Electronic Library Resources and Turkey

Okay, today's post is only loosely related to natural sciences, but it does highlight some great electronic library resources, especially two that might come in handy for Thanksgiving tomorrow.

WMU Libraries have several items with "cookery (turkey)" as a subject, but two of these resources may be of special interest on the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow. The first, titled Let's Talk Turkey: A Consumer Guide to Safely Roasting a Turkey, a pamphlet put out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is part of our Government Documents collection in the library. By clicking on the web link included in Talk Turkey's catalog record (see record detail above), you can access the PDF version of the pamphlet. This resource is an example of how U.S. Government Documents are increasingly available online.

The second item is Wild Turkeys: Hunting and Watching. Haven't gotten your Thanksgiving turkey yet? Why not skip the grocery store and instead let this resource show you how to get your turkey the old fashioned way. Wild Turkeys is an e-book -- an electronic version of the book that is viewed online.

To check out and read the book, you click on a web link in this item's library catalog record (see record detail at above), which takes you directly to the e-book viewer. This viewer has many features, such as a hot-linked table of contents (TOC) that allows you to click directly to book sections listed in the TOC, and a feature that lets you search for, and go directly to, keywords in the book text.

The WMU Libraries have many e-books on various topics available through the library web site. For an overview, see the Electronic Books Guide on the Libraries' web site. I'll talk more about effectively using electronic library books in future posts.

Meanwhile, have a Happy Thanksgiving!

*** View my parallel blog at on the WMU Libraries site ***

New SciFinder Scholar Features

SciFinder now has three interesting new collaboration features: Tags, My Connections, and Comments. All three are Web 2.0 features of sorts, allowing SciFinder Scholar users to interact within, and add content to, the site.

The Tags feature enables you to add specific references in SciFinder Scholar to a "tagged" list that is saved by the database and can be viewed, even after you close the research session during which you tagged the reference. This is a lot like SciFinder Scholar's Saved Answer Set feature -- but with a twist. The Tags feature allows you to invite others at your home institution to share tags. In other words, any faculty, staff, or student at Western Michigan University could invite any other WMU faculty, staff, or student to share Tags. Once you share Tags with someone, the two of you can access each other's list of Tagged references.

You can invite others to share by using the second new feature, My Connections. This feature allow you to send invitations to share your Tagged list, to respond to others that have invited you to share, and to view the list of people with which you are already sharing.

The last feature, Comments, allows you to attach comments to specific reference in SciFinder Scholar. While you can view a list of all of the reference you have tagged, oddly, you can only view references with comments if that reference is also tagged.

I've played around a bit with these new features, and they look like they have a lot of potential for researchers working in groups, professors or TAs using reference as instruction materials, or anyone that simply wants a easy way to share a reference.

But, there two thing to keep in mind. First, as of this post, SciFinder does not allow you to make a Tag "group" in which only certain people on your My Connections list can see only certain Tagged references. This means that once you are set up to share tags and comments with people, you can see *all* of each other's tags and comments. Second, you can only share with people at your home institution, i.e., people that are associated with the same SciFinder Scholar subscription. Perhaps SciFinder will expand this feature so anyone using the database could share tags and comments, but for now, this is not the case.

For more information about these and other new features, contact me or see SciFinder's How to Use New Features publication.


*** Have you seen my parallel blog on the University Libraries site? ***