Moody Library Welcomes New School Year by Introducing New Research Tools

9/23/2009

New Research Tools

Have you check out the latest research tools? We now have LibGuides and ebrary E-books. Users can find them both on our home page under the Quick Links section.

LibGuides benefits both students and faculty. Libraries formerly had sheets of paper that listed our resources and recommendations for encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference works, books, etc. LibGuides takes that same concept and puts it on steroids by including Web 2.0 features. It can incorporate links to video feeds, podcasts, and facilitate access to our collection of E-books (did you know we have over 80,000 via netLibrary and ebrary?). Depending on the guide, there may be opportunities for users to recommend web sites. Any user is free to add comments to any section of LibGuides to encourage conversation. We hope you will take advantage of the brief user feedback surveys which are inserted on many of our guides so we can gauge our progress. The guides are not “canned” and are developed individually and uniquely by the librarians so they will not all appear the same. Any changes librarians make are instantaneous.

Faculty benefits from greater collaboration with librarians and can become aware of more of the library’s resources. Faculty members can assist the librarians in the development of the guides by recommending books, web sites, and other resources. In addition, LibGuides is highly flexible and can be designed for a large subject discipline or we can add or create a page for a specific assignment giving faculty new options for creating assignments. The library professors look forward to developing an even closer relationship with our classroom teaching professors. If any faculty has suggestions of new pages to add to LibGuides or questions, please let us know.

The librarians are working hard to create new guides so be sure to continue checking it frequently as the librarian’s are busy creating many more guides. We look forward to hearing your feedback about LibGuides as we seek to improve our service to the HBU community.

In addition, the library has nearly doubled its collection of E-books with the addition of ebrary’s Academic Collection. This collection brings the total number E-books to over 90,000. You can access the ebrary collection the same as you would any HBU database; however, remember that for access to netLibrary, you must create an account while you are on campus.

The library is excited about these new resources and we hope you will take advantage of them!

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