Be inspired, be creative. Celebrate National Poetry Month!

Just in time for National Poetry Month – find open access poetry journals all in one place in a new, custom e-collection at the University Libraries!

Fountain Pen, by Antonio Litterio is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 US / lightened from original

From Abalone Moon to Valparaiso Poetry Review, you can now enjoy over sixty (60) open access poetry journals anyplace, anytime.  Open access (OA) means that no paid subscription is required and typically no login restriction is imposed.  While there may be no subscription cost, please be assured that these journals are part of EBSCO’s database of thousands of OA journals not only because of their commitment to the OA sharing model of publication but also because they operate under the same rigors of research and scholarship as other academic journals.

While these journals were previously available in our EBSCOhost database of OA journals, they were not easy to locate by subject until our cataloging department worked with our e-journal management vendor (EBSCO) to make this easy, custom collection of poetry titles possible.  Alternatively, you can also find OA poetry journals by doing this search in our catalog.

Take some time out from studying today to enjoy browsing these journals!  You may even find an opportunity to submit a work of your own.

For more on poetry, please visit our English Literature LibGuide.

 

New Look for LexisNexis Academic

The LexisNexis Academic research database has a new look for the new year.  LexisNexis is one of our best databases for finding current news from a variety of sources, information about legal cases and decisions, and basic business directory information.  They’ve simplified their interface with a single search box to search all of their content.  Use the ‘Search by Content Type’ to search in the major areas (News, Legal, Companies) and use the ‘Advanced Options’ below the search box to see further refinements based on the section that you are searching in.  Additional help is available from the pop-out menu on the left side of the screen.

LexisNexis Home ScreenAs always, results in LexisNexis Academic are full text of articles or transcripts, and can be exported to your e-mail.  For additional assistance in searching LexisNexis Academic or any of our research databases, contact our reference librarians.

Blackboard Classes now Link to LibGuides for Library Resources

Do you have a class in Blackboard? Would you like to have access to high quality academic resources for online research?  This quick video shows you how to find a link to academic resources from the Blackboard class menu. LibGuides (library guides) will take you to electronic resources in multiple formats including articles, e-Books, newspapers, videos, and more. LibGuides are accessible 24/7 from a Smartphone, tablet, or computer.

(Click here to view full width video in a separate window.)

Updated Find It! Button Connects You to Full Text Faster

We’ve been making some changes behind the scenes to our Find It button, which you may have seen in many of our article databases.  If you see new Find It at UT button in your search results, you can click on it to see if we have full text access to articles or to link to our library catalog and interlibrary loan request forms.

Some of the improvements we’ve made are:

  • The Find It! button will take you directly to our ‘best bet’ for full text from any of our resources.  (see Figure 1)
  • If for some reason our ‘best bet’ doesn’t bring up full text (or if you’re asked to pay), just click on the link in the upper right to go to a full list of all possible sources for full text. (see Figures 1 & 2)
  • Additional options from the full list include searching for the title in our library catalog, submitting an ILLiad interlibrary loan request, exporting the citation to EndNote, or searching for the title words in Google Scholar.  (See Figure 2)

We plan to include the updated Find It! button in all of our databases before the Fall semester begins, but you may see some of the old style links in some databases until we work with each database vendor to make the change.

Screenshot of Full Text Found

Figure 1: Best Bet for Full Text found

Screenshot of Full Listing of Options

Figure 2: Full Listing of Options

 

Library Professors Author New Book for Grief Bibliotherapy

Book CoverDeath – the final mystery of life. During our lifetime, each one of us will experience the loss of a loved one. Developing coping skills that enable us to accept the grief process and survive bereavement is most important during our formative years. Each one of us needs to develop a personal mechanism for coping with the death of a family member, a friend or neighbor, and even a beloved pet.

Identifying literature that educators and caregivers can use to assist children and young adults in developing coping skills to understand and accept the death of a loved one was the motivating factor for the book, Death, Loss, and Grief in Literature for Youth: A Selective Annotated Bibliography for K-12. The 613 resources represent books, media, and Internet sites that students in kindergarten through high school can use to help them cope with their loss.

Alice Crosetto, Associate Professor, University Libraries, and Rajinder Garcha, Professor Emeritus, University Libraries, hope that this resource will help children and young adults, as well as their caregivers and teachers, with this final mystery.

New Collection: Muslim Journeys

Muslim Journeys LogoThe University Libraries has recently received the Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys, a grant of twenty-five books and three films on aspects of Islamic culture and religion for our collections.  During 2013, we will be presenting a variety of programs to feature these materials and the themes they represent.  Our first program will be a book discussion of Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam co-sponsored with the UT-Muslim Students Association on March 19th at 6 p.m. in Student Union Room 2582.  Other programs will include a lecture on Islamic Art by Carolyn Putney at the Toledo Museum of Art in September, and a film screening as part of the Toledo Lucas-County Public Library’s Film Focus series.  A full calendar of events (including those at Owens College & Lourdes University, who also received the grant) is available on our Muslim Journeys LibGuide.  Additional information about the collection, including introductory essays, discussion points, and related materials, is available on the LibGuide or at the Bridging Cultures Bookshelf site.

The Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys is a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, conducted in cooperation with the American Library Association, the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, Oxford University Press, and Twin Cities Public Television. Support was provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Additional support for the arts and media components was provided by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

Catalog & Database Lists Improved!

We’re rolling out improvements to the look and functionality of two important library resources today!

Click to see a larger screenshot with explanations.

The library catalog will get a new look… now your search will bring up the most relevant materials to the top of your search, and you’ll be able to further refine your search by location, format, date, etc. using the menus at the left.  Also new is one step searching for articles, right from the catalog search results.  This brings almost all of our materials– books, articles, DVDs, and much more–into a single easy search.  Check it out today!  The old version of the library catalog is still available for searching, too.

The other major improvement is to our list of research databases and other electronic resources.  Our new page features an alphabetical menu across the top and an expanded menu of subject categories.  All databases are listed, including those that we get through OhioLINK and those that we purchase just for University of Toledo users.  Signing in from off campus is easy–just use your name and Rocket ID number, including the ‘R’ at the beginning.

If you have any comments on these changes, please let us know either here in the blog or at AskIt@utnet.utoledo.edu.

UT Students’ Projects Now in Digital Resource Commons

UT Libraries recently contributed copies of over 400 graduate students’ projects to OhioLINK’s Digital Resource Commons (DRC). Users are able to browse and search the collection a variety of different ways and view the full text of all documents free of charge.

The Digital Resource Commons was created to provide a statewide platform for Ohio’s public universities and private colleges to save and share the instructional, research, historic, and creative materials they produce.

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Currently all of the UT projects in the DRC were written by graduate students on the Health Science Campus and its predecessors, the Medical University of Ohio and Medical College of Ohio.  Included are:

  • Scholarly projects by master’s students in biomedical sciences, nursing, occupational health, and physician assistant studies;
  • Scholarly and capstone projects by master’s and doctoral students in occupational therapy;
  • Scholarly projects by master’s and doctoral students in physical therapy; and
  • Evidence-based practice projects by doctoral students in nursing.

So far they are the only programs which have submitted students’ projects in digital format to UT Libraries for cataloging.  Digital copies of projects from other graduate programs are more than welcome.  Please contact Sheryl Stevens in the UT Libraries Cataloging Department for more information.

Records for all these projects are still in the Libraries’ online catalog.  All links have been updated to connect to the new DRC locations.

 

University Authors’ books in the Library

Steinbeck in Vietnam book coverThe University Libraries try to buy copies of books authored by our university community for our collections.  Just recently, for example, we added Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War, by Dr. Thomas Barden, Dean of the Honors College.  Sometimes we find out about these authors through local publications like the UTNews or the Toledo Blade, but we don’t catch every one.  If you know of a publication authored by a member of the UT community that we don’t already have, please let us know!

All of the publications by UT authors are marked in our catalog with the alternate title: University of Toledo Authors Collection.   You can view these by year and primary author as well.

 

Hooray for Bollywood!

New films added to our collections from the Bollywood genre: