Tisch Library Newsletter

	BiblioTech Connections Newsletter of the Tisch Library of Tufts University Winter 2003 No. 36
Tisch Homepage Tufts Catalog Tufts Homepage	In This Issue: BLC Ask 24/7 Reference Service Think Before You Print New and Notable Databases TILT: A Web-Based Library Tutorial	Level G Update Upcoming Events: Exhibits, Poetry Walk, & Author Talk Library Award Nomination
	BLC Ask 24/7 Reference Service The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) has introduced a new service for students, faculty and staff of Tufts and other participating universities. The ASK 24/7 Reference Service offers real-time assistance from reference librarians 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year via the Web. The BLC ASK 24/7 Reference Service is staffed by librarians of the BLC member libraries and by reference librarians elsewhere worldwide. Ten of the eighteen BLC institutions, including Tufts, are currently participating in a pilot. This interactive service offers an educational alternative to the Web search engines used by researchers and students working at odd hours from their dormitories, homes, offices, and elsewhere. Now professional library research assistance is just a click away at any time of the day or night. To try out this new service, or just to learn more about it, simply choose the Ask 24/7 link on the right-hand side of the Tisch Library home page . Return to Contents Think Before You Print The Tisch, Music and Ginn libraries and the computer labs on the Medford campus are coordinating a shift to pay-for-print software for their public computers, with a pilot to start this spring term. This step is necessitated by increased costs, environmental factors, the ongoing shift from print to electronic resources, and the competing demands placed on limited budgets. Students will be granted a certain allowance of free copies at the beginning of the changeover. The Tufts libraries currently provide access to over 13,000 electronic journals and 500 electronic databases. Providing free printing from increased electronic resources has placed significant pressure on library budgets on the Medford campus. Data from the past four years indicate that the costs related to printing have doubled in that time period. These include costs related to hardware, toner, paper and maintenance. The library is now spending $60,000 annually to subsidize public printing with future costs predicted to increase. % Growth (Decline) Compared to FY96 Graph begins at left with 1996 and ends with 2004. Each line marks a 100% increase from a starting point of 0. Pay for Print Business Case Graph begins at left with 1996 and ends with 2004. Each line marks an increase of $10,000 from a starting point of 0. (More detailed charts and figure information may be viewed.) Figures for 1996 show a print expense of $13,000, photocopy revenue of $21,000, and an electronic resource expenditure of $158,000, whereas in 2002 the corresponding figures are $42,000, $14,000, and $930,000. In other words, an increase in electronic resource expenditure of 489% has been accompanied by a 223% increase in printing expense, while photocopy revenue has declined by 33%. The ability to print for free has resulted in an enormous waste of paper. Every day, Tisch Library staff members pick up two reams of printed pages that are not retrieved by patrons. The libraries have a responsibility to address environmental issues by reducing the waste of paper that occurs at library printers. Many students have indicated that this is a serious concern, and the shift to a more responsible arrangement has the support of Tufts environmental student groups. The necessity of charging for printing is not unique to Tufts. Many New England libraries charge for printing, including Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, and all the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire state universities. The Boston and Grafton campuses of Tufts have charged for printing for some time. How It Will Work The software installation will employ the same card system as the photocopying machines, with the same price structure. Documents to be printed will be placed in a queue at a new print station. Patrons will go to the print station to "release" the document. The station indicates the size of the print job and asks for approval, thus giving patrons control over what they are printing. Currently, patrons often don't know the size or nature of their print jobs, and they end up unintentionally printing material they don't want. Reduced waiting time at the printers should be another favorable consequence of the change. Options Other Than Printing Patrons will be able to download their material to a floppy disc if they don't want to print in the library or the labs. Patrons can also e-mail records to themselves for reading at leisure or printing on personal printers. Printing two pages per sheet will also be an option. Return to Contents New and Notable Databases The newest additions to the library's extensive array of online databases, listed A-Z, are the following: The Times Digital Archive The complete digital edition of *The Times* (London) contains every issue (over eight million articles) of the "world's newspaper of record" from 1785 through 1985. (Data will be added monthly until the entire period is available in late 2003.) Researchers can search through this source to retrieve full facsimile images of either a specific article or a complete page. The entire newspaper is captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. From The Times, Saturday, Feb 11, 1933: George Orwell's Letter to the Editor concerning his descriptions of hotel kitchens in Down and Out in London and Paris. New York Times Historical Archive Covering from 1851 to three years before the current date, this source includes full-text and full-image articles dating back to the first issue of The *New York Times. The collection includes digital reproductions of every page from every issue, cover to cover, in down-loadable PDF files. Oxford Reference Online* This full-text source provides Web access to one hundred major Oxford University Press dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works in the humanities, social sciences, foreign languages, science, technology and medicine, the performing arts, and religion. Works can be searched separately or across the entire databases. Included are over 1.5 million entries. World Shakespeare Bibliography Online This bibliography provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare that have been published or produced since 1971. In addition, Early English Books Online is a full-text database worth re-announcing. It includes over 125,000 English-language titles published from 1475- 1700. Title page of a book included in Early English Books Online Return to Contents Web-based Research Tutorial Introduced All members of the Tufts community now have access to TILT (the Tisch Library Tutorial), an interactive, Web-based tutorial. Originally the brainchild of staff at the University of Texas, TILT is made available at no charge to other libraries via an open publication licensing agreement. The implications of UT's generosity can't be overstated. Being able to use TILT's framework has allowed us to concentrate our efforts on personalizing the tutorial for Tisch Library users. Tufts students will benefit from UT's generosity! Whether students are beginning researchers or are brushing up on their skills, TILT helps them learn how to: understand the variety of formats of information available and choose the appropriate format(s) for an information need effectively use periodical indexes identify differences between popular and scholarly periodicals construct search strategies choose between subject and keyword searching evaluate information sources TILT is made up of three modules: selecting source material, searching sources and evaluating sources. The modules can be completed in any order, though there is something to be said for starting at the beginning. Each module takes about thirty minutes and can be stopped and restarted at any time as many times as necessary. Many interactive activities and quizzes are built into TILT in order to evaluate success. The quiz results can be sent to faculty to be used with other data to assess their students' success. TILT is available 24 hours a day. It should only be used with Internet Explorer. For more information about it, contact Laurie Sabol, instruction coordinator, at 617-5167 or at laurie.sabol@tufts.edu. Return to Contents Update on Level G Progress A team of Tisch library staff has been developing options to finish out Level G, the ground-level area where older volumes of little-used scholarly journals were moved last January to alleviate stack crowding. The goals are to permit public access to collections in this area, as opposed to paging for needed volumes, and to gain increased study space, needs identified as important priorities in the library's strategic plan. The library administration, considering this project a top funding priority and supported in this by the Faculty Library Committee, is working closely with AS&E administration as well as Development to identify funds so that the project can begin in May with the goal of completing it in September 2003. Return to Contents Upcoming Events: Exhibits, Poetry Walk and Author Talk National Library Week Exhibit Tisch Library will celebrate National Library Week (April 6-12, 2003) by mounting an exhibit consisting largely of contributions from members of the Tufts community. The exhibit will run from March 15-April 30 in the library lobby. Tufts students, faculty, and staff have been invited to participate by commenting on their favorite books, quotations about libraries, and memories and uses of libraries. Tufts Author Talk by Anita Shreve On April 1, 2003, from 3:30-4:30 p.m. in the Hirsh Reading Room, Anita Shreve, J68, will read from the book she is currently writing and from Sea Glass: A Novel, published in spring 2002. An accompanying exhibit in the Tisch Library lobby will run from January 10 to April 5, 2003. Poetry Walk On April 11, 2003, from 10:30-11:30 a.m., the third Tufts Poetry Walk will tour sites around campus where poems will be read aloud. The Walk, which celebrates the Tufts Poet tradition begun by John Holmes, will start from the patio in front of Tisch Library. Return to Contents Tufts Libraries Nominated for Excellence in Academic Libraries Award It is a pleasure to announce that the Nominating Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has nominated the Tufts Libraries for an Excellence in Academic Libraries Award for 2003. Nominations recognize academic libraries that are outstanding in furthering the educational missions of their institutions. Simply being nominated for this very competitive award is a great honor. Each year one library is selected in each of three library categories: university, college, and community college. If, in this fourth year of awards, Tufts should receive the $3,000 University Award, we would be the first university library selected that does not belong to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Return to Contents BiblioTech Connections is published three times a year: in the fall, winter, and spring. It is made available in print form as well as via the Web. Contributors to this issue: Regina Raboin Laura Walters Christopher Barbour Laurie Sabol Jo-Ann Michalak Editor: Margaret Gooch Return to Top
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