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Credo Reference is adding a Publisher Collection from Ashgate. Fifteen comprehensive, specialty titles will soon be available on the Credo Reference platform. Ashgate publishes over 60 reference titles annually in humanities and social sciences. The titles to be available through Credo Reference are representative of the cutting edge research for which the company is known. [...]

Gale  announced yesterday the availability of Biography in Context, a new next-gen resource evolving from, and soon replacing, the Biography Resource Center database. Biography in Context includes the following: Read Speaker text-to-speech technology, available on every page, is an ideal option for struggling readers and the visually impaired Document translator allows students to translate any [...]

We often get questions about finding and/or designing logos. The Identity Archive Project is a free website with a database of symbols and logotypes form all over the world. Users may search it by keyword. These are assigned by the person adding the logo to the database and there is no glossary, but the database [...]

It’s been a long time since I sat behind a reference desk–the fact I can even say that  I sat behind a desk probably tells you how long. And I’ve never worked in an academic library. But I got some insight into the job of academic reference librarian from Annie McCormick, the editorial assistant that I [...]

It seems I missed National Punctuation Day, which was September 24.  Some people celebrated by making  punctuation pizzas. Others wrote poems. I’m observing the day retrospectively by looking for some good web sites that you can bookmark if you get punctuation questions. Some of the most useful seem to come from the OWLs (Online Writing Labs) of colleges and universities. One [...]

Using Google maps, walkjogrun.net will show routes for exercise developed by others or you may make your own.  It will show the route, compute the distance, speed and the calories that are burned.  Living in a small town a route was not available but I mapped out my daily walk to the post office and back.  I did [...]

San Jose Public Library, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is now available on smart phones. They have created apps for the I-Phone, the Droid, and Windows phones. Users may download it. They will then be able to search the catalog, renew books, access databases, and download content and e-books. They still have to come [...]

Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest LLC, today announced the integration of content from the Thomson Reuters subscription-based Web of Science service with its Summon web-scale discovery service. This integration enables display of cited-by counts in Summon search results for ISI Web of Knowledge SM subscribers to highlight the highest impact articles for researchers. [...]

The Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History (or HEARTH) is a searchable electronic collection of books and journals in home ec and related disciplines published between 1850 and 1950. Created by staff at the Mann Library at Cornell, the collection currently comprises 1,174 books and 13 journals. This is the first phase and it includes books published [...]

Scott Wasinger, the Senior Director of Sales for eBooks and eAudiobooks for NetLibrary, chatted with Sue Polanka last week for the No Shelf Required blog.  The discussion included details on how EBSCO is implementing the NetLibrary content into the existing EBSCOhost interface, what changes we can expect to see with the classic Netlibrary interface, new [...]

Flight Track Pro was one of  Time Magazine’s ”Top Ten iPhone Apps of 2009.”  Although it is expensive for an app ($9.99) it is great for tracking flights.  It can be used on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.  It gives real-time status of flights, including gate numbers,  time of leaving and arriving at the gate plus [...]

Digital exhibits are now a library feature. Many libraries and archives are digitizing rare books and special collections. They create exhibits for the Web so that people all over the world have the opportunity to see them. Finding these exhibits just got easier thanks to the Smithsonian library. Their Library and Archival Exhibitions on the [...]

As I sit at the desk and field questions from students about the communal printers, I start to wonder at the true value and savings of ebooks. If students are printing out the entire book, is it a true saving, or does it only appear so? Should we be so eager to turn to electronic [...]

Readprint.com is a free library which is online.  It includes fiction, non-fiction, essays, short stories, plays and poems.  There are also quotations arranged by topic.  The books that are included are those which the copyright has expired or from authors who have not applied for copyright. Searching is by author, title or even words within the books. The books are [...]

One of the challenges of reviewing reference databases is that there’s really no point in time when the database is “done.” A case in point is Oxford’s superlative Oxford Dictionaries Online, which is reviewed in the September 1 of issue of Booklist. Although the reviewer loved it, and we gave it a star, there were a few problems [...]

EBSCO announced this week the launch of two new bibliographic databases, Alternative Press Index (API) and Alternative Press Archive. Alternative Press Index contains extensive and up-to-date guides to alternative sources of information available today and Alternative Press Index: Archive delivers archives of the alternative sources dating back to 1969. From their press release: Alternative Press Index is a bibliographic database of [...]

As regular Points of Reference and Reference Books Bulletin readers know, POR blogger Sue Polanka also writes No Shelf Required, a blog about e-books. Now she shares her expertise in a more traditional format–her book No Shelf Required: E-Books in Libraries was recently published by ALA Editions. In it, a wide range of contributors offer chapters on [...]

Food allergies seem to be everywhere these days. The news is full of stories about what children can bring in their school lunches and parents worry about what will be served at birthday parties. Eating out at a restaurant can be risky. Now people with food allergies have a new resource, Allergy Eats, a website [...]

Last week, having finished working on the 2010 Encyclopedia Update, I decided to take a look back at previous updates, and I wrote here about the very first two updates we did, back in the mid-1980s. For several years after we started our annual updates, there were few changes either in encyclopedia publishing or in our [...]

ebrary®, a leading provider of digital content products and technologies, today announced that its flagship subscription e-book database, Academic Complete, now exceeds 50,000 titles from the world’s leading publishers.  Academic Complete continues to be the largest multidisciplinary e-book database licensed to libraries throughout the world, under a simultaneous, multi-user access model with continual growth.  Furthermore, [...]