Letter from the Dean

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the CUL Online Resources Newsletter. Many of you have asked us to provide regular updates on our continually expanding array of online resources and we hope you will find this first issue of our newsletter informative and useful. It is our intention to publish our newsletter at the beginning of each semester. The 2006 academic year finds us at a particularly exciting juncture. Our decision to subscribe to ARTstor, a database of over 300,000 digital images of art, architecture and archaeology, will provide valuable teaching and research resources for faculty in the Meadows School of the Arts and Dedman College as well as in the Perkins School of Theology and others. SciFinder Scholar has been on our ‘desktop’ for some time, but as it is the leading resource for research in chemistry, and a useful tool for engineering and other science disciplines, you may find the additional user instructions helpful. At the same time, we have worked hard to devise better ways for you to search and retrieve online resources, utilizing a tool called SerialsSolutions to simplify online access and locate full-text articles without you having to know which databases to use. It takes a lot of hard work on the part of the library staff to put these resources at your fingertips. We are devoted to meeting your needs and hope that these online resources, and our information updates such as this newsletter, will go part way to doing so.

As always, we look forward to your feedback. Don’t hesitate to call or email me, Curt Holleman, CUL Deputy Director and Head of Collection Development, or any member of the CUL Electronic Resources team. In the meantime, let me wish you all the best for an invigorating and productive fall semester.

Sincerely,

Gillian M. McCombs
Dean and Director,
Central University Libraries

WE sometimes forget the remarkable improvements that have come to libraries in a relatively short period of time. A little over ten years ago we were welcoming our first general electronic index to the library. Until that time we pored through paper indexes to find citations to journal articles. After we found the citations, we began our search for the articles. If we were lucky and the library owned the article, we still had to find its location and hope that nobody else was using it.

With the early electronic indexes, we did not have it much better. They offered keyword searching, making it easier to find our citations, but we still faced the same library search for every article that we wanted. In more recent years, our major electronic indexes (e.g., Academic Search Premier and InfoTrac OneFile) have become significant full-text databases, offering expanded lists of hundreds of thousands of journal articles that are available to us no matter how many people are using them at the same time. These indexes also link to many of our full-text resources that they themselves do not contain. Our average user today is much more likely to find the journal articles that we provide from a computer at home, in the dorm, or in the library than from a search in our stacks.

Our challenge is to acquaint you with the e-resources that you may need or love to have. Not only do we provide the many general and specialized databases that have added so many thousands of journals, indexes, and other resources to our collections; you also will find wonderful browsing databases such as JSTOR, Project Muse, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that enable you to trace words and people through history. Consider looking into these as well as the featured databases in our newsletter.

Curt Holleman
Deputy Director
Central University Libraries

Featured Resources 

• ARTSTOR DIGITAL LIBRARY

  SMU students, faculty and researchers can now access online approximately 300,000 visual images and related catalog data through ARTstor, a non-profit initiative with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and other fields. As a campus-wide resource, ARTstor is designed to be used by researchers in fields that do not traditionally use images, as well as by art historians. ARTstor’s Charter Collection contains approximately 300,000 digital images of visual material from different cultures and disciplines, and seeks to offer sufficient breadth and depth to support a wide range of non-commercial educational and scholarly activities. The Collection has been derived from several source collections that are the product of collaborations with libraries, museums, photographic archives, publishers, slide libraries, and individual scholars.  These source collections include: The Image Gallery, The Carnegie Arts of the United States, The Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, The Illustrated Bartsch, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, The MoMA Architecture and Design Collection, Native American Art and Culture from the National Anthropological Archives, and Smithsonian Institution. ARTstor’s proprietary software tools enable users to view and analyze images through features such as zooming and panning, and to save groups of images for personal or group uses, as well as for use in lectures and other presentation, either online or off-line. “ARTstor is a valuable addition to the digital resources available through our libraries,” says Beverly Gibbons, Fine Arts Librarian at Hamon Arts Library. “ARTstor provides the SMU community with a wider range of visual materials for educational and scholarly use, and broader access to images of important art, architecture, design and archeological objects.” For more information, please visit http://www.artstor.org  or contact SMU Libraries at http://www.smu.edu/cul/ask/

  
  
• SCIFINDER SCHOLAR
  

  SCIFINDER SCHOLAR: NOT JUST FOR CHEMISTS. SciFinder Scholar is perhaps best known as a leading resource for research in the chemical sciences. SciFinder Scholar is an electronic version of Chemical Abstracts, and provides integrated access to several Chemical Abstracts Services (CAS) databases. Users can perform simple concept or author searches, or use one of the more advanced options such as reaction or structure searching. Given its size and scope, SciFinder Scholar is a useful research tool in many science and engineering disciplines. SciFinder Scholar indexes more than 9,000 journals and includes a range of material types such as conference proceedings, dissertations, and books. It includes more than 13 million MEDLINE references. It includes references to more than 24 million journal articles and patents. It is updated daily, and patents from all leading authorities are included within 2 days of issuance. Did you know that 35% of content focuses on engineering sciences?   Did you know that 21% of content focuses on the biological and life sciences?   Did you know SciFinder Scholar contains nearly 1 million references in geological sciences? The SciFinder Scholar application must be downloaded and installed on each PC where the application is to be searched. The installation needs to be done only one time. The database may only be searched from PCs on the SMU network. The subscription is restricted to PCs and Macintoshes on the Southern Methodist University campus (SMU-in-Legacy is included) in libraries, labs, and offices and to PCs and Macintoshes that are connected to SMU's network using PPP software. For more information about setting up SciFinder Scholar, please see http://www.smu.edu/cul/restricted/databases/sfschlr/

  
  
• TEXSHARE
  

  SINCE 1997, the Central University Libraries have participated in the TexShare Online Database program, a program funded largely by the Texas legislature and managed by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission [TSLAC]. The program makes subscription databases available to users at more than 700 public, academic, and medical libraries across Texas. Resources available through the program include electronic books and encyclopedias, as well as newspapers, magazines, and peer-reviewed scholarly journals, many of which are full text. As of July 1, 2005, funding for TexShare decreased significantly through a culmination of the loss of funding from the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund, budget cuts directed by the 78th Texas Legislature, and the decision to place TexShare databases in the capital budget for TSLAC. Although participating libraries contributed almost $1.5 million in fees for participation in the program, some databases were dropped from the program on July 1. CUL continues to provide the following databases to our users as a result of our TexShare membership: EBSCOHost Academic Search Premier Business Source Premier MasterFILE Premier Medline and MeSH Military Library Fulltext Regional Business News Gale InfoTrac Newspapers Health and Wellness Resource Center with Health Reference Center Academic Literature Resource Center - LRC Student Resource Center - Gold   OCLC OCLC WorldCat ProQuest Heritage Quest Texas Digital Sanborn Maps 20th Century American Poetry 20th Century English Poetry   NetLibrary E-books