Staying Current

How do you stay current with the literature in your field of study or research?  If you find this a challenging prospect, our librarians have the tools to help.

Staying up-to-date with what is happening in your area of research may take several forms.  Are you interested in having browsing access to the most current volume of a favorite journal or magazine?  Or, would you prefer to receive an email message or RSS feed to newly-published research on a topic of interest?  In similar fashion, would you like to know when your published article is cited by other researchers?  Or, do your enjoy reading blogs and current news from News sites and the popular press?

If any and all of these apply to the information you would like to retrieve and your workflow (more on that question of management, below), note that there are open Web resources and library-licensed tools that can serve this process of keeping current.  A selection of these tools and assists are listed, below, by approach or form.

Table of Contents (your favorite or essential journals)

• Browzine (see our previous post)
• Journal TOCs (free, scholarly journal TOCs)
• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Publisher Websites (some offer free TOCs)

Search and Citation Alerts (your area of research interest or by publication)

• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Google Scholar Alerts (via email with Google Account--either to "My Citations" or to a topic search)
• Google Book Alerts (an option as from the Result Type menu)

Blogs, News Media, Website Updates

• Subscribe to feeds using feed readers or Web browser.

Library Guides, Liaisons and Workshops
You do not need to do this alone.  Speak to your librarians for assistance and customization.  Attend a drop-in workshop or do-it-yourself by reading our Web guides.

• Research Guide to Keeping Current in the Literature
• MyUW, Research Tab (Create a customized, browsing access list of your "Favorite Library E-Resources")

Managing the Information you Retrieve
Campus Libraries provide support for several software products for managing your citations and formatting your reference list.  Evaluate these tools and attend a drop-in workshop to explore their features.  The beauty of these tools is that they can communicate well with library-licensed databases making it relatively easy and efficient to move records from database to manager. 

Have any tips and resources to share?  If so, please reply to this post.

Book Discovery Tools

One of the interesting and sometimes challenging aspects of our work in libraries is to match a library user with the texts that he or she will most want to read, be it for research or entertainment.

If you intend to also read for fun this summer, chat with us, check out our Pinterest Boards, or try some of the tools, below. Each one enables you to explore a genre or factor a recommendation based upon authors or books you already enjoy.

Fiction Connection

Novelry (New! Sign up for its July launch)

Which Book?

Goodreads and Shelfari (for those who appreciate the added social networking)

Locate available copies of books on campus or within the UW-System by using the library catalog and its UW System search feature. The Madison Public Library, as part of the South Central Library System, is also an amazing resource for satisfying popular reading interests--search its catalog to locate items of interest. 

And, if you haven’t yet discovered it, Steenbock Library hosts its very own "Little Free Library" in which you can also freely exchange popular reading materials.

Remember the Milk

If you can appreciate a fun, yet useful, web application, enhanced by dairy reference and whimsical cow graphic, then “Remember the Milk” is for you.

This free application enables you to list your necessary tasks, set priorities and email reminders, and establish dates for when you anticipate (or need) to complete your tasks.

Once you have remembered to use this application, you will not be forgetting to pick up that quart on the way home!

43 Things, Online Goal Setting

I generally like to start the New Year by revisiting my to-do lists. While many of mine take the form of assorted, recycled slips of paper attached to the office monitor or slipped into the portable calendar, there is a nifty (and free) online application suitable for making those to-dos a bit more social—that is, to record and to share them in a venue where you can draw inspiration from and cheer on others as you and they tick off the items from your respective lists. If you are similarly given to this reflection and would like to incorporate this process into your online work-flow, check out the 43 Things site.

Wishing you a happy and productive New Year!

Culture of Sharing Forum (April 12)

UW-Madison Libraries are sponsoring a student forum on issues related to Web technologies, copyright, and open access--essentially, how and why it all matters. Come hear keynote speaker Nelson Pavlosky, activist with Students for Free Culture, and participate in breakout sessions.

Breakout sessions include:

• Remixes and mash-ups: YouTube, sampling and legal repurposing
• Peer-to-peer file sharing: What CAN you do?
• Sharing your work: including open access publishing options
• Open source: sharing programming solutions
• Digital rights management: DRM in CDs, DVDs, iTunes and more

Closing session will be facilitated by Gavin Baker, co-founder of Florida Free Culture.

The forum will be held, Saturday, April 12 (3:00-6:00 PM) at the Memorial Union.

For more information, visit the forum site:

Culture of Sharing: P2P, YouTube, Open Access, Open Source, Copyright, and Why it Matters to You!

This should be a fun and interesting event--hope you can make it!

Create your Own Search Engine (Rollyo)

Have you ever desired your own search engine crafted to search just the sites you know, like and trust? If so, then give Rollyo a go. With Rollyo, you can easily create a searchroll of favorite Web sites. Name your searchroll and enter up to 25 sites to search (according to the FAQ, the most effective searchrolls search 5-15 sites).

If you just use the “Create Searchroll” application, the customized search engine will only exist on your computer. When you register and create your own login, your searchrolls will be credited to you and be made publicly-available. Creating your own login also enables you to save searchrolls to a personal profile page and to access your searchrolls from any computer.

Note: Rollyo searches can only search from the entire site or site root level; searches cannot be limited to a particular page or section of a site (example from Rollyo FAQ: cnn.com but not cnn.com/politics)

LibraryThing

What’s on your bookshelf? With LibraryThing, social networking meets your personal library. LibraryThing is a free (up to 200 titles) cataloguing application that enables you to document the contents of your personal library (drawing bibliographic information from libraries and booksellers) and as a social networking space, to browse the personal libraries of those who may have titles in common or an enthusiasm for particular genres of literature.

You can rate the books in your personal library, write reviews and share book recommendations with other participants in group forums.

Take the tour to learn more.

ScreenHunter and Jing: Free Apps for Screen and Video Capture

ScreenHunter offers free screen capture software to capture any part of a screen image, then print and edit the screenshot with annotations. Screenhunter also works well with Web capture and scanning. ScreenHunter can capture a full screen, an active window or a specific rectangular area of your choice. You can capture virtually anything on your computer screen. ScreenHunter can be used for group projects, research papers, presentations etc. It can be downloaded for free here (http://wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter.htm).

After an image is captured it automatically saves them in BMP or JPEG formats. It also can save captures to the clipboard to be copied to other programs, such as Word. ScreenHunter is simple to use because of a selectable hot-key capture which allows users to capture images at any point with the push of a button (F6).

Similar to ScreenHunter is the Jing Project. Jing is also currently a free program but it allows users to instantly generate video with audio from screen captures on your computer to share anywhere. Jing works on a Mac or PC and is ideal for step-by-step instruction. If your grandma is having technical trouble with her computer, use Jing to record the necessary steps to a solution. You can save the video clip with audio and add it as an attachment in an email to her—a convenient service for both of you. Jing also has the option of uploading your video to Screencast.com. After you add your file to Screencast.com simply send the link and your video can be viewed directly on the Website with no additional download required.

Jing Project, Frequently Asked Questions

Example Jing video: Using the Ethnic Newswatch Database to Retrieve a Full-Text Article

With thanks to intern, JM for this blog post.