Literature Resource Center is back up!

Literature Resource Center is unavailable

The folks at Thomson Gale are working to restore access; they'll let us know when it's back up.

Worldcat access is restored!

Worldcat is asking for username/password

It's being looked into …

A note from CSA re: Community of Scholars on Illumina

A note that recently appeared on the CSA Technical News listserv:

In response to customer feedback, we have implemented some changes to the behavior and presentation of the complimentary resource, Community of Scholars: Social Science, now provided on CSA Illumina. For those customers who have a subscription to one of CSA's own Social Science databases (listed below), this resource will continue to be a free supplement to your subscription. The following changes will ensure that the content provided by Community of Scholars: Social Science will be available to users who find it valuable while not intruding upon the work of users focused on bibliographic content alone.

Login links to a Social Science database will no longer result in the overt selection of Community of Scholars: Social Science. The resource name will no longer appear as 'Now Selected'. Community of Scholars: Social Science will no longer be listed as a selectable database. Instead, it will serve as a feature that compliments results of a Social Science database search. Advanced Search limits will no longer be affected by Community of Scholars: Social Science.

These changes in behavior are now in effect.

Community of Scholars: Complete will continue to be offered as a full-featured database.

Community of Scholars: Social Science is a free supplement to the following Social Science databases:

• ASSIA
• LLBA
• LISA
• PAIS
• International Physical Education Index
• ERIC
• Social Services Abstracts
• Sociological Abstracts
• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Chronicle of Higher Education and The Chronicle of Philanthropy added to Expanded Academic ASAP

Thomson is announcing the imminent addition of The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Chronicle of Philanthropy to Expanded Academic ASAP.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is the world's top source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. It also serves as a great resource for teachers and professionals conducting research on pedagogy. The Chronicle, published weekly in print, will be made available in full-text with a seven year backfile. The content will be fully subject indexed.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is published biweekly in print. It is considered the premier newspaper of the nonprofit world. It is a great resource for charity leaders, fund raisers, grant makers, and other people involved in the philanthropic enterprise.

Full-text for these titles will appear on product soon.

As of right now (11am April 17) they're not there, but presumably will be soon. C of HE has been available to use as print subscribers, but only on a username/password basis; since the
username/password we have enables the logged-in user to change subscription options, we have naturally been reluctant to make it public.

Gallup Brain is back up

Bibliography of Native North Americans

We are being asked if we are interested in joining in an OCUL consortial subscription to the following Ebsco database – your comments most welcome:

Bibliography of Native North Americans™ (BNNA) is a bibliographic database covering all aspects of native North American culture, history, and life. This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy. BNNA contains more than 80,000 citations for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. Dates of coverage for included content range from the sixteenth century to the present. The database is an essential research tool for anthropologists, educators, historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, legal and medical researchers, linguists, theologians, ethnobotanists, and policy makers. BNNA will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions, struggles, and issues surrounding North America's indigenous peoples.

Free Thomson Gale databases during April

Thomson Gale is offering free, unlimited access to diverse databases during National Library Month, April 2006.

Scholars Portal problems on Wednesday (Apr 5)

We've confirmed that the "flakiness" some people reported this morning with Illumina was related to new indexing procedures CSA is implementing. The new indexing tools work in "real-time" against databases — that is, instead of updating a copy of the database and then copying it over the production database, the online version of the database is now being updated as it is being accessed by searchers. This means that while a database is being updated, searches against that database will be slower. This morning, while MEDLINE and PsycINFO were being updated, some searches were timing out and returning zero hits.

The new indexing method will allow us to build much larger indexes, so this will be of particular value for Scholars Portal as we continue to push the envelope on content. What we need to do, however, is adjust the timeout values on database searches whenever updates are being run so that we avoid the "zero hit" problems of this morning. The new indexing method will also allow us to schedule indexing jobs in off hours, since the procedures will be less labour intensive, at least in the long run.