Industry Trends - Media and Telecommunications

Looking for global Industry Trends? Check out Mergent Online available through Research Databases. You'll find global trends in major industries, including Telecommunications and Media.

Two New Collections Added to Ebrary

Now included in the growing Ebrary collection.

Canadian public policy collection
This is a collection of monograph publications from Canadian public policy institutes, government agencies, advocacy groups, think-tanks, university research centres and other public interest groups. The organizations included in this collection represent the leading edge of primary research and opinion in all areas of Canadian public policy. Their publications are vital to the understanding of developing issues in every arena of Canadian public life.

Canadian health research collection
This is a collection of monograph publications from Canadian research institutes, government agencies and university centres working in the area of health and medical research. The organizations included in this collection are very active publishers of primary research in the field. The publications included are both general policy documents as well as those of a specialized technical nature.

Wikipedia changing its policies on anonymous entries

I'm sure many profs and TA's have been seeing wikipedia articles popping up in student reference lists for the past year or so. For those who haven't seen it, Wikidpedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) is a free online encyclopedia that is created and edited by anyone who wants to create or edit an entry. The idea is that the user community will police itself, and any erroneous entries will be corrected quickly by users who catch the problems and/or mistakes. Wikipedia has become incredibly popular with students but has been met with great cynicism by librarians and scholars who still like to think there's such a thing as authority.

Some recent publicity about problematic entries has caused Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales to come to the defence of his product, but he's also changing some of the ground rules for contributing to it. The NY Times tells you more...

http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1025_3-5981119.html

An additional article on the risks of Wikipedia.

• Denning, P., Horning, J., Parnas, D. & Weinstein, L. (2005). Wikipedia Risks. Communications of the ACM. 48(12), 58.

An article from the other side...

• Giles, J. (2005). Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Nature. 438 (Dec. 15), 900-901.
  

I'd love to hear what instructors have to say about Wikipedia. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Are you students using it? Are they aware that anyone can create the content on Wikipedia and that there might be a problem with that? What is the quality of the entries on subjects of your expertise?

Ebrary - direct page linking

It is possible to link to a specific page in an Ebrary title (say a specific chapter start page). If you access any given title you can simply copy the URL from the Address Bar in your browser. You'll notice however that the URL never changes, regardless of what page you view. To access a specific page with the URL, simply add the following to the end of the URL: &page=xx where xx is the page number.

So for instance this title (Elementary number theory in nine chapters) has the following URL: http://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca:2048/
login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ucalgary/Doc?id=10073533

To go to page 47, simply make the URL say this:
http://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca:2048/
login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ucalgary/Doc?id=10073533&page=47

Thanks!

I just wanted to say thanks to all the C&C folk who volunteered to take part in our library website usability testing last week. The project coordinator was really impressed by the number from Communication and Culture who puts their names forward - it far exceeded our demands! So, for those of you who took part - your feedback was greatly appreciated. For those of you whom we didn't need, we appreciate your willingness to participate and, if you have any specific comments about the new library site that you'd like to pass along, Chris and I would love to hear from you!

Enhancements to EBSCOhost databases in Jan. 2006

EBSCOhost is introducing several product enhancements in the beginning of 2006 to their databases (Academic Search Premier, Communication and Mass Media Complete, etc.).

* Visual Search delivers a graphically-rich, extremely efficient visual searching alternative, available in addition to EBSCO's popular Basic and Advanced Searching modes.

* EBSCOhost Clustering displays links of search results sorted by subject, in addition to regular Result List article links. The links provide users with instant access to just those articles concerning particular subjects.

* Database Selection from the Basic and Advanced Search Screens is available using a drop-down list of the databases in the profile being searched, eliminating the need to return to the Choose Databases screen to select a different database.

* Database Groupings by Subject can be presented in the database drop-down list to offer users groupings of databases sorted by popular subjects, such as technology, business, medical science, psychology or education.

* Printing, Emailing and Saving in Standard Industry formats allows researchers interested in citing articles using specific industry formats to choose from the following: AMA, APA, Chicago/Turabian: Humanities, Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date, Modern Language Association or Vancouver/ICMJE.

* RSS enabled Alerts allow users to feed results from EBSCOhost Search and Journal Alerts into their news readers and aggregators, as well as their web sites.

* Context-specific Help is instantly available when users click on question mark icons.