Tips and tricks for searching HeinOnline

An RSS feed pointed me to this post, from the Hunter Law Library at BYU.

The writer gives 4 tips for better search control in HeinOnline databases. Two we know: Boolean operators (always in CAPs) and truncation. A third -- proximity -- is indicated with quotation marks (around the words that are being paired) and a tilde (~) plus number that follows. "molotov poland "~5 translates this way: look for Molotov within five words of poland In Lexis Nexis, the construction of proximity would be expressed this way: aceh w/5 tsunami.

Most interesting, and brand new to me: the ability to "boost" a search term. Add a caret ^ followed by a number: "molotov poland"~5 AND harriman^6. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant.

Seems to help with thorny FRUS searching questions and probably would have helped with the banking act questions we got last spring . . . remember those? Of course, it's not entirely clear to me what an optimal "boost number" would be, but I guess we should just experiment.

For more info, see the Advanced Search Syntax Guide, linked from the HeinOnline Wiki.

New Harvard OCP website

OIS has announced the launch of a new OCP project: Expeditions and Discoveries: Sponsored Exploration and Scientific Discovery in the Modern Age.

The collection showcases maps, published materials, photographs, letters, field notes, and manuscripts related to expeditions undertaken in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which "Harvard University played a significant role -- as underwriter, participant, collector, and repository."

South America, the Pacific islands, and East Asia figure prominently. In addition, there are extensive materials from George Reisner's excavation of Samaria (the capital of the ancient kingdom of Israel), 1908-1910.

The site's main page suggests covers explorations and discoveries 1626-1953, but the earliest materials I was able to find are digitized accounts of Captain Cook's travels. Perhaps the site is intended to grow.

I've also added a link to our delicious account.

LexisNexis Wiki: New features to know about

LexisNexis is now offering a "Tip of the Week," via its wiki. The current tip, useful to a lot of students, no doubt, describes ways to track down RNC convention transcripts on Academic.

Another feature is an "Image of the Week." The current one, on the wiki front page, comes from the Serial Set (via LexisNexis Congressional).

If you're interested, you can have the tips delivered to you via RSS feeds.

Free E-Resource for Locating Translations

UNESCO produces a resource called the Index Translationum, an international bibliography of translations. It's just been added to the E-Resources site.

The database contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about one hundred of the UNESCO Member States since 1979 and totals more than 1.800,000 entries in all disciplines: literature, social and human sciences, natural and exact sciences, art, history and so forth. It is planned to update the work every four months.

The Index has been published since 1932. Widener has volumes not covered in the online version at these call numbers: Widener | WID-LC | PN886 .Z99 I52x , Widener | WID-LC | PN886 .Z99 I53x.

So next time someone wants to know what Dutch, German, or English versions of Tolstoy's War and Peace may be out there, you'll have a place to go!

Three new websites added to our del.icio.us links

• GreenFILE   From EBSCO, this is a freely accessbile database comprised of scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports.  Offers abstracting and indexing of more than 600 titles, including comprehensive coverage of Bioscience (back to 1964), Conservation Biology (back to 1987),  Journal of Ecology (back to 1917) and Journal of Environmental Planning and Management (back to 1948).  

• Cholera Online: A Modern Pandemic in Text and Images  Produced by the NLM this online collection brings together 221 English language monographs from 1817-1900.  The Images area is organized under such themes as "Social Commentary," "Patients and Victims," "Urban Outbreaks and Hygiene."  The site was reviewed in the March 28, 2008 Scout Report.

• Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics  "Created by the OCP here at Harvard, the collection provides background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide and is organized around  significant episodes of contagious disease.  These materials include digitized copies of books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula, and  manuscripts -- a total of more than 500,000 pages -- many of which contain visual materials" including engravings, maps, illustrations, and the like.  Epidemics covered include cholera, smallpox, the 1665 Great Plague of London, syphillis, spanish influenza, tropical diseases, yellow fever, and TB.

These resources are multidisciplinary and even complementary -- great for history of science projects, straight-up history, sociology, ecology, etc.  

Blocked Content in Factiva

This week, we discovered that certain news titles in Factiva are unavailable to us due to the terms of our subscription. From the "source info" page, it's impossible to tell that access is blocked, so you might start searching -- as JC and I did earlier this week -- and come up empty. This handy list will help you identify those titles. Many we have alternate access to; others will need to be retrieved via ILL. The list, of course, is static and our world is dynamic, so its accuracy may weaken over time.

Searching for newspapers by country in LexisNexis

Posted to the LN-Academic listserv in October, after the new interface was launched.  Beware, however, that results seem to vary depending on the search route you take; "barack obama" in newspapers of "africa" from the "previous 2 years" demonstrates this inconsistency. 

A. You can use the Sources tab to impose geographic restrictions.

1. Click on Sources to open the Browse Sources form
2. At the top of the form, make sure that Publication Type is selected
3. Use the Filter By dropdown to pick Europe (or a specific country)
4. Click on the News folders in the bottom portion of the screen
5. You will now see that a new drop down box appears at the top, allowing you to choose "Multiple/Single Sources." If you choose "Multiple" it will give you a nice selection of the big group files for Europe such as "Toute la Presse - Français"
6. Choose the source(s) you want and click OK - Continue to run your search

B. You can search international news sources on the News tab.

1. Click on the News tab
2. Select a broad source such as "All News, English" or "Major World Newspapers"
3. Run your search
4. In the results set, switch the clustering from Publication Type to Geography

C. You can search international news sources via Power Search.

1. From the General search screen (not our system default), click on the Power Search tab.
2. Select one broad news sources from the dropdown box, such as "All News (English)" or "Major World Publications (Non-English)"
3. Use the Add keywords option below the search box to pop up our taxonomy selector tool
4. Use the dropdown box to switch to the geographic taxonomy and browse to the country or region you want
5. Add the index terms to your search
6. Run the search
7. In the results set, switch the clustering to Geography

Foreign Language Quotations

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Ref PN 6080 O95) has many quotations in languages other than English. You don't need to know the author of a quotation; you can just look up keywords in the index. Some examples: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" (Alphonse Karr); "Festina lente" (Emperor Augustus I). Anonymous quotations (e.g., "Arbeit macht frei")are sorted by language under "Anonymous." The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is also available in the e-resource collection Oxford Reference Online.

SFX (Citation Linker) glitch

This week and last, several of us have noticed that Citation Linker searching isn't always turning up a truly complete list of online access options for serials.

Yesterday,  Vida encountered this problem with the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Citation Linker didn't identify the availability of full-text via Factiva, so it looked as though the  online version ended at 1922. 

Days before, a student looking for the LA Times for the late 1980s and 1990s couldn't imagine (in this instance, wisely) that we'd be missing 20 some odd years and wrote me an email .  Citation Linker listed only LexisNexis holdings (6 mos.), ProQuest Historical Newspapers (to 1985) and a HOLLIS link.  Factiva -- absent from this SFX results list -- had the time period the student needed to search. 

I notified OIS of the problem via the Comments line and was told that after a recent update, the SFX software was not parsing Factiva links properly.   The good news is that they're aware of the problem and addressing it; I don't know how soon the fix will happen, however.  As of this writing, the Citation Linker list for the LA Times  is still incorrect.

Until the problem is resolved -- or  just whenever you have the feeling that your Citation Linker  results are not quite right, Factiva is another place for you to try.

Roper Center Polls: alternative access to LexisNexis

LexisNexis has announced that Roper Center materials will no longer be part of its collection and that access them will end on December 31, 2007.

Don't forget that we have direct access to the Roper Center directly via E-Resources. According to Meghan, Roper makes even more available than LexisNexis, since both summary and micro-level data are there.

Users (i.e., Harvard affiliates)will have to enter an email; I suppose that non-Harvard affiliates would require our mediation.

What I learned at the Reference Desk today!

A student from the U of Denver, doing research while here in Boston was interested in accessing the 1850 census. The print volumes in the Reference Room only present aggregate data -- to his dismay, as he wanted a list of the actual heads of households (by name and such) for Essex County in New York.

Thanks to JC's knowledge and our online subscription to Ancestry.com (the "library edition," which you access via e-resources) we could get that level of detail. Ancestry has apparently scanned in the individual census records -- which include the names of heads of households -- back to 1790. Very neat indeed!

Finally: Online access!

The New York Review of Books is now an e-resource. The archive dates back to 1963. Alas, however: no PDFs and no way to search David Levine's cartoons.

Terms and Connectors is the key!

As anticipated (see this previous post), the new LexisNexis interface is now live.

If you are initially disoriented by what you see, here's a tip: move from "General" to "News." Then: change the radio button from "natural language" to "terms and connectors" and you'll see a screen that has the standard (and probably more powerful) search functions with which we are familiar.

COERS is taking up the issue of the LexisNexis redesign tomorrow, and as I've learned from Laureen, there's to be discussion about what default screens to set. I don't anticipate much resistance to a request for a default change, but I'll be writing up a short statement for COERS this evening.

This new L-N has many, many nice features, so don't be put off! It's now a 21st-century resource!

A helpful description of the new Smart Indexing Technology is available, too.

E-Resource Bonanza!

The list of new e-resources was distributed in an OIS email last week. Among the ones that look especially promising for us (and worth having an early look at):

Primary Source collections:
19th Century United States Newspapers (Gale)

American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series 1, 1760-1900 (Readex)

Everyday Life and Women in America, c.1800-1920 (remember the marriage manual question?)

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007 (covers modern slavery, too: remember the senior thesis on camel jockeys? A UK-produced resource, so also try British spellings.)

Mass-Observation Archives Online (We have the full set on microfilm here in Lamont; the digitized "Topic Collections" are only a small portion of what's actually available to Harvard users.)

Biography:
World Biographical Information System Online (WBIS Online) (the Saur product returns, apparently with improved searching and now with digitized texts, so we don't have to send students to microfiche copies in Widener RR.)

Politics, Law and Government:
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

HeinOnline World Trials (Lots of neat stuff here, from witchcraft to Crippen to Leopold and Loeb. The default is a browse by "resources"; there is an alternative tab for general "Search" functions, however.)

Some of the HeinOnline databases are clearly specialized legal resources, but others may become more valuable to us once we are immersed in a world of government documents. The U.S. Presidential Library will also have lots of immediate utility for us when that large core class gets taught again.

Academic Book Reviews
IBR - Internationale Bibliographie der Rezension (Also known as the International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences and published since 1971, this was previously available only at Widener and as a networked CD-ROM. IBR covers scholarly journals primarily from Europe and North America. The search screen is in German, but it's easy to figure out. I'll add it to a revised "Finding Book Reviews" guide in the fall.)

Reference
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (Another addition to the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf collection.)

Finding Letters to the Editor in Factiva

Last week, a patron was interested in using Factiva to track down letters to the editor about immigration reform issues. The procedure is a bit quirky, so I pass on steps to you.

To set this limit, you should:

1. enter your search term(s).

2. Click on the Subject category.

3. Click on the subcategory Content Types.

4. Click on the up arrow next to "Letters" to add the code to your search. Just be sure you have inserted an "and" as well; without a Boolean operator, the query can't be processed logically.

Then, before you run the search:

5. Scroll down the page. By default, Factiva is set to "Exclude" three categories of information: republished news;recurring pricing and market data; and obituaries, sports, calendars. Uncheck the boxes. Unless you do so, you will get a "no results" message.

LexisNexis redesign

In case this is also news to you -- as it was to me (and to our e-resource stewards) -- LexisNexis is (finally?) updating its interface. The redesign, which has been in beta testing since January is set to roll out this month, according to the LexisNexis announcement.

This page links to several tutorials that explain the changes and new features. Be warned, though: pace is excruciatingly slow.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: How Far Back You Can Go

I discovered today that ProQuest Dissertations and Theses is now supplying full-text back to 1997. Previously, we'd used 2003 as our rough cut-off date (or I had); the database is evidently growing backward now, too!

ARL's "Know Your Copy Rights" website and campaign

From the ARL press release:

"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Know Your Copy Rights™ – What You Can Do a brochure that gives faculty and teaching assistants in higher education an easy-to-scan explanation of when and how they can legally use intellectual property in their teaching, often without requesting permission or paying fees.

"Among the topics covered in the brochure are: fair use, the advantages of linking to instead of copying works, and special provisions for displaying or performing works in classes. It also includes a handy one-page chart that highlights 24 situations when various categories of works can be used.

"A broader Know Your Copy Rights™ campaign, aimed at helping librarians implement strategic copyright education programs on campus, will be rolled out by ARL in the coming months. It will include a Web site that helps librarians address copyright issues relevant to different groups across their institutions, including faculty, students, legal counsel, academic leadership, and library staff."

In addition to the brochure, the site also supplies a one page poster that distills some of the copyright provisions.

Reason for Truncated Access to Some E-Resources

Q. Why does Harvard online access to the Journal of the History of Biology only start in 1997, while the Springer website offers online access to the entire the journal?

A. The truncated access is due to the licensing arrangement offered from Springer to Harvard. For Springer journals, our current license covers volume years from 1997 to the present. Back years (from 1996 to the inception of the journal) are only available by separate purchase, and Springer makes this purchase prohibitive. Springer offers these backfiles bundled in groups of journals categorized by broad subject area. Using this particular case as an example, the Journal of the History of Biology is bundled in the backfile package Biomedical and Life Sciences, which covers 117 titles for a one-time cost of $113,465.59. The libraries have limited funds for one-time purchases, and collecting preferences tend to run towards selective purchase, making Springer's model impractical. We have in the past purchased other Springer backfile collections, specifically the Medicine and Physics & Astronomy bundles, so you may in fact see other Springer journals with deeper backfile access.Please let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks!

kind regards,Kristin--

Kristin Stoklosa
E-Resources Manager
and
E-Resources Coordinator for the Sciences
Harvard College Library

Never on Sunday

I found out the hard way that the Times Digital Archive (Times of London, 1785-1985) does not include any Sunday issues. The main search screen does not mention this fact, and even includes Sunday dates in its dropdown menu. But there is no indexing or content available for those dates; users wanting articles from the Sunday Times before July 1985 will need to use microfilm at Widener. After July 1, 1985, all issues of the Times of London (including Sundays) are available in Lexis-Nexis under the memorable title "Times (London), The."