MLA, APA, University of Chicago?

Need help getting the reference list at the end of your paper, or the citations in the paper, in that special form your teacher wants? On the library home page click on Citation and Bibliography Styles. That takes you to a page where you can choose the right guide for the style you need, whether it's APA, MLA etc. The Diane Hacker links you'll see are for a manual that gives lots of examples for the different styles. Citation Builder and Citation Machine are sites that take your entries and format them for you. Between these different resources you should be pretty well set, but remember, in the end, it is your teacher, not these sites, not a librarian, who decides if you did it right or not, so ask your professor when in doubt!

Britannica vs. Wikipedia, continued

In the last post I mentioned the December article in Nature that compared the science articles in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica issued a response to which Nature has in turn posted its own response. (The link for the Britannica rebuttal is only to a partial quoting of their document - the link to the actual .pdf seems to be having problems...)

Quite a bit of uproar, and interesting the way it highlights changing intellectual publishing and activity.

Britannica vs. Wikipedia

Interesting article today in the online Times of London, about a rebuttal published by Encyclopedia Britannica in response to an article in Nature reporting that there wasn't a large difference in accuracy in science entries between Britannica and Wikipedia. What WikiPedia's creator says about WikiPedia is good advice in general, namely to try to use more than one source in examining a topic or issue, to help ensure balance and accuracy. (We have a link to the full version of Britannica on our "Reference" page.)

New printing settings

In an effort to conserve paper and toner, the library is setting certain printing limits.

• 50 pages per print job
• 2 copies at a time
• 3 slides per page for PowerPoint

Please help us as we seek to conserve limited and expensive resources.

History of microfilm

It isn't one of those things you tend to think of, but microfilm (I mentioned in yesterday's post that we're moving our microfilm collection) has a history like anything else. One early use of microfilm was in 1871, when Paris was besiged by the Prussian army. A Parisian photographer, Rene Dagron, had the idea of photographing records and messages, and then attaching them to carrier pigeons to communicate with the rest of France. (See this site.) In the 20th century microfilm became the way to save space and cost of many library materials, like back runs of newspapers. That's changing now, with the advent of digital archives like that of the NY Times Historical, but microfilm will still be with us for a while yet! (The photo here is from the AP Mulitmedia Archive we have, of a modern homing pigeon fancier training his birds.)

Microforms are moving!

We are moving all our microforms, the microfilm, fiche, the readers etc. from their current location on the ground floor to the SMC area on the same floor, where the movies and children's books are kept. This is part of a rearrangement that will accomodate the temporary placement of some offices from the Rakov building that will be moving in with us for this coming academic year while Rakov is rehabbed for AC.

Grey literature, what is it?

Grey literature is, by one definition: "Information produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing i.e. where publishing is not the primary activity of the producing body." (Luxembourg, 1997 - Expanded in New York, 2004) So it's literature of all sorts, reports, papers etc., produced by a variety of sources, government agencies, special interest groups, educational agencies and so on. It often is very useful for a wide variety of research needs. It comes in both digital and print form, but digital is the most significant part.
We will be developing a grey literature collection soon on Lake Ontario for the Environmental Science Department, on the SUNY D-Space site.

Map sites

Looking for country maps to download? Try FactsOnFile in the Reference section of our home page. Click on it, then Country Profiles on the right hand side.
Like a US topographical map for your next hike or trip? Try the TerraServer site!
There are many more options of course, ask us to find out more.

Meet the last candidate for library director!

There is an open meeting with the last candidate for the position of director of the library tomorrow, Tuesday 3/7, at 10am in the library cafe. Please stop by if you can, we are very interested in your participation. (The meeting will be in the area with the sofas in the cafe.)

Meet the next library director!

A candidate for library director will be in the library cafe today, Friday March 3, from 10-10:30am. Please do stop by, he'll be sitting with students and other interested people on those sofas. We value your input as to who should direct the library in this rapidly changing era!

Need articles in French, Spanish, German...?

A great site for foreign language articles is Lexis-Nexis. At the library web page click on Finding Articles, then Lexis. At Lexis, click on the Guided News Tab, then change the drop down to Non-English News, and select your language. They have articles from newspapers and popular magazines in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. So catch up on the news with titles like El Pais, Spain's largest daily paper, 1996-date, and many others.