The Knox College Library & The Office of Instructional Technology will be presenting a series of brown bag lunches this year featuring demonstrations and discussions of technology-based information products and services that enhance teaching and learning in the liberal arts.
These brown bag sessions will meet in Ferris Lounge from noon until 1:00. Coffee, iced tea, and water will be provided. The schedule for this fall’s ‘Technology in 20 Minutes’ programs is:
- Monday Sept 22: What is RefWorks and how does it help you manage information? [handout-pdf]
- Wednesday Oct 1st: How to link to online articles for electronic reserves (or in a Moodle page) [handout-pdf]
- Tuesday Oct 14th: Using Choice Reviews Online to select books for the library’s collections [handout-pdf]
- Thursday Nov 6th: What is RefWorks and how does it help you manage information? [handout-pdf]
- Friday Nov 14th: Using Choice Reviews Online to select books for the library’s collections [handout-pdf]
The Library has a trial of RefWorks until June 15th. RefWorks, a web-based product, is used to manage bibliographic references, store information about those reference, and to format notes and bibliographies. RefWorks also includes the RefShare component, which allows you to share bibliographies on the web.
For this trial period, access RefWorks (from on-campus only) at http://www.refworks.com/refworks. The first time you access RefWorks you need to create an account and register. Click on the link to “Sign up for an individual account” and register your account.
The RefWorks Quick Start Guide outlines what a new user needs to know to start using RefWorks. In addition, there is a RefWorks tutorial available within the program itself. To access this feature just click on the Tutorial link located at the top of each page, or go directly to http://www.refworks.com/tutorial.
As of Feb 4th, connections made to the Knox Library Catalog will be via secured (https) connections. This change to switch all catalog sessions to secured (https) connections is a result of our consortium’s (CARLI’s) continuing effort to protect patrons’ confidentiality so that personal data (names and borrower IDs), which are used to place requests or renew items, are protected.
Depending on the browsers you use, and your browsers’ preference settings, you may notice several new behaviors in the Library Catalog. If you are viewing a catalog record that has enhanced content such as a cover image, you may now encounter a browser alert that says, “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?” In Internet Explorer the security setting “Prompt,” for “Display mixed content,” will generate this message. Other possible settings are “Disable,” which will prevent the enhanced record content from displaying, or “Enable,” which will allow the enhanced content to display without the warning message.
The Library implemented a new proxy server this summer. EZproxy extends our web-based licensed databases and e-journals to Knox students, faculty and staff working off-campus in a (mostly) seamless manner. To use Knox’s licensed databases or e-journals with EZproxy, you need do nothing but click on a link to a licensed resource from the Library’s web pages, and log into EZproxy with your Knox username and password. EZproxy will then pass you through to the database as if you were connected to the Knox network. There is no additional setup required in your browser in order to use EZproxy. Additionally, the links to e-journals that you discover in the new SFX link resolver will also be automatically proxied with EZproxy.
[Updated 9/24/07] If you have links on your web pages or Moodle site to library-licensed resources such as databases and articles in ejournals, and you want those links to go through the EZproxy, simply precede the link with the EZproxy URL (http://ezproxy.knox.edu:2048/login?url=) as in this example:
http://ezproxy.knox.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.earthscape.org/
For help with linking using EZproxy, please contact Laurie Sauer.
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Our ‘Knox Linker’ link resolver product was discontinued by the vendor this past summer. The library recently purchased and implemented a new link resolver called SFX. SFX is partially subsidized by CARLI (the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois) and is maintained on a CARLI server.
SFX is similar to the old ‘Knox Linker’ product, but you will see some improvement in service when linking to electronic journals. The SFX product has an expanded Knowledge Base listing not only more freely accessible e-journals, but also has more accurate information about dates of coverage for Knox’s e-journal subscriptions. Linking to SFX from a database, such as PsycInfo, is accomplished with the purple (of course!) “Find it!” button:
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