Subject Headings for Special Collections

Below are the subject headings associated with our different special collections. You should be able to search these by subject to pull up a full listing of the materials in each location.

ROBESON

Paul Robeson Institute for Ethics, Leadership, and Social Justice Collection.

-- all titles should also has the following subject heading:

Robeson, Paul, 1898-1976.

-- media will also have one of the following local fields depending on the format:

RVCC DVD Collection.

RVCC Videocassette Collection.

RVCC Compact Disc Collection.



HIRSCH

Hirsch Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection.

--media will also have one of the following local fields depending on the format:

RVCC Compact Disk Collection.

RVCC DVD Collection.

Hirsch Audiocassette Collection.

CD-ROM

RVCC Transparency Collection.

RVCC Videocassette Collection.



ESL

RVCC ESL Collection.

--all titles should also has the following subject heading:

English language -- Study and teaching -- Foreign speakers.

--media titles should also have:

RVCC ESL Audiobook Collection.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Reference help for nursing students.

I have created a research guide for helping nursing students. The guide is unlisted so it is not accessible through the 'Research Guides' tab, or in any other public way. The link is: http://library.raritanval.edu/sp/subjects/guide.php?subject=reffornurses and I will email this out to all reference librarians as well.

I've organized the guide by semester and class along with the requirements for resources, the assignments, typical topics that students choose, and faculty who usually teach the class in case you need to get in touch with them.

Students usually struggle with APA formatting and MS Word which I offer to help with  and give them a once over on their papers closer to the due date. You do not have to do this if you don't want to.

The big assignments for fall are for Nursing of Adults II (QSEN group project paper) and Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing (research critique paper). I have sample papers for these classes which I will have at the reference desk. They are NOT to leave the ref desk under any circumstances and students may not photocopy any of the sample papers. They can write ideas down when consulting them, but that is all. The sample papers are numbered- there are 3 sample papers for Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing, and there are 5. Make sure all sample papers are back in the 'Nursing' binder.

Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!
-Alyssa

Students changing passwords

It seems like everyone's password is expiring lately and many are vexed trying to set up a new one. This may not be sound privacy policy, but I advise the frustrated ones to use their first initial capitalized, their last initial lowercase, and a 6 digit date they will remember (but not their birthday). They seem to be able to change it on the first try after those instructions.

As a reminder, the parameters for the password are

• 8 digits long
• at least 1 capital letter
• at least 1 number
• cannot have their name in it
• cannot be their previous two passwords

Personally, I keep a rotation of 3 passwords that I just keep going through...

New url for Print Release

http://printsrv:9191 will display all print jobs for all printers in the library (Updated May 2011)

Screencasting for Virtual Reference

I've posted about Screenjelly.com before, and I just had the chance to use it for an email reference questions. Screenjelly.com is a super low-end screencasting website that allows you to quickly record 3 minutes of screen activity. It is not fancy or editable, but is great for a quick and dirty how-to screencast. I created this one to show a student how to access JSTOR and Project Muse to find articles. Her email said she was using "databases" but only finding books, so it sounded to me like she was confusing the catalog with the databases. This quick video helped demonstrate where she was going wrong. You do have to create an account to grab a link for the video, but it's free and easy.

RVCC Financial Aid Code

The code for RVCC is 007731.

http://www.raritanval.edu/studentserv/finaid/faq.html

Students with off-campus database problems

If a students contacts you that he/she cannot log in to the databases from off-campus, please provide the following response:

I can give you a temporary password to use today. It will allow you to access the databases until 2am. However, you should make sure that your G# and password are working to log in to Lion's Den. If you can log in to Lion's Den but not the library databases, you should contact the MIS helpdesk, helpdesk@raritanval.edu or 908-526-1200 ext. 4357 and let them know about the problem. Unfortunately the library has no control over password issues.

If you are unable to log in to Lion's Den, you will probably need to go to the MIS helpdesk in person with your college ID card to have your password reset.

For today, you can use the temporary log in below:
Username: ezproxyguest
Password: password from the daily email in reference inbox

Make sure you are giving students the password from the EZPROXYGUEST email, not the libguest or libclass email.

Screenjelly

Screenjelly is screencasting software that does not require any download. You simply go to the website (http://www.screenjelly.com), click the Record button, and you will have 3 minutes to record the action on your screen with voice. This could be good for very short, informal demonstrations because the recording will include you having to switch windows away from and back to the Screenjelly website. But a library is giving a poster session at ALA on how they use it to quickly and visually answer chat and email reference questions, which sounds like a great idea. Instead of describing to students the steps for ILL, for example, you could quickly record the steps on your screen and send the video. Check out the site and watch the Demo.

CHOICE Websites

CHOICE frequently reviews websites, many of which are freely accessible. I thought I'd share a batch of recent ones.

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
"provides hourly updates on business ethics and human rights news and reports" for over 4000 companies worldwide.

Leight Hunt Online: The Letters
"electronic access to...surviving correspondence of the British Romantic poet" in facsimile images. Uses OCLC's CONTENTdm as its platform.

International Children's Digital Library: A Library for the World's Children
"an international collection that...appeal[s] to children ages 3-13 (all over the world) and...provide[s] quality literature...Contains more than 10,000 digitized children's books in 54 languages."

The Torture Archive
"provides access to over 83,000 pages (with more materials to be added) of primary documents concerning the detention and interrogation of individuals by the US government."

English Short Title Catalogue
"designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473 to 1800." (Sounds like Worldcat with a Brit-centric spin)

The Federal Reserve Board: Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions
The Beige Book from the Federal Reserve, online. Great for "undergraduate students seeking up-to-date, easily digestible commentary on the economy."

William Faulkner on the Web
"biography, Yoknapatawpha locale, synopses, annotated character listings, critical resources, and links to other important Web sources...student friendly site even offers MLA citation models for each of its pages."

Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence
"Their goal is to craft an academically viable, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia while also creating an important base of knowledge for the world community on this...topic."

Tutorialized: Photoshop Tutorials and Flash Tutorials
"over 3,000 Flash tutorials and over 12,000 Photoshop tutorials, along with hundreds of lessons covering other graphics software as well."

JSTOR for Nursing Articles

Thanks to Nan for this:

While fielding some nursing assignments today, I found the most relevant articles were in what I consider an unlikely place -- JSTOR! You may want to add this to your battery of "viable alternatives" if you have exhausted all the traditional sources...Nan

Find your legislator assignment

I get this assignment at the reference desk every semester, and have already had one ambitious student asking how to find the information. Perhaps a throwback assignment to when it was necessary to use reference books for this, but the assignment is simply for the student to find the state senators and assemblymen and federal senators and representatives for their hometown. Although this information is easily found online (easily, maybe only for librarians??), students seem to have a lot of questions about how to find it!!

I've put together this webpage with links to get them started on their search. Although the right Google search will take them directly to the information they need, I've included links to the homepages so that they have to do a teeny bit of searching and website evaluation to get the answers. Feel free to give the tiny URL out to students if they will find it useful.

https://sites.google.com/site/dempseyrvcc/all-assignments/find-your-senator--congressmen

http://tinyurl.com/njlegislator

Lion's Mail (i.e. RVCC Gmail)

Information about how to set up an account and FAQ's regarding the new Lion's Mail system are available at the links below:

http://www2.raritanval.edu/How_to_logon_to_RVCC_Lion_Mail.pdf

http://www2.raritanval.edu/RVCC_Lion_Mail_Email_System_FAQs.pdf

Faculty and staff will still use Outlook as their primary RVCC email account, but will also have Lion's Mail accounts if you wish to set one up.

Students will only be using Lion's Mail, which will probably generate lots of reference questions at the beginning of the spring semester! As more information comes out that might be pertinent to our work there, I will post it here on the blog.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Journals

From an email from Julie on Nov. 20, 2009:

Students enrolled in a math course have been instructed to come to the Library and look for articles in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics journals. Those journals are:

• Teaching Children Mathematics (available in Proquest 1997-2003)
• Mathematics Teacher (available in Proquest 1992-2003)
• Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (available in Proquest and JSTOR 1970-2003)
• On Math (not available)
• Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School (Available in print at the Circulation Desk)

Using WEST key numbers

A student asked how to look up a legal topic using a West Key Number and I realized I didn't know how! I found this great, simple explanation of the West Key Number System and how to understand/use it. West Key Number System

If you're not familiar with it already, you'll recognize a key number by the little symbol of a key that appears before a number.

There's also a Wikipedia entry about the West American Digest System, which is what the Topic and Key Numbers refer to.

Time's 50 Best Websites of 2009

Some you know, some you might not, but an interesting list.

50 Best Websites

Ordering Official Transcripts

This message was posted to Lion's Den on 7/21/09, in case you missed it:

Summer visiting students who wish to obtain an official transcript to be sent to their home College must place an order from the RVCC home page.Click the drop down arrow marked Quik Links and scroll to TRANSCRIPTS. Follow the instructions listed on the link.

Using tags for Reference

Using web-based tags has made organizing websites I like SO much easier! I've been using Delicious, but there are a number of other tagging sites available. Here's a fun video on how tagging - also known as social bookmarking - works:



Nan and I have been discussing creating a Delicious account for Reference, where we can all access a number of bookmarks that might be useful. Currently there are many bookmarks saved in Internet Explorer and Mozilla on the Reference computer, but as the video points out, these bookmarks are only available on THAT computer. Tagging them with a service like Delicious makes them accessible from anywhere. There are further uses for these bookmarks as well, like incorporating links to them in Research Guides or other places on our website.

The main drawback to social bookmarking is that your bookmarks are saved elsewhere, so you are dependent on that service for retrieving them. In January of this year, tagging site Ma.gnolia lost all of its users data. Oops.

Technorati is the other most popular tagging site. According to Wikipedia, Faves "has a wider range of functionality that encourages interaction with 'friends' in rating the content of linked webpages." This might be more group friendly and worth considering for something like Reference tags.

Diigo allows you to also highlight parts of a webpage and attach sticky notes! I'm going to have to try this one out.

Leave comments and let me know if you prefer a particular service or have other thoughts on creating common tags for Reference-related websites. Oh, and the other great thing is we can assign as many tags as we want to a site. So if I would call something "instruction" and Nan would call it "infolit", we give the site both tags and then can both access it intuitively. No more need to be mindreaders!

Useful websites in our catalog

Did you know you can access a lot of useful reference websites directly from our catalog? Bob provided me with the following list of reference sources whose websites are available from our catalog. Thanks Bob!

United States Senate
US Courts: The Federal Judiciary
Basic Facts about Trademarks
The World Factbook
United States Code
The White House
United States House of Representatives
Vital Statistics of the United States - we discarded the print and will now rely on the electronic version for this reference!
The Library of Congress
Dictionary of Occupational Titles Index
Agricultural Statistics Database
Digest of Education Statistics
Constitution
Official Congressional Directory
National Center for Health Statistics
Reports of the Surgeon General
Where to write for vital records
National Transportation Statistics
Bureau of Labor Statistics
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
MedlinePlus
USA.gov
US Securities and Exchange Commission
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
The Consumer Action Website: Federal Citizen Information Center
GPO Access - a service of the US Government Printing Office
Consumer.gov - your resource for consumer information from the federal government
Recalls.gov - your online resource for recalls
Travel.state.gov
Federal Reserve Bulletin
The Federal Register
MapMachine

-Megan