Ten Things You Need to Know about Google Books

10. Google books can be found by going to Google and selecting books from the "more" pull-down menu or by typing books.google.com

9. The people at Google are scanning an amazing number of books from academic libraries throughout the country and making them available completely searchable.

8. Some books have a limited "preview" available for viewing.

7. The Limited preview isn't very limited, and is often a fairly large portion of the book. Sometimes, you might get lucky and the entire chapter you need to read will be there.

6. Printing is disabled for the limited preview.

5. Books out of copyright are available to download and print. To find books that are downloadable, choose "Full view only" from the "Showing" option at the top of the page.

4. They now include magazines, such as Popular Mechanics

3. To find out if we own the book in the Library, click on the "Find this book in a library"

2. The advanced Search allows you to specify author, language, publisher, title, issn, isbn, subject and publication date.

1. Google books might be the very best place to look if you are searching for very specific and yet fairly authoritative information.

National Game @ Your Library Day

Okay, I have no idea who invented this (or why) but in honor of National Game @ Your Library Day, I have decided to put the fun in library (that doesn't really make sense, does it?)

Anyway. Who knew that we have a ton of video games in the library? We have some in the Multimedia library and some in the music library (Did you know we have a professor here who writes music for video games?).

I hereby pledge that when I finish playing Morrowind, I will donate it to the library. Of course it could take many months. ;)

Also, in honor of this day, I would like to share with you this very fun (remember that I am a librarian) game about the Library of Congress classification system. I scored 4400. If you can prove to me that you beat me, maybe I will give you a prize. :)

They say it's the same, but it's not the same

By now, you will have noticed that while you were away enjoying your summer vacations, basking in the sun on the beaches of Oahu, the Web elves took away your old comfortable UCR Library Home Page and replaced it with something...else.

Don't Panic. It will be okay.

For the most part, all of the changes were to the very top page. The menus on the left were changed slightly, mostly so that they would collapse and uncollapse based on the beta brainwaves (and mouse clicks) of the user. Honestly, wasn't it looking a little crowded over there.

The main part of the page has a lot more words on it. We are going to track how many times each of those words catches the attention of unsuspecting users and if they do not...well it might mean they get the axe. It's a dog eat dog world in the Web real estate game.

Honestly. I want to know what you think. You can let me know here, or you could do something actually useful and fill out our teeny, weeny survey.

I missed you all and I am glad you are back.

Springer eBooks

We have been working with Springer (a notable publisher in Science, Engineering and Medicine) to selectively acquire some of their books in electronic format.

In order to evaluate their products and our interest in them we will be able access their entire collections until December 31st. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

We like Springer because they are not charging a premium for electronic access, and they are fully downloadable (PDF). I hear they even work on the Kindle.

YAML (Yet another Mailing List)

Hello. How are you all doing today. I hope you are well.

I have a great idea. What if you don't use RSS and you don't want to miss out on my informative and mightily amusing missives.

Thusly, I have decided to start a mailing list for engineering graduate students (I know, I know, all of you undergrads are saying, "but what about us?" Wait your turn.)

In a brilliant flash of irony, I have decided to announce it here, which, unless you have bookmarked my blog or are an active RSS user, will do you no good.

I have to come up with a better plan.

If no news is good news, than what is this...

Bad news. We have no money. In a cosmic way. Zip, zero, zilch. I have not been able to purchase, more or less, a single book since January. Please tell me if there is anything important we are missing. I can't even stand to look at all of the lovely, informative, fascinating and unattainable expensive books I am not able to buy. If you have written something, edited something or read something wonderful from 2008 that we really should have...let me know.

I will be able to order direct requests until further notice.

Please bear with me. We still have ILL.

EndNoteable

How many of you have ever heard of EndNote? (show of hands).

Those of you who are already using it, happily and trouble free, can move on to the next post.

The rest of you...

I don't work for EndNote, I don't get any money from EndNote, I have no relatives who rely on EndNote's parent company ISI in any way.

However, it is probably one of the most useful pieces of software you could own as a graduate student, outside of Microsoft Office (or Open Office or Abio), and maybe IE/Firefox/Opera, and whatever specialized engineering software you use for your specific field of Engineering.

EndNote exists solely to help researchers like you keep track of all of the papers you have ever read and easily put them into whatever papers you write. It even works with LaTeX, if you push it hard enough. (since when has x been alloud to sound like "k").

To find out more about EndNote, visit the EndNote Shrine on our Library Home page.

If you ever need help with EndNote, I am here for you.

Google Scholarly

I think it is time that we had a little talk. I have heard that some people (I am not naming names) think that Google Scholar can do everything that our library databases can do, only easier and more...free.

While I truly love Google Scholar, and indeed anything free, I think you all should know a few things about Google Scholar.

A few things about Google Scholar

IP trouble

Many of you may know by now of the trouble we have been having with the new Engineering Building IP's. One by one our vendors are adding the new IP ranges to our authentication profiles, but it is not going as quickly as we hoped.

In the meantime, I would like to let you know that if you find a resource that does not recognize you as coming from UCR, you might want to try the campus wireless connection or the campus Client VPN. Plus we always love you see you in the library :)

Please feel free to contact me if you need any help.