While you all were out hiking and biking and playing in the sun, we spent much of our summer working on improving the Library’s online catalog. Our goals were to better integrate the pages with our website and improve the process for searchers. Besides the new ‘look’ we also now rank keyword searches by year instead of relevance (although the relevance option is still available via the ‘Modify Search’ option). We don’t plan to make further large-scale changes for the remainder of the semester but are always working to improve our website. Please contact us if you have any problems, questions, concerns or suggestions.

Just introduced, you can now IM the Dimond Reference Desk for help!

Promoting Publication in Open Access Journals - UNH Library Progress Report and Proposal - May 24, 2006

Background:
The high inflation rate for library journal subscriptions continues with projections for next year at 7-9%. One of the options for reducing the impact of journal inflation on Library and University budgets is to promote publication in the growing number of open access (OA) journals.

“In its second year of publication, Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology had an impact factor of 13.9, making it the highest ranked general biology journal in the world, and five OA journals from BioMed Central ranked in the top five journals in their specialties. These successes are backed by research showing that OA articles generate between 25% and 250% more citations than non-OA articles in the same journal from the same year” (Library Journal, April 15, 2006).

Previous efforts by the Library to support open access:

• membership in SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) an organization started by the largest research libraries (ARL) to develop and promote alternatives to high priced commercial journals including open access journals and repositories. We were a founding member.
• UNH joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), an active program of governmental, media, and public relations devoted to supporting the proposal by the NIH and the U.S. Congress to have taxpayer-funded biomedical research freely accessible in PubMed Central.
• adding records for open access titles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (2200 titles) to the Library’s online catalog.
• membership in the group of libraries supporting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online reference work ($3000 over 3 years).

Reason for proposal:

• COLSA faculty member submitted paper to an open access title (Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology) and was charged the full article processing charge of $1345. Although grant funds can be used to cover this charge, institutional membership can provide a discounted rate for all submissions. By joining we could also encourage our faculty to participate in Open Access publication.

Proposal:

• UNH pay about $1846 annually for supporting membership in BioMed Central (BMC, 150 titles), $2000 annually for membership in the Public Library of Science (PLoS, 6 titles), and promote publication in their peer-reviewed journals. About half of the institutions in the Boston Library Consortium are members of BMC, one third members of PLoS.
• For the annual supporting membership at the lowest rate, UNH will receive a discount on article processing charges (15% BMC, 10% PLoS) and customized web pages which will serve as a permanent showcase of UNH published articles with links to OA full text.

Tie in to Academic Plan:

• “ Resourcefulness III. The University of New Hampshire will make efficient use of its human, information, financial, natural, and other resources … “
• “ d) Ensure the Library and other information resources and services are sufficient to support the University’s goals. “

For more information see the following websites:

• Public Library of Science
• Membership in PLoS and to see what the list of journal articles published by each institution see
• BioMed Central
• SPARC
• ATA
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Whether you’re rushing towards a deadline or have all the time in the world in which to complete that five page paper for English, History, Marketing, or Zoology, don’t forget where the good stuff is…the UNH Library. New and returning students will find knowledgeable people ready and willing to help guide them through the resource gathering phase of the paper process.

There are five libraries on campus each with a different subject focus: Biological Sciences in Kendall Hall; Chemistry (Parson Hall); Dimond; Physics (DeMerritt Hall); and Engineering, Math, and Computer Science (temporarily housed in New Hampshire Hall). Dimond Library houses the non-science information.

In addition to the people who will help you navigate through the information maze, the Library subscribes to electronic information that can be accessed remotely, 24×7. Start with our page devoted to databases.

For returning students, here is a list of the databases that we added to this page over the summer:

• Criminal Justice Abstracts
  covers crime trends, crime prevention and deterrence, juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, police, courts, punishment and sentencing. The database contains indexes and summaries of international journal articles, books, reports, dissertations, unpublished papers on criminology and related disciplines, and governmental and non-governmental reports on a wide range of topics in criminal justice.
• Criminology: A Sage Full Text Collection
  
  includes the full-text of 23 journals published by SAGE and participating societies, some journals going back 23 years, encompassing over 5,500 articles. It covers such subjects as Criminal Justice, Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Justice, Corrections, Penology, Policing, Forensic Psychology, and Family and Domestic Violence.
• Film Index International
  
  An information resource for entertainment films and personalities produced in collaboration with the British Film Institute. With a scholarly, inclusive approach to all areas of film studies - from the very first silent movies, to art house classics or the latest blockbusters - Film Index International provides truly international coverage, indexing films from over 170 countries.
• Historical Statistics of the United States
  The standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. This resource contains a compendium of statistics from over 1000 sources that include over 37,000 data series — three times more than in the previous edition — and dozens of new topics, among them slavery, American Indians, and poverty. Topics ranging from migration and health to crime and the Confederate States of America are each placed in historical context by a recognized expert in the field. The resource will permit users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting their own particular areas of interest.
• Vault Online Career Library
  Vault has been called “The best place on the Web to prepare for a job search.” Vault is a great resource for insider company information, advice, and career management services. The site contains more than 80 career guides and employer profiles, continually updated “insider” information on over 3,000 companies and 70 industries including employee surveys on thousands of top employers, a collection of company-specific message boards for employees, and an extensive free job board with thousands of top job openings.
• World Trade Atlas
  The U.S. State Export Edition of the World Trade Atlas® is the official source of State export data utilizing the Harmonized Schedule (HS). It was developed in cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Census and contains up-to-date State data by origin of movement into the export market. The State Export edition is published monthly — containing six years of monthly, year-to-date and calendar-year data.

Beginning Monday, August 21st, Cat’s Cache will be available in Dimond and all four branch libraries to pay for printing and copying.  Cat’s Cache is a debit card system attached to UNH IDs that allows anyone with an account to pay for doing their laundry at residence halls, purchase food in the dining halls (and some local restaurants) and now, pay for printing and copying in the computer clusters and the library.

Copiers and printers will not accept the current copy cards after 8/20/06 – so if you purchase one in the next week please fund it with only the amount of copies you will need until 8/21/06. Any funds left on a copy card will have to be transferred to Cat’s Cache at the ID Office in Holloway Commons.

If you do not have a UNH ID card, you may purchase a refillable guest card for $1.00 (comes with .50 of copies/prints.) Funds can be added to guest cards either from an add value machine in Dimond (or in McConnell or the MUB) or funds can be transferred online from your bank account.

Printing in the Library