Collection News, October - November 2007

• Libraries Go to the Movies
• InfoLinks Updates
• New York Times Archive
• Get Lost in Space

UA Librarians have been busy this year preparing several short videos on library services and databases. Sit back, grab a bowl of popcorn and a soda, and enjoy quick takes on topics such as:

New videos are premiering frequently and we welcome your suggestions on topics for future films. Now playing on our Guides and Tutorials pages.

Tired of scrambling for a piece of scrap paper and pencil so you can hunt down a book in the stacks? Worried about the waste of paper and toner every time you print a record from the catalog? The latest updates to InfoLinks should help you achieve the status of clean, green, researchin' machine as we've added functions to save both the planet and your time:

First, use our new Text Message function to send the title, location, and call number of a book to your cell phone. It's much more convenient than carrying a computer with you into the stacks. Note that, depending on your cell phone plan, charges may apply.

Second, you'll now notice that InfoLinks pages "print friendly" without most images, buttons, and extraneous text.

Not a grate spellor? In keyword searches you will now see suggested terms when your search retrieves few results and spelling alternates can be found.

And, for those of you who just like to have InfoLinks handy no matter what, we have several new options for putting the library catalog right into your search bar. Add InfoLinks as a search option in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 browsers or add InfoLinks to your Google Toolbar. You can grab these features for your computer by visiting our Toolbars and Gadgets page.

The New York Times has recently made a large portion of its archive freely available on the web. Users can now view and search:

The full backfile of more than 13 million articles can be searched for names, places, events, and keywords in the text. Our microfilm copy of the New York Times is at PER MFILM F128.1 .N48. The Times is also available full-text from 1980- on Lexis Nexis Academic.

NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS) allows you to explore the latest research on Earth and beyond to the, er, final frontier. The service is updated daily and contains more than 4 million abstracts for publications in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, physics, and geophysics. Many citations include links to full-text preprints from the arXive.org database. Users can set up daily or weekly alerts on topics of interest or export records to the RefWorks bibliographic management software. So put on your spacesuit and start exploring today.