Help – Library Research Databases In Jeopardy!

Faculty, do your students use online research databases such as Ebsco’s Academic Search Premier or CQ Researcher to complete your assignments?  Are you aware that the state has eliminated funding for these databases?

In the Los Rios District, we are very fortunate that the District Office has supplied funding for this year to guarantee that Los Rios students will have access to databases through Spring 2011, but there are no assurances about the future.  Community college students throughout the state could lose access to many thousands of up-to-date, full-text, high quality periodical articles that instruct, inform, and help them fulfill course requirements.  Distance education students will be especially hard hit.

In response to this crisis, the CCC Council of Chief Librarians has presented to the Board of Governors a “Resolution Requesting Action by the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges to Support Continued Funding for Online Library Information Resources and Services Needed by Students and Faculty.” The resolution asks the BOG to direct the Chancellor’s Office to actively seek other sources of funding for online information resources and services.

If you value students’ access to the databases, you can help. Send an email voicing your concerns and your support for the resolution to:

Mr. Lance T. Izumi, President, Board of Governors CCC ngriffin@cccco.edu
Chancellor Jack Scott, California Community Colleges fjames@cccco.edu
Dr. Morgan Lynn, Executive Vice Chancellor, CCC mlynn@cccco.edu
Ms. Jane Patton, President, Academic Senate, CCC jane_patton@wvm.edu

Online library workshop coming up!

The library will be holding an online workshop on Wed., November 11 at 7:00 PM. We frequently offer drop-in orientations inside the library, but this one will be available to students at home or anywhere else they’ve got internet access. Students will learn how to find full-text articles in the library’s subscription databases; professors offering extra credit will be notified by e-mail that their student successfully completed the workshop. (For those of you familiar with the usual drop-in workshops, this one is equivalent to the “B” orientation.)

If you’re curious about the technology, we’ll be using the Elluminate web conferencing platform, which is provided to all California community colleges via CCC Confer.

We’ve got more information about this event on the library website. This is a late addition to our schedule, so please spread the word! http://scc.losrios.edu/~library/onlineworkshop

Use Your Sacramento Area Libraries!

Maybe we’re not paying enough attention to the American Library Association, but in the library we were surprised to learn that September was Library Card Sign-up Month.  And now it’s over… At SCC, you don’t have to worry about getting a library card–it’s bundled into your Employment Card or Student Access Card–but this might be a good time to think about the advantages of setting yourself up with outside libraries too.

Resources for a Teachable Moment

Many SCC faculty are making use of recent campus events as a teachable moment for critical thinking.  To support that momentum, the library would like to share a sample of significant information resources.

Books and Media in the SCC Library

Asking the right questions: a guide to critical thinking.  M. Neil Browne.  2010, 2007, 2004.

From critical thinking to argument: a portable guide.  Sylvan Barnet, Hugo Bedau.  2008, 2005.

Beyond feelings: a guide to critical thinking.  Vincent Ryan Ruggiero.  2008, 2004, 2001.

The thinker’s guide to fallacies: the art of mental trickery and manipulation.  Richard Paul and Linda Elder.  2006.

How to think about weird things: critical thinking for a New Age.  Theodore Schick, Jr., Lewis Vaughn.  2002, 1999.

Find many more titles in LOIS, the library catalog.  Suggested keyword searches:  critical thinking, persuasion, logic, reasoning, freedom of speech, reasoning, ethics.

Websites

There are many.  Turn up a good quality list of resources by searching for “critical thinking” at INFOMINE, Intute or Librarian’s Internet Index (research databases of handpicked websites).

The Library has also posted a few links to published articles from library databases about the abortion debate on its Twitter stream.

Librarians are deeply invested in helping students think critically about information.  Bring your students to the library for an orientation, or send them to do some digging on their own.

Library Databases = Millions of Published Articles

“Who’s winning the war in Afghanistan?”

“I need some articles about prenatal care - in nursing journals.”

“Can you help me find an article about getting a job in the green economy?”

You bet!  The SCC Library still has magazines, journals, and newspapers on the shelves, but that collection doesn’t compare to the thousands of periodicals and millions of articles available in the Library Databases.

You and your students can find newspaper, magazine, and journal articles on just about any topic, from any computer, at any time.  Database searching involves a few more steps than Google, but the payoff is an altogether more reliable source of published information. 

Send your students to a drop in library orientation, or bring your class to a customized orientation for step by step instruction.  Or just call, email, IM, or stop by the library reference desk with your questions. 

You can now log into the databases from off-campus using your unified password.

Trial Databases Available!

The library is evaluating a few databases, which are available for a limited time from the databases page:

• Access World News from Newsbank provides full-text articles from The Sacramento Bee, lots of California newspapers, a number of major metropolitan dailies, and some popular magazines. It also has “Special Reports,” which provide a list of links to news articles on a given topic.
• Credo Reference searches the full text of hundreds of reference works, from the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology to the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms (you can view a complete list online).
• Reference Universe from Paratext allows you to search the tables of contents and indexes of print reference books, so that you’ll know just what’s in those huge volumes located on the 2nd floor of the LRC.
• The journal Science needs no introduction, and Science Online provides full-text access from 1997 to the current issue (our access to this journal via Academic Search Premier only goes through 2004, though you can always find current issues on the 2nd floor of the LRC). It also has some additional features, such as complete access to the ScienceNOW news archive.

Please use these resources while we’ve got them, and if you’d like to make any comments, this is the place!

Start your searches with our new widget

The library has developed a new tool: a “widget” that allows you to start searching the library catalog and a few of our subscription databases without going to the library home page first.

If you enter keywords into the search boxes and click “Search,” you’ll be taken directly to a page of results.

If you are an instructor using the new Desire2Learn courseware, when you create a new course you’ll see this widget on the home page. If you already have a course and don’t see it, you can add the widget to your home page. For more information on using the widget, including the code you’ll need to embed it elsewhere, go to its home page.

Does this seem like a useful tool to you? Would you like to see more tools like it? Do you have suggestions or other feedback? Let us know!

Millions of E-books on the way?

You might have heard of Google Book Search, which allows you to search the text of millions of books and provides full-text access to books no longer protected by copyright. You might also have heard that Google was being sued by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild on the grounds that by scanning all these books, they were infringing copyright on a massive scale. Finally, you might have heard the news in October of a settlement that would allow Google to continue its Book Search project. But have you heard what this settlement means for libraries?

As part of the settlement, Google would make a large portion of its database of full-text books–those that are currently out of print but still protected by copyright–available to libraries in two forms. First, it would sell subscriptions that libraries could purchase, just as we do other electronic databases. Second, it would provide access to its database at no cost from a limited number of computers within the library.

Clearly we will need more details to assess exactly how this settlement (which has not yet been approved by the court) might affect SCC library users. For instance, how much will a subscription cost, and how might Google limit library users’ ability to use the books in its database? What is clear is that this arrangement has the potential to add millions of books to our collection, books from some of the world’s greatest libraries, including Harvard, University of California, University of Michigan, Columbia, and Stanford.

If you’d like to explore the issues further, here are a few links:

• Google’s press release announcing the settlement
• A discussion of the issues on the Digital Campus podcast (start at 21:15)
• A bibliography of pieces written about Google Book Search
• Siva Vaidhyanathan’s blog, The Googlization of Everything, which trains a critical eye on the activities of the world’s most interesting corporation
• For those who can’t get enough, a link dump collecting all sorts of responses to these developments

Library Database News

Find even more relevant and reliable magazine and journal articles than ever in new library databases (available from the library’s databases page effective July 1):

• Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) – more than 4,700 full text journals, 3,700 of those peer-reviewed. Subjects range from biology, chemistry, engineering and physics to psychology, religion & theology, and everything in between. Replaces ProQuest’s Research Library with about twice the number of full text journals.
• Literary Reference Center (EBSCO) – replaces Gale Literature Resource Center.
• Business Source Premier (EBSCO) – full text for more than 2300 business journals.
• LexisNexis Academic – over 6000 news, business, and legal resources
• Opposing Viewpoints – balanced content on key issues of our time

Contact your librarian to discuss how your existing assignments can be supported by the new databases.

Continuing library databases:
We hope you will also enjoy continuing access to CQ Researcher & Global Reports, ScienceDirect, ARTstor, JSTOR I and II collections, Naxos Music Library, Oxford English Dictionary & Oxford Reference Online.