Effective on the first day of the new semester, the library’s regular semester hours have resumed:
Monday – Thursday 9 a.m. – 10 p.m.
Friday 9 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Sunday closed
Complete details about the library’s hours, including closures for holidays, are available here. The library is closed this Saturday, August 30 and Monday, September 1 for Labor Day weekend.
A Video Version of the Periodic Table
[from the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus, 8/22/08]
A Video Version of the Periodic Table
The University of Nottingham, in England, has put a high-tech twist on the periodic table, creating a clickable version that points to short YouTube clips about each element.
The Periodic Table of Videos, as their creation is called, features 118 videos, each about 2 minutes long. Scientists perform experiments with the elements or describe unusual properties of each one. In the clip about Beryllium, for instance, a researcher refuses to open a jar holding a sample of the element, explaining that exposure to it can cause a rare and deadly disease. (Another researcher interviewed in the video explains that the element is used in the processing of medical X-rays.)
The “most watched” elemental video, according to the site, is the one for Sodium. If you drop sodium into water, the reaction is explosive, as researchers demonstrate. —Jeffrey R. Young
PubMed Now Indexes Videos of Experiments and Protocols in Life Sciences
For faculty who teach in the life sciences and use visual online resources to enhance learning, this will be of interest:
(from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Wired Campus) PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online database, is now indexing videos from The Journal of Visualized Experiments. According to the publication’s official blog, JoVE is “the first video-journal to ever be accepted for publication in PubMed.”
The online, open-access journal publishes videos of experiments and protocols in the biological and life sciences and offers its video-articles to science bloggers to illustrate their posts. <full article>
Use the CUNY portal for Blackboard and eSims Access
From July 15, 2008, all Blackboard users will no longer be able to access Blackboard through the backdoor, which uses Last Name, SSN, and Date of Birth. Users must logon directly to the CUNY portal to access Blackboard. Also, students will now need to access eSIMS directly through the CUNY portal, NOT through http://esims.cuny.edu.
New JSTOR collection, Arts & Sciences V
CUNY recently acquired JSTOR Arts and Sciences V. There are currently 18 titles but the collection will grow to at least 120 titles. This collection has been added to our Find/browse ejournals by title or subject [Serials Solutions].
Blackwell Ejournals Moving to Wiley Interscience
Blackwell ejournals will now be part of Wiley Interscience. Blackwell was purchased by John Wiley & Sons. Blackwell Synergy will close down June 27 at 9 pm and the content will appear on Wiley Interscience on June 30 at 9 pm. It appears the content will be offline during the transition. Journals will automatically be forwarded to their new address.
Grove is Gone …
Grove Art Online and Grove Music Online are now part of Oxford Art Online and Oxford Music Online respectively.
Library Renovation Alert! Summer 2008
The library’s 5th floor will be closed for renovations from Monday, June 30 through Friday, August 22. The impact on library services will be as follows:
Books located on the 5th (upper) floor of the library (Circulating Stacks – call numbers A through P) will be inaccessible. If you need a book from the 5th floor, please ask a reference librarian to help you locate a copy at another CUNY library.
Group study rooms, the electronic classroom and the college archives will be unavailable for use.
The library administrative offices will be relocated to the 4th floor and can be reached at x5497.
Due to the temporary relocation of library personnel, the Multimedia Projection Room will not be available for group screenings. Please note, however, that the Multimedia Resource Center will be open for faculty borrowing and on-site use of materials.
Library Exhibit Marks 125th Anniversary of Brooklyn Bridge
The Ursula C. Schwerin Library at New York City College of Technology, 300 Jay Street (at Tillary), Atrium 4th Floor, Downtown Brooklyn, is hosting an exhibit marking the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. The exhibit will run through the end August.
The exhibit features materials provided by the College’s Department of Architectural Technology, a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge, and two large posters on the history of what was the tallest structure in the Western hemisphere at the time of its opening and the Hart Crane poem “The Bridge.” Also featured are facsimiles of photographs of the bridge from the collection of Brooklyn Borough Historian and City Tech graduate Ron
Felix Baez, Architectural Technology CLT, worked with the library to mount the exhibit, which also features a multimedia display of scores of scenes from the bridge’s long history courtesy of Alberto Rivera, Library CLT. For more information, contact Library Professor Morris Hounion at 718.260.5491.
SpringerLink package ejournals in Serials Solutions and SFX
Earlier this month, we loaded City Tech’s SpringerLink package ejournals into Serials Solutions (“Find/browse ejournals by title or subject”). Be aware that although SpringerLink indicates that it has 1900+ titles, we have access to about 1300+ titles–our ejournal set is custom for CUNY SpringerLink participants. Be aware that the icons indicating access and coverage are not reliable: if you are browsing, the icon seems to indicate partial access. Just click through to the ejournal and you often will find complete coverage.
SpringerLink is also enabled in SFX aka Find it! which means if you search other databases or Google Scholar (provided you’ve customized Google Scholar to link to NYCCT), you can link through to full text in SpringerLink.
