Library News

Inspiring Social Justice Ad Contest

UNITE Northeastern & INSPIRE Social JUSTICE! Ad Contest Create a poster or (2) minute video celebrating Diversity & Inclusion Total of $350 in prizes for the best submission! Submit entries to the Office of Institutional Diversity & Equity in 125 Richards Hall no later than March 29, 2010. Criteria:     Original works of art that: ·        Demonstrate aspects of social justice, diversity and/or inclusion, which may include: disability, nationality, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, age and ancestry. Submissions Must Include: ·        Poster must be submitted on 16×11 sized paper ·        Videos must be 2 minutes in length ·        Must be submitted in both hard copy (as appropriate) and electronic format ·        Open to NU students, faculty and staff.      Sponsored in conjunction with UNITE (Unifying Northeastern Identities Through Education) For more information, check out the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity website, or contact Sharifah Suleiman at s.suleiman@neu.edu. Download the contest flyer here.

You need an outlet!

We’ve seen your emails. We’ve heard you tell us at the Circulation Desk. We’ve read your notes on the suggestion board. We know what you want: OUTLETS!!! So thanks to the Provost’s Office and University Facilities, we are in a whirlwind of wire-pulling and outlet-creation here at Snell Library. Between now and finals, we will be adding several hundred outlets to all the study floors of Snell Library. We’re thrilled to be able to provide what we know everyone who brings a laptop, notebook, phone, camera, and scanner really needs in order to get work done. Power to the people!

Enjoy the quad outlets, coming soon to a table near you!

What Do You Think of the Library? Tell Us and You Could Win a Kindle!

Today we launch our 2010 library quality survey, LibQual! Continuing until April 9, you have the perfect opportunity to share with us your thoughts on the Library by taking the LibQUAL+® survey.   Help us to make the library a better place, physically and online, by taking 5-10 minutes to complete the LibQual survey here. We do this survey every 3 years, and every time it helps us find out how to make our services better for you. There is a lot of information about how the survey works on our LibQual FAQ. This year we also offer great prizes: An Amazon Kindle E-book reader, four $100 gift certificates to the NU Bookstore, and thirty-five $10 gift cards to Dunkin Donuts! Year-round, we listen to your comments and suggestions and try to act on them. A high rate of participation in the LibQUAL+® survey will help us be sure that we are focusing on the concerns and suggestions of a truly representative sample of our graduate and undergraduate students,   faculty, and staff users.  The Library listened to your comments after the 2004 and 2007 survey results and made these specific improvements: extended Library hours; added more tables on the first floor and more attractive study areas like the Hub; simplified and improved the Library website; and subscribed to the Web of Science database. Shortly, we will be adding a substantial number of electrical outlets for laptop users. For more information, please contact Elizabeth Habich at e.habich@neu.edu, 617-373-4924.

Signs of Spring at Snell

Chair

Did you notice? The Adirondack chairs are back on the side porch at Snell Library! I love the spring colors, though it’s still maybe a TAD chilly for me to sit out there…

Everything biology, now in Web of Science

NU researchers already know about Web of Knowledge, the mega-database from the Institute for Scientific Information that’s linked to the Journal Citation Reports. Often used for broad searching and citation tracking, Web of Knowledge through the NU Libraries now goes much deeper with the addition of BIOSIS Previews, the premier journal article database in biology. The NU Libraries have always offered BIOSIS; in fact, it was the very first online service that we ever licensed on the web, back in the palmy 1990’s when home was a haven from library research, and every other database had to be searched on a CD-ROM network on the first floor of Snell Library. Now we are shifting BIOSIS from the Ovid platform to Web of Knowledge. With this change, you can search BIOSIS with numerous other journal citation databases across and beyond the sciences. BIOSIS adds more international coverage to Web of Science, and it includes patents. We hope this will be a real boon for interdisciplinary research. Search “extraterrestrial life” and find scholarship from astronomy journals, journals in meteorology, astrobiology, medical sociology, and philosophy all in the same results set. Indexing goes back to 1969. Try BIOSIS and experience these expanded search results for yourself!