Archive for the tag 'Periodicals'

The New York Times: All the news that’s fit to print (or surf)

October 20th, 2008

Lura Sanborn – Reference Librarian

There are several ways to access The New York Times through Ohrstrom Library – online or in the library, choose the one that fits your needs and stay connected to a great source of information.

Current News: Come to the library!  We love to see you!  The print version of  The New York Times is delivered to the library daily and is available in the periodicals room on the library’s main level.
Can’t make it in?  Try ProQuest (available from the library’s website HERE) providing access to the New York Times from 1980 to the present day.  Select the publications tab and search for “New York Times”.  Or, for instant gratification, use THIS LINK (so long as you’re online on campus).

Historical News: Feeling old-school?  We have The New York Times archive, 1851-2008, available on microfilm on the library’s lower level.

For Easier Access: Consider using The Historical Newspaper Collection.  This online database, available at the library’s website HERE, provides access to The New York Times from 1851-2001 (as well as a few other newspapers).

Fun search fact: Check out the search box in the upper right-hand corner to quickly search headlines appearing on your birthday.

RSS Feed: The Times offers a wide selection of RSS feeds in a variety of themes.  Customize the daily feed headlines coming to your feed reader to support your own special interests in news.  You can access the list of feeds HERE.


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Periodical Picks: The Science of CAPTCHAs

September 30th, 2008

Lisa Laughy - Archives Assistant

The September 12th issue of Science, recently out on the shelf in Ohrstrom Library’s periodical room, features a cover article about the combination of new tech and old books.  Five researchers have tested the effectiveness of the CAPTCHA web security measure to pick up the slack in OCR book digitization. If you regularly browse the web, you have encountered a CAPTCHA – asking you to decipher a difficult to read section of text and type the letters into a box.  Now researchers are finding a way to re-purpose your small efforts into something rather useful.   Science describes the project:

“Millions of books written before the computer era are being digitized for preservation. Because the ink has faded, optical character recognition software cannot decipher many words. Through a repurposing of an existing online security technology called CAPTCHA, these words are being manually transcribed by millions of Web users.”

Here is the abstract from the published paper:

“CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are widespread security measures on the World Wide Web that prevent automated programs from abusing online services. They do so by asking humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet perform, such as deciphering distorted characters. Our research explored whether such human effort can be channeled into a useful purpose: helping to digitize old printed material by asking users to decipher scanned words from books that computerized optical character recognition failed to recognize. We showed that this method can transcribe text with a word accuracy exceeding 99%, matching the guarantee of professional human transcribers. Our apparatus is deployed in more than 40,000 Web sites and has transcribed over 440 million words.”

The article estimates that over 100 million CAPTCHAs are typed a day, amounting to hundreds of thousands of human hours.  Taping into that resource to accomplish such a useful task as the digital preservation of old books is a fascinating prospect.  Come into Ohrstrom Library’s periodical room and read the full text of the article in the September 12th issue of Science, starting on page 1465.

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ProQuest RSS: Tap Into Search Feeds

September 26th, 2008

Lisa Laughy - Archives Assistant

Our third RSS feed related post this week is about using your feed reader to keep track of search results from the ProQuest database.  It is very simple to set up a RSS feed for your searches and then receive automatic updates whenever new items are added to the search results.  Here’s how it is done:

Once you have narrowed down your search in ProQuest, scroll to the bottom of the search list and locate the little RSS icon (see the image below).

Click on the “Create RSS Feed” link and a window will pop up with your customized feed address.  Click on the feed address located in the yellow box in the new window (shown below).

This will open up a browser window that takes you to the feed address.   You can now either select your feed reader from the drop-down list at the top of the page (I am using Bloglines – see picture below), or copy and paste the feed address from your browser’s navigation bar into your feed reader and follow the steps to subscribe.

Now that you have subscribed to your search feed in ProQuest, you can keep track of updates to your custom search without having to go back to the ProQuest website.  It will save you time and ensure that you have the most current periodical resources for your research topic.

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Periodical Picks: From A(dvocate) to Z (Magazine)

September 17th, 2008

Patti Lynn – Library Assistant, Periodicals

Did you know that Ohrstrom Library subscribes to nearly 200 periodicals?   With titles ranging from A (Advocate) to Z (Z Magazine), our periodicals cover almost every imaginable subject.  While there are many academic titles to choose from (Science and Journal of American History come to mind) we also subscribe to a number of titles selected largely for recreational reading (Car and Driver and Sail are two examples).

Two recently received magazines illustrate the range of our holdings.  First, the 798 page September issue of Vogue is now on the shelves (weighing in at an impressive 3 pounds 11.4 ounces).  Second, the current issue of the magazine with what I consider to be the most curious title in the collection, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, has arrived.  So, the next time you visit Ohrstrom Library, take a quick tour of the Pillsbury Reading Room, and I’m sure you’ll find at least one magazine to browse through.

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