Top News: June 2007 Archives

The Journal Finder enhancements announced earlier this month are now in place. We hope you'll agree that the new Journal Finder, powered by Serials Solutions, combines a cleaner, more responsive user interface with enhanced search and navigation capabilities.

Serials Solutions is the name of both a company and the e-journals management system used to power the new Journal Finder. Put another way, Journal Finder is simply Temple's branded name for the back-end Serials Solutions management system. For all the geeky technical details read Serials Solutions AMS page. Temple librarians work diligently with Serials Solutions to ensure that Journal Finder provides the most accurate, up-to-date record of the Libraries' serials holdings.

There are two ways to track down journals in the new Journal Finder: Search and Browse. Each of these functions is contained inside its own light blue box on the Journal Finder home page. The Search function allows you to search for a complete or partial title (the default) or for a word or words in any part of the title ("Title contains all words"). You can also search for a title by its ISSN or International Standard Serial Number. The greatly enhanced Browse function, located in the lower of the two light blue boxes, allows you to retrieve an alphabetical list of titles by subject. This can be helpful if you're trying to get an idea of the journals Temple subscribes to in a particular academic discipline, for example archaeology or film studies.

--David C. Murray

The Library is pleased to announce the addition of Standard Rate & Data Service (SRDS) to its suite of electronic databases.

Considered the Bible of directories when it comes to finding publications by category, SRDS is the largest and most comprehensive database of media and marketing information.

Cataloging media properties and marketing lists, SRDS provides media rates and data for more than 100,000 U.S. and international media properties, including both traditional and alternative marketing media. Advertising rates, contact personnel information, as well as circulation figures for Radio, TV and Cable, Business Publications, Consumer Magazines, and Newspapers are included. Demographic information is also provided.

In terms of functionality, SRDS allows users to search, create contact reports, and obtain additional information with direct links to media kits.

SRDS is updated frequently. In fact, each listing is verified up to 20 times per year, and more than 21,000 listing updates are made every month.

--Kristina De Voe

The library's access to Social Work Abstracts has changed over to a new interface through EBSCO. What does this mean for the user?

1) The interface is easier to use and familiar to most users already through Academic Search Premier or the numerous other databases we access through EBSCO.

2) With the EBSCO interface comes links to hundreds of full-text journals directly from citations in the database.

3) Users can set up search alerts for new issues of journals or ongoing searches. This means that you can get automatic announcements (email or rss) when a new issue of a journal is available in the database or when articles are specific topics (or by specific authors) are added to the database. (See EBSCO's support page on setting up search alerts.)

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me.

Derik A Badman

Journal Finder will be getting a new look and improved subject-browsing capabilities during the last week of June.

If you'd like to try out the new version in advance, a fully-functional preview is now available.

I'm a night owl. OK, insomniac actually. For the sleep-challenged among us there's little to watch on the tube after midnight. Yes, TiVos and DVRs have helped, and IPTV is just around the corner. But back in the early 90s, when I was a grad student at the University of New Mexico, those technologies were still a long way off.

One show that took my mind off the fact that I couldn't sleep was The Western Tradition, a 52-part lecture series covering the entire sweep of Western history from 3000 BCE to the current age and beyond. The series was produced by WGBH in Boston (c1989), and is now available for free on the Annenberg Media web site. The appeal here lies primarily in the person of recently deceased UCLA history professor Eugen Weber. The British-educated Weber delivers up engaging lectures in an over-the-top, highly mesmerizing, English accent. My local Albququerque public TV station would insidiously run these lectures back-to-back, thus contributing to my insomnia. After listening to lecture 9 on The Rise of Rome who could possibly resist lecture 10, The Roman Empire?

--David C. Murray