Heroines

There's an interesting list of heroines in today's Times of London, featuring articles on a variety of women who challenged injustice and cruelty in 20th century Europe. Pictured here is Irene Gut Opdyke, a Polish woman who rescued a number of Polish Jews from the German death camps.

Want to know more about one of these women, or the events they were a part of? The NY Times Historical Archive, which has the entire NY Times, 1851-2004, might be a good start. Academic Search and JSTOR would be good resources for articles from magazines and journals. For books try our catalog or WorldCat, which indicates books held in other libraries.

ScienceDirect - manuscript download

Many of you are familiar with ScienceDirect, which is a full text article database composed of many prominent Elsevier journal titles. There is a new and exciting feature to this you may not know about - Article in Press. What this means is that all journals included in ScienceDirect will now allow you to see, download and print out those articles which have passed peer review but have not yet been typeset etc. This makes them available 4-8 weeks in advance of when they normally would have been seen.

For an example, go to ScienceDirect, and in the journal box type Advances in Water Resources. Click on go, and then over to your left, on the top of the column of volume numbers, you will see, in bright red, the phrase Articles in Press. Click on that to see the latest articles!

By the way, ScienceDirect is something of a misnomer - there are many good health science and business and economics titles in the database as well for example.

Fuel economy

Interested in comparing gas mileage between different makes? Or seeing what other owners of your make of car get per mile? How about tips for improving fuel economy? You can learn answers to these questions and more at www.fueleconomy.gov, an informative site from the U.S. Department of Energy.

100,000 square feet

100,000 square feet, that's one big building! You're always welcome to ask one of us for help in locating things however, and we also have floor maps of the library online.

Memorial Day Weekend

We are open Saturday, 5/24, but will be closed Sunday and Monday, 5/25-26, in honor of Memorial Day. You may view our hours here.

Pictured here are soldiers at Ft. Benning putting flags on graves, Memorial Day 1995. The photo is from our AP multimedia database.

Office 2007

New PC owners typically have Office 2007. Word, Excel and so on in 2007 look and work quite differently than in previous versions. However, you can open files created in 2007 on our campus lab PCs, which have a converter software installed. You can install it on your own office PC (or ask the IT helpdesk staff to do so at x5151.) The Microsoft converter is available here.

If you're using Office 2007 and want to make sure your file will be usable by others who may not have 2007, resave the file as a different document type, for example in Word 2007 save it as a .rtf (rich text format) file.

Call the IT HelpDesk at 395-5151 for more help with this. All campus labs will have Office 2007 on them for this coming fall semester.

Check your library account from any PC

If you click on "My Account" in our catalog site, you can see a list of all the books and other items you have out. You can also renew items from that screen.

Get email alerts about articles!

It's always nice to get a heads up on something of interest to you, isn't it? You can get emails alerting you about articles in your areas of interest from several different databases we have. The biggest one probably is Ingenta, which covers over 30,000 different publications. ScienceDirect has such a service too, as does HighWire Press.

With each of them you simply need to register (it's free) then set up your alert to search for those subjects you are interested in.

Summer Hours

If you are going to be around this summer, please note that we are closed this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, for Commencement Weekend. On Monday, 5/19, we will reopen for our summer hours.

Mac printing

On one of our Macs? Want to print? Like the saying has it, "when all else fails follow directions!" ;-) There are directions taped to the table top by each Mac. The main thing is that after you do file print, you need to go to the Mac's desktop and click on the printing authentication button, where you check the box next to your print job/s, then enter your user name and password.

After commencement...

Congratulations to all our 2008 graduates! This blog would like to offer a bit of advice, if we may; even though you are done with school, you may still at times find yourself needing information. Some of that information you will be able to get from free web sites, but there are other sources available to you too.

All New Yorkers for example are able to access a very good article database site offered by the state library, the NY Online Virtual Electronic Library. Don't forget your local public library system either! Some city libraries have as many or more books as many college libraries, and if you use a smaller public library they can get you books from other sites.

Library Hours

We are open our regular hours right through the end of next week. Click here to see the schedule. Good luck on those finals!

Typewriter anyone?

Occasionally people still need to use a typewriter to fill out forms and so forth, and the library does have one. Not the one in the picture, that's a classic early 1900s Underwood, but a somewhat more recent electric typewriter. You can find it on the main floor by the reference desk. The picture is from myTypwriter.com, an interesting site that both sells antique typewriters and presents a little of their history.

The first commercial typewriters were made here in New York, by Remingtion, in 1874!

Gas prices

Have you noticed the current high gas prices? Heh heh, who hasn't?! There's lots of great articles on the subject of gas prices in the databases we have - I would recommend Academic Search and Business Source Premier in particular. Both are available at our Article/Databases page.

An excellent government statistical source is the Energy Information Administration's petroleum data page. There's everything there from weekly supply estimates to spot prices, crude oil production and more!

Kiefer Room open!!!

That PC lab on the ground floor, the Kiefer Room, is back open! It's a little rough from the construction, but there are working PCs and a printer :-)

To get downstairs take the center staircase from the main floor and follow along the hall.

The restrooms downstairs are still closed due to construction.

Thanks for your patience!

International Statistics

Interested in international statistics at all? Need general stats for countries, or more specific stats, such as health expenditure, balance of payments etc.? One resource is OECD.Stat (from the UN's Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.) Try it, it's a wonderful, and free, resource.