UBC Library has just subscribed to a new database of interest to Linguists – MIT CogNet.

MIT CogNet provides online access to resources from several fields, such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and education.

The platform provides an ever-growing electronic collection of relevant books, journals, conference proceedings, calls for papers and grey literature, and provides searchable access to ten major reference works published by the MIT Press.

The information page for CogNet is at:
http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=1517

Browse the list of eBooks here:
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/

Have you ever found the perfect book at Amazon and wanted to quickly check if it was available at UBC Library? Do you wish you could find a copy of that great journal article cited on a webpage, without having to go into the Library catalogue on another webpage?

LibX is a browser plugin that provides direct access to the UBC Library’s resources from a webpage in two ways.

(1): It creates a searchbox – right in your browser toolbar – that allows you to search the UBC Catalogue, Journals, Google Scholar or WorldCat simply by highlighting or dragging-and-dropping the text. The search box is placed directly below the address bar in your browser, like this:

(2) LibX also places a tiny UBC icon
on pages displaying citation information, such as online book sellers, abstacts, or bibliographies. Clicking the icon takes you to related library offerings. For instance, on book pages at Amazon, the icon will link to the book’s entry in the UBC Library catalogue. The icon is displayed next to the book title, like this:

The icon is displayed at Google, Yahoo! Search, the NY Times Book Review, and other pages.

For more information and to download the plugin, go to: http://www.library.ubc.ca/labs/libx/

The semester is well under way, and research paper deadlines are quickly approaching. Are you looking for a time-saving tool that can help you track research, save your citations, and even format your bibliography?

RefWorks, an online citation management tool, can do all those things and more. If you’d like to see how RefWorks can help you with your research process, come to a library workshop on RefWorks this Thursday:

In this hands-on workshop you will create your own personal database in RefWorks, learn how to add references, and use these references when writing a paper, automatically formatting your footnotes and bibliography in the citation style of your choice. The focus is on indexes, databases, and citation styles used by scholars in the Arts.

WHERE and WHEN?
Thursday, September 27
12:00-2:00 pm
Koerner Library : Room 217 (show me a map)
Sign up here.

RefWorks is sponsored by the UBC Library, and available free-of-charge to current UBC faculty, staff, and students.

UBC Library subscribes to hundreds of online resources to support research across the disciplines at UBC. In Linguistics, there are several databases you might search depending on your area of focus. All linguists would find the essential Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) useful, while those interested in language, new media, and communication could explore Communication and Mass Media Complete. Linguists interested in stylistics or the language of folklore might turn to the Modern Language Association’s MLA database, and graduate students love the fulltext of dissertations available through Proquest Theses and Dissertations.

Until now, there was no way to search all four of these at once. Now you can! Introducing MetaLib, a new search tool that enables you to search multiple databases simultaneously.

If you’re interested in exploring this tool, come to a library session Introducing MetaLib this Wednesday, September 26 from 1-2pm in Koerner 217. In this session, we’ll give you an overview of MetaLib and show you how you can use it to search across a set of pre-defined databases in a broad area like Newspapers, select databases from a specific specific subject area such as Linguistics, or create your own set of databases to search.

Register for the session here, and try out MetaLib beforehand here.

On May 2nd, the RefWorks research tool will be migrating to a Canadian server in response to concerns over privacy of data housed on US servers. (For more information, see this article at University Affairs.)

As a result of the migration, RefWorks users please note the following:

1. RefWorks will be unavailable for most of May 2nd.

2. AFTER May 2nd, log-in access to RefWorks accounts will be from a new URL. If you access RefWorks from a ‘bookmark’ or ‘favourite’, please change your bookmark to this link:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info

If you access RefWorks from a library webpage, you do not need to make any changes as the links will be changed by the RefWorks administrators.

If you use the RefWorks tools Write-N-Cite, RefGrabit, or RefShare, please read on:
3. Write-N-Cite users will need to download and install the new version of Write-N-Cite from:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info/Refworks/WNCDownload.asp.

4. RefGrabIt users will need to download and install the new version of RefGrabIt from:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info/Refworks/BookMarklet.asp.

5. RefShare webpages will still be available, but have new URLs. The new URLS will be available when you log-in to your account after May 2nd. If you currently link to RefShare webpages, their URLs will need to be updated.

If you have questions about the account move, please contact me. For help with RefWorks or RefShare, you can also visit the UBC Library RefWorks website.

If you ever use Wikipedia as a resource for linguistics, you may be interested in a challenge currently going on over at the LINGUIST List.

Inspired by a letter sent by Barbara Partee regarding the coordinated efforts of a group of Russian linguists to improve linguistics coverage in the Russian-language Wikipedia, the LINGUIST has started a mini-funding drive to support a half-time LINGUIST staffer to coordinate similar efforts in the English-language Wikipedia.

The LINGUIST List would act as a hub and facilitator by calling for volunteers, coordinating efforts, identifying Wikipedia pages that need to be created or updated, and ensuring accuracy and consistency across the entries. As Wikipedia is a massively popular source of information, this would benefit Linguistics as a whole.

To read more about this effort, visit:
http://www.linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2007/wikipedia/

One of my favorite language sites is Omniglot (www.omniglot.com), a guide to the languages, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems of the world.

Developed and maintained by one man, Simon Ager, the extensive site (and gorgeous, too!) provides visual and textual information on writing systems like alphabets, abugidas, syllabaries, complex writing systems (Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, etc.), and alternative writing systems (fictional and constructed alphabets and other communication systems), as well as information on some of the languages written with these writing systems.

Links included on each language page provide further information. For example, if you go to to page for Ainu (spoken on the Japanese island of Hokkaido by an estimated 15 families), you’ll find that it is written with a version of the Japanese katakana syllabary. You’ll also find numerous links to sample texts in Ainu, links to information about the Ainu language and people, online word lists (and lessons), sound files of oral literature of the Sakhalin Ainu, and other sites of related interest.

This site may be useful for students in LING 101, Languages of the World.

Books of related interest in Koerner Library:

Coulmas, Florian. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Blackwell, 1999.
An excellent reference for all major (and some minor) writing systems.

Coulmas, Florian. The Writing Systems of the World. Blackwell, 1991.
Linguistic study of writing and writing systems.

Daniels, Peter T. & Bright, William. The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Detailed coverage of most all writing systems, with illustrations and text samples.

Looking for the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics? No need to come to the library – this book is now available online.*

The Encyclopedia encompasses the full range of topics in linguistics, including such areas as historical, comparative, formal, mathematical, functional, philosophical, and sociolinguistics.

To use the book, you can either Browse by scanning through a list of the entries in alphabetical order or Search for entries. In the left hand column, there is a list of related entries called See also, which is a list of entries related to the one you are currently looking at. Below this, you’ll see a list of Adjacent entries which can be used to browse through nearby entries (alphabetically) just as you might do with the print edition.

Another great feature of this collection is the “Cross Reference” tool. Highlight a word or phrase and then click the blue “Cross Reference” button to search across the entire encyclopedia for that word or words.

Illustrated material includes colour images of brain functioning, tree diagrams of both linguistic structure and language families, and diagrams of theoretical models.

One of the lovely things about online resources is the ability to link to related works. In this ebook, the bibliography at the end of each entry provides a link to the UBC Library catalogue for each citation. Simply click the “Find’ icon to search the catalogue for the book.

Enjoy! As always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments about this resource.

———-
* If you’d prefer the print book version of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, we have the four-volume set in the Reference section of Koerner Library (on the second floor), at call number P29 .I58 2003.

For finding information on a specific language or languages in a specific region of the world, the Linguist List Languages database is an excellent starting point. The database allows you to search for a language information in a number of different ways: by language; by language family name; by Ethnologue code; and geographically, using an interactive world map.

Once you’ve found the language you’re interested, the results show basic information about the langage (Alternate and Dialect Names; Countries Spoken in; Status as a living or extinct language; Language Family), plus links to language-specific information on other linguistics sites such as Ethnologue, ODIN Database (Online Database of Interlinear Text), and the Rosetta Project, as well as all the resources related to the language in the LINGUIST-list database, like this:

Another one of the neat features of the database is that it also keeps track of languages which have become extinct or are in imminent danger of becoming extinct and provides a handy browse list of names, with links to the database for more information on each language.

UBC Library is currently trialling two new databases from CSA, COS Funding Opportunities and Community of Scholars.

COS Funding Opportunities is a compiled database of available opportunities for grants, fellowships, prizes and other type of funding for any discipline, worldwide. Opportunities come from the public and private sector, including governments, foundations and societies, and corporations. Each record is researched, verified, and indexed to ensure accuracy, timeliness and quality of data. Each record includes information on deadlines, amount of award, any eligibility criteria, and contact information for more information from the sponsoring organization.

Community of Scholars provides authoritative information about more than 1 million scholars and organizations around the world, including verified affiliation and publication information. This database is a unique tool for finding researchers by specific area of study. Linguists, check your entries – if you want to make changes or additions, there’s a handy form in the database that allows you to do so.

The trials are until November 30; please send any feedback to Doug Brigham, eResources Librarian.