Library Website and Associated Services

As you may know the Library has been trialling a new look website.  

The trial ends this coming Friday the 19th June and the new website will become live this coming Monday 22nd June 2009.  As part of this we will be making some changes to the web site and some of the associated services.  These changes are listed below:

• The old website will now be decommissioned. To date users have been able to navigate to the old or the new version from an intermediary web page – this will be deleted on Monday 22nd June with the links of the University website titled ‘Library’ both leading to the new website.

• The Library Portal (which contains the library catalogue service) will be edited to limit the functions associated with searching the library catalogue. The additional information in the Portal (the tabs entitled Databases +, Reference and Support) will be removed because this information can now be found on the Library website.

• Subject guides for Business and Law to be added to the website. Preliminary versions of these subject guides will be added to the website from Monday.  We will be working at developing these over the Winter term and aim to have complete versions available to staff and students prior to the commencement of Semester 2/2009.

• The Library FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) will now be visible from the central pane of the home page of the Library website. This service helps to resolve your questions and demystify some of the services on offer from the Library.  Directly above the FAQs is a feed from the Library Blog.  Both of these feeds are updated when the source service is updated.

• Library Catalogue, e-Journal search, SuperSearch and Library FAQs to be ‘embedded’ within the Library website. To date these services have been provided in parallel with the website and have had their own interfaces.  These services will now be ‘embedded’ within the website and have the interfaces modified slightly to standardise the look and feel of the service.  This is part of a long term strategy to integrate and simplify Library discovery services.  Embedding of the services also helps the Library to track usage of these services and to respond to usage patterns when we develop the services.

• Library Blog interface to be redesigned. In the near future we plan provide the blog with a new look which makes it more consistent with the look and feel of other Library online services.  We will then embed this service within the website (see previous item)

Beyond Google ?

Google has become the default internet search engine and for good reason but there are other alternatives out there which might you of you are using the web for research purposes.

Please email other suggestions in for posting (smcvey@nd.edu.au) or make a comment on this post...

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature.


Intute
Intute is search service created by a network of UK universities and providing resources specifically for education and research. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources.


Scirus
Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet. Driven by the latest search engine technology, Scirus searches over 450 million science-specific Web pages, enabling you to quickly:

•Pinpoint scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data on the Web.
•Find the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles, patents, pre prints and journals that other search engines miss.
•Offer unique functionalities designed for scientists and researchers.

Infomine
About 120,000 research university level sites, heavily annotated, and cataloged. Divided into several databases by subject.

And for something a little different try talking directly to your peers...

getCITED
getCITED is an online, member-controlled academic database, directory and discussion forum. Its contents are entered and edited by members of the academic community. By putting its content in the hands of its members, getCITED makes it possible to enter in and search for publications of all types. This means that, in addition to the books and articles accessible with other databases, book chapters, conference papers, working papers, reports, papers in conference proceedings, and other such research outlets can all be entered and then searched for within getCITED.


Is what you are looking for no longer there ?

You need to travel backwards in the 'Wayback Machine'

Providing access through the Internet Archive, the 'Wayback Machine' can look at 85 billion archived web pages. If your URL is no longer valid plug it in here and see what it did look like at various points in time from 1996 onwards.


Or try this comprehensive list of search tools by Gary Price...

Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources