At Your Service: September 2009 Archives

Temple University Libraries' subject specialists create guides to library resources for general subjects as well as for specific courses and assignments. Faculty should contact Subject Specialists to get more information on these. Here are the Subject Guides that are currently available.

Blackboard is a great place to make these guides available to students. View the Screencast below to see how easy it is to embed a library guide into your Blackboard course.

For more information, see Integrating the Library Into Blackboard.

Temple Libraries is pleased to announce a new service that greatly simplifies requests for library materials from other campus libraries and the Library Depository. When you search the Diamond catalog and you find a book or an article in a bound volume that is at the Ambler Library and you're at Main Campus, for example, all you have to do is click on the request button at the top of the catalog record, login using your access net account, indicate where you want to pick the material up, and hit the submit button. It's that easy. We've eliminated those cumbersome forms. Also, for articles in bound volumes, you will receive those electronically through your Temple email account. No need to come to the library to pick those up.

This service is available for all material that is currently requestable - that is bound journals from the Depository, journal articles in bound volumes, and circulating books. Books that don't circulate such as reference books or books that are checked out or missing, may not be requested. This service covers material in the following libraries: Paley and Media Services; SEAL; Ambler; Harrisburg; and Health Sciences Libraries. If you want to request material from Paley, Media Services or SEAL your pickup location must be Ambler, Harrisburg, or the Health Sciences Libraries.

The screenshot below illustrates how Diamond now looks for books and journals that can be requested:

If you have any questions or concerns please call 215 204-0744 or email us at libcirc@temple.edu

If you search for journals in our Journal Finder, you can now access RSS feeds to get notifications of new issues' table of contents.

What is RSS? We've created a subject guide on that very subject called "Current Awareness with RSS Feeds". It includes information about what RSS feeds are and how you can use them for different purposes. If you haven't used RSS feeds before I'd suggest watching the brief video embedded on the first page of that guide.

If have you used RSS feeds before, Journal Finder can help you find RSS feeds for the tables of contents of hundreds of academic journals from a wide range of publishers such as: Sage, Wiley, Blackwells, Elsevier, Oxford, Nature, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and many more.

When you search in Journal Finder, if a journal in your results has an associated RSS feed, you will see the standard RSS icon, which looks like this:

Clicking on the RSS icon will take you to the url for the RSS feed.

Next to the RSS icons are small information icons which will take you to the aforementioned subject guide on RSS.

If you have any questions feel free to ask your subject librarian.

-Derik A Badman
Digital Services Librarian