The Rensselaer Libraries are pleased to announce a number of exciting new services and utilities.
As more and more information becomes available on-line, librarians are no longer restricted to providing reference and consulting services at a physical desk in the library. In fact, for many resources, they are not restricted to being in the library building. The staff now answers many e-mail reference and technical messages from home, especially during evenings, weekends, and holidays.
Taking advantage of the mobility that electronic resources and laptop computers afford us, librarians will begin to spend scheduled time in academic departments during the fall semester. For several hours each week, librarians will be available in classrooms, lounges, or office space, depending on the school and department facilities, and they will advise you of new library materials and resources, and be available to answer your questions, assist with library research, consult with you on your library assignments.
Please check with your departmental administrators to learn where and when a librarian will be coming to a lounge or classroom near you. For more information, please contact a reference librarian by sending e-mail to lib-refbi@rpi.edu.
Beginning this fall, Rensselaer's Research Libraries will begin offering a new personalized service to our patrons. Known as My RensSearch, this service will provide participating Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students with a customizable webpage that they can tailor to their specific research interests.
What's more, My RensSearch will allow Rensselaer's patrons to choose their favorite resources from lists of databases, websites, and other research tools and then have these items quickly available every time they log in. My RensSearch will also give the ability to search popular ready reference sources such as the library catalog, the campus directory, class reserves, encyclopedias and more all from the same page. Students and faculty will also have access to library subject specialists, who will be able to guide them to new resources in their disciplines through customized news items. Whether logging in from campus, home, or on the road, My RensSearch users will be able to get access to their own custom research library.
Patrons will also be able to alter the look and feel of My RensSearch to fit their own preferences, by selecting their own color scheme, or by choosing a different template or "skin". Look for a link to My RensSearch on the RensSearch main page, located at the URL http://www.lib.rpi.edu/ this Fall.
Version 5.0 of ProQuest, one of the Libraries' most popular database suites, is now available. Featuring the databases ABI/INFORM with business and management journal articles, and PA Research II with general and scholarly articles representing a number of subject areas, as well as ProQuest Newspapers providing access to major U.S. newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, ProQuest provides users with the option of searching one or any combination of these databases at the same time. All of these databases contain full text articles with the majority of the materials as page image Adobe documents.
The new ProQuest interface is designed to be more convenient and easy-to-use, and a number of enhancements make it even easier for users to access. Its most notable enhancements include:
To access any of the ProQuest databases:
For a user guide to all of the ProQuest databases, please refer to http://www.lib.rpi.edu/instruction/guides/proquest.pdf.
The Libraries are continually adding to our electronic collections to make more and more information available to our users on the desktop or the laptop, and as a result their on-line resources now include dozens of indexing/abstracting databases of bibliographic citations, thousands of electronic books and journals, and a growing number of reference sources. Users on campus can access these resources directly from any office, classroom, lab, or dorm.
Off-campus users, however, must follow special procedures to set up their web browsers in order to access these resources. The Libraries have set up a proxy server that authenticates "remote" users and allows access. You must use the proxy server to access all electronic books and journals, bibliographic databases and reference titles.
To read more about the proxy server and how to set up your browser to use it, click on the Proxy Service link under Services on the RensSearch web page, or go directly to the following URL:
http://www.lib.rpi.edu/services/proxy.html
Please note: To use the proxy service, you must use Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer is not compatible with the current server. Our instructions provide information on how to download and set up Navigator, if it is not your current browser. Also note that you must use a 4.7x version of Navigator. Versions 6.0 and higher are not compatible.
For more information on the proxy server, or for help in setting up your own service, contact the Libraries Reference Desk by phoning ext. 8320, or contact a member of the Reference staff by directing e-mail to lib-ref@rpi.edu.
If you've never heard of netLibrary, you should check it out! netLibrary, the largest on-line library of eBooks, provides electronic versions of printed books that have the same information, are enriched with photos and illustrations, and which can be viewed on-line from any computer connected to the Internet. What's more, with netLibrary's technology, you cannot only search titles, authors, and keywords, but the entire text of any eBook, so that you can instantly pinpoint the exact information you need! You can view eBooks free for 15 minutes for quick reference, or you may choose to borrow and read them at your leisure. (Note that netLibrary requires you to register (free of charge) in order to "borrow" books.)
netLibrary allows you to search by author, title, keyword, publisher, or any word(s) in the full text of the book. However, just as with print books, the Libraries have access to no more than one or two "copies" of a title. This means that if you're using netLibrary's search function and receive a message that a book is currently unavailable, your library's copy of the book is being accessed by another user.
The "Browse this eBook online" function allows you to view the full text of an eBook without logging in and checking out the book. You can browse an eBook for only short periods of time (approx. 15 minutes); after you have been inactive for that period of time, the eBook may be borrowed by another library patron. (Note that this function is only available when viewing an eBook on-line.
After registering to use netLibrary, you may check out a title and read it online. The screen will display the book pages to the right and a table of contents for navigation on the left.
Advantages of using the eBook reader include the ability to bookmark, highlight and annotate selected text; a zoom function; and the ability to print selected (up to 5000 characters) text.
However, please note that the eBook Reader software is not currently compatible with some firewall/proxy configurations, nor will it work with WebTV, Macintosh, or any version of UNIX, including Linux. Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 or greater, Pentium 100, 32 MB of RAM, and 20MB of free disk space are required.
The netLibrary collection also includes a large number of "public" books, with fewer restrictions on use. These 3,500+ eBooks include classic works of fiction, speeches, government reports, and other electronic texts.
A list of subject categories and associated eBook titles are available at http://nylink.suny.edu/coop/netlist.htm.
The Rensselaer Libraries are pleased to announce that they have recently added a number of new journals, archives, and other information resources.
JSTOR, an extensive digital archive collection of scholarly journals in the areas of the humanities, social sciences and general sciences, contains the entire runs of over 150 journals, from the first volume up to volumes published only a few years ago. New issues of existing titles are made available three to five years after publication, and new titles are added on an ongoing basis.
JSTOR uses the best of current information technology to preserve and present the scholarly content of its collections. Journal issues are scanned using OCR in order to create text files that facilitate full-text searching, and are then made available to users in PDF format to preserve the original content "look and feel."
Access to these titles will be available in the on-line catalog, and from links under Full-text Databases and Science and Humanities & Social Sciences Databases in RensSearch.
The Rensselaer Libraries now provide access to all of the more than 130 Oxford University Press on-line journals that are currently available. These journals cover the spectrum of academic fields, with special strengths in biology, biochemistry, genetics and ecology, economics and business, health sciences and medicine, history and area studies, communications and language studies, and mathematics and statistics. Full-text articles are primarily available in Adobe PDF format. Coverage varies from title to title.
Oxford University Press also provides a free e-mail Content Alerting Service, whereby users may receive, via e-mail, the latest table of contents for journals of interest.
Access to these titles will be available in the on-line catalog, and from links under Full-text Databases and Science Databases in RensSearch.
It's now possible to access the complete editorial contents of the issues of Scientific American magazine published since January 1993 on-line, with articles and features includng all text and graphics in high-quality color PDF files. Contents of the on-line files include Scientific American magazine (1993 - present), and Scientific American Presents and Special Issues, 1997 - 2000.
The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences is a fully searchable site of articles by scientists and scientific historians in the fields of biochemistry and physiology, cell biology, developmental biology, ecology, evolution, genetics, immunology, molecular biology, neuroscience, microbiology and virology, plant science, structural biology, and science and society. It contains 3,000 specially commissioned, peer-reviewed and continually updated articles, with selected news provided by Nature each day.
You can access the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences through the on-line catalog and links on the Science Databases web page.
The Libraries have just purchased access to an additional ten years' worth of backfiles to the Web of Science database, and users can now search for articles and citation references dating back to 1974.
Web of Science is a collection of 3 citation databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index . Citation databases allow users to see where, when, and how often a particular author or article has been cited. They treat the references of an article as index terms, allowing them to be searched as data elements. Citation searches retrieve items not found using traditional author, title, and subject searches. Citation databases are especially useful for graduate students and faculty who need to do extensive literature searches, but they can also be useful for anyone doing a comprehensive search on a particular subject.
Coverage is 1974 to present, with weekly updates, for over 8,000 core research journals and selective coverage for thousands of additional titles.
Go to the table of contents.
Go to the Kiosk homepage.