Credo Reference Topic Pages

Have you used these Yet? Why not start today?

Topic Pages are Credo Reference’s approach to organizing and presenting information resources. They are a dynamic “one stop shop” where you can find much of what your library has on any one topic. Topic Pages aggregate information from Credo Reference, your other library databases and the open web, all on one screen.


There are close to 10,000 Topic Pages live on the Credo Reference platform. They are a place where you can find information from many of your library resources, all on one Topic, all on one screen. There are three ways to find Topic Pages on Credo Reference:


1.  Keyword Search: Place a term in the search box and click ‘search’. If a Topic Page matches your search term, it will be listed first on your results page, under the Heading ‘Topic Pages’
2. Topic Browse: Click ‘Find a Topic Page’ in the top tool bar to be brought to two options. Browse our full list of Topic Pages by subject or view an alphabetical list:
3. Related Topic Pages: On the Topic Page itself, you will see a tag cloud on the right hand side of the screen below the images. These links all point to Topic Pages related to the Topic Page you are currently exploring. Click the link to be brought to that Topic Page.

Try this out. You won't be disappointed. If you need further help, come to the library and talk with the library staff.


Find Credo Reference on the library page list of databases.

More Information about State Budget Cuts

The Budget Office Announced $170 million in rescissions to help bring the state budget Into balance. The reductions are the first part of the state’s deficit mitigation plan that will go to the Legislature in December.


Allotment reductions for the State Library totaled $205,595.
Personal Services $ (60,000)
Computer Access Program ( 9,500)
CLC (17,500)
Grants to Public Libraries (10,714)
CT Humanities Council (107,881)

Source: Ken Wiggins, State Librarian

CQ Researcher: Changing Demographics

Changing Demographics:

Will the rising minority population benefit the economy?

The nation is undergoing one of the most important demographic transitions in its history. For the first time, minority babies outnumbered white newborns last year, and Census estimates predict that by 2042 non-Hispanic whites will no longer be in the majority. Already, more than a third of Americans are minorities, and non-whites accounted for 92 percent of population growth between 2000 and 2010, a trend driven by rising Hispanic immigration. Meanwhile, as millions of baby boomers retire, the nation is growing older. More than a fifth of Americans will be 65 or older by 2030, compared with one in eight today. Seismic changes also are occurring on the religious front: Protestants are no longer in the majority, and millions have abandoned religion altogether. And, in a striking trend of reverse migration, millions of blacks are moving back to the South. Read the whole report (password protected). Contact the library for user name and password.

Source: CQ Researcher November 16 report
Image: Happy Citizenship Day! A youngster rests after joining other local children who attended a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 2012. Some 40 million Americans — about one in eight — are foreign-born. (Getty Images/Kevork Djansezian)
Next Report: Sugar Controversy

State Budget Cuts and Our LIbrary

We receive a number of services from the state, including ICONN-many databases from Gale plus a few from EBSCO and ReQuest-our Interlibrary Loan service that uses CCAR,   Neither iCONN nor CCAR are affected by the reductions. 

For the Connecticut Library Consoritum (CLC) there is a 5% reduction. That impact has not been defined by CLC as of yet.  We belong to the Connecticut Library Consortium, a membership collaborative serving all types of Connecticut libraries by initiating and facilitating cost-effectives serves, creating and supporting education and professional development, andhelping libraries strengthen their service to users.

Project MUSE Trial

Our trial of the full text journals in MUSE is now active and may be accessed at the MUSE website, http://muse.jhu.edu. . Access is based on the IP addresses submitted with your request, therefore, a login and password is not needed. Just in time for the end of semester research!


Trial Start Date: November 23, 2012
Trial End Date: January 6, 2013

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Since 1995 the MUSE journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE is the trusted source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, with over 120 publishers currently participating.

Android Apps and Security Risks

Bit9 analyzed more than 400,000 apps within the Google Play marketplace, focusing on the permissions requested by these applications and the threat each vulnerability poses. Alongside our Android app analysis, Bit9 also conducting a targeted survey of IT security decision makers responsible for the mobile policy of more than 400,000 employees. Our report, "Pausing Google Play: More Than 100,000 Android Apps May Pose Security Risks" shows that 72 percent of all Android apps (more than 290,000) access at least one high-risk permission. 71 percent of respondents say that their organization allows employee-owned devices to connect to their company's network.

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Last night Louise Erdrich won the National Book Award for Fiction with The Round House, a novel about racial injustice on a North Dakota reservation. The nonfiction category was won by Katherine Boo for Behind the Beautiful forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. She tells the story of the slum dwellers struggle in the shadow of luxury hotels in India. The award for Young People's Literature went to William Alexander for Goblin Secrets. The Poetry award went to David Perry for Bewilderment: New Poems and translations. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times was honored with the Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.  The award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters went to novelist Elmore Leonard.

To be eligible for an award, a book must have been written by a United States citizen. Winners receive $10,000 and a bronze statue.

Wilson Quarterly stops print editions.

There is no easy way to say it: The Summer issue is the last print edition of The Wilson Quarterly.
Beginning with the Autumn issue, the WQ will appear in digital formonly--as an app available for Apple and Android devices, on the Nookand Kindle, and as a PDF available for download on your computer.  It is a change born of both economic necessity and faith in the future. We hope you will join  the next leg of a journey that has already stretched over 36 years. Newsweek, too, will stop publishing a print edition at the end of this year. The times they are achanging;

LIBRARY FACT: INTERLIBRARY LOAN SERVICE

The Hoffman Family library participates with more than 200 school, public, and academic libraries throughout Connecticut that have expanded their resource sharing services with reQuest Interlibrary Loan (ILL). With reQuest ILL in our library, you can create and track your own ILL requests for books and other resources through an easy-to-use Web interface that is available 24/7.  We also lend and borrow from more than 75 libraries outside of Connecticut. Directions are on the library page or just ask any librarian.

NO TALKING ON CELLPHONES IN LIBRARY

REMINDER

Talking on your cellphone is prohibited in the Hoffman Family Library!

  

Failure to comply with requests will result in being asked to leave the library.

Thank you for your cooperation!

HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING

Learn the real story about one of America's favorite civic holidays!

Connect with this URL

 ~ In the Classroom ~

CONSTITUTION HALL PASS

The History of Thanksgiving

Webcast Air Date: November 2012

Live Chat: Weekdays November 12 - 21, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST

It's free to view and participate - all you need is an internet connection  

Click here to tune in  

Grab a seat at the table as we talk turkey! Learn the real story about the Thanksgiving holiday: find out about the native peoples who were living in what is now New England, learn about what kinds of foods our early Thanksgiving dinners did and didn't have, and discover how the day was made a national holiday during the Civil War.

Don't forget to use our great discussion questions

before and after you watch the episode! 

FREE ACCESS TO ELIBRARY THROUGH DECEMBER

Staying informed, getting homework help, and finding relevant information quickly. We know that access to information is critical in times like these, and PROQUEST IS here to help. 

 In an effort to provide information in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, from now through December 2012, ProQuest will provide access to its eLibrary® product—including access to the full text of The New York Times—to  library users and students in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.  

For your information needs, eLibrary includes 8 different types of media comprising more than 2,500 full text magazines, newspapers, e-books, and transcripts, along with thousands of images, maps, websites and videos.  In addition, users can search more than 7,000 editor-curated Research Topics.

To get started, here is the link for our library users and students: 

 http://elibrary3.bigchalk.com/elibweb/elib/do/search

7 Days of Free Downloads

The Library Journal to create awareness for VideoBlocks.com is giving away 7 days of complimentary access to download anything you want from over 50,000 clips of video, motion backgrounds, production music, and more. Contact me at the library to use this 7 day window of opportunity.

Changes to EBSCO Searching

Boolean Operator Changes

EBSCO will be introducing a change to query processing so that AND, OR and NOT are only interpreted as Boolean operators if they are in UPPERCASE. The objective is to enable the search engine to handle unintended Boolean operators literally so book titles and phrases don't fail or return poor results. Examples of phrases and book titles with unintended Booleans:

And then there were none
And so it goes
To be or not to be
Moby Dick or the whale

eBook Apps

Following the success of eBooks on EBSCOhost, eBook apps will extend the portability of eBooks from currently-supported eBook Reader devices to Android and iOS tablets and phones.

Other Changes
Planned enhancements include integration with WorldCat to locate books at other libraries, integration with HathiTrust to enable full text searching within books, and cited references, and customization of real time circulation display. Additional enhancements will improve subject and journal search experiences.

Another Award: The Man Booker Prize

Hilary Mantel  won the 2012 Man Booker Prize with her novel, Bring Up The Bodies , becoming the first British author to win twice. She picked up the prestigious award - and £50,000 ($80,500) in prize money at the London ceremony this week.

Bring Up The Bodies, Mantel's 13th novel, is the sequel to 2009's Wolf Hall, for which she also won the Booker. Set in 1535, it traces the efforts of Thomas Cromwell, chief Minister to Henry VIII, to keep the peace during the the final days of Anne Boleyn. If you like historical fiction, these two books are terrific.

The prize, launched in 1969, aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. Last year's winner was Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

The Oxygen Barons by Greg Feeley

Greg Feeley is an English instructor at Goodwin College. His first novel, The  Oxygen Barons,  was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and is now available in the library.If you like great futuristic/space adventure, this is for you. Meet the characters Galvanix, a man of science, and Taggart, a woman of war. You may want to read all of Feeley's novels. 

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.(The Philip K. Dick Award for 2011 went to Simon Morden for The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy, which is not in our library. We can borrow it for you through Interlibrary Loan.)

Cender for Medical Consumers Update

 Their website stopped posting new material on October 19, 2012. Feel free to use their archives accessible on the webpage. The policy work of the Center continues. 

The last post was "Should you get a flu shot?"

The Center for Medical Consumers is an independent,nonprofit organization. Their website took a critical look at the evidence supporting common treatment decisions.  The recurring themes include over diagnosis and its consequences, how to recognize unnecessary treatment, how to understand inflated claims for screening tests and preventive drug therapy.  The website still has important information, but will not be updated.
www.medicalconsumers.org

EXTENDED LIBRARY HOURS

YOU ASKED FOR IT AND HERE IT IS.

BEGINNING MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, THE LIBRARY WILL BE OPEN UNTIL 9:30 P.M. MONDAY THROUGH THURSDAY.  ALL OTHER TIME REMAIN THE SAME.

VAST Academic Video Online

VAST is now bigger and better, with the addition this month of approximately 75 videos in disciplines never before in VAST—covering subjects such as cinema studies, including silent and feature films; rehabilitation therapy; and sports medicine and exercise science. VAST now offers more than 16,000 titles.

They have also listened to what you said about the interface and have made a few changes to make it more streamlined for users. So now you can limit your search to VAST content if you want to. Access the database from the library page "Databases." The URL for the product VAST: Academic Video Online is http://vast.alexanderstreet.com.


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: This product is optimized to operate with Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher and Firefox 3.0 or higher. Audio and video resources are accessible with Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher.