Library News

Reserve a Study Room or DMC Workstation in Snell Online, & How!

Note: The information on this post is out of date. Please visit our Rooms and Spaces page for the most current information on room booking in Snell Library.

New CoLab study rooms on Snell Library's level 1

There are 20 brand new CoLab group study rooms on the first floor of Snell Library, and now a brand new reservation system to go along with them! 

Reserve a Group Study Room in Snell Library

First of all, to access NUSSO, the new, online self-service reservation system, log in with your myNEU credentials at https://nuevents.neu.edu/ and follow the directions on the page in order to reserve the room of your choice. The link is also available under the “Self-service” tab on myNEU. You can follow the instructions in the system to make a reservation for you and your group, or stop by the first floor Help & Information desk to get help using the system.

The fine print:

  • Group Study Rooms can be used for group study only.
  • Group Study Rooms can be reserved only by students: undergraduate or graduate.
  • Group Study Rooms can be reserved for up to three hours at a time.
  • A student may have only one reservation at a time.
  • Reservations can be made up to two weeks in advance.
  • These rooms are only bookable during the library’s regular service hours, meaning that during overnight study they will be first-come first-served.

Have any questions about reserving these rooms? Visit the Help & Information desk on the first floor, call 617-373-8778, or email circulation@neu.edu.

Snell Library Recording Studios (temporarily located in CoLabs E & F) are available through the new system, as well. When you put in your request, library staff will follow up after you make your reservation to confirm and talk through any training or equipment questions you might have.

Reserve a Digital Media Commons Workstation

This is new: Digital Media Commons Workstations can now be reserved. These computers, Macs and PCs, on the second floor of Snell Library, are intended to be used for media creation and project work. For standard computer use, about 200 additional Mac and PC computers are available in the first floor InfoCommons on a first-come, first-served, basis.

The fine print:

  • DMC Workstations can be reserved by students: graduate or undergraduate.
  • DMC Workstations can be reserved for up to 90 minutes and students may have three reservations at a time.
  • These reservations can be made up to two weeks in advance.

Have any questions about reserving the workstations? Visit the second floor DMC information desk, call 617-373-2465, or ask online at dmc.northeastern.edu/content/contact-us

 

Snell Library Seminar & Presentation Spaces

Using the same NUSSO reservation system, Snell Library Seminar & Presentation Spaces are available by request for faculty and staff to use as a special lecture, seminar, or other presentation space. These spaces include the 90 Snell Library seminar room and the two Digital Media Commons presentation areas: DMC Circle-1 (white), and DMC Circle-2 (blue). These spaces may not be reserved for use as standard classroom or group study space. More information on these spaces and the reservation process is available on the library’s web site.

Have any questions about reserving this space? Visit the Help & Information desk on the first floor, call 617-373-8778, or email circulation@neu.edu.

 

Keep up with Current Contents

If you’re actively involved in research, you’re probably on dozens of email lists from publishers and scholarly societies, and maybe you’re even following them on Twitter, or with an RSS feed reader. Well here’s a way to consolidate your alerts to make things a little easier to manage and to reduce the amount of mailbox clutter you receive: Current Contents Connect (Thomson Reuters/Web of Knowledge). With Current Contents Connect, you can
  • Browse tables of contents of all your favorite scholarly publications within a single web site;
  • Subscribe to tables of contents of your favorite journals to receive an update when new issues are published;
  • Set up an alert based on a topic or keyword;
  • Find that hot new article your colleague told you would be really interesting to your research;
  • Link directly from an item in the Table of Contents to the NU library’s subscription, or to request a PDF via interlibrary loan;
  • Email the article author directly to request a reprint or ask questions; and
  • Save the citation to Endnote, Refworks, or Zotero.
Citation tracking is a key strength of the Web of Knowledge family of databases. This means the following advanced features are also available:
  • View a list of all the references the author of the new article has cited (and if they cited you, of course!);
  • Subscribe to an RSS feed to be alerted every time this new article is cited by someone else; or
  • View a citation map that shows links from one journal article to another (see below).
Citation map for Ionescu's Dialectic in Plato's Sophist (2013)

Citation map for Ionescu's Dialectic in Plato's Sophist (2013) (click to enlarge).

          Note also that we have moved away from our old E-journal Finder, so if you have been receiving alerts from that system (in the form of emails from TDnet/Teldan), those alerts will end sometime this fall. Current Contents Connect is the perfect substitute going forward.

Digital Media Design Studio Closing August 21st

The Library’s Digital Media Design Studio (DMDS) closes its doors on August 21st. Beginning on August 26th, most of the Studio’s services will be distributed elsewhere in the library, while construction of an innovative landscape of improved facilities and services gets underway. Here is how we are addressing key services:
  • Basic audio and video recording rooms will be temporarily available on the first floor in while construction for an improved suite of studios are built for spring term. Reservations to use the temporary studios will be available through a new booking system.
  • Multimedia workstations with a full suite of software are available in the Digital Media Commons.
  • Media equipment, such as video and audio recorders, will be available for check-out from the new first floor Help & Information Desk.
  • Instructional sessions, workshops and support for multimedia projects will continue to be available to you and your students, either in your classroom or library location, as appropriate. Learn more about instruction here.
  • We will assist you with media reformatting, duplication and digitization requests, in partnership with Terry Beadle of Academic Technology Services.
  • Unfortunately, we will not be able to assist with off-air recording requests during the fall.
Staff offices are also changing in September. Temporarily, Thomas Bary and Jonathan Iannone will reside in 260 SL, adjacent to the 2d floor Digital Media Commons (DMC). Library and Information Services student staff will continue to provide a wide range of media and printing services from the DMC Information desk. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns. Let’s discuss how we can work together to meet your research and curricular needs in the coming school year. Debra Mandel   Associate Dean (Acting), User Services 320 Snell Library (617) 373-4902 d.mandel@neu.edu

Scholar OneSearch Quick Tip: Search the Library Catalog

Now that Scholar OneSearch is live, we want to help you get the most out of this research tool! This is our next installment in a series of Scholar OneSearch Quick Tips. Today’s tip: searching the library catalog. The default option in Scholar OneSearch lets you search beyond Northeastern University Library holdings and includes articles from a variety of journals, because the tool is meant to help people quickly discover all kinds of information in different formats. This is the “Library Catalogs + Articles” choice that is already selected when you first start to search. But sometimes you just need to know if the NU Libraries (Snell, Law, African-American Institute) have a specific book, video, or journal, and you don’t want all that extra stuff. That’s where you want to click the area marked above to select a different option. Choose “Library Catalogs” instead. You can do this on our library home page (shown above) or in the Scholar OneSearch environment: Now when you do a search, two things will be different:
  1. No articles will be included in your results, and
  2. It will only show you books, e-books, videos, journals, etc. that the NU Libraries own or have access to.
Here I have selected “Library Catalogs” and am about to do a search on “language acquisition”: Here’s the top of my results list. I got 915 items. Notice that the items shown are a journal and a couple of books, and also that on the left-hand side under Material Type I can select just Books, or just Video and Audio, or whichever I choose, but that Articles is not one of the choices. The same search as above, under the “Library Catalogs + Articles” selection, gives over 420,000 results (!!!), most of them articles. So if you don’t want articles to overwhelm the other items, it pays to change the selection of where to search. You may also want to choose the “Library Catalogs” option when you have a specific item in mind and you want to see if the library has it. For example, let’s look for the book Life of Pi. First I’ll look using the default “Library Catalogs + Articles” option: This search brought back over 369,000 results! And the first 3 items I can see are two articles and a video. It’s not obvious from here if we have the book or not. Now let’s try it with “Library Catalogs” selected: Much better! Only 28 results, first of all, and the first two are the movie and the book, so I can see right away that we own the novel (although it was checked out at the time of writing this post). So, you can see that changing the selection to “Library Catalogs” can help make a much narrower target for your searches. If you were familiar with our old library catalog, NUCat, you’ll see that the “Library Catalogs” option mimics the types of results you would get from NUCat. What Scholar OneSearch tips would you like to learn about? Let us know! Related information:

Four Great Reasons to Sign In to Scholar OneSearch

You’ve tried the new search box on the library web page and it seems just fine. But did you know that you can get even more out of it when you sign in? Sign In to Scholar OneSearch   If you’re a current NU student, faculty, or staff member, here are 4 great reasons to sign in to Scholar OneSearch every time you use it: 1. If you sign in, you get more high-quality search results. This is because the NU Libraries subscribe to some great scholarly content that will display ONLY if you show you’re affiliated with the university. Web of Science (the Thomson Reuters citation indexes), ArtSTOR, GeoRef (American Geological Institute), and MLA Bibliography (Modern Language Association) have key scholarly citations that you will only see if you sign in with your myNEU credentials. 2. If you sign in, you can make requests. Some full text and book requesting options are only available to NU affiliates. Signing in lets you see all the options available to you. 3. If you sign in, you can save your work. Whether it’s individual citations, or whole batches of results, you can make folders for different projects, and even save searches to update and run again at a later date. Instead of having to remember another password, this service is based on the same credentials you use for myNEU. 4. If you sign in, you can see your account information. You can view and renew the items you have checked out from the library, and see the requests you have made and waiting lists you are on. And here’s another tip:

Think about connecting directly to Scholar OneSearch the next time you’re in myNEU. Just go to the “Services and Links” tab in myNEU (or use the library tab, if you’re a faculty/staff member), and look under “Useful Links”. Because Scholar OneSearch recognizes your NU identity, you will automatically be signed in. Give it a try, and let us know if you think it’s worthwhile!