Your source for what's new at Mizzou Libraries
Among the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants is funding for the Journalism Digital News Archive’s Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News conference.
Read more at the Reynolds Journalism Institute Blog.
Need research help? You can ask a librarian for help using our chat service–now available almost 24 hours a day.
During the day you can chat with MU librarians and library staff. At night, we offer access to a chat reference service called ChatStaff. They will be able to answer most research questions, except for some that are Mizzou-specific.
To access the chat service and see what hours chat reference is available, visit libraryanswers.missouri.edu.
Dr. Frank W. Booth, PhD. is a Professor in the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at the School of Medicine, the department of Nutrition & Exercise Physiology, and is a Research Investigator at the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. His research interests currently include elucidating mechanisms underlying the decreases in physical activity and gaining a better understanding of why cardiorespiratory fitness, or VO2max declines as an organism ages. Dr. Booth has published over 220 publications and has numerous national and international honor awards from exercise biology organizations. To learn more about Dr. Booth, click here.
Dr. Booth published, along with several University of Missouri doctoral students, in Public Library of Science (PLoS One), an open access journal for science and medicine.
We’d like your feedback about whether to use scarce funding to purchase a new scanner for the photocopy room of the Health Sciences Library. We have two models on trial. They are easy to use, and you can send to your cell phone, e-mail or a jump drive. Please feel free to stop by and give them a try.
The MU Libraries are reviewing discovery tools as our subscription to Summon comes up for renewal, and we are considering the other commercial discovery tools available.
A discovery tool provides a single search box for ease of searching many library resources at one time. It includes citations for books, e-books, scholarly journals, magazines, dissertations, DVDs and many more resources, with links to full-text for the materials for which we have access.
EbscoHost has provided free trial access to EDS, their discovery tool. This trial gives the libraries and our users an opportunity to test the tool and assess whether it would be a good tool to add to our collection.
Since this is a free trial, it has not been fully customized, as it would be if we were to subscribe. It does not contain all records from our catalog of books, but instead only has a subset so that we can see how book records are integrated with the other records in the results. We have also not activated all of our subscriptions to display within it.
To conduct a comprehensive search, we recommend using the Summon Search & Find and the individual subject databases we provide. However, for other searches the EbscoHost EDS will be sufficient to identify materials.
Please test it out and give us your feedback. We would like to know what you think about the tool – if you found it easy to use, which features you like/did not like, etc. Your feedback will help us as we consider the future of a discovery tool for the MU Libraries.
If you have any questions, please contact Rhonda Whithaus (whithausr@missouri.edu).
Dr. Michel J. Davis, PhD, is a Professor and Associate Department Head, Department of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology. He is also a Margaret Proctor Mulligan Distinguished Professor in Medical Research. The focus of his research is research is on mechanisms of vascular mechanotransduction, currently working on projects answering the two following research questions:
To learn more about Dr. Davis’ research interestes and projects, click here.
Dr. Davis recently published in Public Library of Science (PLOS), an open access journal for science and medicine:
Jamalian S, Davis MJ, Zawieja DC, Moore JE Jr (2016) Network Scale Modeling of Lymph Transport and Its Effective Pumping Parameters. PLoS ONE 11(2): e0148384. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148384
iPoll is a database that focuses on public opinion polls and allows those polls to be searched in a question format, this makes this database extremely useful when trying to gather data about how public opinion has changed over time. This is made even easier when the time period that iPoll covers is taken into account, iPoll was started in the 1930s which is when surveys were first starting to be used for research. This means that you can track how public attitudes have changed on issues from the 1930s to now, for example, I searched the term “global warming” between the years of 1994-1995. I then found a question that asked whether or not people thought that global warming was a problem now or would be a problem in x number of years. The largest group that gave an answer said that they believed that global warming would be a serious problem in 50+ years, 24% of respondents believed this. I ran the same search between the years of 2014-2015 and found a survey that had asked the exact same question, on this survey 50% of respondents believed that global warming was causing an immediate problem. What a difference 20 years makes.
Tracking trends is just one thing that iPoll can do, through it you can download data, look at entire surveys, and see the breakdown of the respondents based on factors such as political affiliation, gender, and region. Sadly, this last feature isn’t available for all of the surveys, but all surveys will give a simple bar graph breakdown of the responses. If you really need the breakdown of the respondents, then you can just choose the limiter iPoll plus and you will automatically cut down your results to only the ones that have that data.
iPoll is a great resource for public opinions in the US and internationally, and with all of the options available, it should be at the top of your list when looking into public opinion.
Tips and Tricks:
-When you first enter the database, there is a list of trending topics to the left.
-Boolean Searching is available
-Wildcard/truncation is %
-Selecting a topic allows you to refine your search even more by only searching your keyword in surveys about that subject.
This week’s post features three University of Missouri Faculty:
They recently published their latest research, open access, in Family Medicine, the official journal of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.
Here are some of Dr. Cronk’s thoughts on Open Access:
“The journal we selected is the most relevant journal for our target audience. We sought to reach individuals involved with the training of Family Medicine residents in order to highlight the importance of our topic.”
“Yes, definitely. I think it is important for the advancement of science generally, and our field specifically, to have ready access to the latest research and scholarship. Open access journals make it easy for busy professionals to learn and benefit from the latest publications in their respective fields.”
Here are some of Dr. Morris’ thoughts on Open Access:
“Family Medicine is the top journal for family medicine educators and so is considered the key journal in which to publish educational research in our specialty. I’d certainly like to publish there again.”
With the prospect of a possible shortfall of $1 million to the MU Libraries collection budget in FY2017, we are seeking input on some lower-use journals, particularly the titles in the bundles purchased through publishers Elsevier and Wiley.
Follow this link to provide your input on specific journal titles between now and April 4.
We are beginning with these bundles because:
Also included are some high cost/low use journals from other publishers in a variety of disciplines.
Learn more about the campus-wide collections review process and the reasons for it.
Echosec offered the journalism library a free account to share with all of journalism. They want feedback and they wanted the library to tell everyone since the tool searches social media that this information is not filtered.
For those of you unfamiliar with Echosec, it is a software tool that allows you to monitor several social media platforms. As a reporting tool, it has all kinds of interesting possibilities. For strat comm, it is a social listening tool allowing you to monitor company, brand and product mentions.
You can search by keyword, social media handle, or zoom in on a specific area to see what people are sharing.
Please contact Dorothy Carner carnerd@missouri.edu or Sue Schuermann schuermanns@missouri.edu for login and password.