March Madness at Snell!

March Madness: Helpful Hints for a Successful Semester Spring break has come and gone and now students are gearing up for their own March Madness—that final stretch of the semester when the weeks race by and then, BAM, papers are due and final exams have arrived. Ready or not, it’s time to start getting research together for whatever projects you may have and Snell Library is here to help you find what you need. Check out the hints below to learn how Snell can help you get the wheels in motion: Ask a Librarian! Seriously—they know their stuff about digging up the research you need and not to brag, but I think our staff here at Snell is pretty exceptional. And really easy to get in touch with! You can meet them at the reference desk on the library’s second floor or you can email, text, and chat with librarians online. Group projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for many students. The first floor (especially the Cyber Café) is a great place to meet up and divvy up assignments. You can also book a group study room right on the library website. Finding Books and Articles. Sometimes that obscure book about realist perspective on the development of the dessert banana just isn’t available here on campus. Fortunately, interlibrary loan can help you get the things you need. You can also apply for a Boston Library Consortium card if you want to go raid BU’s bookshelves yourself. But remember, the card takes up to a day to process and it can take a little time for an article to be scanned and uploaded for you from another library. Start thinking about the research you need now so you can bang out that paper come April. Collecting citations. Creating a bibliography has never been easier. Northeastern provides a subscription to EndNote (ideal for grad students) and Refworks.com (perfect for undergraduates and researchers looking to share sources). Check out this post by Amanda to get started. Wireless Printing. You’ve burned the midnight oil, your paper is done, and you’re ready to print. Thanks to new software that you can download from myneu.com, you can send documents straight to the library’s printers from your own laptop. This can be especially helpful when you’re printing out a paper five minutes before it’s due. Not that any of us students do that… Phew! Well, I hope this list helps you out. Take it easy on those late night cups of coffee and stay tuned to Snippets for more hints on how to take advantage of everything our libraries have to offer. Good luck with the rest of your spring semester!

Announcing BioMedCentral Institutional Membership

The Northeastern University Libraries are pleased to announce a new institutional membership in BioMedCentral, effective March 1, 2011. Northeastern joins over 350 institutions worldwide who support BioMedCentral, an online publisher with a pioneering policy of providing free and open access to the peer-reviewed research papers they publish. All research articles published in BioMedCentral’s 213 biomedical and clinical journals are freely and universally accessible online with no barriers to access. And authors keep the copyright to their articles, allowing them to freely reuse and redistribute their research in print and online. Northeastern’s institutional membership helps sustain this publishing model through direct support of BioMedCentral as well as providing to its affiliated authors a 15% discount on the article processing fee paid upon acceptance of their submitted articles. As well as securing Open Access to research, publishing in BioMedCentral’s journals brings many additional benefits, including: • Immediate publication upon acceptance • No extra charge for extensive datasets, comprehensive methods, color figures, and video footage • The ability to track how many people have viewed a paper on BioMedCentral’s website • A large number of journals to choose from, covering all subjects in biology and medicine with different levels of selectivity For more information about BioMedCentral, visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/. For more information about Northeastern’s BioMedCentral membership and how it can benefit you, please contact me at h.corbett@neu.edu.

New: RefWorks! Collect Citations and Auto-Format Bibliographies

Now you can automatically create bibliographies in three simple steps! After creating an account on the RefWorks website, collect all your research citations in one place, and then use the RefWorks program to automatically create citations and format bibliographies in your papers. You can access your RefWorks account from any computer connected to the internet, and you can even keep your RefWorks account as an alumnus. (1) Start by making an account on the RefWorks website. (2) Next, as you do research, use library database features or the RefWorks browser plugin to automatically send citations to your RefWorks account. (3) Finally, use the RefWorks Microsoft Word plugin to create citations and bibliographies for your paper. (Mac Pages users can use a slightly different process outlined here.) To learn more about using the program, see the RefWorks company’s series of tutorials here. And don’t forget, Northeastern University also provides a subscription to EndNote. Which one should I use? In general, RefWorks is better for undergraduates and researchers needing to share references, while EndNote has a higher learning curve but more features and is better for graduate students, faculty, and staff involved in deep research projects. For more information, see our in-depth comparison chart. Contact us if you need help with RefWorks or EndNote!

Go Deeper: Delve into African American Studies

This month and all months, we honor the African diaspora and the many contributions of African-Americans. The Northeastern University community is fortunate to have two related experts to help us to learn more about African American history. Kantigi Camara is the Librarian who runs the John D. O’Bryant African-American Institute Library. And Research & Instruction Librarian Christine Oka designed this research guide. She also provides reference assistance and manages a related collection at Snell Library. Additionally, here is a gorgeous website celebrating Black History Month, which was put together by the Library of Congress.

Tech Alert: Elsevier Ejournals, WorldCat Outages This Weekend

Add this to your reasons to get out of Boston and go skiing (or surfing) this weekend: SciVerse, the Elsevier publishing platform that includes Science Direct ejournals and ebooks as well as the Scopus search engine, will be undergoing upgrades this weekend and will be unavailable Saturday, 2/26, from 8am to 8pm, or nearly all day. In addition, WorldCat Local, which allows you to search the catalogs of most United States and some international libraries, will be unavailable Sunday, 2/27 from 1am to 6am.  That’s basically late late overnight Saturday night. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we hope that the enforced hiatus from these two services offers you the opportunity for some rest and relaxation as we head into Spring Break!