USF Lakeland Library Services

Today, Friday March 31st, I will be absent from the campus all day.

ScienceDirect will be unavailable on Sunday, April 2nd from approximately 2:00 AM EST until 9:00 AM EDT (07:00 - 13:00 GMT) because of the beginning of US daylight savings time.

The USF Libraries try their best to provide its users with the most electronic journals possible. But, in some case, it is necessary to access a print journal.

In a past entry, I explained how to get journal articles that are not available in Lakeland or not owned by any of the USF Libraries through ILLiad, our interlibrary loan (ill) system. If you have used the article databases, you have surely used the SFX button, appearing with each of your search results. SFX gives you a list of options to access the content of the article, including a link to the electronic full-text if available.

Now, those two systems work together to make it easier for you to make a interlibrary loan request. If the full-text of an article is not available, under the catalog search option, SFX now gives you a link to ILLiad that automatically populates the fields in the ill request with the necessary information.

But, before making the ill request, please make sure you have searched the USF (and the PCC catalog) to verify that the journal is not on the shelves of the PCC/USF Library. An ILLad account is also necessary. And remember that you cannot use ILLiad to request articles in print journals housed at the main Tampa Library.

The Value Line database, which provides investment research on stocks, mutual funds, otions and convertibles, is currently down. The issue is being investigated.

Starting tomorrow, Saturday March 25, the Polk Community College will have its Spring Break. The PCC/USF Library will have reduced hours, like so until Sunday April 2nd:

• Saturday March 25th and April 1st - CLOSED
• Monday-Thursday March 27th - 30th - 12:30 PM to 9:00 PM
• Friday March 31st - 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM

The Open Use Lab will follow these reduced hours in the library. During closing time though, the following instructional labs will be open to act as the Open Use Lab.

• Saturday March 25th and April 1st - Open Use Lab moved to room 1170B (if its available) from 9am to 1pm
• Monday-Thursday March 27th-31st - 12:30 PM to 9:00 PM - Open Use Lab moved to room 1170A from 8am -12:30
• Friday March 30th - 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM - Open Use Lab moved to room 1170A 8-5

On Wednesday, April 5th from 10-11 am, there will be a class on Compendex in room LAC1170B. This class will showcase our new interface for the Compendex database, Engineering Village 2. Students, staff and faculty are all invited to attend.

Today, Wednesday March 22, I will be absent from the campus for meetings.

I’ve become a Safe Zone Ally last Friday; therefore my office will now be a Safe Zone for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning individuals within the University of South Florida community.

It’s baseball’s Spring Training season in Florida these weeks and I hope you’ve been enjoying the Detroit Tigers’ games in Lakeland. If you are interested in baseball research, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has made its index public in February. The Baseball Index (TBI) is a free catalog to baseball literature. It encompasses books, magazine articles, programs, pamphlets, films, recordings, songs, poems, cartoons, advertising, or anything else that may be of interest to the baseball fan or researcher.

As an index, the Baseball Index does not contain the full-text of the sources referenced. But you can use the USF catalog for books and journal titles, or the Citation Linker for articles citations, to see if we have the resource you need. If we don’t have, it may be available through interlibrary loan (ILL).

We have now access to Compendex through a new interface, Engineering Village 2. Compendex is the online version of the Engineering Index, the most important index covering scientific literature in all fields of engineering.

Engineering Village 2 offers three modes of searching, a thesaurus, limits by document and treatment types, results refining, email *and* RSS alerts, direct export of citations to Refworks and even a cool little application that permits easy blogging of search results. Coverage is from 1884 to current; updated weekly. This database doesn’t contain full-text but a link to the full-text is provide when available.

Look for Compendex in MetaLib!