Show your Librarian some love / Todd Gillman

Many academic librarians feel unloved and underappreciated on their campuses, and the main reason is that they sense they are viewed as second-class citizens by members of the teaching faculty.

... Just as children raised in a loving environment tend to fare better in life than those from broken homes, so students trained by professors and librarians who cooperate and affirm each other's role fare better than those forced to bear the brunt of troubled relations.

... If your students didn't get enough exposure to research education before your course (and trust me, they didn't) you owe it to them to bring them in. Most undergraduates come to college having mastered only the most basic tools for research. They can use a dictionary. They can conduct a search in Google that yields results (5 million, in fact!). They may even be able to run an online search by author or title and then find the book on the shelf. But that's about it -- and that's not nearly enough.

... So if you are a teaching faculty member, why not respond to that librarian who e-mails you every fall with an offer to meet you and your students for research-education (or "information literacy") sessions at the library and take him or her up on it?

Todd Gilman is the librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.

New Library Catalogue for UJ

The Library and Information Centre is proud to announce the launch of UJLink, the new library catalogue interface, on 1 November 2007. UJLink has a contemporary look and feel and in addition offers enhanced services such as: The ability to do a meta-search which can include the library catalogue as well as a selection of electronic databases and catalogues from other institutions. My UJLink – a facility where library clients can: (1) rate the items in the library collection, (2) save their most useful searches for re-use, (3) keep a reading history, (4) view their loan record, (5) renew items on loan and (6) place holds on items that are not currently available.

What's New @ RefWorks

Some changes have been made to RefWorks to help you with your research and improve service:

Direct linking from RefWorks to the database
At the top of your RefWorks page, next to the University of Johannesburg, you will now see a blue i displayed. Clicking on the i will allow you to go directly to the UJ list of database.

Updating User Information
We've now added more User Types to the RefWorks interface, this will help us get a better understanding of who our users are.

While all new users will have the option of accessing the new user types, as an existing user please update your user information in RefWorks and chose the type that best suits you.

You can update your user information by clicking on the Tools option on the menu list and then choosing Update User Information

Email your Librarian
Have a question on RefWorks? Want to suggest a citation format or maybe even improvements? You can now use the Email your Librarian link, located under the Help function, to email any questions or suggestions regarding RefWorks to your Administrator.