2010

Springer Books Go "E"

First, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Amira Aaron and I am the new Associate Dean of the Northeastern University Libraries for Scholarly Resources (books, journals, and Library information in all formats). Today I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the 2010 full collection of eBooks from Springer Publishing, one of the top international publishers of scientific, technical, and medical titles. Our set also includes 2005–2009 volumes from the Computer Collection, including the prestigious Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Over 4,000 new eBooks are added to the Springer collections each year. The eBooks can be downloaded by chapter and are fully searchable, even on the book chapter level, and they can be printed out and bookmarked online. The Springer eBooks primarily cover the disciplines of science, engineering, and medicine, but there are also titles in business & economics, humanities, social sciences, law, and mathematics. Individual titles can be found in NuCat. There’s one additional feature of the Springer eBook collection that I wanted to mention. The “MyCopy (Buy a Print Copy)” service allows you to easily order your own personal soft cover edition of Springer eBooks purchased by the Library (back to 2005); they will be immediately printed on demand and shipped to you within a few days. Note that sometimes the “Buy a Print Copy” link doesn’t appear right away for the newest eBooks. So why eBooks? Many of you are no doubt avid consumers of eBooks for your personal reading. Academic libraries are also undergoing a huge transformation to eBooks in many disciplines. We are now able to offer 24/7 access to these books from multiple locations for multiple users. With growing numbers of distance education and online classes, many students no longer come to campus on a regular basis, so electronic books and journals are critical to support teaching and research. Searching across the content of many of these eBook collections is powerful and will help you to discover hidden information on a particular topic. In the Library, we also need to deal with space limitations for print materials and an increased need for study space. Finally, we don’t have to deal with lost or damaged books and you don’t have to worry about fines for late returns. Don’t forget to search the Internet Archive and Google Books for the full text of older books online. In the Internet Archive you’ll find over 1100 pre-1923 Northeastern books that we’ve digitized through the Boston Library Consortium. We hope you enjoy exploring the new Springer collection and we’d love to hear from you about your use of eBooks offered by the libraries. Join us for a Faculty workshop on using Springer eBooks this Friday, October 29th, from 10-11 in Room 90, Snell Library. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me at a.aaron@neu.edu or 617-373-4961. For more information visit our Press Release

Oxford Reference Online: Premium Is Now Available!

Oxford Reference Online: Premium is an online collection consisting of over 200 award-winning and scholarly reference titles from Oxford University Press — and it is now available at NU Libraries. The addition of Oxford Reference Online: Premium to the Library’s online collections is one of numerous, ongoing initiatives being taken by the Library to increase its support for the needs of students and faculty working or studying off campus or enrolled in distance courses. Titles include companion volumes to specific subjects, like the Oxford Companion to the Bible; discipline-specific dictionaries and encyclopedias, for example The Encyclopedia of Mammals; a good number of English and foreign language dictionaries; and grammar and style manuals. These reference works may be searched either individually or as a group in a single, unified search. Titles are arranged either alphabetically or in clear subject categories. Click here to access the online collection. For more information, contact Jamie Dendy at j.dendy@neu.edu. Press Release

Open Access Week: Annals of Environmental Science

OA Week DOAJ The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 5,553 journals produced worldwide that are fully open access. But did you know that one of those journals is produced here at Northeastern University? In 2007, faculty members Geoffrey Davies and Elham Ghabbour began publishing the Annals of Environmental Science, a peer-reviewed, open access international journal for the environmental sciences. It’s now publishing its fourth volume! Some of our faculty authors have chosen to publish their research in open access journals — for example, Biology professor Kim Lewis has been published in the prestigious Public Library of Science journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Genetics. Why not try publishing open-access yourself?

Open Access Week: The Right to Research for Students

OA Week Right to Research CoalitionThe Right to Research Coalition asserts that access to research is a student right. They’re working to redefine the current system of scholarly communication — in which access to published research is limited to those at institutions that can afford to subscribe to expensive journals and databases. The huge expense of traditional subscription-based information is another issue driving the open access movement — why should that information be limited to those who can afford it? And it’s not cheap, either — check out the introductory animation on RRC’s homepage. You might be surprised that a subscription to ONE journal can be equal to or greater than a year’s worth of tuition at Northeastern! (See Sticker Shock: The Price of Library Resources for some price comparisons between journal subscriptions and big-ticket consumer items.) To celebrate Open Access Week, the Right to Research Coalition is presenting a webcast tonight (Thursday, 10/21) at 7:00 pm Eastern time, in conjunction with UC Berkeley. You can find out more about it here: http://www.righttoresearch.org/blog/open-access-week-2010.shtml.

Keith Richards, Aspiring…Librarian?

In his just-released autobiography, Life, Keith Richards apparently confesses that he has always had a passion for collecting books and secretly wanted to be a librarian. In addition to the incongruity, I loved that he went so far as trying to learn to organize his personal collection according to the Dewey Decimal system but gave it up as too much of a hassle.  I suppose it’s a good thing for all concerned that he never came over to the dark side, and stayed in the world of music where he clearly belongs! Even as a child he loved books — here’s a quote via the (London) Times: When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser. If this makes you want to watch/listen to some Stones, Martin Scorsese’s concert film Shine a Light (2008) is on DVD at Snell, along with Gimme Shelter, the film of the Altamont concert in 1969 on VHS for the hard-core fan. The reissue of Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile) is on order, and should be at Snell in a few days. So Keith, how about coming to a “Meet the Author” talk at the library?