Hidden Gems contest alert!
The MacRae Library on the Dal Agricultural Campus is hosting a self-guided library tour and gem hunt.
Find the gems, discover the secret phrase, and enter to win a prize!
The contest runs until October 3; the winner will be notified by email.
Good luck!
Dalhousie Libraries is excited to share that we’ve added the comprehensive Burleigh Dodds agricultural eBook collection to our resources. In it, you will find over 1,900 chapters on subjects like crops, livestock, and forestry, that focus on areas including crucial steps in the supply chain, breeding to harvest, and sustainable management practices.
This collection is an excellent resource for undergraduate students, as well as more experienced researchers in the field of agriculture. It features an easy-to-navigate platform and the ability to read chapters online or download them to your computer, with new content chapters being added frequently. The procurement of this collection highlights agriculture-centered resources for our students, faculty, and researchers.
A unique feature of the Burleigh Dodds eBooks collection is its organization. Rather than a limited assortment of full books, this compendium is comprised of themed chapters from a wide range of various books. Searching these chapters for the information you need is simple – a search bar on the top of each page allows you to search by keyword, title, author, ISSN, or subject. You can also do an advanced search by selecting the “search” button at the top of the page. You will then be directed to an advanced search page to sort and narrow your results based on your needs.
You can access the collection directly or visit the Dal Libraries website and select Databases A-Z in the Quick Links and scroll until you see Burleigh Dodds Agriculture eBook Collection.
If you need help navigating the database, please don’t hesitate to contact our Agriculture subject specialist librarians, Erin MacPherson or Jaclyn Chambers-Page.
We hope you enjoy this expansive collection!
Due to a planned power outage, the MacRae Library on the Agricultural campus will be closed on Monday, July 31. 
Wednesday, April 26 is Lesbian Visibility Day at Mount Saint Vincent University. To mark this special day, an event will be held from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the MSVU Art Gallery.
The event will highlight the MSVU Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection, the Dalhousie University Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive, and the Dalhousie University Lesbian Oral History Project. Speakers will reflect on lesbian visibility and invisibility, and the need for collections that highlight the lives of women who love women. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.
The event is a highlight of Lesbian Visibility Week, which runs from April 24-30.
Please contact elisabeth.heroux-rhymes@msvu.ca to RSVP.
Are you a graduate student, research assistant, or teaching assistant looking to develop your research skills? The Research Summer Camp is a comprehensive program that will take you through the research process from literature searching and writing all the way to publication. The program is open to any student, faculty, or staff member at Dalhousie, but is specifically tailored to graduate students.
The Research Summer Camp will be offered as a series of online modules on Brightspace and live online sessions. Modules may include short video lectures and interactive exercises to help you brush up on your literature searching, writing, information management, and research skills. By registering for this program, you will have access to all of the pre-recorded modules beginning on May 15th, 2023. You also have the option to register for sessions in the program that will be delivered live (online) in May and June.
Starting in May 2023, we are also offering certificates for completion of Research Summer Camp sessions and modules. For a full list of available certificates, see the Certificate page on the Research Summer Camp website.
Registration is open now, and access starts on May 15th, 2023. To self-register for the program
· Log into Brightspace
· In the Academic Support menu, select Self-registration
· From the list of courses, find and select Online Community – Research Camp 2023-2024
To register for live sessions, visit the Dal Libraries Events Calendar: https://dal.libcal.com/calendar/events
Program website, including schedule, module descriptions, FAQs: https://dal.ca.libguides.com/ResearchCamp
The DMP Assistant will be unavailable from 9am to 6pm AST on February 22nd, 2023 for a system upgrade.
Any work that DMP Assistant users have completed prior to the shutdown will be migrated to the new 3.1.0 platform, along with any other existing data management plans (DMPs), templates and user data. Users should save and/or export any existing DMPs/data that they may require during the shutdown period. Once launched, users will be able to access the DMP Assistant 3.1.0 service at the same URL (https://assistant.portagenetwork.ca/) with their existing credentials, and new users may create accounts as normal.
The upgraded version of the DMP Assistant will improve security and user experience, and come with several exciting new features, including a new “Research Output” tab that allows users to:
For more information or any questions, please contact Shiloh Williams, Product Lead, Data Management Planning, Digital Research Alliance of Canada, at support@portagenetwork.ca.
In honor of ICPSR’s International Love Data Week 2023, which has the theme of “Data: Agent of Change”, Dalhousie Libraries will be hosting a series of online presentations aimed at giving you insights into varied aspects of working with data. Whether you are a new, experienced, secret, or not so secret “data agent”, you may very well find the right tool or approach that you need during a Love Data Week event. Taking place from February 13-17, presentations include:
To register for these (free) online sessions presented by Dalhousie Libraries and other organizations, check out our Love Data Week 2023 Research Guide. You will find Event details and registration information in our Events section.
Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, will be upgraded February 1. The platform, including Dalhousie Dataverse @ Borealis, will be unavailable from approximately 11 am – 5 pm Atlantic Time.
This upgrade should bring exciting new features, including:
To test these features, feel free to use their demo sandbox environment.
For more details reach out to the Borealis team with questions or feedback.
Please join Dalhousie Libraries in congratulating James Boxall for being awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee medal in December. This medal was awarded to James to recognize his career of service to geography and geographic education in Nova Scotia and Canada, of which a few highlights follow.
James was instrumental in the creation of the Canadian Council for Geographic Education, now Canadian Geographic Education, an organization which supports a network of over 20,000 teachers. He is also a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Past-President of the Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives, and co-chair of the Canadian Roundtable on Geomatics.
James has been with the Dalhousie Libraries for 31 years in a number of roles related to geography and is currently the library’s GIS Specialist and Map Curator. He has developed and taught courses in Human Geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Geospatial Information Management in the School of Information Management, and Marine Spatial Planning in the Marine Affairs Program. James has been published widely and his geospatial and geography teaching led to his involvement with projects in Canada, the UK, Mexico, and Vietnam, often as co-chair of the International Network for Learning and Teaching Geography.
Congratulations to James on receiving this significant award in recognition of all he does at Dalhousie and beyond.
At the end of 2022, Dalhousie University will no longer have access to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This tool is best known for the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). JCR is a subscription product, and its owner has arbitrarily decided to allow subscriptions only in combination with another of its pricey databases, Web of Science. Dalhousie ceased subscribing to Web of Science after internal review found the journal coverage was already available through other, more cost-effective subscriptions. Fortunately, while the JIF is widely recognized, it is not unique. Other products are available through Dal Libraries that serve much the same purpose.
The JIF was developed in the 1960s as a tool to help decide what journals should be included in the new Science Citation Index. It was developed to help librarians see what journals researchers were consulting. It was not in itself meant to determine quality of those journals. The JIF is calculated by averaging the number of citations to the journal’s contents as a whole over a two-year period. Only citations found in journals indexed in the Web of Science database count. The JIF does not look at citation counts at the article level – a few highly cited articles can sway the average.
It is worth knowing that citation counts are often used as a proxy for quality or “impact” but authors might cite an article for a variety of reasons, so metrics based on citation counts do have limitations.
In addition, not every academic journal is included in JCR. Only about 12,000 journals have a JIF calculated in JCR – a small fraction of the number of peer-reviewed journals currently publishing.
The JIF is often used to help identify journals in which authors might aspire to publish. There are several alternatives to this.
The JIF can also be used to determine whether a journal is “predatory”. Journals that lack integrity often advertise that they have various “Impact Factors” as a way to deceive authors. A quick way to check the veracity of these claims is by going to the recognized source – JCR. However, that is by no means the only way a journal can or should be assessed. Checking to see if the journal in question is indexed (included) in databases such as Scopus, Academic Search Premier, and the databases commonly used in your field is a way to not only see if a journal is possibly trustworthy, but also if publishing there will ensure the accessibility of your work. For more information, see https://dal.ca.libguides.com/c.php?g=257122&p=2830098
Unfortunately, the JIF is often used to access the quality of the work of individual researchers. We say unfortunately, because this is not an appropriate use of this metric. As the very first statement of the internationally recognized San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) says, “1. Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” This is because the many limitations of citations as a proxy for quality, combined with the limitations of journal level metrics do not provide reliable insights into the value of work at the individual level.
Please contact one of Dal Libraries if you have questions about using Scopus or other subject specific databases to help you select a journal to publish in, look up a CiteScore, or have general questions about our resources.
Contact us:
W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library
902-717-5244
kellogg@dal.ca
Killam Memorial Library (Arts & Social Sciences, Computer Science, Management, Sciences)
902-494-3611
killmref@dal.ca
MacRae Library (Agriculture)
902-893-6669
macrae.library@dal.ca
Sexton Design & Technology Library (Architecture & Planning, Engineering)
902-494-3240
sexton.library@dal.ca
Law Library
902-494-2124
lawref@dal.ca