BarnardRefDesk

Contains indexing and abstracts for GLBT-specific core periodicals and GLBT-specific core books and reference works. Indexes important historical GLBT publications, including ONE, The Ladder, Mattachine Review, The Advocate, Christopher Street, Body Politic, The New York Native, and much more. Includes some monographs and reference books, as well as grey literature, including newsletters, case studies, and speeches.

Labels: databases

Wide-ranging collection of scholarship focused on the lives and events that have shaped African American and African history and culture. Features biographies and other articles from Oxford's reference works; primary sources; images; maps; timelines; and charts and tables. The core content includes: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American experience; the Encyclopedia of African American history 1619-1895; Black women in America; the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature; and the ongoing project African American National Biography.

Searchable database containing digital facsimile images of newspapers, presented as full page layout as well as single articles. Advertisements and illustrations are included. This collection includes numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.; and it encompasses the entire 19th century.

Provides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, this collection provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

This is mostly for Heidi and Julie, but any reference librarian here on a Saturday, Sunday, or other day when Jenna isn't here should consider logging in to Meebo.

The ref desk computer is now set to log you into the BarnardReference accounts on AOL, Google, and Yahoo automatically, when you go to the Meebo page from either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

If you want to log in from your remote computer instead and aren't sure how, ask me.

From Student Computing Services, this news:

Resume Printing

We are now offering resume printing services in the Lehman Computer Lab.

You supply the paper. Bring the resume paper of your choice to the LCC.

We print the resume. We will print your resume using a local network printer that is not part of the NINJA printing system.

The OPAC is back. Here's what's new in this latest version of the OPAC:

• Title is again the default search.


• Two new forms of keyword truncation have been added: internal and left-hand truncation
  labo?r retrieves labour, labor, labourer, etc.
  ?phobe retrieves technophobe, anglophobe, etc. (this can be slow)
  


• holdings keyword searching. This doesn't work fabulously well (see below), so we're just playing around with it at the moment: but you can use a holdings key code: "hkey" to search any part of the holdings record: so hkey comp retrieves everything in the Moral & Political Philosophy Reading Room and hkey comp skey aesthetics would retrieve everything there with aesthetics in the subject heading. This hkey search will find terms in the location (using the brief location code), call number, and holdings notes.
  The problem: This search only works with location keywords having fewer than 10,000 hits. So searching for hkey mil and skey women will give you wildly inaccurate results. For that, you're better off using the OPAC location limits, or using the limits in the cataloging module.


• subject headings display in the list with dashes between parts of the heading (this does not affect searching: entering searches without the dashes still works fine)


• the Keyword with Relevance search is now configurable and we've set it so that all terms entered are searched with a default "and." This should make the search more useful, and we'll be looking at whether it should be given greater prominence in the search types list.


• Some bugs have been fixed:
  
  • it is again possible to email records containing accents and diacritics without losing the field that contained the accent.
  • contents notes are no longer jammed together, with no punctuation between each item, and are now displayed as a list

As you play around with these new features, please send us your comments and suggestions (clioserv@columbia.edu). These are getting a "soft" opening: the help screens and other information will be up by the time classes begin. A spotlight should be up later today.

CLIO OPAC Subcommittee
Gary Bertchume, Marina Chilov, Lois Coleman, Ria Koopmans-de Bruijn, Russell Merritt, Jill Parchuck, Sarah Witte (chair)

This is a source of clip art for our subject and research guides. Images are free for educational use, and the site is not annoying, unlike many other clip art sites!

Jenna

Responding to a request from CUL to have a unified IM address to post on their sites, I created BarnardReference on AOL, Google, and Yahoo. They are associated with the refdesk e-mail account. I apologize if this leads to more spam in there!

The password for the account is the same as for refdesk, but it ends in 07 instead of the other number. If someone wants to sign onto the account when I'm not here, that would be swell.

For Barnard purposes, I think we should continue to give out our BarnardLibName addresses.