New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar

Library promo from Brigham Young University! Did you know studying in the library is a bajillion times more effective then studying in your shower?

For the Horde (or Alliance)!

The current library display is on computer games, with an emphasis on  RPG games (that's role playing games to you newbs). We have books on how to create compelling storylines for game developers, how to write addons for World of Warcraft (using Lua), and the sociological and cultural aspects of gaming.

If you are a gamer, you will love this display! If you think games are undermining society, this display will be an eye-opener.

Music and more

UHMC students and faculty now have access to three new streaming media serivices:

• Naxos Music Library is the world's largest online classical music library. Currently, it offers streaming access to more than 43,030 CDs with more than 616,300 tracks.
  On average, 500 new CDs are added to the library every month.
  
  The Naxos Music Library offers the catalogs of more than 50 classical, jazz and world music labels with more labels joining every month. Among the labels whose catalogs are included in the service are leading independent classical labels such as BIS, Chandos, CPO, Haenssler, Hungaroton, Marco Polo, Vanguard Classics, VOX, and of course Naxos. World music content is provided by ARC, Celestial Harmonies and others; and there is also jazz, film music, nostalgia, classic and contemporary rock content. 
•  Naxos Spoken Word Library - literature and poetry ranging from medieval times to the twentieth century, and many newly written texts supplement an ever-expanding range of non-fiction. 
• Naxos Jazz Library - streaming jazz library.

The Naxos libraries can be accessed from any internet enabled device. An iPhone/iPod touch/iPad application is available from the iTunes Store.

The UHMC Library also provides access to Films on Demand.  This streaming media service gives UHMC students and faculty access to thousands of films online.

Using LibX and Zotero Together.

The three main difficulties faced by library users are (1) how to navigate among the library catalog, (2) how to search the catalog effectively, and (3) how to manage information once it is found. LibX drastically simplifies the first two tasks, and Zotero simplifies the last task. Put them together and you've just streamlined the entire research experience in a fairly dramatic way. Take a look at this tutorial.

You can use my ca-ca-catalog

Students and faculty from the University of Washington's Information School get their groove on.

Google Wave Available for Everyone

If you haven't tried Google Wave, now is your chance.

Google Wave Available for Everyone: "Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on our Enterprise blog)."

Library Toolbar

LibX is a free, open source scholars' extension for the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers that lets people use services offered by their library. Users can search their library catalog(s) and databases through a search bar or through a context menu. The context menu is adaptive (changing depending on what the user selected) and configurable (allowing the user to include any configured resource.) You can get your own LibX toolbar to search UHMC Library.

LibX will also embed a cue when it sees a book record, for UHMC it is a little rose (the library's flavicon). So if you are searching for books at Amazon, LibX will put this cue next to the book title. When clicked it will perform a search at the UHMC Library and let you know if we have the book.

You may see the cue showing up in other places, like on a Google search. If clicked, it LibX will preform a search of the UHMC Library catalog based on your Google search.

You can also search via your browser's context menu: