Lynch School Library Newsletter

SFX is a feature of a growing number of Boston College Libraries' databases. SFX allows you to go from a citation in a database and view a list of services available for that citation. Boston College uses the name and icon

for this technology. The current services offered on the Find It Menu include:

Not all of these services will appear when you click the Find It link. It depends on the database that you are using. You will only see

(Find It) links after you have searched a particular database.

Boston College Libraries now provide access to an added ten years of the ISI Web of Science database, with coverage spanning 1982 – the present. Web of Science , made up of Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index , provides access to nearly 9,000 major journals across the disciplines. Web of Science is most famous for its “Cited Reference” search feature, letting you search for recent works which cite earlier research literature of interest. Through a cited reference search, you can discover how a known idea or innovation has been confirmed, applied, improved, extended, or corrected. You can also search the database by author, topic, journal title and address.

ISI Web of Science now has a very useful alerting feature that allows you to keep up to date with the latest relevant information in your field. After you perform a search in the database you can choose to save the search strategy as an alert. Each week the alert automatically searches the latest week of data and then sends the results to you by e-mail. Find out how to set up alerts . Please note that one can only access the alerting features by registering and personalizing one's ISI Web of Science homepages.

Also note that a number of other databases and collections of electronic journals provide automated current awareness services that result, depending on the type of profile or strategy, in table of contents of your chosen journals or a list of individual article citations being e-mailed directly to your e-mail box. See also the Research Guide: Automated Alerts .

New Brochure Introduces Open Access
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have published a new brochure that introduces open access to scientific and scholarly research, an increasingly popular strategy for advancing scholarly communication in the Internet age. The Open Access brochure describes the benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists. Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on Internet connectivity to increase a research article's use and impact. The brochure also suggests steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work. For example, retaining rights to post their pre- or post-prints in institutional repositories can help ensure broad exposure for a scholar's research (see Boston College Libraries' Suggested Addendum to Publishing Contracts ). Broader scale faculty actions include working towards their academic society's adoption of open access or helping to publish an open-access journal themselves. Also see the news item below: Institutional Repository .

[To view PDF documents, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader , which you can download free of charge]

As a result of usability testing, the BC Libraries have made changes to its web site. Library users told us they wanted a logical place to begin their research and also the ability to more easily contact library staff. Now library patrons can begin research with a Subject Quick Start . For in-depth coverage on a topic, they can use a Research Guide . They can find tutorials and answers to frequently asked questions on the How Do I...? page. If they still have questions, they can email or make an appointment with a Subject Specialist .

The BC Libraries have purchased the database Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). When complete, this database will deliver every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. It will comprise nearly 150,000 titles and editions and will allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material. The database is divided into seven subject areas: History and Geography; Fine Arts and Social Sciences; Medicine, Science and Technology; Literature and Language; Religion and Philosophy; Law; General Reference. Eighteenth Century Collections Online is the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken. It is also an excellent complement to two other BC Libraries' databases: Early English Books Online (EEBO), which provides full-text access to nearly every English language book published from the invention of printing to 1700, and Evans Digital Edition , the full-text digital collection of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in America from 1639-1800. All three databases are potentially very valuable to one researching aspects of educational history and related fields.