Depending on whether you heard the news over the summer, you may have been pleasantly surprised by the new addition to the Moody foyer when you arrived on campus this semester.  Yes, Moody Library is now proud to house a Starbucks coffee shop in our entrance.

If you’re a fan of all things java, here are a few other coffee-related library materials to give you some interesting reading while you’re downing your venti soy chai latte.

We’ve got a lot of books about coffee hidden in our stacks – just take a look at a few of the subject headings:

• Coffee
• Coffee Industry (if that intrigues you, put a country name after that – such as Coffee Industry – Guatemala – to learn more about specific countries’ industries)
• Coffee Industry – Law and Legislation – United States
• Coffee History
• We even have books under the subject heading Starbucks Coffee Company

If you’d like some solid statistics on coffee drinking to provide justification for the amount of time you will be spending in the Moody Foyer this semester, the library can also help you.  Check out the database called Proquest Statistical Insight and in the search box type “Subject: Coffee” for lots of great industry data, sales and market share indicators, agricultural production statistics and a whole lot more.

While you’re on a hunt for research, check out the database called Sociological Abstracts and do a search for the term “coffeehouses” and read up on all the fascinating ways the coffeehouse has contributed to social development all over the world.  Then think about what could happen to you this semester at Baylor, as you read your class assignments and do your own research while sipping a cup of joe at our new Starbucks in the library.

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On March 28, 2011, the New York Times implemented a new policy regarding access to articles from their website, www.nytimes.com.  That policy restricts access to 20 articles/month, unless you have a personal subscription to the paper New York Times or unless you set up a digital subscription.

Because of questions we’ve received from Baylor faculty, students, and staff, we contacted the New York Times to see if they have a subscription model so libraries can set up a digital subscription for their constituents.  They responded to us that they did not have such a model in place.

However, if people currently enrolled at or employed by Baylor University want to set up a personal digital subscription, they will receive a 50% discount because of their affiliation with Baylor University.  To receive that discount, do the following:

1. Login to or create your account at the NYTimes website.  Note:  Make sure this account is associated with your Baylor e-mail address.
2. Go to College Readership Digital Subscription.
3. Complete the form on that page (select your status at Baylor and provide the name of the university (Baylor University).
4. The next screen will indicate that a message has been sent to your Baylor e-mail account.
5. When that message appears in your e-mail account (check your junk mail if you don’t see it), click on the link provided in that message.
6. The screen that displays will be a form to complete to set up your personal digital subscription.  Near the top, slightly right of center, you should see the weekly subscription rate (at a 50% discount) , which will be billed to your credit card every 4 weeks.

Alternatively, the Baylor University Libraries do provide access to the New York Times from a number of our databases, which are listed below:

• from 1851 to 1922 in Freely Accessible Journals
• from 09/14/1857 to 12/31/1922 in ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Legacy Platform)
• from 01/01/1923 to 12/31/2007 in ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Legacy Platform)
• from 06/01/1980 to present in LexisNexis Academic
• from 01/01/1985 to present in Academic OneFile
• from 01/01/1985 to present in Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context
• from 01/01/1985 to present in InfoTrac Custom Newspapers
• from 01/01/1995 to present in Access World News
• from 01/01/2008 to 3 months ago in ProQuest Digital Microfilm (Legacy Platform)

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Thanks to the New Electronic Resources @ BU blog for this info!

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If you haven’t already checked out Google Art Project, drop whatever you’re doing and head there now! –> www.googleartproject.com. With GAP, you can explore important museums from around the world. Go on a virtual tour and examine hundreds of works of art, many at amazingly zoomed levels (closer than the guards would let you get to the real thing!) You can also create and share your own collection of artwork from the galleries you visit.

Creatively using Google’s well-known “street view technology” from Google Maps, you can virtually walk around the museums, seeing the art just as you would if you were visiting the museum in person. There’s a great visitor’s guide that explains how the GAP works, gives you a behind the scenes look at how GAP was created.

Museums currently involved in the project are:
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

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I’m going to start this post with one of my favorite language stories.

If I called you a “nice person” you’d feel that was a complement, right?  Ah, but that’s by today’s standard.  For Chaucer to call someone a “nice” person was to say that person was foolish, silly, or ignorant.  Both Chaucer and Shakespeare could also use it to describe someone as “wanton” or “dissolute” (think of the Prodigal Son, here).

The resource, par excellence, for exploring the past use of words in English is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  Not only does this dictionary give you the definitions of words, but it will cite the word’s use in that sense as used in literature, letters, and other documents down through the years.  For many years while doing my doctoral research I had the compact OED on my shelf and consulted it frequently as I worked with Middle English and Middle Scots literature.  I should explain that the compact OED compressed the original 12 volume  into 2 and came with a magnifying glass – which you didn’t want to lose or you’d have quite a time reading the very small print.

The OED has a long and distinguished history as a reference tool (I’ll list of a few of the books written about it below) and now it has been “relaunched” as an online product: Oxford English Dictionary Online.  Now, not only can you search for meanings of words, you can find out which authors and publications are the most cited in the quotation examples; you can see, through the “Timelines” section, which decade/half-century had the most new words introduced into the English language; and you can search for “loan words” from other languages that have become part of the English language.  The “Historical Thesaurus” section will let you explore the changing use of a word by concept through time and language shifts . . .  

But enough of my rambling on.  Time to go play and explore.  I’ve developed a small intro “quiz.”  If you’d like to take it I have a surprise for two folks who complete the quiz correctly (random drawing from all correct entries). Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/OEDintro.  “Quiz” deadline is February 11th; surprises announced on February 13th.

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Interesting Reads on the OED (BearCat links where available; Amazon where not):

Berg, Donna L. A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary. 1993.  Part II, the “Companion” includes notes on people important to the development of the OED, the sources used, and interesting facts.

Gilliver, Peter, et al. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. 2006.

Shea, Ammon. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. 2008.

Willinsky, John.  Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. 1994.

Winchester, Simon.  The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. 2003.

Winchester, Simon.  The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. 1998.

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Here’s an interesting bit of Facebook security news that is of interest to well, anyone reading this who might be on Facebook!

Facebook is rolling out a new security feature in the Account Settings – Secure Browsing. Basically, it means that if you check a certain box, you can log into Facebook using the encrypted “HTTPS” protocol, which means that when you are surfing Facebook in a place with a poorly secured wireless network (say, at Starbucks or Panera, etc.) someone else at that site who might possibly have software to “sniff out” usernames and passwords will not be able to do so.

This is something you should enable right away! To do so, go into your Account Settings and click “change” nest to “Account Security” and look for the checkbox under “Secure Browsing (https)” and get on the security train! Facebook has stated that they are still rolling out the option to all their users, so check back often to see if it’s been rolled out to you!

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Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool that will make your life a whole lot easier.

Zotero is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that allows you to quickly collect, manage and cite your research resources. With one-click you can download citation information for books from BearCat, Amazon, or another library catalog, articles from a large number of the databases the Baylor Library subscribes to, like Jstor, Academic Search Complete, Science Direct or IEEE (for starters!). You can also collect citation information for newspapers, videos from YouTube, pictures from Flickr, or even archive web pages that you have found for your research.

After you download your citations, you can manage them with categories or tags; sort them by title, author or date added; and search for your resources using an iTunes like interface right in your web browser.

And if that’s not enough to send you into fits of joy, you can also drag and drop your resources into Microsoft Word, or any other word processing program (Google Docs, your email, etc.) to automatically format the resource into the proper citation style format – MLA, APA, Chicago (there are literally thousands to choose from with Zotero!) You can also download word processor plugins to seamlessly integrate your Zotero library with Microsoft Word or Open Office to format in-text citations and generate a bibliography when you are writing papers.

Check out this screencast which will introduce you to all the great features of Zotero:

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out the Baylor Library research guide on Zotero, or come to one of the introductory workshops at the library in the next few weeks.

Workshop times:

• Thursday, January 27, 4-5 pm
• Wednesday, February 2, 3:30-4:30 pm
• Tuesday, February 8, 4-5 pm

Sign up for the workshop time of your choice here.

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Reference librarians Ellen Filgo and Eileen Bentsen will be hosting a Citation Clinic this evening in the Moody Library Study Commons – Dottie Riley Room. Stop by this drop in hour to get help with citations on your papers. They can show you how to use Zotero, Refworks as well as give you tips about oodles of different citation styles. They will be there to help you! Drop on by!

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In honor of Veterans Day today, here are links to some wonderful digital collections of historic photographs, postcards, documents and other materials regarding our honored veterans.

• World War I Postcard collection, from the Bowman-Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina
• World War I Panoramas from the Library of Congress

• Historic Government Documents from World War II from the Southern Methodist University Digital Collections
• War Poster Collection (WWI and WWII) from the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division
• American War Experience – Korean War from the Northeast Texas Digital Collections
• Korean War Propaganda Leaflet Collection from the North Dakota State University Libraries Digital Collections
• The Virtual Vietnam Archive from Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive
• Central Connecticut State University’s Center for Public Policy and Research and CCSU’s Library have a fantastic Veterans History Project Digital Archive, full of oral history interviews with veterans.
• The Library of Congress also has a good collection of oral history interview with veterans at its Veterans History Project Collection. “The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. The Project collects first-hand accounts of U.S. Veterans from the following wars:

  - World War I (1914-1920)
  - World War II (1939-1946)
  - Korean War (1950-1955)
  - Vietnam War (1961-1975)
  - Persian Gulf War (1990-1995)
  - Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts (2001-present)”

• The U.S. National Archives has also been putting some wonderful pictures up on their Flickr stream tagged “Veterans Day”, including this iconic image:

Thank you for your service to our country, veterans!

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This morning, the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature was announced; the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa is this year’s recipient.

If you would like to find out more about this acclaimed author, the Baylor Libraries have a number of great resources where you can find quality information. Remember that while we are showing you these resources searching for info about Vargas Llosa, you can use these to find info about any writer you may have to research for a paper or project.

First of all, if you would like to research Vargas Llosa’s biography and background, the electronic resource called the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” is absolutely key. If you search for Mario Vargas Llosa’s name, you will find a biographical and critical essay written about him by an expert scholar. Included are a detailed list of his works and a bibliography of further readings – all helpfully in one place!

Now that you’ve found some helpful background information, you might want to find his books – both in Spanish and English. BearCat Plus will be our next stop. If you search for “mario vargas llosa” you will find every record we have in our catalog that mentions his name.

If you look to the right side of the results, you can use three of the limiters to find specific types of books.

“Language” will let you limit the results to find books that are just in English, or just in Spanish.

“Subject (Name)” will let you limit the results to find books about the person you are searching for. You will find many books of literary criticism about Vargas Llosa here.

“Author/Contributer” will let you limit the results to the books written by the person you searched for. Used in conjunction with the Language limiter, you can find all the books written by Vargas Llosa in whatever language you want to read him in!

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Lastly, on our swing through helpful resources, you might want to search in the MLA International Bibliography. Searching through this database will bring you critical articles about the author’s works, published in scholarly journals.

There you have it! A great way to find out great quality information about any author – and particularly Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s Nobel Laureate.

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Dropbox is a fabulous tool that lets you easily sync your files online across different computers and mobile devices. Currently you can get 2 GB of storage for free (you can get more space if you upgrade to a paid account) which is a great deal! With Dropbox, you can save your file to the Dropbox folder on one computer and it’s instantly available on another! You can also create shared folders with other Dropbox users when working on group projects.

Dropbox is a great tool for students who need to get access to files easily or who are working on group projects. Check out the features here. The software is available for Mac, PC and Linux computers and there are currently mobile apps for iPhone, iPod, iPad and Android devices. So you can get access to your documents and files from wherever you may be!

And that’s not all! (Do we sound like an infomercial yet?) Lifehacker is reporting today that Dropbox has an ever better deal for students! You can get up to 500 MB more storage for each referral from a .edu address.

Have any of you used Dropbox? If so, leave a comment and let us know what you use it for and what features you like the best.

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