Problems with Blackboard + E-Reserves

The start of a new semester always comes with its share of hiccups. One item that's come to our attention regards course electronic reserves. Several instructors have reported that their e-reserves are not showing when accessing within Blackboard.

The e-reserves are actually being processed as the library receives them, and they are in fact available through the Libraries e-reserves web site: http://www.lib.muohio.edu/reserves/. The data from the Libraries isn't currently being captured properly by University IT Services. IT services is working to resolve the problem with Blackboard -- for the moment, though, please direct your students to access through the Libraries' site. (Students can go directly to http://www.lib.muohio.edu/reserves/; or in Blackboard click on the name of the class that appears in the Blackboard popup window. That will take them directly to the Libraries site where they can get the most up to date article listing.)

OhioLINK Adds Thousands of Scholarly E-Books, Opens E-Book Center

Thousands of new scholarly e-books, published by Springer, are now available to students, faculty and staff at OhioLINK member institutions. These are recent (2005-2007), high-quality scientific, technological and medical books. Students can use these books to do research anytime, anywhere. Faculty can use the books for research or as course materials. Faculty can assign particular readings and link to relevant chapters or sections from course pages or Web sites. New Springer e-books will be added regularly. These recent additions bring the total number of e-books offered by OhioLINK to 25,000.

These new e-books are available as part of the new Electronic Book Center. Similar in concept to the Electronic Journal Center, the E-Book Center will allow you to find and utilize e-books from multiple publishers using one common interface. Currently, the E-Book Center contains 5,000 e-books from Oxford University Press and Springer. Additional e-books and e-book collections will be added, including the Electronic Reference Books collection. Links to OhioLINK’s other e-book collections are available from the E-Book Center’s home page.

Books in the E-Book Center will also be accessible from the OhioLINK Library Catalog. Records are being added for the new e-books.

Supplementary files in OhioLINK journals

Part of the gradual shift we're seeing towards more data and computation intensive and media-rich science is the greater use of supplementary files as adjuncts to primary research articles. The OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center now displays any accompanying material included in Institute of Physics and Elsevier articles as "Supplementary Files" below the abstract. The available files include videos (.mov, .avi and .mpeg formats), PDFs and PowerPoints. All files sent to OhioLINK by publishers are made available.

Here's a good example:
http://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=00144827&issue=v313i0013&article=2766_domgaraamoad

Many Cell articles also contain supplementary files, for example:
http://journals.ohiolink.edu/ejc/article.cgi?issn=00928674&issue=v130i0002&article=323_sbfaotkkbscf

New Grad Student Orientations

The Miami University Libraries are pleased to welcome our newest graduate students at these upcoming orientation sessions:

* Thursday, August 23, 7-9 p.m. OR
* Friday, August 24, 2-4 p.m.

These sessions will include a question and answer session on new and existing library services and resources, a quick tour of King Library, and an opportunity to meet informally with liaison librarians who coordinate library services to individual academic programs.

We hope that you can join us for one of the sessions, which will be held at King Library, Room 110. For online registration, please visit http://www.lib.muohio.edu/registration/graduate/

RefWorks Import Guides for Life Sci Lit Databases Now Available

Step-by-step guides for importing citations from PubMed, BIOSIS, Agricola, and Google Scholar into RefWorks are now available at the MU(LS)2 blog, http://miamiulifescilib.blogspot.com/

Some of you will note that Web of Science (Science Citation Index) is conspicuously absent from the list above. Thomson ISI has indicated that they will be releasing a new version of Web of Science "soon," so I'm awaiting the new version to see how it handles exporting and will make a guide accordingly. We'll also tackle a few other databases (e.g. SciFinder Scholar); please let me know of any others you use regularly.