Healey Keynotes

Moving forward at the Healey Library

A few weeks ago, University Librarian Daniel Ortiz  was happy to announce that the Healey Library had joined the Fenway Libraries Online (FLO.)

We have already begun to enjoy the fruits of this alliance; recently the staff at FLO regenerated the keyword index for Healey Library's Voyager catalog; upgrading subject headings, author names, and words in titles. 

This will make searches of Voyager faster, more relevant, more robust, and allow you to find what you need on our shelves!

Dr. Ortiz, the staff of Healey Library, and the staff at FLO, are working on many more improvements in the coming months.

Soon, we will soon a new way to access eJournals will be introduced, making finding that important research article that much easier. We will be rolling out a complete upgrade of our Voyager catalog as well!

Summer 2008 is going to be an exciting time at the library, stay tuned for more announcements from Dr. Ortiz!

Access Healey from Anywhere

The librarians at Healey Library have created a tool that allows you to search for Journals, Books, and Articles directly from your Firefox browser.

You can down load the toolbar for your Firefox Browser here.

To search, select the catalog or database from the menu to the right of the search box and the field to search from the menu to the left. Then input your search term and click the Search button. Multiple terms may be added using the "Create New Search Field" button, a blue down arrow directly to the right of the search box.

The toolbar will automatically turn many ISBNs, ISSNs, DOI IDs, and PubMed IDs found on any webpage into a link to a search for that ISBN in the Healey collection.

You can also select sections of text (such as a bibliographic citation) and drag it to the diploma icon in the toolbar to search Google Scholar and open its best guess for the article in our Article Linker.

 

The toolbar also allows you to highlight titles, authors, or keywords from any webpage, right-click, and search them in the library catalog or Google Scholar.

The toolbar can be used on or off campus (though you will need to login with your library barcode if you are searching databases.)

If you are having difficulty installing the tool bar please contact us.

HealeyTools is an edition of the LibX toolbar created by Annette Bailey and Godmar Back at Virginia Tech.

NEW - Roper Center Public Opinion Archives

Looking for public opinion data? UMass Boston researchers now have access to the entire Roper Center Public Opinion Archives site. The Roper Center conducts polls on a wide array of topics including, the 2008 presidential election, abortion, education, the environment, the Middle East, war, and the list goes on and on. Use the iPoll database to search the full text of surveys, including the individual questions asked, and to retrieve the survey questions and results.  First time iPoll users must complete an iPoll New User Registration form.

The site has public opinion surveys from 1935 to the present.  Because you have access to older as well as current polling data, you can trace over time how public opinion on a topic has changed. 

Morrie Schwartz's library is coming to Healey

The Healey Library is to receive the personal library of Morris Schwartz, the late Brandeis professor made famous by his award winning book, Tuesdays with Morrie.  The book, also made into a successful 1999 film, chronicles the final months of Schwartz's remarkable life.  At the age of 78 he was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal illness commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Rather than fearing death Schwartz faced it as a learning opportunity and shared his experiences with audiences on national television and radio. His appearance on Nightline prompted former student and sportswriter, Mitch Albom, to reconnect with his favorite professor. The two began meeting weekly in Schwartz’s Brookline home and their talks about life and death became rich content for the best selling book.

Schwartz’s library is a life-long academic collection of approximately 2,000 books primarily in the field of sociology and related disciplines. The collection has been generously donated by Schwartz's widow, Charlotte Schwartz, who chose Healey Library because of her friendship with Robert Hutchins, a retired UMB Sociology professor.

Healey Library Joins Fenway Libraries Online

FROM: Daniel Ortiz, University Librarian

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I am pleased to announce that Healey Library has recently joined Fenway Libraries Online (FLO), a group of academic and special interest libraries in the Boston/ Cambridge area.

For twenty years, FLO has implemented state-of-the-art library systems and provided its member libraries with new opportunities for cooperative collection development, particularly in the acquisition of electronic databases. By joining FLO, the university community will have access to more than a million books and other materials, which will be added to the list of resources in Healey Library.

Additional institutions that are part of the FLO membership include: Emerson College, Emmanuel College, Lesley University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Museum of Fine Arts, New England Conservatory, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Wheelock College.

I want to thank Provost Paul Fonteyn, Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance, Ellen O’Connor, as well as all the UMass Boston deans for providing guidance and support in making this significant decision.

Explore the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Healey Library’s newest database, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB), will be a big plus for all who seek biographical information about noteworthy people who are in some way related to the British Isles. These may be people born there, people who moved there, as well as people from former British territories. The Oxford DNB includes not only the expected kings and queens but also poet laureates, Nobel prize winners, important military figures, musicians, artists and the list goes on.  It even includes an entry on the Piltdown Man (supp. fl. 4 million BC), an archaeological hoax. The biographies are substantial and well researched. Many of the biographies include a painting or photograph of the person. No living people are included in the Oxford DNB. 

Looking for 19^th century artists? Women politicians? You can also use the Oxford DNB to help you find people.  You can search by specific criteria such as sex and field of interest.  You can also search by broad themes such as Armed Forces, Arts and Culture, and Politics: British Isles. Or you can choose to browse the Oxford DNB alphabetically, by birth date order or by death date order.

You will find the Oxford DNB an extremely interesting, rich and powerful resource.

Google Gullibility (Finding things isn't as easy as Google!)

Recently found this at the Association of College and Research Libraries Blog:

A Pew Internet & American Life Project study about search engine users indicated that the vast majority of them expressed satisfaction with their search skills. According to the study, 92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching and 87% of searchers say they have successful search experiences most of the time, including some 17% of users who say they always find the information for which they are looking. Now if most Americans are using Google to find the latest information on Paris Hilton or the Academy Awards ceremony, I imagine they find what they need. But in the event they don't immediately and easily find what they seek, some poor search behavior is likely to emerge.

In his Alertbox newsletter, Jakob Nielsen shared the results of research that indicated that while search users have better skills now than they did five years ago, when their first efforts fail most searchers are incredibly bad at finding, and that's typically because they don't know how to search. According to Nielsen, users face three problems:

* Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy (i.e., revise the strategy)
* Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site's likely usefullness
* Inability to sort through the SERP's polluted mass of poor results, to really address whether a site meets the user's problem (SERP=Search Engine Results Page).

As academic librarians we assumed that end-users only had trouble with our catalogs and library databases because they were oriented to librarian-style searching (which only appeals to librarians), and that making all library databases more like search engines in order to facilitate finding (which is what everyone else wants to do) would bring about a new golden age of end-user information retrieval. I see two significant flaws in that vision. First, end-users clearly have a hard time finding information on ultra-findable Google if their first effort fails, and second, the solution to the first problem is better search skills - the type of skills that librarians use to find information. Neilsen refers to current end-user search behavior as Goggle Gullibility because:

many users are at the search engine's mercy and mainly click the top links. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don't know how to do better.

Rosenfield's finding formula is "browse + search + ask = find". That's why we need to develop search systems based on the knowledge that there "is more than meets the eye when it comes to the process of finding" and not simply on an assumption that finding is simple, intuitive and completely different from searching. Searching is an integral part of finding. Searching involves decision making, and so does finding. Searching does assume more of a plan of attack, while finding suggests a more carefree and random approach. But as Rosenfield points out, "most of the systems we design don't really support finding." I'll take that to mean both web search engines and commercial library databases.

Finding, as Rosenfield puts it, "is arguably at the center of all user experiences." I agree. Everyone wants to find, both end users and librarians. But until systems better integrate browse, search and ask functions it's highly unlikely that finding will be the simple, mindless task we think is an end-user's version of search. Rosenfield thinks the answer to better finding is web design based on analytics. Studying users' behavior and understanding what they are trying to accomplish is a well traveled path to creating better user experiences. The more we know about our users' behavior when they search our systems, the better we can do at anticipating their needs and structuring search systems that facilitate their finding. This is especially true for our complex library websites where enabling finding is a challenge. As I've written previously, I think what we all want is to "create," and both searching and finding are means to that end. I prefer "search first, find, and then create."

Confucius Collection

As part of the Confucius Institute at UMB, the Healey Library has received a new collection of Chinese books. The Confucius Collection will be housed in the Curriculum Resource Center on 5th floor. The books are available for the entire university community and will be primarily used for Chinese language instruction in summer institutes.

The Confucius Institute was founded here in November of 2006 in cooperation with the China's Ministry of Education. It's mission is to "promote understanding of Chinese language and culture in the communities served by the University." UMass Boston is the 7th Confucius Institute in the country and the first in New England. For more information about the establishment of the Institute, see the UMB press release.

ISI Web of Knowledge’s New Look

The ISI Web of Knowledge database platform, which includes the Web of Science and Medline, has a new look with a totally new simplified interface.

The Web of Science’s three components (the Science Citation Index, Humanities Citation Index and Social Science Index) have merged together to form one consolidated scholarly multidisciplinary database. They no longer are individual databases that can be searched separately. You can do all the searches offered in the old interface including author, subject and the renowned cited reference searches. In addition, you can search Medline, the most comprehensive medical database, as an individual database or broaden your search to retrieve articles from other disciplines by searching it together with the ISI Web of Science.

The many enhancements on the search results page lead you to the most relevant results.  You can view results grouped together by subject areas, document types, authors, source titles, institutions, languages, and countries. Thus you get breadth of coverage, but can easily focus on the most pertinent results.

Hiding under the Additional Resources tab are some special resources:  Thomson Scientific WebPlus, ISI Highly Cited, Biology Browser, and Index to Organism Names.

The ISI Web of Knowledge offers many sophisticated research tools. You can analyze your results, create citation reports, set up email alerts, RSS feeds, and save searches. You can also access EndNote Web from the ISI Web of Knowledge.

So explore the new ISI Web of Knowledge and take advantage of all it has to offer.

Inspiring Words

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of TED: Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED hosts an annual conference in which artists, authors, entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates, politicians, scientists, and more come together to share their ideas. World famous and not so famous speakers are invited to give a short talk during the four days of the conference. There are almost 200 talks are available for free on the TED website. The speakers include, Bono, Jane Goodall, James Watson and many more. Don't miss the talk entitled, "Greening the Ghetto" by environmental activist, Majora Carter.