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Internet Help The Virtual Library Science Sources on the Web Wolves on the Net Undergrad Instruction & the Web |
The University Libraries Home Page
by Laura Cohen, Network Services Librarian
The virtual library is a reality at the University at Albany. The Internet has become an increasingly important component of library service, and staff at the University Libraries has been working actively to integrate Internet technology into its delivery of information. This issue of Library Update highlights the University at Albany Libraries Home Page, library services and resources available through the Internet. The Home Page is a site on the World Wide Web which brings to your desktop a wealth of information that once required a library visit.
Our Home Page connects you to important library-related information and services. In addition, a large quantity of reference and research material on the Internet are just a few clicks away. These resources have been integrated into a convenient and easy-to-use interface. Visit the Libraries Home Page and bring the electronic library into your office. We are located at http://www.albany.edu/library/.
Find out about the University Libraries: From the main screen of the Home Page, choose Divisions and Services to access the entire Fact Sheet series. This series includes information on borrowing policies, interlibrary loan and document delivery, our growing collection of electronic databases and services, how to place material on reserve, and much more. These guides provide contact information if you need further assistance.
Getting Help About the Internet
Learning to use the Internet can take time and effort. The University Libraries Home Page (http://www.albany.edu/library) offers several instructional guides to get you started, guides which can be used as self-help tutorials that allow you to learn at your own pace. At the main screen of the Home Page, choose the option "Internet Help" to locate the information that may be useful to you.Our Internet help guides cover several topics at a basic and intermediate level. The topics include:
A Basic Guide to the Internet
Although some of these guides are available as paper handouts in the library, the online guides have several advantages over their more traditional counterparts. Most importantly, these guides are hyperlinked to the Internet sites to which they refer. As you read about a topic, you can jump directly to the Internet sites discussed in the guide. For example, the "Quick Reference Guide" describes the search syntax of several Internet databases and then links you to each site from within the guide.
As another advantage, these guides are cross-referenced to one another. This allows you to move back and forth among the guides as the topics warrant. Finally, the guides are updated on an ongoing basis. The only constant about the Internet is change, and Web publishing allows for immediate revisions to ensure that the information is up-to-date.
Our Internet guides have been recognized beyond the University at Albany community. A selection of these guides is used to train the staff at the New York Public Library, as well as students at Utah State University. In addition, some of our guides have been awarded a place on the "PC Webopaedia," a Web-based database of guides to the PC and the Internet sponsored by Sandy Bay Software, Inc.
For the more ambitious learner, the Home Page has gathered together a large collection of sites with information on many aspects of the Internet. From within The Virtual Library, choose the option "Resources About the Internet." This page lists several subtopics, including Dictionaries, Discussion Group Directories, HyperText Markup Language, Learning Resources, Multimedia and Programming, News, and Publications. The links on this page provide an in-depth look at the Internet offered at many of the most important sites available.
Using the Internet for Research
The Internet has become an important resource for academic research. Much of this activity is concentrated on the World Wide Web. The Web is the hypertext portion of the Internet in which files are hyperlinked (or linked) together on server computers throughout the world. A link to another destination may be a word, phrase or image. In a graphical environment such as Windows or the Macintosh, the Web also offers a multi-media experience which may include photos, art work, video, and sound. In addition, the search capabilities of the electronic environment make it convenient to locate information. In the Libraries and on the campus as a whole, the Netscape Navigator is the graphical program used to access and navigate the Web. Another advantage of the Web is its currency. Many Web sites are updated on a continual basis, and provide up-to-date information not available via traditional media.In such an environment, research sites on the Web can provide more than merely electronic copies of the same material we might find in a book. The Web offers a rich new dimension to the world of information. At the University Libraries, we are actively seeking out the best and most enhanced resources that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Web.
Here is a sample of resources from the Libraries Home Page (http://www.albany.edu/library) that demonstrates the uniqueness of the World Wide Web. You can access all of them by choosing "The Virtual Library."
Subject Directories and Search Engines. The Home Page contains a page which gathers together thousands of Internet subject directories and search engines for easy access to most of the major resources on the Internet. Subject directories gather Internet sites submitted by site creators or evaluators and organize them into subject categories. Some directories, such as the Argus Clearinghouse and the WWW Virtual Library, are highly selective and are an excellent source of high quality research sites. Search engines gather sites by means of a computer program and contain millions of documents which are retrievable by user query. Alta Vista and Ultraseek are two of the best.
Library Catalogs. The Home Page contains links to thousands of library catalogs worldwide.
Reference. The Reference page includes nearly 200 resources in several categories, including Books, Currency Converters, Dictionaries and Thesauri, Financial Aid, News, Weather, Style Guides, and International Resources. For example:
The Reference page also contains searchable phone books for both businesses and individuals worldwide. You can even look up the e-mail address of that elusive colleague you ve been searching for.
U. S. Government Information. The Federal Government has made a strong commitment to making information available electronically. To this end, agencies have mounted numerous sites.
Subject-Specific Information. Research sources in the academic disciplines are proliferating. New sites are added to the Libraries Home Page on a daily basis. Here are some examples of the sites available:
- Arts and Humanities:
- Business:
- Political Science:
- Social Sciences:
Explore our "Virtual Library" and search the wider world of the Internet for resources to meet your research needs.
Science Sources on the Web
by Michael Knee, Physical, Mathematical, & Computer Sciences Bibliographer
Science Sources on the Web contains links to important scientific resources on the Internet. The resources identified relate to the sciences studied and researched at the University: Atmospheric Science, Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Science, Geological Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics. For each of these sciences, there is a separate page with links to sources for that subject. In addition, there is a Science page that includes links to general, interdisciplinary, or multi-disciplinary sites. A "what's new" page enables users to learn about new resources. When a link to a new resource is added to one of the individual pages, the same link is created on the "what's new" page under a date heading. Links remain on the "what's new" page for two to three months which allows users adequate time to keep up-to-date.
knee@csc.albany.eduEach of the pages of "Science Sources on the Web" include the same three elements:
- A group of links to "starting points" for that subject or a sub-discipline. Starting points are highly regarded sites that provide the user with organized lists of links that enhance browsing.
- "Searching tools" which links to the University Libraries Home Page's listing of "Internet search engines." A user can then select an individual search engine like Ultraseek, a multi-threaded search engine such as MetaCrawler, or one of several other search engines in this extensive list.
- Links to value-added resources for that subject discipline. This includes links to dictionaries, encyclopedias, professional societies, courses and tutorials, databases, tables-of-contents services, electronic journals, formulas, constants, maps, images, atlases, awards, bibliographies, biographies, grants, patents, quotations, and other electronic sources available on the Web.
"Science Sources on the Web" can be accessed by using its own URL: http://www.albany.edu/~knee/ or the individual pages can be located under "Subject Collections by Discipline" on the University Libraries' "Virtual Library" (http://www.albany.edu/library/).
Wolves on the Net
by Michael Knee, Physical, Mathematical, & Computer Sciences Bibliographer
Wolves: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature provides comprehensive, worldwide coverage of the scientific literature about wolves for the years 1968 through 1987. Originally, it was compiled in 1988 as a print on paper bibliography. In 1995, the bibliography was converted to HTML and made available on the World Wide Web. By placing it on the Web, it is accessible to researchers throughout the world.
knee@csc.albany.edu
The home page for the bibliography (http://www.albany.edu/~knee/wolf.html) serves as a table of contents and a hyperlinked entree to the citations. In addition to an introduction, which provides information about scope, coverage, arrangement, and method of compilation, there are twenty-one subject categories or chapters. In each chapter, the citations are arranged alphabetically by author and there is sufficient bibliographic detail to locate it in a library, request it via interlibrary loan, or purchase it. Since many citations could have appeared in two or more chapters, "see also" references are provided at the end of each subject category which are linked directly to the citations. The hyperlinked author index is another means of entry to the bibliography.
Several Web-based wolf and wildlife home pages furnish links to the bibliography. In 1996, it was accessed over 1,300 times. Specific subject home pages are a very successful means of sharing information with the larger research community.
Undergraduate Instruction and the Web
by John Pipkin, Dean, Undergraduate Studies and
In the past year the Office of Undergraduate Studies, The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (C.E.T.L.), the University Libraries and many Schools and Colleges along with many unsung individuals have been promoting the use of the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, in undergraduate courses. The Undergraduate Studies effort has focused on General Education courses and has been guided by two firm convictions. First, the Web is (for now) the best way to get beyond strictly local, desktop resources such as multimedia CD-ROM, into the broader information world. Second, the Web provides a fascinating and potentially very fruitful way to get students and faculty engaged with information technologies.
Trudi Jacobson, Coordinator, User EducationUniversity librarians have been in the forefront of teaching students how to use the Web. Often students are anxious and confused and have unrealistic expectations of what they will find. While the Libraries Electronic Information Classes teach students how to navigate the Net, they also emphasize the need to integrate the Web as one source among many in information searches. Students are sometimes under the false impression that the Web replaces more traditional resources, including print media. Librarians also stress the need to critically evaluate information derived from the Web and actively engage students in this process.
The effort to involve General Education faculty has been spearheaded by Associate Deans Roger Stump and James Wessman, with strong support from Lil Brannon and Kathy Turek of C.E.T.L. Faculty encounters with the Web tend to run as follows: First comes excitement at the endless resources out there. They discover the exciting things that the various search engines come up with from their key words. Then comes a measure of disenchantment and frustration. Access times can be abysmal. There are depressingly limitless possibilities for the dissemination of banalities, prejudices and falsehoods. Much of the Web is ephemeral. Most of it is shallow. There is much less to many sites than meets the eye. And, perhaps, one realizes how Web materials ignore or subvert the norms of published academic resources. Authorship and proprietorship are concealed or deconstructed. Serious, refereed, electronic journals for example are outnumbered many times over by Web sites without any quality control at all, to say nothing of an editorial function. After these initial encounters with the profound, unblinking disorder of the Web, faculty begin to home in on truly worthwhile and exciting resources for their teaching and research.
Then comes the serious question of how or if to use the Web to move along the learning process in classes. We d like to make several points based on experiences in the past year. First, there s a place for saying to students "here s Netscape, have fun." But students especially in lower division courses are structure seekers. To lay out meaningful paths for students, to steer them through the dross and to apply intellectual filtering functions is very time-consuming. Second, although faculty are happy to have a Web page created for them as we have been doing they must ultimately have active control over their own course materials. It s one thing to pass on to students an interesting set of Netscape bookmarks, and another to manage actively a Web site associated with a course, using tools such as Hotdog. Given the present state of the tools, it is clear that a sizable majority of faculty are not prepared to do it themselves. Third, some faculty and many parents fear the vision of a world of isolated students, passively clicking at screens, and not even having to go to class. In our experience intensive computer use seems to increase, not decrease, social and intellectual encounters both virtual and real between students. Nevertheless the truism that active learning is better than passive learning means that we must encourage students to work proactively with Web materials, creating their own paths and perhaps their own home pages. It is very clear that we do not yet know the best way to harness Web technology either physically or pedagogically. On the physical side, there has been quite hot debate about the merits of dedicated Netscape laboratories, and the contrasting vision of "an ethernet jack by every seat and a notebook computer in every book-bag."
Finally, as with all technical innovations, the diffusion process creates new inequalities. Freshmen and sophomores living on campus are intrinsically advantaged over commuters, because soon all dorm rooms will have RESNET (ethernet grade) access, which provides a qualitatively different experience than a telephone modem, no matter how fast. But student access to Netscape terminals on the podium itself is very limited indeed. Among faculty, access to computers powerful enough to use the Web is also uneven. In significant parts of the University we have to say of Web-based learning what George Bernard Shaw said of a major religion: "we don t know if it would work, because it s never been tried."
We strongly urge readers to click around the local neighborhood of cyberspace and see for themselves. One of the most impressive local sites, from a pedagogical point of view, is the group of linked pages produced by the Project Renaissance teams. Here the premises of collaborative, active, inter-disciplinary, Web-oriented learning have taken visible and intriguing forms.
Faculty interested in joining the General Education effort should contact James Wessman (442 4892, jw787@csc.albany.edu). Librarians are available during class time to teach your students how to effectively use and evaluate the Internet. For more information, and to discuss your class s needs, contact Trudi Jacobson, Coordinator of User Education Programs (442 3581, tj662@csc.albany.edu).
Nancy Stanfill
Nancy Stanfill joined the University Libraries faculty on October 3, 1996 as Preservation Librarian. She will manage our Preservation Office and its staff and administer the New York State Comprehensive Research Libraries State Aid grant which funds our preservation program. Nancy is a member of the first class of Preservation and Conservation Studies M.L.S. graduates from the University of Texas, new home of the earlier Columbia University program in this specialization. A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, where she focused on Photography and Video, Nancy has a wealth of experience in conservation of paper, books, photographs, and objects. In addition to two years with Heugh-Edmondson Conservation Services, she served as an intern at the Conservation Analytical Laboratory of the Smithsonian Institution and at various libraries at the University of Texas at Austin. Her final internship was at the prestigious Huntington Library in San Marino, California. A member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Library Association, Nancy presented "From Useless to Useful: Choosing a Treatment for a Seventeenth-Century Spanish Manuscript Based on its Context within its Collection" at the Winterthur Museum in spring 1994. Nancy can be reached at 518 442 3543 or via e-mail at Stanfill@csc.albany.edu.
LIBRARY UPDATE is a semi-annual
newsletter published to inform
faculty about University Libraries'
collections and services. Responses
from readers are very welcome.EDITOR: Dorothy Christiansen
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