if USF Libraries home page goes down

http://usfsitedown.fcla.edu/

children's books by subject or genre

There are several ways that you may locate children’s books by subject or genre:

USF Libraries Catalog:
1. Go to the advanced search screen
2. Enter a genre or subject in the first search box (poetry, mystery, science fiction, history, frogs, adoption, Mexico, etc)
3. Select “USF LIBRARY – St. Petersburg – Juvenile” in the pull-down menu for “location”
4. Click “Search” to see results.

NOTE: Call numbers for nonfiction books will begin with a numeric (Dewey Decimal) designation. Easy/picture books will begin with an “E” designation and chapter books will begin with an “F” designation.

Children's Literature Comprehensive Database:
1. Go to the USF Libraries web site at http://www.lib.usf.edu
2. Click on “databases by title/subject”
3. In the “by title” box type in Children’s Literature
4. Click on the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database link to enter the database.
5. Use the search form to locate books by keyword. Options on the right side of the screen also allow you to limit your search by genre, age, grade, lexile range, etc. You may also locate award winning books by using the menus near the bottom of the search screen. To locate a list of award winners for a specific award, use a keyword search on the award name: “sunshine state” or “caldecott” or “quill,” then limit your search to the “award” field.
6. When you locate a book of interest, click on the title to see the full record which may also include book reviews and awards. Scroll to the bottom of the full record to find the link to “View the WorldCat Record for this item.” Clicking on this link will allow you to see if USF or another local library owns the title.

Print Reference resources:
A variety of reference books provide lists of children’s books arranged by subject, title, and/or appropriate age. Many of the indexes provide call numbers for the children’s titles that can be found in the Poynter Library collection. Generally, these indexes are located in the PN1009.A1 or Z1037 call number areas in the first floor reference stacks. Specific call numbers for these titles may be located by searching the USF Library catalog for the subject of: childrens literature indexes or picture books indexes.

A selected list of titles includes:
• A to Zoo: Subject Access to Children’s Picture Books. REF PN1009.A1L54 2006
• Best Books for Children. REF Z1037.G48 2002
• Best Books for Young Adult Readers Grades 7-12. REF Z1037.C176 1998
• Beyond Picture Books REF PN1009.A1B278 2008
• Connecting Cultures: A Guide to Multicultural Literature for Children. REF PN1009.A1T475 1996
• Radical Reads: 101 YA Novels on the Edge. Z1037.B65 2002

Read,gov

Published by the Library of Congress. Includes:

Classic Books

Episodic Reading

Author Webcasts

Booklists

Local/Community Resources

Information about, “Book Fairs, Storytelling Festivals and Other Literary Events Across the U.S.A. and Around the World” and One Book Projects (By State or Country). Australia, Canada, and the UK have One Book Projects.

A New Online Book Club: Books and Beyond

Accessible via Facebook. Read.gov offers two RSS feeds or e-mail update lists.

network status/blackboard status

http://www.nelson.usf.edu/systems/status.html

That will take you to a status page for Blackboard and MyUSF.

FAFSA form for Financial Aid

The FAFSA form for Financial Aid must be electronically submitted. Financial Aid is not allowed to accept paper copies. One computer is available for use in the Financial Aid office, but often students end up in our Information Commons to submit the document. The computers in the Library Information Commons are set to display PDF documents in the full version of the Reader, and not through any IE or FireFox Acrobat "plug-in". If not set properly by default to open the full version of Acrobat, articles do not print from library databases (a far more frequent use of Acrobat in our Commons!)

Where to Direct the Student:
The only computer that is set up to allow the form to submit properly is the Reference Desk (Student Use) computer. This computer has a different setting for Acrobat Reader than the computers in the General Information Commons. The setting is changed by opening Acrobat, navigating to the the default preferences (Edit and Preferences) and changing the way PDF's are displayed under the Internet section, by making sure that the checkbox for "display in browser" is checked. this setting can be changed by the end user, so you may have to reset this if not set properly.

Other Issues:
If a student leaves any field blank on the form, the form can not be submitted. According to Erin, there are two fields in particular that appear to be problematic; the student has to enter a zero or an “NA” if the questions do not apply. They may not leave any field blank. She said that although the students are told this, there are always some who do not pay attention to this detail. Erin said that it is printed in red even but some still goof.

H1N1 student information

Web sites for student information on H1N1:

http://www.stpt.usf.edu/h1n1/providers.htm
http://www.stpt.usf.edu/h1n1/index.htm

Hotspot wireless connections

Just had a call from a non-student asking about wireless access in the library. When I told him he had to be a USF student he asked if he was allowed to use his own “hotspot” wireless connection via Verizon in the library. I’ve never heard of getting in that way. Would it interfere with our wireless?

Systems response:

He would need to be sure that it is locked down properly, and running on a channel that does not interfere with ours. Since it would be impossible to regulate this effectively, I would tell him that he needs to go outside of the library to use it, such as on the breezeway. If we begin to allow this technology, it will interfere with student use of our wireless eventually, even if not on this occasion. It really depends upon how it is set up, which we cannot control.

Troubleshooting the microform reader/printer

Some suggested tips for the microform reader/printer:

Blue screen of death – turn PC off and on again (and be sure fiche machine is turned ON before turning PC back on again).

Black/blank screen within scanning software – check autoexposure buttons on the fiche machine itself; then hit file/scan to page again to test.

Word Files that are "read only"

We are getting an increasing number of students who pull up a file and get the message that it is “read only” Seems to be occurring mostly (or entirely) on Word documents. Berrie needs additional information to try to diagnose what is going on.

If you have one of these come up, please try to note:
The file type (word, excel, etc)
How the student retrieved the document (did they pull it up from email, from a thumb drive, etc)
The number of the machine that they are using
The model of the thumb drive that they are using (to see if the problems relate to a particular type of thumb drive)

course evaluations of instructors

There are course evaluations online for recent classes at USF. Since fall 2005, USF has not placed bound volumes of student evaluations in the libraries. This site allows patrons to search for courses by semester, course number, instructor name, etc. The advanced search option looks nice.

I did not see anything that would imply that one needs to be logged onto NetID or physically on campus to access this information.

http://usfweb3.usf.edu/fair/evaluations_mart/evaluations_search.aspx

Finding information on non-profits

From Marcy,

In Lexis Nexis, on the “company dossier” search screen, you can also search for non-profits, 501c3, foundations, etc. – to quickly pull what’s available on one organization and/or to pull together a list of non-profits within a given geography. Non-profits are a favorite of several of the business course projects for undergraduates so it may be useful for answering some of those questions.

USF Budget and local salaries

From Jim,

If the person is interested in budget information at the college, departmental, or office level, they can request that information from the USF budget office. It is a matter of public record. All they need to say is they want the information under "Chapter 119, Laws of Florida." Of course, one trend that many of us have witnessed as more information is done online and less is available by paper (think of faculty reviews that used to be available to students) is that institutions make it difficult for people to locate information.

Fortunately, there is a new database portal available through tbo.com (publishers of the Tampa Tribune), that includes salary information for individuals. This will be very helpful to share with people who wish to know salary information of any public employees who work for the state, as well as many public agencies in the Tampa Bay area (including USF).

They should visit:
http://www2.tbo.com/static/news-special-reports-data-bay/tbo-special-reports-database-hillsborough-salaries/

Then they can enter the name, or partial name. If it's a common name, they can limit information to the University of South Florida by clicking on the drop box. One caveat: the salary information seems to include only funds from public sources. For example, Jim Leavitt--the USF football coach--is listed with a compensation of $750,000. Of course, his contract with guaranteed endorsements, etc., pushes him up around $1.5 million.

Florida Newspapers

Some additional Florida newspapers are now available in digital format through the advanced news archive search of Google (http://www.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search). The digital versions of the St. Petersburg Times and Evening Independent have been available for about a year.

These new titles include:

• Ocala Star-Banner (primarily 1950s-1970s, it seems)
• Gainesville Sun (in the 1980s; earlier issues not yet available)
• Boca Raton News (sketchy)
• FSView and Florida Flambeau (papers of FSU, good coverage in 1940s-1970s, and another source on activities in Florida government)
• Lakeland Ledger (primarily 1950s-1980s)

Also, there are a couple of regional papers with substantial coverage that, along with the St. Petersburg Times, may provide a broader national perspective on Florida events. Two with good 20^th century coverage that come to mind are the Milwaukee Journal and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Locating comparative international statistics

Print volumes on a variety of social and economic factors:
World Development Indicators REF HC59.15.W656 2009
Little Green Data Book REF HC59.3.L58 2006

Electronic sources:
GlobalEdge
MarketLine
StatUSA
CIA World Factbook

Also Marcy's web pages:
Country profiles http://www.nelson.usf.edu/reference/documents/BusCountryProfiles.html
Bookmarks
http://delicious.com/marcylibrarian

Digital Archive of American History Sources from Cornell and Michigan

Courtesy of Jim Schnur:



"Over the past few years, the libraries at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, with assistance from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have embarked upon notable digitization projects of nineteenth-century books, journals, and documents covering the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Known as the “Making of America” collections, the websites at these institutions allow for full-text searching with results displayed as scanned documents in their original format.

The holdings in the period from 1850 to 1900 are quite good, and offer a great digital repository for students. You may search these holdings if you use the advanced Google news archive portal, or go to the sites below directly rather than through Google. "

Making of America (MOA) portal at UMichigan: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/
MOA portal at UMichigan (books only): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/
MOA portal at UMichigan (journals only): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/
MOA portal at Cornell: http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/

Display Rotation in Horseshoe

If you run into a display that has been turned sideways, here is an easy fix.

Press: CTRL & ALT & F12.

This will bring up the properties, where you can uncheck the "Enable Rotation" box.

Papers Past

I wanted to pass along this great resource I discovered while doing research early this morning. Called “Papers Past,” it is a scanned digital archive of many pre-1920 newspapers from New Zealand. While located about as far away from Florida as one could be in a geographical sense, these papers offer excellent coverage of late nineteenth century events throughout the United States and Florida (such as the Spanish-American War and its effect on Tampa).

Here’s the link:

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=p&p=home&e=-------10--1----0-all

Some newspapers are fully searchable; others may be browsed but have not yet been scanned with OCR that would allow full-text searching. What makes this collection so amazing is that it covers a substantial portion of the mid- and late-nineteenth century (from 1839 to 1920), provides free access, and allows for the easy saving of digitized “clippings” (just right-click!). It complements the Times of London and historical New York Times. The other nice thing—similar to many of the old county newspapers from throughout the United States before the 1920s—is that it includes excerpts borrowed by NZ papers from other publications that have never been microfilmed or digitized and thus no longer exist in their original form.

Microfilm scanner

three selections to the scanning menu-

“Default”- 300dpi resolution 256 shades of gray scanning, with auto polarity and auto brightness selected. Best quality for printing, but 1MB per scan.
“Low Resolution”- 200dpi resolution black & white scanning, auto polarity and auto brightness. Good quality for text but bad for pictures. Good for PDF scanning.
“Darker”- Same settings as default, but darker prints.
“Legal Size”- This theoretically should scan a legal size page, but has not successfully printed a larger size. It could be that the software is capable, but the optical limitations of the scanner prohibit it. The printer is capable of it. We’ll play with it for a while and see.

Due to all of the strange dialog boxes that pop up, as well as the lack of options for selecting the modes above, I changed the lockdown of the computer. I gave the login full permissions to the machine, as an administrator, but installed DeepFreeze so that all changes would be reversed upon restarting the machine. If you have any problems with it, please turn off both the computer and the scanner, then start the scanner and then the computer. It seems to be hit or miss whether the scanner can be turned off and on without restarting the computer. Sometimes it works, other times you get the ‘blue screen of death’.

The scanner unit itself will enter a powersave mode after about 15 minutes, and the bulb will go off. It recovers well from this state, but students will likely turn the unit off manually since this has been the procedure with the older units.