Staff News – July 2008

The Library is please to welcome 3 new staff members this month. Stop by the Library and say hello and welcome to:

Helen Williams. Helen is the new Telehealth Assistant. You may already know her. Helen has worked in other departments here at Loyola including the MRI Department and the Wheaton outpatient oncology center. Helen remarked that she is very happy to be here and finds telehealth very interesting.

Diane Bartkowiak. Diane is a recent graduate of DePaul University where she studied English and Psychology. She has been working at DePaul’s Library for three years and intends on pursuing a Master’s in Library Sciences. Diane is the new Technical Services Assistant and helps process the new items that come into the library.

Joanna Bertucci. Joanna has recently joined our staff as a Reference Assistant. Joanna is currently attending Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She is in her second year of library school and is looking forward to gaining experience and knowledge here at the Library.

Welcome Graduate Students!

The Health Sciences Library welcomes all the Graduate Students. The Library is your place for research and study. We have materials of all kinds including electronic, full-text articles and textbooks. We have a quiet place to study, conference rooms, a comfortable lounge, computers for you to use, and wireless access for your laptop.

EbscoHost 2.0 Released

The next generation EBSCOhost 2.0 user interface was released today, July 16. You may experience a very slow response time and also receive the dreaded “page cannot be displayed.” Obviously, EBSCOhost 2.0 wasn’t quite ready to be released! You will find that most of the changes are cosmetic as the search interface remains clunky and not very user-friendly. Graduate Nursing students who use Cinahl will have a bit of a learning curve because of the rearrangement of its features. Three things I like about 2.0 are:

· the results are now displayed in the middle of the main screen just below the search statements.

· you can mouse over the magnifying glass icon to preview the citation and abstract

· the results display is much cleaner and easier to read

Two sidebars on either side of the results list give options to narrow your search. The left sidebar suggests additional terms to narrow your search, or you can select other limiters such as age groups or sex. The right sidebar allows you to limit to Research or Peer Reviewed articles, and this is where you can display the full list of limiters. The “folder has items” link will also be found in this sidebar. The sidebars can also be hidden (or expanded) by clicking on the small arrow in the frame border allowing a full screen display of your results. On the downside, do remember to clear your search box when doing a new search or combining search sets. The previous search terms are not cleared and you could end up with some confusing results.

For a help sheet that outlines the new features click here.

Scholarly Communication: Issues for Health Sciences Libraries in Clinical Settings

The National Library of Medicine recently implemented a new web page designed specifically for issues relating to scholarly communications. Issues that are covered include costs, accessing research, author’s rights, increased impact, and the effect on budgets.

For the health-science patron, the most common type of scholarly communication is the peer-reviewed book or journal. Peer-reviewed journals used to be available only through paid subscription, but technology has adapted to changes with accessing journals. This web page helps define issues and offers suggestions about these changes.

To access this page, click here

By the Numbers, Part 2

One purpose of the HSL is to obtain and deliver scholarly information.  To that end, Interlibrary Loan is a highly used value-added service.  In FY08:

• 3800 requests were submitted on behalf of our users to other libraries of which 3700 were filled, and,
• 6400 requests were received from other libraries of which 4600 were filled by the HSL

Intracampus Loan i.e., requesting or loaning items to the LUC libraries is another aspect of our resource sharing.  Of the 759 requests submitted on behalf of our users to the LUC Libraries, 753 were filled.  We also filled over 1100 requests that came in from the LUC Libraries.

The Interlibrary Loan staff stays busy processing all of these requests but continues to provide excellent service adhering to our 24-hour turnaround policy.  Many of the requested articles are received within 24 hours and are delivered to the requestor’s email.

Copyright and E-Book File Sharing

From Copyright Clearance Center:

“P2P file-sharing, long the scourge of the music and movie industries, increasingly is making waves in the publishing world.  Most notably, textbook file sharing is on the rise.

The RIAA and MPAA have implemented aggressive campaigns to stop illegal file-sharing, but publishers have generally taken a more subdued approach, opting for take-down notices over litigation. And while the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits against content users have generated tremendous attention to the P2P issue, file-sharing is still alive and well.

If more and more students eschew bookstores in favor of downloading free textbooks from P2P sites, publishers will be faced with a familiar conundrum: move even more quickly to adjust business and distribution models? or take up the battle in the courts. Either way, change seems to be in the air.”

By the numbers

One thing Librarians like to do is keep statistics.  Now that the we’re into a new fiscal year, here are some stats from FY08.  In the six months that we have had a site license to RefWorks, there are 146 registered users with over 1600 sessions.  Since we launched the Faculty Publications Database in April, there have been 200 hits to it.  Accessing our electronic resouces from off campus is a heavily used service.  For the past fiscal year, over 5700 users have signed in through Archer resulting in over 2.9 million hits.  Interestingly, Niehoff users, who come in third behind LUHS and SSOM in the number of users accessing remotely, account for the highest number of hits, 33% vs 29% (LUHS) and 21% (SSOM).  Next up will be circulation and ILL stats.

Blackwell Journals Update

The Blackwell journals that the Health Sciences Library subscribes to appear to now be accessible at Wiley InterScience.

Not all of the links are correctly redirecting, yet, however.  If a link to a Blackwell title directs you to the main page of Wiley InterScience, instead of to the title’s page, there are two ways to find a journal.  From the main page of Wiley InterScience, you can either search for the journal by selecting Publication Titles in the Search box and entering the title OR you can browse the journals by going to the link Journals under Browse By Product Type.

The links will hopefully be fixed soon.

Thank you for your patience.