional user for Spanish.

SpringerProtocols is a set of peer-reviewed, reproducible procedures for scientific experiments in the life sciences with step-by-step instructions in HTML and PDF and some streaming videos. 1980s-present.

LandScan Global Population Database from East View is a global population database that shows geographical distribution of population at one-kilometer resolution over an average 24-hour period. Demographic (age, race, sex) and socioeconomic characteristics are integrated with population data to allow integration with risk and impact assessment models

Children's Core Collection from EBSCOhost indexes book citations and reviews for fiction and nonfiction, story collections, picture books, and magazines. 1928-present.

Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities provides information on the journal article publishing process: acceptance rates, style and formats, types of review processed, time required, and other criteria to find the best fit for your manuscript.

2011 data has now been loaded into JCR - Journal Citation Reports from Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge . Journal Citation Reports allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 10,600 scholarly and technical journals from more than 2,500 publishers. 528 journals received their first Impact Factor in this release. It can show you the most frequently cited journals in a field, highest impact journals in a field, and largest journals in a field. Search or browse in JCR Science Edition or JCR Social Sciences Edition.

Best's Library Center provides full-text insurance reports, credit reports, and other in-depth insurance industry information and statistics.

New materials lists for items cataloged in June 2012, have been posted.

Databases formerly found on the CSA Illumina and ProQuest search platforms are now all available on a new ProQuest search interface. Now that all of these databases are on the same platform, they can be cross-searched simultaneously. We have also created subject categories where you can search all the engineering databases (for example) together in a pre-selected list, or you can select your own set of databases for easy cross-discipline searching. All of these databases are also indexed in Summon.

Two more titles have been added to our suite of Mergent databases:

First Research from Mergent provides full-text industry profiles, state profiles, and call prep sheets for sales calls.  

Key Business Ratio from Mergent's Dun & Bradstreet provides data on public and private companies, including solvency ratios, efficiency ratios, and profitability ratios.  

SAGE Research Methods indexes full-text books, reference sources, the "little green book" series (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences), the "little blue book" series (Qualitative Research Methods), journal articles, and videos. Since this platform focuses on methodology rather than disciplines, it can be used by researchers from the social sciences, health sciences, and more. Full text available in HTML and PDF. You can limit searches by research method type. 1970s-present.

MADCAD indexes full-text building codes, evaluation standards, design standards, and technical bulletins from ASCE, ASHRAE, ASME, ASTM, FEMA, NFPA, and SMACNA, plus state codes from Virginia in HTML and PDF.

Summon has implemented a new way to display and link to content that exists only as a citation in its database (as opposed to those available in full text). Currently this includes many records provided by Web of Science and ERIC (and soon MLA International Bibliography) which previously would have linked to these sources, even though the full text of these articles is not available in these databases. Now Summon will show an intermediate screen [above] that displays the full citation and record details, including the source for this citation (as a link so you could go to that database for further searching). Included on this page will be a Request button that will display the familiar Get VText screen, where you can manually search for the full text or request it via Interlibrary Loan.

Google Scholar has changed access to its advanced search options. From the default search look for the down-arrow on the right side of the search box. Use that arrow to reveal the advanced search options, including phrase searching (you could also use quotes), author searching, limiting to particular journals, and limiting by publication date.

New materials lists for items cataloged in May 2012, have been posted.

Collections are moving on the second floor of Newman Library. DVDs have moved from beside the Circulation Desk to between the bathrooms and the reference desk. New books have moved in front of the reference desk. The Business, Humanities, and Social Sciences reference collection has been compacted and moved closer to the reference desk. All of the stacks on the second floor will be shifted counter-clockwise towards the reference collection and away from the main elevators.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) from Gale indexes the full text of newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, maps, diaries photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages as HTML and PDF, plus some image formats. Subject areas include British politics and society, religion, education, Asian diplomacy with Western countries, economics, and English, French, and German literature. 1789-1914.

Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present indexes citations and full-text biographical and critical material for over 800 British women writers, including literary, social, and historical materials. Early medieval-present.

Plunkett Research provides market research, industry analysis, glossaries, and company profiles in HTML and PDF, plus industries statistics in spreadsheet formats and overview videos.

ProQuest Statistical Insight (formerly LexisNexis Statistical) indexes statistical information produced by U.S. federal agencies, states, private organizations, and major intergovernmental organizations. PQSI provides descriptive abstracts, detailed indexing, full-text PDFs of source documents and tables, and downloadable table data in spreadsheet formats. 1970s-present.

The Glossary of Geology from AGI allows searching and browsing of 39,000 entries covering geology, climatology, geologic engineering, geophysics, hydrology, mineralogy, paleontology, and soils.

The Folio/Oversize collection of books too large to fit on our regular shelves has moved from the first to the fifth floor. These are sorted in call number order, and like most books in Newman, can now be requested in advance to be pulled and held for you at the Circulation Desk.

RAND State Statistics indexes data from all 50 states (some down to the city or county level) in areas of business and economics, quality of life, education, energy and environment, government finance, health and socioeconomics, and population and demographics. Data can be downloaded in spreadsheet formats. 1960-present.

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research indexes questions and response data from public opinion polls and academic surveys. Polls are available in HTML and PDF; data sets can be downloaded as text or SPSS files. Many results can be viewed as interactive cross tabulations. You must create a profile and sign in to access data sets. 1930s-present.

We have a growing collection of over 3900 DVD titles, including education titles, documentaries, TV series, blockbusters, indies, and foreign films. DVDs are searchable in Addison by title, actor/director, subject, and call number. You can also view a complete list of DVDs. Here are the top 50 checked out DVDs this year.

The addition of Summon to our searchable resources last summer significantly changed how library patrons find resources. It effectively incorporates the functions of the other three search tabs on the home page (Addison, Databases, and Journals). Here are the top 20 searches for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Our popular reading collection is made up of best sellers and recently published fiction and non-fiction. (Old timers would know this as our browse books collection.) This collection is located on the exterior wall beside the second floor Learning Commons. These books check out for 21 days and cannot be renewed. Here are the most checked out books from this collection this year:

We track common searches in Addison to improve your search experience. (We gather aggregate data; we can't track individual searches or associate searches with patrons.) Here are the top 20 searches for the 2011-2012 academic year.

New materials lists for items cataloged in April 2012, have been posted.

• Mergent Online now provided international stock prices in addition to U.S.
• Mergent BondViewer provides reports on U.S. taxable bonds, municipal bonds, and retail notes
• Mergent Historical Annual Reports (Mergent Archives) provides annual reports for worldwide companies, industries reports, digitized documents like Moody's Manual, and equity reports

Most of our journal subscriptions supply the full-text articles as PDFs. Now ScienceDirect Ejournals also supply articles as ePUB and Mobi ereader formats that can be downloaded and moved to your device. ePUB is a format widely used by ebook readers and mobile devices like the iPad or Sony Reader. Mobipocket is mainly used on Kindles. Unlike PDFs, these formats allow using features of the ereader, like resizing the text, annotations, and bookmarks. You will find the download option for ereader formats on the right side of the page, below the article abstract.

New materials lists for items cataloged in March 2012, have been posted.

On April 1, 2012, IEEE Xplore Digital Library will upgrade its interface. All current saved searches will be DELETED with this release. We encourage you to copy and paste your saved searches into a document so they can be recreated after launch.

Three databases from the Africa Knowledge Project index the full text of articles, reports, dissertations, short stories and folktales, plus audio and music files on Africa and the African diaspora.

As part of the implementation of the Summon Discovery service by Virginia Tech's University Libraries, we are assessing its use and effectiveness among faculty and students.  We are inviting you to participate in a focus group discussion, or one-on-one interview, on your use of, and experiences with Summon, and your perception of its effectiveness in finding research information. The information collected will provide insight into how the Libraries might enhance the service to better meet your research needs.

The Virginia Tech Libraries have purchased over 120 journal backfiles from Emerald, which has digitized volumes as far back as 1898. The full-text content of these journals are indexed in Summon, and will be linked through Get VText when searching other databases.

New materials lists for items cataloged in February 2012, have been posted.

We are now subscribing to Acta Horticulturae online from the International Society for Horticultural Science. Acta Horticulturae is a peer reviewed, monographic series of scientific and technical publications covering the entire range of horticultural sciences. This series is mainly composed of the proceedings of the International Society of Horticultural Science Symposia and the International Society of Horticultural Science's International Horticultural Congresses. It is indexed in the major life science databases. Virginia Tech access to this publication begins with number 1, 1963.

The American National Biography Online from Oxford provides HTML full-text biographical entries and over 2,700 illustrations on 18,700 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life -- whose lives have shaped the nation. It includes access to The Oxford Companion to United States History encyclopedia with entries on all aspects of American history.

The ACS Symposium Series provides full text ebooks (each chapter is a separate HTML page or PDF) covering agriculture, food chemistry, organic and polymer chemistry, and chemical education topics. Each book is peer-reviewed.

The Grand Corpus des dictionnaires [9e-20e s.] contains entries from 24 French language dictionaries published from the 9th to 20th centuries. You can limit searches to grammatical categories, etymologies, historical usage, and quotes and citations. The interface is in French.

Through the efforts of the University Libraries, Virginia Tech is now an institutional member of BioMed Central . This will enable authors affiliated with the university to qualify for a 15% discount on article processing charges for any of over 200 peer-reviewed, open access journals available from BioMed Central.

Newman Library is increasing its recycling capacity as RecycleMania is in effect on campus. We have worked closely with Facilities Services and campus recycling to direct more materials into the recycling stream, including containers and discarded materials.

New materials lists for items cataloged in January 2012, have been posted.

Advertising Red Books provides information and data on advertisers and advertising agencies including contact information, business profiles, and client lists.

Newman Library now lends a variety of electronic equipment. Items include:

• iPad 2 (16GB)
• iPad camera connection kit
• MacBook Pro (15.4" monitor, quad-core 2.0GHz, 4GB DDR3, 500 GB HD)
• Gateway (17" monitor, quad-core 1.5GHz, 4GB DDR3, 640GB HDD)
• Kodak PlaySport Zx3 Digital Video Camera
• Olympus Digital Voice Recorder WS-700
• Calculators -- TI-89 Titanium Graphing, TI-84 Plus Silver, TI-BAII Plus Pro, TI-30XA

The Mac version of the printer driver for the library's multifunction printers is now available for download. Simply install the driver to be able to print to library printers from your Mac laptop (or home desktop). The final step of printing will have you enter your Hokie Passport number so that your print jobs will be connected to your account.

Art & Architecture Complete from EBSCOhost indexes citations, abstracts, and some full text from journals, magazines, trade publications, and books covering all aspects of art and architecture. It also includes a large image collection. 1901-present.

The Virginia Tech Writing Center has moved to Newman Library's second floor learning commons, just past the elevators. It is a free service for all Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff, at all levels.

In conjunction with the Newman Book Runners faculty delivery service, beginning January 17, 2012, Interlibrary Loan materials will be deliverable to participating departments (these are listed in the right column). If you are a faculty member in one of these departments, please contact Interlibrary Loan at 540-231-6344 to request departmental delivery.

We are shortening the time items you request (from storage, from Newman's shelves, from another branch, or as a recall) are kept on our hold shelf from 10 to 7 days. If you do not pick up your held material before this period expires, it will either be returned to its usual location or automatically switched to the next patron who has placed a request for the item.

Beginning in January 2012, University Libraries have added online access to three more journals from Nature Publishing Group to the collections: Nature Protocols, Cell Research, and Molecular Therapy.

WilsonWeb was purchased by EBSCO, and databases hosted on the WilsonWeb platform are transitioning to the EBSCOhost platform. This will allow cross-searching with other EBSCO databases. Users with MyWilsonWeb profiles will need to recreate alerts and saved searches using a MyEBSCOhost profile.

Starting January 9, 2012, books in Newman Library with a status of Available can be requested to be pulled and held for you.

New materials lists for items cataloged in December 2011, have been posted.