Paper Due Tomorrow? Here’s Where to Start

You’re a Hopkins student, which means you’re smart, savvy, and over worked … especially this time of year. There are exams to study for, projects due, and papers to write. It’s easy to fall behind. Occasionally, all of your good intentions and planning fly out the window and you find yourself starting a paper 24 hours before it’s due.

Are you in this situation? Have a paper due tomorrow and don’t know where to start looking for research? If you’re answer is yes, here are a few tips:

Continue reading Paper Due Tomorrow? Here’s Where to Start…

Johns Hopkins Awards Student Book Collectors

Open to all undergraduate or graduate students enrolled in a degree program at Johns Hopkins, the 2008 Betty and Edgar Sweren Student Book Collecting Contest attracted 26 entries from six academic divisions. Participants wrote essays describing how and why the collection was assembled and submitted a bibliography of up to 50 titles and a wish list of up to 10 titles to reflect their future goals and areas of interest in developing. Cash prizes of $1,000 and $500 were awarded to first- and second-place winners, and $250 to honorable mention. Selections from the winners’ collections are on display on the main level of the university’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library beginning April 18. More details about the winners are available after the break.

Continue reading Johns Hopkins Awards Student Book Collectors…

Library of Congress Research Orientations

Sticking around the Baltimore area this sumer? Doing research in the Humanities or Social Sciences? The Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Library of Congress is offering an orientation to researching their collections.

Dates and Times:
Morning orientations will occur from 10:30 am-12:00 pm on May 5 and 19; June 2, 9, 23, and 30; and July 7, 14, 21, and 28. Evening Sessions will take place from 6:30-8:00 pm on May 5, June 2, and July 7.

Location:
Jefferson Building, Room G-07. The Second Street entrance is open to those holding a Reader Identification Card; all others may enter using the First Street entrance. Reader ID cards can be obtained in the Madison Building, Room 140. (Attendees for evening sessions must use the Second Street entrance.)

Registration:
Due to limited space, registration is required. Register by phone (202) 707-3370 or online. Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or by email ADA@loc.gov. For more information call Kathy Woodrell (202) 707-0945 or Abby Yochelson (202) 707-2138.

Save a Tree, Opt for Double-Sided Printing

Do your bit to help mother nature. Next time you print in MSEL, use both sides of the paper.

1. When you’re ready to print, select the Print Preview button on the browser toolbar.

2. From the preview window, select the Print button in the upper left hand corner. Copy Print on AIR will be selected. Press the Preferences, or Properties, button.

3. Choose the Finishing tab at the top of the Printing Preferences window. Print Style menu - change to 2-sided Printing. Press OK to close the Preferences dialog box and then Print.

4. You will be prompted to name your print job as usual. Please remember to close the browser when finished, so the normal settings will be restored.

Image Is Everything: ARTstor Can Help Illustrate Your Point

Need a specific image for your term paper? Want to explore a topic in a visual way? Try ARTstor, a research database containing over 500,000 images of art and cultural objects.

The collection, which the Libraries subscribe to, documents artistic traditions across all times and cultures and embraces architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual and material culture. Educators, scholars, and students use ARTstor in a wide variety of disciplines — not only art, but in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, literature, religion, sociology, Classical antiquity, music, and Medieval and Renaissance studies. ARTstor comprises several collections, including: Hartill Archive of Architecture & Allied Arts, the MoMA Design Collection, Native American Art & Culture, and the Schlesinger History of Women. In addition, there is a general Image Gallery that includes a wide assortment of illustrations across many disciplines.

Images from ARTstor may not be used for any commercial purpose, but may be used liberally to support your studies — for papers, presentations, or just as a means to research a topic. ARTstor is accessible from any networked Hopkins computer or may be used from off-campus via EZ Proxy or JHSecure (VPN); it is listed among the libraries’ research databases, or you may go directly to http://artstor.org (while on-campus).

Google (Scholar) Guide

Do you Google? If so, you might know that characters like quotation marks, asterisks, and other operators can customize, even refine, your search. Google Guide offers a wealth of such tips and tricks for searching Google, including a cheat sheet.

Although this guide is explicitly written for regular Google, and interestingly enough, not by Google, a quick application of the tips listed in the Crafting Your Query Using Special Characters section shows that the functions also work in Google Scholar, which searches over a broad range of scholarly literature.

One feature that was news to me was using the tilde (~) to prompt Google, and Google Scholar, to look for search term synonyms. Click here for more information about using the tilde operator.

If you’re off-campus, you can customize Google Scholar to link to library resources via the Find It tool (on campus Google Scholar will already do this by recognizing the Hopkins IP address). Just remember to use the VPN software in order to access those resources.

Questions about using Google Scholar in conjunction with the library’s resources, or need help searching? Be sure contact your local librarian.

HUT Closed for Spring Fair

The HUT will close at noon on Friday, April 25 and reopen at 8:30 am on Monday, April 28. Gilman Hall is locked for the weekend of Spring Fair, which means the HUT has to close as well. Enjoy the fair!

Library Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer

The JHU LibX Library Toolbar is now available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer!

New to the toolbar? Download it in order to:

• Search the JHU Libraries Catalog, Google Scholar, and our e-journal service FindIt right from Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Highlight text on a webpage and drag-and-drop it to search quickly.
• Use a right-click menu for easy access to searching and our off-campus proxy service.
• Get embedded links on sites you frequently use like Amazon into the JHU libraries catalog.

See screenshots, learn more, or download the toolbar. To watch it in action, check out Virginia Tech’s screencasts on using the toolbar or the right-click menu.

JSTOR statistics (and my iPod)

You may have read our prior updates on JSTOR, a journal archive database that includes fulltext PDFs of journals (minus the most recent 2-5 years). I recently investigated our 2007 JSTOR usage statistics and found some interesting tidbits on just how much you people work.

How much is JSTOR used here at Johns Hopkins? Currently Hopkins has access to approximately 758 archived journal titles in JSTOR, 99% of which were used at least once in 2007. In 2007 you downloaded a whopping 368,360 full text articles. This makes JSTOR the third most used electronic resource of those resources that provide us with standardized usage statistics. So what does this have to do with my iPod? As I listen to my iPod and think about how often I use it, this usage connection struck me. Currently, I have just under 2,000 songs on it and close to 96% of the songs have been listened to at least once. Considering I spend probably 70% of my time in meetings, which really cuts down on how often I’m able to listen, that’s pretty high use.

The archive also contains several highly used journals: The archives of Science had over 9,000 downloads in 2007. It is hard to believe that AAAS, the publisher of Science, had considered ending its relationship with JSTOR in 2007. Articles from the archive of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the USA were downloaded over 8,000 times in 2007.

Other highly used JSTOR journals in 2007 included: Continue reading JSTOR statistics (and my iPod)…

Web of Science is problematic

Good Monday Morning!

Web of Science, which includes Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Essential Science Indicators, and Journal Citation Reports, is acting a bit oddly right now (9:45 am). Our Serials Department is working with the company to rectify the situation.

Thank you for your patience.