LofT Notes 14 - 8/27/2004

In this Issue:

• Article Finder and Single Search
• Central Digital Repository
• Digital Media Lab in Tibet
• Documentary Newsreels Online
• ENGnetBASE Engineering Electronic Library
• Historical Census Browser
• Reference Instant Messaging
• RefWorks
• Safari Tech Books Online
• Spanish Film Project
  

Article Finder and Single Search

Work continues on Sirsi's Resolver and Single Search. Resolver, redubbed Article Finder, is now linked from a button in over 50 indexing and abstracting services. We continue to see some inconsistencies, and given the volatile nature of the e-journal business, we'll likely go on seeing them for many years, but overall it's working well and getting a good reception. SingleSearch, the federated search tool, was put on a back burner to get Resolver linked widely by the start of classes, but the process of configuration continues. Sirsi will soon deliver a new user interface for both public and staff. The implementation committee has decided that the Rooms content management product is not useful for UVA in its current state. We'll be looking at alternatives and may revisit the Sirsi product after a scheduled major revision next spring.

Central Digital Repository

The first public interface for the Central Digital Repository has now been successfully implemented using Fedora, and limited internal testing is now under way. The test group will be gradually broadened, with a release to the entire Library expected in September, barring any unforeseen implementation issues.

Digital Media Lab in Tibet

Digital Media Lab staff members Will Rourk and Michael Tuite traveled to "the roof of the world" in July and August to support Prof. David Germano’s Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library project. The goals of their trip were twofold: First, they worked at Tibet University where they established a satellite Digital Media Lab facility and trained faculty and students to participate in digital collection development. Second, they worked with THDL collaborators from U. C. Santa Barbara and Williams College to document two of Tibet’s largest monasteries. Tuite and Rourk will present some of the results of their work at a library presentation in September.

Documentary Newsreels Online

This fall the Robertson Media Center will offer online versions of nine documentary videos from the premier documentary distributor, California Newsreel. The videos have been purchased in support of several classes, principally "Africa in Cinema," taught by Professor Kandioura Drame in the Department of French. These titles are in high demand by students of African culture and cinema; online distribution will improve access to this material by the UVA community. This project will be a test case for the Robertson Media Center, allowing us to evaluate the distribution of motion media over campus networks and giving us the opportunity to examine the students' degree of acceptance of this relatively new type of online resource. Responses from both Professor Drame and his students will be gathered at the end of the semester.

ENGnetBASE Engineering Electronic Library

This resource makes available and searchable online the full text of over 220 handbooks and reference texts published by CRC Press, one of the premier publishers of scientific and engineering information. The books included span the entire gamut of engineering disciplines from aerospace to biomedical to chemical to human factors to nanoscience to systems engineering and many others in between. New titles are added on a regular basis. Search results can be reviewed in crude HTML form in order to narrow down desired information and then have it displayed in the form of PDF page images with illustrations and tables included for printing. Searching within tables is also supported. ENGnetBASE will be an invaluable resource for all users in the engineering disciplines, as well as others in related areas including risk analysis, forensics, technology management, communications, statistics, and simulation.

http://www.engnetbase.com/

Historical Census Browser

The Geospatial and Statistical Data Center is developing mapping functionality to compliment the online data delivery of the U.S. Historical Census Browser. After selecting data for a given year and geographic level, users will be able to create online maps of census characteristics that can be overlaid with related geographic layers showing jurisdictional boundaries, roads, and waterways. The maps can be viewed or saved as PDF documents. Still in testing and development, the mapping functionality is currently available only to the UVA community; full release is expected early in 2005. The new tools will be used and evaluated by Ed Ayers and his class "Rise of the Slave South" this fall.

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/

Reference Instant Messaging

On Monday, August 30, 2004, the library will resume offering real-time reference service. Three libraries -- Alderman, SEL, and Fine Arts -- will participate in a pilot program using AOL Instant Messenger (IM) for reference chat. The pilot will run throughout the fall semester, and the initial hours of operation at all locations will be Monday through Friday, 11 AM to 5 PM. This service will supplement our existing reference services. The target audience for reference chat will be patrons -- mostly undergraduate students -- who already use IM as their preferred communication tool.

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/questions.html

RefWorks

The Library and ITC have jointly purchased a site license for UVA of RefWorks, a Web-based bibliographic reference manager similar to EndNote and Reference Manager. A group will be formed to work on publicity and user education, but the program itself is now available to everyone at UVa. If you're coming from a UVA IP address, you will be allowed to create a user account, which you must have in order to search and store references. RefWorks can search Virgo and some other sites directly and can import data from most major databases. The producers are also willing to create import filters for other databases on request. There is now a link in each saved record to our Article Finder and from Article Finder to RefWorks, allowing you to go from a Finder window to open RefWorks and save the reference to your account there.

http://www.refworks.com/

Safari Tech Books Online

This resource makes available and searchable the full-text of over 1,400 books dealing with computers, networking, enterprise computing, operating systems, web page creation, database management, programming and markup languages, graphics, desktop publishing, and many other related IT topics. Books can be searched by keyword, author, title, subject, publisher, and even code fragments. Relevant code can be cut and pasted into other documents and applications, if desired. Publishers in Safari include well-known names such as Addison-Wesley, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Microsoft Press, O'Reilly, Que, and Sams Publishing among others. Books included in the Library's subscription generally are ones published since 2001 and new titles will be added monthly. Safari Tech Books Online has broad appeal to all computer and PC users, whatever their skill level, interests, or task at hand, including users in the humanities and social sciences and in business areas. Users should be sure to log out when finished in order to make sure our simultaneous user limit is not exceeded.

http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/?uicode=virginia

Spanish Film Project

Contemporary film can serve as a very effective tool in foreign language instruction and films from the RMC collection are frequently used for that purpose. Spain, in particular, has a rich cinematic tradition. Part of this tradition, however, is the not infrequent use of sexually explicit scenes that make the films essentially useless (though perhaps more interesting) to high-school Spanish teachers for instructional use. In order to address this problem, Prof. David Gies proposed - successfully - to the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an on-line collection of short digitized clips from Spanish films, each to be accompanied by transcripts, downloadable activities, and a visual dictionary of words and phrases. So, for three weeks in late June and early July, fifteen Spanish language teachers from around Virginia assembled daily in the Digital Media Lab to select and translate clips from Spanish films, create lesson plans and activities, and assemble a database of words, definitions, and images that will comprise an on-line dictionary. The creative energy of the group was quite intense and accounts for the prodigious volume of high quality content that they generated. With another two years of funding in the grant, the Spanish Film Project will grow to be a unique and compelling resource for Virginia’s Spanish teachers.