Issue 7, March 2000

New Library Catalog! Sarah Neises Polk Library's new Catalog is now available! Searching for books, videos, maps and other items has never been easier. You can connect directly to our catalog at http://polkweb.uwosh.edu/ or link to it from the library's main web pages at: http://www.uwosh.edu/library/. The catalog is easy to access from on campus or anywhere in the world with a connection to the World Wide Web. Polk's new catalog makes it easy to limit your search by such criteria as language, format (videorecordings, sound recordings, maps, etc.), type (music score, kit, etc.), location in the library (EMC, Reference, U.S. Documents, etc.). Look for the Limit Your Search button at the bottom of each search page. Another new feature is the three keyword-searching options available; each with unique features designed to suit different searching techniques. Students will find it much easier to locate Course Reserves materials in our new catalog. There are drop down menus that allow students to choose Instructor, Department and Course. The Polk Library Catalog will be improving in the months to come. We will add features that will allow you to search our catalog and other UW System catalogs at the same time. Also, keep an eye out for the ability to access information about your record, place holds/recalls online and more! To arrange an instruction session for your students on how to use the new catalog, contact the Library Instruction Coordinator Marisa Finkey at 424-3436 or finkey@uwosh.edu. Transition to the New Library System is Complete! New Catalog... Has Web-based searching. Makes finding library materials by format, type, or location easy. Employs three types of keyword searching. Gives students better access to materials on Reserve. Allows the library to add even more features in the near future. Table of Contents New Databases Available through Polk Library Cynthia Huebschen The new year has been a very active one already in terms of adding new databases, and UW Oshkosh students and faculty will see a number of changes on the library's web resources pages. UW Oshkosh faculty have long wished for better access to journal citation information, and in January this wish was granted. UW System library funding has provided access to Web of Science, the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) databases Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, with coverage from 1987. Previously available through DIALOG, these databases are now in an easy-to-search Web format. The indexes are searchable by author, journal title, article title, author's affiliation, and keyword. References may be searched by cited author, cited work, or cited year. Web of Science is not a full-text product, although in a few cases it does provide links to charts or graphs offered by an article's publisher. At this time, Web of Science is available only on campus, to a maximum of three simultaneous users. For this reason, it is important to log off when you finish your session, to make that connection available to another UW Oshkosh user. Information available in the full record from these indexes includes article title, source (journal) title, volume, issue, ISSN, publication date, page range, publisher, publisher's address or WWW address, document type, language, a complete list of authors, authors' addresses, references, author-provided keywords, and abstract. Records may be marked for printing or downloading. A simple click can display a list of articles that have cited this work in their reference lists, or allow you to search for other articles whose cited reference lists include some of the same works as the current article's reference list. A link is available to Web of Science from Polk Library's Web Resources by Subject page. Look under the heading "Faculty Research Corner" (http://www.uwosh.edu/library/faculty.html). This section also offers links to other new products of particular interest to faculty, including MathSciNet, maintained by the American Mathematical Society. MathSciNet is a Web database providing access to citations from Mathematical Reviews and Current Mathematical Publications, from 1940. The full text of all reviews from Mathematical Reviews is available. The articles themselves are not full text; however, when available, links will be provided to full-text articles available in J-Stor (which includes journals such as American Journal of Mathematics, Annals of Mathematics, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics). Records may be marked, and hypertext links are available to full journal information, institution codes and addresses, mathematics subject classification, works by the reviewer, or works by a given author. The database is searchable by author, journal, Mathematics Subject Classification, or keyword. MathSciNet is available on campus only, at this time, and is provided by UW System funding. Also new this year is Web access to BIOSIS, an electronic version of Biological Abstracts, covering 1994 through 1999 (with year 2000 records beginning to appear in March or April). BIOSIS is available off campus; please contact the Reference Desk, Sarah Neises, or Cynthia Huebschen for the passwords. BIOSIS will be included in the same menu with another product from this vendor (SilverPlatter): PsycInfo. Previously available from EBSCO, this version of PsycInfo (Psychological Abstracts) will also offer retrospective coverage and is also available from off-campus to UW Oshkosh users with a password. Another newly available database with UW System funding is Statistical Universe, a companion to Academic Universe, from Lexis-Nexis. Found on Polk Library's Web Resources page under "General" and other categories, Statistical Universe offers searching of statistical publications, including American Statistics Index, which previously was searchable only in print form. When the full text of statistical documents is available online, Statistical Universe will link to it. Still another new database, funded by UW System, is a periodical, which might be of interest to students doing topical research on current events, or those who are looking for a topic to research. This is an online version of the popular Reference title, CQ Researcher, from Congressional Quarterly. Available on and off-campus, CQ Researcher will retrieve the full text of recent issues, including the chronologies, bibliographies, and charts and graphs for which the print publication is noted. Issues are available for approximately the last six months. Some recent topics include "the Digital Divide", "Embryo Research", "Reforming School Funding", and "Closing in on Tobacco." Table of Contents Direct ILL Available Erin Czech If you use FirstSearch's WorldCat database to locate books, stop filling out those paper ILL forms for material that Polk Library does not have! Use a new feature recently added to WorldCat that allows you to request an interlibrary loan of a book by filling out a simple, electronic form. The electronic request will require less processing and should be filled quicker! Questions regarding this service can be directed to Interlibrary Loan (424-3348) or the Reference Desk (424-4333). Table of Contents Quality Control in Circulation and Stacks Management Roberta Stuemke One usually associates the term "quality control" with the manufacture of a material product, like a car. However, it can be applied just as accurately to taking steps to ensure that the customer gets the best possible service. The Circulation/Reserve Desk and Stacks Management employ several measures to monitor and improve the quality of our services. Most of these are invisible to the patrons and even to other library staff. Quality control begins during student employee training. We use a combination of checklists, tests, and evaluations, as well as supervised on-the-job training. Many tests are routinely given not only to new employees, but also to returning workers, to refresh their memories and skills. One way to guard against error at the Desk is double-checkin. Last year, approximately 91.17% of all returns were checked in a second time before reshelving. 91 errors (.15% of items checked) were found and corrected. One of the results of the double checkin system is a steadily diminishing number of Claims Returned complaints from patrons. Stacks Management systematically searches for all questionable items. A search is opened whenever a patron cannot locate an item that should be on the shelves, or reports that an item might have been returned. Searches are also started for all items that reach the billing stage, and continue for a full year after the patron pays the replacement fee. 4,826 individual searches were conducted last year. Another Circulation/Reserve procedure is the routine checking of all fine and fee receipts, ensuring that patron computer records have been properly cleared after payment. When an error is found and corrected, the responsible worker can be apprised of it and retrained if necessary. When returns are organized onto trucks for shelving, these trucks are processed for random shelf-checking, with 15-60 call numbers written down to be searched for by Stacks Management personnel after reshelving. Last year, 25.48% of all Main Collection shelving was checked, and the error rate was less than 2.5%. Stacks Management also maintains an active shelfreading schedule, to monitor and maintain accuracy on our open shelves. So far in 1999-2000, 36.55% of the Main Collection has been shelfread, showing an on-shelf accuracy rate of 97.92%. 61.88% of the Bound Periodicals have been shelfread, with 266 errors found and corrected. Our plans for the future are to continue our present quality control measures, and develop others as needed, in order to improve our accuracy and our level of service. Table of Contents Forrest R. Polk Library Scheduled Building Hours--Spring Break 2000 Friday, March 10 7:45 AM - 4:30 PM Saturday & Sunday, March 11 & 12 Closed Monday - Thursday, March 13 - 16 7:45 AM - 10:00 PM Friday, March 17 7:45 AM - 4:30 PM Saturday, March 18 Closed Sunday, March 19 6:00 PM - 12 Midnight Regular Spring Semester schedule resumes on Monday, March 20 Please Note: Specific areas and services may have shorter hours than the general library building hours. For more information on hours, check the schedules posted outside the library, pick up the handouts of hours available at Circulation and Reference, call 424-3320 or go to http://www.uwosh.edu/library/hours/home.html. Building admittance and services end 15 minutes prior to the closing of the building. Table of Contents New Collection Funding for Polk Library John Berens With the final adoption of the UW System 1999-2001 budget, Polk Library has received $102,000 in new funding each fiscal year to support the library's collections. Of this new funding in fiscal year 1999-2000, $39,000 will be used to cover inflationary price increases on continuing print periodicals (prices rose an average of 10% this year). $41,000 is earmarked for new or expanded access to electronic resources (for one example, see "Books to Bytes" on this page). Finally, $22,000 is being provided for expanded book purchases (both through the Approval Plan and departmental allocations). A total of $1.6 million was distributed to all UW libraries for campus library collections. UW Oshkosh's share of this total was 6.375%. In addition to the funds allocated directly to the campus libraries, another $666,000 is held centrally for System-wide licensing of additional electronic resources. See "New Databases Available through Polk Library" in this issue. Table of Contents Books to Bytes Patrick Wilkinson Are scholarly monographs online with their full content? Yes, they are, and Polk Library recently entered into an agreement with academic libraries in Wisconsin such as Marquette University and Lawrence University to provide selected, recent monographs to faculty, students and staff. How is Polk Library going to provide ebooks to campus? The library joined the Wisconsin Academic Library Consortium, and the consortium has contracted with NetLibrary to provide this service. Initially, the consortium purchased a "Library Collection" of over 500 recent monographs in fields from American History to Zoology. In addition, by joining NetLibrary, consortium members now provide access to thousands of eBooks that have been gathered free-of-charge from a wide range of public domain sources, including Project Gutenberg. This "Public Collection" also contains a large number of political documents, including presidential speeches. You can access NetLibrary from Polk Library's web pages under the heading "Faculty Research Corner" (http://www.uwosh.edu/library/ faculty.html), or you can point your browser to http://www.netlibrary.com/. From computers on campus, you can find, view, or check out books in the "Library Collection," which is restricted to UW Oshkosh faculty, students and staff. Also, from computers on campus , you can set up a personal account that allows you to access the "Library Collection" from computers off campus. More information about how to use this new service will be forthcoming. In the meantime, questions can be directed to Sarah Neises, Cynthia Huebschen or Patrick Wilkinson. For more information about academic libraries using eBooks and NetLibrary, see The New York Times for December 9, 1999, "Racing to Convert Books to Bytes: Evolving Market for E-Titles." The article describes how academic libraries such as the University of Texas in Austin successfully uses eBooks to supplement (not replace) their print collections and provide 24 hour access to important material. Table of Contents Staff News Karen Dunn's Faculty College on "Cyber-Plagiarism" was the subject of a feature article in the Oshkosh Northwestern and a report on Wisconsin Public Radio in January. Karen is a Reference Librarian. Paulette Feld, Technical Services and Reference Assistant, presented a program, "Planting the Seeds for Success" at the Colorado Library Association's 1999 Annual Conference in Snowmass. Jeanne Foley, Access Services Coordinator, has been elected secretary to the Wisconsin Library Association's (WLA) Circulation Services Roundtable. Mary Keefer, Educational Media Collection Coordinator, attended the "Classroom Technology Conference" on January 26 in Oshkosh. Joshua Ranger, University Archives and Area Research Center Librarian, co-authored an article that appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of Archivaria (The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists) entitled "'The Next Great Idea':Loaning Archival Collections." Karen Reiter, Technical Services Assistant, is the 2000 chair of WLA's Support Staff Section. The section will be holding a conference on campus later this spring. Roberta Stuemke, Stacks Manager, gave a presentation at a UW Madison School of Library and Information Science conference in November. Her topic was "Performance Measurement: Quality Control for Circulation and Stacks Management." Table of Contents Polk Library News is a publication of Forrest R. Polk Library, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Patrick Wilkinson, Editor