It may be all over by now, but we had a steady stream of students looking for Place Names of British Columbia last week under various incorrect versions of the title (BC Place names, etc.), author names (Aldridge, Agrik: it’s Akrigg), and also the very general question, “How can I find out what this word means?”

On floor one, some of the lights are out; staff in sorting have contacted Richard, Plant Ops, etc. It should be fixed soon.

The annual 4th year English class assignment that requires the students to look at a title in the ESTC has started. The assignment requires them to look at the microfilm version (and notes that the librarians will try to direct them to EEBO!). 1641-1700 is call number AW1 .R-972 and 1475-1640 is AW1 .R475 in storage in the back of 219. Most seem to have the reel number and document number as they have searched in the ESTC.

Picked up some good tips at Lynn’s Lexis-Nexis session. My favorite: segment searching in Lexis-Nexis Academic.
One of my frustrations with this db was the limited range of search fields: full text; caption; author; headline.
However, you actually can use “segments” or field searching to search common journalistic segments such as bylines, company, person, sections of the paper (ie, news). All documents are divided into searchable fields, which you can see in bold at the top of documents, like this:

To search a particular field, use the format below (remembering to select “fulltext” in the pulldown menu:

The field codes are given in this Advanced User Guide, p.7, along with other tips.

Good news! Globe and Mail on Canadian Newsstand is now available back to November 1977 full text. The backfiles all seem to be there. Newspaper website has been updated to reflect this.

You probably all know this already, but issn 0022-2445 seems to be known as both Journal of Marriage and the Family and Journal of Marriage and Family. Either title works in our catalogue, journal/ejournal search, etc. so there should be no problem, but a bunch of social work students have an assignment that requires using it. When they try to connect from home, the presence/absence of the “the” looms large, but it’s really just a routine VPN/Proxy thing.
Sheryl

There is a history class (3rd year) that needs to read one month’s worth of a newspaper (from the first half of 20th century). The newspaper choices are Globe and Mail; Times of London; New York Times; and two others (I forget which.) Just a reminder that these newspapers are available online or in microform. The online version can be browsed by date and page for the three sources above, but microfilm might be easier for them to use, and the prof has suggested microform. But for those that want to try online, it is available, either from Times Digital Archive, Globe and Mail Canada’s Heritage, or ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

The library catalogue has finally been changed to show the location for Main Library as I K Barber Learning Centre!

Most people will have found their classrooms by now, but I’ve printed out the list of buiding abbreviations and left it at the desk. If it goes missing, here’s a url: http://www.students.ubc.ca/schedule/cr_list.htm
Complete campus map at http://www.maps.ubc.ca/PROD/index.php
Sheryl

New from Google – the Google News Archive Search available at http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search (advanced search option).
More information, from the ACRL weblog…
“…it aggregates content from both mainstream media sources and traditional library database aggregators. Some of the participants in the venture include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Guardian Unlimited, Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, HighBeam Research and Thomson Gale (AccessMyLibrary.com). Most of these providers were already offering access to their archives as fee-based search engines, but this new twist allows them to be searched in a consolidated fashion through a familiar Google interface. ”