New and recently added electronic resources

The Library is very excited to announce the addition of several new and recently added electronic resources to support research for Milligan College students and faculty.

ACM Digital Library is a premier resource of citations, full text journals, conference proceedings, transactions and newletters covering all aspects of computing hardware and software, research, and the computer and information technology industry.

BioOne is an extensive collection of high quality peer-reviewed full text journals in botany, zoology, ecology and conservation biology, and human biology.

Project MUSE is an interdisciplinary collection of high quality peer-reviewed full text journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Be sure to check out these and many other journal databases, e-reference and e-book collections, and online searchable book and media catalogs available 24/7 from the Milligan College Library website. We welcome and value your feedback on these resources or any other Library service. Feel free to drop in or send us your comments at any time!

Meet our new Librarian Assistant!

Please join us in welcoming Jack Weinbender, our new Librarian Assistant, who began work with us on June 15th.

Jack is a first-year student at Emmanuel School of Religion.  He recently graduated from Johnson Bible College in Knoxville with a B.A. in Biblical Studies and a minor in Audio & Radio Production.  Following his junior year at JBC he married his high-school sweetheart— the former Tiffany Mathews—and, in his words,  “dragged her from her home in Salem, Oregon to the hills of Tennessee.”  Tiffany is enrolled in the Milligan College nursing program.

Jack hopes to earn his M.A. in Religion within the next few years, then earn a Ph.D. in order to teach.  According to Jack, he loves his “wife, the Greek langauge, J.R.R. Tolkien, Apple computers, bluegrass music, anything by Larry Hurtado or James Dunn, the X-Files, and barbeque sauce—in that order.”

He notes, “I hope to help in analyzing statistical data to aid in understanding the present state of the Library to foster an informed decision-making atmosphere.”  In addition to working with library statistics and reports, Jack will staff the library reference desk one night per week once the Fall semester begins.  He will also organize and maintain library invoicing and communication with the Business Office.

Library Director Gary Daught notes, “I am very excited by the complexion of the Library Staff. I feel like we have been able to construct something of a ‘dream team’ as I consider the skills, professional dispositions, and high level of engagement [staff] bring to the Library and its mission among the Milligan College learning community. I cannot wait for us all to get started working together. It’s going to be fun!”

Our new Information Services Librarian/College Archivist, Meredith Sommers, joined us July 13th, completing our library staff.  We’ll post a profile on her next week!

What we did on your summer vacation, Part 1

“So, what do you, like, DO at the library all summer?” is one the most frequent questions students and faculty ask library staff as one school year ends and another begins.  I mean, it’s only reasonable to expect that library staff  play Scrabulous and Minesweeper in an empty library all summer while kindergartener-sized tumbleweeds roll past the periodicals racks.

Well, it may surprise you to learn that we do quite a bit!  Though we still have plenty of summer students, faculty and staff, and camp kids to keep us company, we still find time both to carry out our normal duties and to work on bigger projects and initiatives.  Here’s a taste of what we’ve done between graduation and today…

• Our biggest news first…we completed our library staff by hiring two new library staff members:  Jack Weinbender, our new Library Assistant whose first day with us was June 17, and Meredith Sommers, our new Information Resources Librarian/College Archivist, who will begin  July 13.  We’ll post profiles of both of them soon on this blog so you can get to know them better!
• Mary Jackson tagged dozens of new web resources for the library’s del.icio.us page
• Ordered, cataloged, processed, and shelved hundreds of new books, DVDs, and CDs
• Gary Daught, Mary Jackson, and Jeff Harbin attended BCLA Shared Catalog Committee meetings at Maryville College at the end of May
• Jeff cleaned up and shifted photography lending shelves
• Jeff shifted S-Z section of lending books
• Gary presented on the peer review process to two Scholarly Communication classes in Milligan’s M.Ed. program
• Jeff refreshed new book display with over 150 new books, not one of them published before 2008
• Jeff attended two online Interlibrary Loan tutorials and exponentially expanded pool of potential DVD and CD lenders
• Gary attended a webinar on WorldCat Local, and implemented Milligan’s “quick start” WorldCat Local environment
• Readied reserve shelves for next year, removing many outdated items and adding course-relevant materials, and moved out empty shelving unit to create more space in reserves area
• Gary closed out the fiscal year, reconstructed acquisitions fund code hierarchies, and reallocated funds in the library management system
• Gary initiated a review of current periodical/journal subscriptions with faculty
• Added extra shelving unit to provide more room for growing DVD collection, shifted current items and moved furniture to create more space in DVD room
• Jeff cleaned up and organized both the circulation desk and the Interlibrary Loans area
• Gary and Jeff wrote a grant proposal for the library’s “Librarians Bearing Gifts” faculty outreach project
• Worked with faculty to improve our lending collection of music books
• Gary and Jack organized receipt of and binding requests for M.Ed. theses
• Gary and Jack eliminated backlog of periodical check-ins
• Obtained ten additional circulating student-use laptops, bringing our total to twenty.

Whew!  And though the days of summer are quickly sifting through our fingers like so many grains of Myrtle Beach sand, the library staff has much more to accomplish in the 5 1/2 weeks (!) before the fall semester begins.  Be sure to check out Part 2 of this update as the new school year draws closer.

New Look to JSTOR

JSTOR has unveiled a sleek new look on April 7, 2008! Most veteran JSTOR users will find that the basic and advance search screens retain many of the old features, while adding a few new twists.

Highlights of the new features:

• In Advanced Searching, searchers can now specify that search terms be within a certain proximity to each other (within 5, 10, or 25 words). Using this feature can greatly improve full-text search results.

• Save citations within JSTOR and access them again at future sessions. To use the feature, create a MyJSTOR account from the tab at the top of the screen.

• All searches from a session are retained and can be reviewed.

• Simplified printing and viewing of articles in PDF format.

To learn more, watch several short tutorials on the new features at:

http://0-www.jstor.org.library.acaweb.org/action/showBasicSearch

In future posts, I will discuss ways to improve JSTOR searches. But if you have any questions or would like any assistance on JSTOR or any other database, please contact me at mjackson at milligan.edu

I didn’t know we had THAT in the Milligan Library…

As Milligan’s resident reference librarian, I am aware of some really great resources. Some of these are located physically in the library, some are available online through a subscription, and some are free out on the Internet. I hope to have occasional posts highlighting interesting resources that are often overlooked by students and faculty.

Gale Virtual Reference Library

What is it? As its name implies, it is an online reference library. Over 60+ multivolume reference books on social sciences, popular culture, religion, history, medicine and more. The complete text of every volume can be searched at one time, over 86,000 documents.

When would the Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL) be helpful in a research project? The GVRL is a great place to start almost any research project. Many of the articles give excellent overviews, show how a topic may be relevant in many different fields of study, and give keywords, concepts, and references for further study. The GVRL way also be helpful later in a research project to fill in gaps left by other resources. Most instructors won’t accept Wikipedia articles in a bibliography, but instructors like to see GVRL articles.

What kind of topics might be covered in the GVRL? Just a few examples: Bob Dylan (32 articles), Lord of the Rings (21), PATRIOT Act (50), and tobacco (265).

Accessing and using the Gale Virtual Reference Library
Milligan Library Homepage → Electronic Reference → Gale Virtual Reference Library

Type one or more search terms in the Basic Search box. Helpful tip–Return to the basic search screen EVERY TIME to revise a search or begin a new search.

Need help with Gale Virtual Reference Library or any other research question, contact me, Mary Jackson, mjackson at milligan.edu.

Website Tweak Simplifies Search for Library Journal Holdings

The Library collection includes not only books, and non-print media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) but also journals and magazines. Journals and magazines are an important medium of written communication.

• Popular magazines inform or entertain general audiences on a wide variety of topics and interests (e.g., current news, computers, or cats).
• Professional journals and magazines report on news and current practices within specialized professions (e.g., teaching and education, or nursing and healthcare).
• Academic (or peer-reviewed) journals report on the results of research from various disciplines of scholarly study (e.g., Medieval history, physics, or Old Testament biblical studies).

The Library subscribes to many different journals and magazines of these various types, in both print and electronic formats. Until recently, if you wanted to find out what journals and magazines the Library held, you had to first browse a listing of print titles and then search for available titles in electronic full-text format. We are pleased to announce that you can now search for all the library’s journal and magazine holdings, in either print or electronic format, from a single location.

From the homepage of the Library website, click on the Electronic & Print Periodicals link. The link takes you to a journal search and browse service called Serials Solutions.

If, for example, you wanted to find Library holdings for the magazine Smithsonian, simply type the title in the “Find” box and click the “Search” button. The results indicate that we have holdings of Smithsonian in print and electronically in two online databases.

Although we observe that most users prefer to access journal articles electronically, don’t forget that print can still be very useful. Notice that our print holdings of Smithsonian stretch back to 1971, while our holdings in electronic format only go back to 1983. If your research required you to secure an article in an issue from 1979, you would not be able to get it in electronic format. But it is available in print! (Back issues of all our print periodicals can be found in the compact shelving in the basement level of the Library.)

We hope this one-stop interface will help to simplify your search for journals and magazines held by the Library. Remember that articles from journals or magazines not held by the Library in either print or electronic format can be requested from interlibrary loan by filling out the webform here.