Healey Keynotes

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. 

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."

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.

NEW - PubMed with links to UMass Boston holdings

Nursing, medical and allied health researchers take a look at the customized PubMed with links to UMass Boston holdings.

The tabbed search results page makes it easy to locate the full text articles available through Healey Library as well as the free full text articles available in PubMed.

To retrieve an article, switch the display from Summary to Abstract or Abstract Plus. You will see the UMB Online icon. Click on the icon to view the full text article.

To use PubMed with links to UMass Boston holdings from off campus, you will be prompted for your last name and barcode number as you are for the library’s other subscription databases.

Hidden Web: Beyond Google

There is much more information on the web than what can be found through Google. This is often referred to as the Hidden, Invisible or Deep Web. For instance, the Healey Library subscribes to over 80 databases and indexes which are not freely accessible through Google. A recent article from CIO, Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You, reccomends several methods to move beyond Google. 
 

Million Book Digital Library surpasses its goal!

Carnegie Mellon University announced that the Million Book Project has over 1.5 million books. The digital library includes books from at least 20 different languages. In fact, there are more books in Chinese than in English.  It also contains rare books and books dating back to 1000 AD. See the project's progress report for more details.

Press release excerpt:

PITTSBURGH— The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “The Analects of Confucius,” are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

For more on digital books and libraries, check out the New Yorker article, Future Reading.

Would you curl up with a Kindle?

As the days grow shorter and the weather colder, I like nothing more than to retreat indoors, drink hot chocolate and curl up with a good book. Now there a device which may change the way we read. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, developed a new electronic book. The Kindle has been in the works for three years and was recently released to the public. It costs $399 and is being touted as the ipod for books. Amazon has over 90,000 downloadable titles for $9.99, as well as newspaper subscriptions. There is plenty of hype about the Kindle, including a cover story in Newsweek. However, will it live up to the expectations? And more importantly, can you curl up with it? 

More books online

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), of which the UMass Boston is a member, will partner with Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a digital library of its members’ materials. According the BLC press release, “The Consortium will offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials. Using Internet Archive technology, books from all 19 libraries will be scanned at a cost of just 10 cents per page.” OCA was created to provide public access to a digital collection of the world’s knowledge and the BLC is their first large-scale consortium partner.

In related news, the New York Times reports on the freedom of access to digital collections. See "Libraries shun deals to place books on web".

Fun with Dewey

Searching is sexy and fun with Ms. Dewey. MsDewey.com is a search site created by Microsoft to introduce Windows Live Search, which is an obvious imitation of Google. Ask Ms. Dewey any question and she will respond with humor and sarcasm. The search results are beside the point. If you take too long to type a question she will knock on the screen and point to the keyboard. This site is not recommended for real web searching but it is fun to see how Ms. Dewey will respond to your questions.