Geography Awareness Week – November 15-21

November 10, 2015 Michele Charlton Leave a Comment

Geography Awareness Week (GAW) is taking place from November 15-21! Launched in 1987, this week provides a global opportunity for people and organizations to celebrate what geography is, what it can do, and how it helps us understand the world, people and culture, the environment, and the interactions among those features from a spatial viewpoint.

During Geography Awareness Week, GIS (Geographical Information Sciences) Day will also be take place (Wednesday, Nov. 18^th.) GIS Day was developed in 1999 to support the aims of GAW and to focus attention on the role GIS and other spatial technologies play in developing solutions that are based upon spatial science and geographic understanding.

There is an added bonus to this year’s celebration of GAW and GIS Day. The events take place during International Map Year (IMY). The theme for IMY is “We Love Maps”, and the year has been endorsed by the United Nations and numerous national and international organizations, companies, government and not-for-profits. Led by the International Cartographic Association (ICA), IMY for 2015-2016 is being celebrated in Canada with the leadership of a number of key organizations, companies and governmental departments. (IMY for Canada can be found at http://internationalmapyear.ca or @IMY_CA).

Dalhousie Libraries has always played a role in promoting and celebrating both GIS Day and GAW, and this year joining in for International Map Year. Over the years, we have hosted special lectures, public displays, and events joining with other partners across organization with the support of the Geomatics Association of Nova Scotia (GANS).

With the support of the Libraries GIS Centre, this year we will be hosting fun and interactive map displays where students, faculty and staff from across the campus can help create our very own “Where is Dalhousie” web map. They will be located online, as well as in the lobby and South Learning Commons of the Killam Library. You will be able to add in a place marker of where you come from, your hometown or city. This will be a public display viewable by other people involved in GIS Day and GAW, and it will give us a chance to show where our Dalhousie community comes – no matter where in the world our hometowns are.

Enjoy the week and don’t forget – “We Love Maps”.

(The online map will be available before and during Geography Awareness Week from November 10th to 20^th.)

Cambridge University Press ejournals down

September 4, 2015 Michele Charlton Leave a Comment

We are experiencing problems with the Cambridge journal online website at the moment. The provider is working on solutions to restore access, and have confirmed that it could take several days before all functionalities are made available again.

Go Online with Your Reading List: eReserves Service for Faculty

August 13, 2015 Michele Charlton Leave a Comment

Make course-related articles and book chapters available electronically to your students! The Dalhousie Libraries are offering faculty an option to have links to licensed e-content added to their reading lists and uploaded to BbLearn or Brightspace (for the Faculties of Agriculture, Management (CFAME), Architecture and Planning and Health Professions [Social Work programs] ) by one of the Dal Libraries’ staff, with copyright clearance obtained if possible.

You can do this online via the Reserve page on our website.

Go to the Reserves page and select the appropriate library submission form
Login and fill in the brief course particulars
Choose “Upload Reading List for OWL” (you still have the option to fill out our regular form for “In-Library Reserves” if you don’t want your list annotated and added to your BbLearn/Brightspace course)

And that’s it! Once you’ve submitted your list, Libraries’ staff will create persistent URLs for electronic items and post the list to BbLearn or Brightspace for you.

A note of caution: Some publishers limit the number of readers who can use an ebook at the same time. This publisher-controlled limitation can make ebooks challenging to use as textbooks. Before adding one of the Libraries’ ebooks to your syllabus, check with your library liaison who can work with the Libraries’ Resources team to determine if a particular ebook will meet your needs. Not sure who your library liaison is? Check this list: http://util.library.dal.ca/Subspecialists/

We work with paper as well! We’ll seek copyright clearance for print material—articles and book chapters—through our Copyright Services Coordinator and then scan and upload the items into BbLearn or Brightspace. If we’re not able to obtain copyright clearance, the material will be placed on Reserve at the Service Point/Circulation Desk of your selected library and you will be notified of this change.

By offering this service the Libraries are hoping to build new partnerships with faculty, meet the students where they are, and provide quick and reliable access to library resources. We also hope you find it useful!

Note: Please allow at least 2 weeks for your reading lists to be processed. Lists are processed in the order in which they are received.For further information or to get started, please contact:

Nancy Melvin, Killam Memorial Library, 494-2147
Jan Pelley, Kellogg Health Sciences Library, 494-3895
Jolene Reid, MacRae Library, 902-893-4578
Amanda Sparks, Sexton Design & Technology Library, 494-6095
Please contact the Dunn Law Library directly for Reserve information at that location.
John Yolkowski, Dalhousie Libraries Copyright Services Coordinator, 494-4346

LITS is on the move (temporarily)

July 7, 2015 Michele Charlton Leave a Comment

Effective immediately, Library Information Technology Services (LITS) will temporarily be relocated to a new space on the fifth floor, room 5630.

This move is to allow for the renovation of the current LITS office on the third floor. Construction is scheduled to begin in late summer, and will last until late fall.

The temporary offices on the fifth floor will still be accessible for those needing OWL (BbLearn) support.

Learn more about a key figure in ocean studies – Check out the Elisabeth Mann Borgese finding aid

May 29, 2015 Michele Charlton Leave a Comment

No longer will researchers have to visit the Dalhousie University Archives in order to examine the personal papers of ocean expert and former Dal professor Elisabeth Mann Borgese. All they’ll need is a computer with an internet connection.

Over 115,000 papers and more than 700 photographs have been scanned and are being made available online as part of the Elisabeth Mann Borgese Digitization Project, the result of a $100,000 donation from an associate of Borgese’s who wished to see her work preserved for future generations and made accessible to people all over the world.

From correspondence with Ted Turner to copies of United Nations conventions to family Christmas cards, the collection includes materials that cover every aspect of the late Borgese’s life.

Available through the Elisabeth Mann Borgese finding aid, Borgese’s documents are presented as PDFs with searchable text, which should help those wishing to learn more about a key figure in ocean studies, maritime law, and German history and culture.

Springer Open Choice Adopts Creative Commons Attribution License

January 18, 2012 Tina Usmiani Leave a Comment

Leading scientific publisher Springer announced today that it is bringing “Open Choice,” its hybrid open access option, into line with the fully open access journals published by BioMed Central and SpringerOpen. As a result, all open access content at Springer will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. This means that Springer is now allowing commercial use for its hybrid open access program.

Open Choice was launched in 2004 with the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Springer’s Open Choice option allows authors to publish their articles with open access for the majority of its subscription-based journals. The articles are immediately freely available for anyone worldwide in exchange of paying an article processing charge. The copyright remains with the author.

In addition to Open Choice, Springer offers fully open access journals under the SpringerOpen brand. The portfolio of more than 60 journals was recently joined by SpringerPlus, an interdisciplinary open access journal, publishing research in all STM disciplines. Read more about:

Springer Open Choice

Springer and Open Access

App of the Week: SpringerLink

January 9, 2012 Tina Usmiani Leave a Comment

Leading scientific publisher Springer has just launched a SpringerLink mobile app for iPhone and iPod Touch. The app is free to download from iTunes and provides unlimited access to over 5.4 million documents (including abstracts, book and journal covers, and more than 127,000 open-access research articles) spanning every area of science, technology and medicine.

Download it now!

National Library of Medicine Exploring AI

January 6, 2012 Tina Usmiani Leave a Comment

Great news for virtual health consumers!

The National Library of Medicine has announced that it is partnering with Askthedoctor.com, an interactive online source of free medical advice for anyone anywhere in the world, to develop intelligent computerized medical assistants for doctors. Not only are the using thousands of real-language medical questions supplied by the National Institutes of Health–they are also discussing the possibility of working with IBM’s Super Computer ‘Watson’ (of Jeopardy fame).

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