| Library staffers get into Halloween spirit The library was full of tricks—and treats—on Halloween, as staffers participated in the second annual desk decoration contest.
With its fairy-tale woods theme, circulation came in first, followed by the reserves desk, which boasted a haunted house theme. The administrative desk, which featured a monster reading a book of potions, rounded out the top three. “It was a team building exercise for the staff and an outreach for the students,” said Diana Vogelsong, acting university librarian. “For many students, the library is their home-away-from-home, so we wanted to make it fun for them.” —AF 
Photo by Jeff Watts
Music Library now lending compact discs The Music Library is making its extensive collection of 4,000 compact discs available for circulation to faculty, staff, and students. Faculty and staff may check discs out for three weeks. Students may borrow them for one week. The Music Library is located in Room 150 of the Katzen Arts Center, and the holdings are available in the ALADIN Catalog. Please contact the Music Library at 885-3264 for additional information about the collection and circulation policy. AU Library adds value to Google Scholar You too can “stand on the shoulders of giants” as the Google Scholar slogan says. Regular users of the ALADIN Web site may have noticed the recent addition of Google Scholar in the databases section of the home page. Of course, Google Scholar, unlike other ALADIN databases, is a free resource. But used within the context of the ALADIN Web site, it has added value for researchers. Google Scholar users can now get the same results when they log into ALADIN off-campus as they do when they use the resource on campus. The login is important because AU Library staff have worked with the Washington Research Library Consortium to enable links between Google Scholar and the library’s subscription databases. Off-campus users of Google Scholar typically find links to full-text articles available only if they produce a credit card. If, however, the library already has a database subscription and the Google Scholar user has an AU ID number, articles indexed in JSTOR, ProQuest, or other familiar databases are free and accessible. Users will see links such as “Search in ALADIN” and “Full text at American U” in their Google Scholar search results. In a way, Google Scholar functions, with some limitations, as a database that can simultaneously “cross-search” many article databases, the ALADIN Catalog, and the WorldCat database. Users will still notice the high retrieval numbers typically associated with the regular Google Web search engine and may prefer to seek guidance from a reference librarian about which specific subscription databases to use instead of Google Scholar or in addition to it. For instance, a search for “Iran and nationalism” produces 18,000 results in Google Scholar, but a more selective search with the same keywords finds 110 in the Research Library database and 163 in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. In the ALADIN environment, however, Google Scholar becomes a better resource. Nobue Matsuoka-Motley contributed to this column. |
