Time Capsule to be Presented

The UNF Silver Anniversary Time Capsule, donated by the Library to the University, will be presented at the October 2 party. All colleges, divisions and/or departments, as well as SGA have been invited to contribute an item to be placed in the time capsule. These items should be representative of the discipline, division, department or association.

Items included may be historical documents, predictions for the future, a course syllabus, admission requirements, an early roster of the faculty and staff, or any other item of significance that would add to the historical value of the gift. Examples of items already received include a catalog of courses for Fall 1997 from the Division of Continuing Education and a UNF recruitment video from Academic Affairs.

Responding to popular demand, the Library is opening two hours earlier on Saturday mornings. The Electronic Library and Circulation Services are available from 8:00 a.m to 6:00 p.m. Reference and Periodicals service desks open at 9:00 and Media and Documents at 10:00. Please call for specific department hours.

Staff Spotlight

Lien Phan, Library Technical Assistant in the Serials Department, deserves the highest praise for an exceptional year's work. In the course of a normal day, Lien checks in up to 200 journal issues and prepares them for the Periodicals shelves.

In a special project, carried out over the last twelve months, Lien singlehandedly added bar codes to over 54,000 bound periodicals and added holdings information to LUIS. To perform this huge task, Lien edited a large computer file and reconciled long-standing problems. She then assigned bar codes to specific journal titles, physically pulled each volume from the shelf, matched the bar code with the journal, and inserted the bar code inside the volume.

One benefit of this project is that the library established a means to inventory materials and determine which, as well as how often, certain materials in the collection are used. This knowledge guides collection development activities and supports collection maintenance. An early report made possible by this project revealed that less than 1/4 of 1% of the journal collection is missing.

Lien has been a library employee since 1993. She immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990 and became a citizen in March of 1996. Lien and her sister, Thuan Phan, who also works in the Library, are both UNF graduates.

This is a stellar example of the conscientious work performed behind the scenes every day by library staff.

Long-time employee, Senior Library Technical Assistant Sally West is now working in the Cataloging Department after more than ten years in Acquisitions. Eddie Jones, a twenty year Navy veteran and radical Jacksonville Jaguars fan, is the new Senior Library Technical Assistant in Acquisitions.

Our dear friend and colleague, Joan Pickett, from Government Documents, retired from the University after thirteen years of service. All the best and many thanks for all you did for all of us, Joan!

John Lorio is the new Senior LTA in Documents. John is also an adjunct instructor in Language and Literature who brings many years of research experience to the position. Randy Miller accepted the part-time position formerly held by John. Randy recently earned a Master's degree in history at Florida State University while also working in the Science Library. With this impressive lineup of talented staff, researchers in Government Documents continue to receive exceptional service.

Associate University Librarian Margaret Kaus is on professional development leave during the fall semester for a special project at the Library of Congress. She is working in the Special Materials Cataloging Division cataloging long-playing analog discs from the Stephen Sondheim Collection and 78s from the John B. Seacrist collection. Margaret's work will make many rare items available in a national database.

This professional development allows Margaret to see how the Library of Congress formulates and implements the policies that are created for the rest of the library cataloging community.

Local, state, and federal government agencies have long been interested in serving their customers better. Now they can. Enter CD-ROM and online information files. CDs offer vast amounts of data for pennies in production cost. The 1990 Census of Population had files never before available; for example, ZIP code data for census tracts -- unheard of ten years earlier. It keeps getting better: the Government Printing Office (GPO ) is carrying out the Congressional mandate to become more electronically oriented over the next several years. Its web site, called GPO ACCESS, contains scores of hot links to executive agencies and the Library of Congress. The library web page will get you started and the Documents Web page (under construction) will offer several mega web sites (Villanova University and GPO Gate at Cal Berkley). City and state government are also getting on the superhighway. I invite you to come to the Documents Department and see for yourself.

-- Bruce Latimer, Documents Librarian

Distance Learning Initiative Funds FirstSearch Expansion

With the addition of 60 new research databases from FirstSearch, the UNF Library on the Web continues to grow. There are now over 100 electronic research databases available to library users. Over 2.5 million full-text articles can be printed, downloaded, or e-mailed to personal accounts by UNF researchers.

The FirstSearch databases and the online Encyclopedia Britannicadescribed below are subsidized on our behalf for the current academic year by State of Florida funding of the Distance Learning Library Initiative (DLLI). Please encourage your students to use these services so they will be funded again next year! A list with descriptions of the databases is available at: www.unf.edu/library/guides/bases.html

FirstSearch (OCLC, Inc.) features the prestigious WORLDCAT, a combined catalog of library holdings around the world. There are also over sixty research databases covering all subject areas, some with full-text articles and records, all available from home computers. This means that health sciences students can get to the popular CINAHL database from home. Business students can get full-text articles from ABI/Inform, Business & Industry Database and Business Dateline. Music students now have two choices of research databases: International Index to Music Periodicals and RILM.

FirstSearch also includes databases covering engineering, science and technology, current events, life sciences, etc. There is even the full text of the last 90 days of the New York Timesnewspaper - available from your office or home computer! Britannica Online features the current electronic version of

Encyclopedia Britannica as well as classic articles from previous editions. It also provides hypertext links to Internet resources. Britannica Online is available only in the Library at this time, but plans are to make it also available through remote access.

WebLUIS is the new World Wide Web version of the faithful old LUIS. Full-text articles are available from the WebLUIS versions of Business Index and General Academic Index. General Academic is the all-purpose, all-subject research database that is a favorite of Library faculty. It is an excellent database for freshman and sophomore students just beginning their research and as starting points for more in-depth research.

UncoverWeb indexes articles from nearly 17,000 periodicals and is updated daily. This may be the resource to use for identifying recent articles. If UNF does not own the journal, the article can be ordered through Interlibrary Loan Services. If you need it immediately, Uncover will fax the article directly to you at your expense using your bank card.

LIRN is the Library's local area network where cd-rom databases are made available. These include several full-text databases. Business NewsBank Plus and NewsBank Reference Servicegive students the full text of articles from newspapers around the country. Ethnic NewsWatch provides the full text of newspapers, magazines, and journals from leading ethnic publications. Investext reports on publicly-held companies, while Tax Management Portfolios and RIA/Onpoint provide the necessary information for tax research.

Eureka is a commercial consortium database provider featuring the combined library catalogs of the prestigious Research Library Group (RLG) and selected subject indexes. These indexes include architectural, anthropological, Hispanic American periodicals, foreign legal periodicals and the World Law Index.

The Library on the Web is the Carpenter Library's niche on the Internet. It is designed to serve the UNF community and to provide links to the best sites available.

Imagine having to teach 12,000 students how to use these 100 research databases! So far this semester, over 41 classes and 843 students have attended seminars and instruction sessions in the Library. You are encouraged to fill out the instruction request form available in the library very early so we can reserve the date and time you need.

You can access the online catalog, LUIS (and its WWW interface, WebLUIS), not only in the Library but also from your office or remote (off-campus) location. The Internet address is http://www.unf.edu/library/ Guides to the Library and its services are available in the Reference Department or through the Library's Web site at http://www.unf.edu/library/guides/libgids.html

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