Collection News - March 2008
Index Arkansas Adds Newspaper Coverage
Researchers seeking newspaper articles about historic Arkansas events and people now have an easier task. Arkansas newspaper indexing has recently been added to Index Arkansas, an online database for publications dealing with Arkansas topics.
Sponsored by the Special Collections department of the University of Arkansas Libraries, the index now contains nearly 30,000 citations from Arkansas statewide and regional newspapers, joining more than 60,000 citations from other historical and biographical sources.
Index Arkansas is an important resource for students and scholars, containing a total of 90,913 citations from Arkansas newspapers, periodicals and books.
The newly available newspaper citations began as records kept in an old-fashioned card file of 40 drawers. The records were carefully computerized and are now easily searchable by author, title, keyword, and subject. Coverage is mostly from the early 1930s through 1985, with scattered entries from the 1830s through the 1920s.
In development for many years, Index Arkansas was initiated by the late Georgia Clark and expanded by Elizabeth McKee and Andrea Cantrell of the University of Arkansas Libraries. Joan Watkins, is the current manager and senior editor of Index Arkansas.
Search the Catalog from Facebook
Now, you never have to leave Facebook... not even to do library research! Just add our new InfoLinks Library Catalog application to your Facebook profile and you can then search for books, videos, music, and more in the library catalog, for articles in JSTOR, or for whole print or online journals when you have a citation in hand. It may not be as engrossing as Scrabulous or the latest movie quiz but having this in your profile guaranteed to raise your nerd quotient to astronomical levels!
Just can't get enough of InfoLinks? You might also need our search plugins for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Toolbar.
New Ebsco Features
Many new enhancements are now available on the Ebsco database interface which hosts popular resources such as Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, PsycINFO, MLA International Bibliography, the CINAHL nursing index, and more.
Image Quick View
This new feature offers quick previews of images, tables, charts, and graphs inside of article PDFs. To date, more than 800,000 of these image quick views have been added for scientific and technical journals from publishers such as Blackwell, Wiley, and Elsevier.
Redesigned Visual Search
The Visual Search option, which formerly used Grokker-style balloons and colors, now offers two options for navigating search results. The block format (pictured) offers a compass zoom controls and a mini-map of the entire Result List. The column format uses expandable columns and a clear breadcrumb trail. Both styles allow users to stack by publication or subject, narrow results by subject, sort them by relevance or date, and dynamically filter results using a date range slider bar.
Autocomplete
This feature automatically offers keyword suggestions, as you begin to enter a search term in the Find field. Suggestions are based on popular and commonly misspelled search terms. Users will be able to turn the Autocomplete Keyword feature on or off during EBSCOhost sessions from the Preferences section.
Encyclopedia of Life Debuts
The Encyclopedia of Life, a global cooperative effort to fully catalog and describe more than 1.8 million species, launched its first release this month. Though EOL leaders do not expect the site to be complete for another ten years, you can already view detailed species descriptions for beings as disparate as the the yellow fever mosquito, the green anole lizard, and the death cap mushroom.
The EOL project
is a collaboration of several of the
world’s leading natural history institutions
and research facilities, including
the Smithsonian Institution, the Field
Museum, Harvard University, the
Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri
Botanical Garden, and the Biodiversity
Heritage Library consortium.
Looking for a critter not yet in the EOL? The Libraries have recently purchased online access to the exhaustive Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, a scholarly encyclopedia of multicellular fauna, from protostomes to primates.
