TRIAL: PsycEXTRA

Link to database; restricted to yorku.ca.

From the vendor:

PsycEXTRA, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), is a bibliographic and full-text companion to the scholarly PsycINFO database. The document types included in PsycEXTRA consist of technical, annual and government reports, conference papers, newsletters, magazines, newspapers, consumer brochures and more. This database complements PsycINFO and the other APA databases with extensive coverage of gray literature relating to psychology and the behavioral sciences; it contains more than 100,000 records. PsycEXTRA is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA’s Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.

TRIAL: British Library Newspaper Collections

Database link: http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/pubacd_bncn?id=british
Trial ends 2007.11.25; restricted to yorku.ca

From the vendor:

Gale has partnered with the British Library to create one of the richest collections of primary source material in the world. Unparalleled in depth and scope, British Library Newspapers consists of two major collections from the British Library which span 300 years of newspaper publishing in the U.K.: 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century British Library Newspapers. The two collections combined contain nearly three million pages and over 20 million articles.

Problems with Gale databases

Gale reports

“experiencing intermittent problems with our onlinedatabases.  Please be advised that our Engineers are working to correctthe problem as quickly as possible.  Updates will be sent as moreinformation becomes available”

Have you used the new interface for Web of Knowledge?

In one of their recent newsletters, ISI asks if we have been using the new interface to Web of Knowledge / Science. Have you? It’s described more fully at http://scientific.thomson.com/news/newsletter/2007-10/8411546/ . If you have, please post your comments here.

NEW TRIAL: Oxford Language Dictionaries Online

http://www.oxfordlanguagedictionaries.com; trial expires 2007.11.11. Restricted to yorku.ca

From the vendor:

Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (OLDO), a complete toolkit for language users, from learners to professionals, providing unparalleled language coverage and learning support via instant access to Oxford’s top-of-the-range, unabridged bilingual dictionaries.

Initially offering millions of words, phrases, and translations, in French, German, Spanish and Italian, the site will expand to include many other languages such as Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Polish. Included are usage examples and illustrative phrases, grammar guidance, click-through verb tables and pronunciation charts, explanations of grammatical terms, and help with spelling and punctuation. Also included are hundreds of correspondence templates including sample letters, CVs and resumes to provide practical help with writing in each language. Contextualized language reference help includes notes on life and culture, guidance on grammar and idiomatic usage, and Words of the Day. Updates every six months ensure that the most current meanings and the latest new words are just a click away. Advanced search options allow users to search the full text of each dictionary, or restrict a search to specific parts of speech or language register. Extensive links to language learning and usage supplements provide a ‘learn as you go’ gateway to further language study. Citation information is available for all entries. Coming soon: revolutionary pronunciation software allowing users to hear how words sound.

Anthrosource problem resolved (we hope)

The problem reported by many people yesterday, with respect to accessing full-text journal content via the Anthrosource database, seems to have been resolved. Please let us know if you have any further problems.

Emergency downtime for Scholars Portal tonight

From the Scholars Portal folks:

We have encountered a problem with our storage system that requires us to conduct an emergency reboot on it tonight. As a result, all University of Toronto library and Scholarsportal services attached to this storage system will first need to be detached from it before the reboot and then re-attached after it comes back up. We expect the whole procedure to take approximately two hours. The following scholarsportal services will be down from 10:00pm to 12:00am tonight (Saturday, 13th October 2007).

1) Illumina Scholarsportal Search
2) Scienceserver (E-Journals)
3) Refworks

SFX will not be directly affected by this outage, but some of the services listed above (2 and 3 above) that show up as targets on the menus will be down.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the late notice and the downtime, but as it states in the subject, this was very unexpected. If all is well, the whole procedure should take less than the allotted 2 hours.

Upcoming scheduled downtime for Statistics Canada website

Statistics Canada’s Main Computer Centre will be shut down to undergo maintenance on Saturday October 13, 2007. The work will begin at 5:00 am and is expected to last until approximately 12:00 am on Sunday October 14, 2007. The DLI website, FTP and Nesstar site may be unavailable at times during this period. The Census website will continue to be available during the power down. Other sections of the Statistics Canada website may however be unavailable at times.

Problem with Factiva / LA Times

For some reason, Factiva is not allowing us to pull up any content from the Los Angeles Times. I’ve called the vendor, who has been able to reproduce our problem; an investigation is underway.

UPDATE: It turns out that this title is on the “blocked” list for academic subscriptions, i.e., it will appear  on the list of available titles, but will not be searchable. The LA Times is available on Lexis-Nexis, but only to faculty and students enrolled in business programs (and reference librarians, of course).