Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database

Will prickly pear cactus cure a hangover?  Will lavender mist help you sleep?  Is having a grapefruit with your morning coffee a good idea? The RDC Library’s Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database can help answer these questions and more.

The Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database is a wealth of evidence-based information about the possible interactions between foods, natural remedies and pharmaceutical drugs, as well as providing information on what remedies may or may not be effective in treating a variety of ailments.

Features include a Natural Product/Drug Interaction Checker, and a Natural Product Effectiveness Checker.

From their website:

“Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database approaches the subject of natural medicines from a completely objective and unbiased perspective. It seeks to answer questions about natural medicines by systematically identifying, evaluating, and applying scientific information. As a result, it curtails perpetuation of myths and age-old beliefs and replaces them with reliable scientific data.”

How to Find Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database through the Library:

* From The Loop, click on the Library tab
* In the Find Your Subject column, click on Health & Human Services, then Pharmacy
* On the Pharmacy subject guide, click on Find Articles
* Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database is listed under Pharmacy Article databases

Look up your everyday medication or favourite remedy.  You may be surprised!

Wikipedia and Academia

In October of 2007, Martha Groom, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, and Andreas Brockhaus, Director of Learning Technologies, both from the University of Washington Bothell, presented a paper at EDUCAUSE2007 entitled, “Using Wikipedia to Reenvision the Term Paper”. The abstract read:

“The structure of the traditional term paper can limit its educational value. To make the assignment more meaningful, students published their papers in Wikipedia. This session will examine how publishing for a large online community motivated students to do better work and deal with issues of voice, knowledge, and community.”

Groom’s first attempt at incorporating Wikipedia into a class came in the fall of 2006, when she required her students to make a major revision to an existing article or to create one of their own, with a minimum of 1,500 words, for 60 percent of the grade. The assignment, for her course on environmental history and globalization, encompassed an initial proposal, a first draft, revisions and peer review, after which students would post the final article to the Web site. For the next semester, and after student feedback, Groom decided to lower the weight of the assignment (to 40 percent of the grade) and have students work in groups.

The notion of using Wikipedia, vilified by many an academic, will be anathema to many and an intriguing opportunity for others. For more information about this project, visit When Wikipedia Is the Assignment. This article includes a link to Groom and Brockhaus’ power point presentation to EDUCAUSE 2007. More information and commentary can be found at:

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

Using Wikipedia to Re-envision the Term Paper

Wikipedia not good enough for you? Edit it

Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend

Every year the people behind the New Oxford American Dictionary choose a word of the year.  This year’s word: unfriend, meaning “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

Read about the process behind choosing the word of the year, and check out some of the other words that were in the running.  Then let us know – what do you think should be the word of the year for 2009?

APA Style Manual Corrections

APA has made a number of corrections to the 6th edition, a complete list of which is available on their website , along with new sample papers. While most of the changes are relatively minor, a few corrections are quite significant in terms of formatting.  Please take a look and update the information you’ve given to students as soon as possible.  For official information from APA regarding the corrections, please see their blog.

As you are probably aware, the Library has created an online guide to provide extensive assistance to APA users.   This guide has been updated to reflect the relevant corrections.  We have also updated our popular APA handout. The updated handout is available for downloading from the online guide, or is available in print in the Library.

If you have brought your students to the Library this fall for instruction in using APA 6th Edition, the librarian who worked with your students would be happy to visit your class and go through the most significant changes.  This visit likely won’t take more than about 15 minutes; please contact the relevant librarian if you’re interested.

Please contact your Liaison Librarian if you require more information about APA 6th Edition.

ARTstor

ARTstor is a digital library of more than one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. It is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts and associated fields.

The ARTstor Digital Library serves users both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged in the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as African-American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture and Architectural History, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Design and Decorative Studies, Foreign Languages and Literature, History, Literary Studies, Maps, Graphs and Charts, Medieval Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Music History, Native American Studies, Photography, Religious Studies, Renaissance Studies, Theatre and Dance, and Women’s Studies.

In ARTstor you can:

• Browse content by collection, classification, or geography
• Search content by keyword or advanced search terms (e.g., date and geographic origin)
• Sort search results by date, creator, or title
• View images and image data
• Zoom in on and pan images for greater detail
• Print and save images and related data to other hardware (e.g. CD, memory stick, hard drive)
• Create groups of images for later retrieval and presentation
• Organize image groups into shared folders
• Direct other ARTstor users to images or image groups
• Upload personal images and sound files to the ARTstor platform
• Export images and image groups to ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) presentation tool
• Save citations for images or image groups, and email or print these, as well as export them directly into EndNote, ProCite, RefWorks, Reference Manager, or a text file

 How to Find ARTstor through the Library:

• From The Loop, click on the Library tab
• In the Find Your Subject column, click on Fine Arts and then Visual Art
• On the Visual Art subject guide, click on Find Articles
• ARTstor is the first link listed under Visual Art Article databases

 You can also access ARTstor directly from the web.

For more information about ARTstor, please contact Anne Marie Watson at annemarie.watson@rdc.ab.ca

“They have never used a card catalog to find a book.”

Just in time for the start of the new school year, Beloit College has published its latest Mindset List, providing “a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.”  Some are silly, but some might give you pause as you’re finishing up last minute preparations for the start of classes tomorrow.

For instance, I like the idea of a world in which “chocolate chip cookie dough has always been a flavour choice.”  How about you?

New versions of APA and MLA – what you need to know

Both APA and MLA citation styles have changed over the summer, and a new version of each has been published. Here’s what you need to know about these citation styles and support for them in the Library.

One person’s experience with web publishing

A recent article on Inside Higher Ed describes one person’s experience with web publishing.

Professor Douglas Amy had written a new book, Government is Good – one that, he felt, would appeal to a broader market than his previously published academic books. He had difficulty, though, in finding a mainstream publisher. So, he decided to publish the book himself on the web.

Open access debate continues

There is a debate occurring in post-secondary education circles around open access. Open access (OA) publishing provides free online access to articles that have traditionally been published in scholarly journals. With library collections budgets being stretched, and with the high cost of subscribing to scholarly publications, OA journals are well-liked by librarians and others in the academic world.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has recently come out against OA, due to fears about its financial impact. This opinion, however, does not reflect the view of all university publishers; ten directors of university presses (including the directors of the presses at the University of Calgary and Athabasca University) have issued a statement in favour of OA.

OA is something you’re going to be hearing more and more about.  It is starting to come up not just in conversations between libraries and publishers, but also in conversations between faculty members and tenure committees (is publishing in a peer-reviewed OA journal equivalent to publishing in a peer-reviewed print journal?) and faculty and students (are articles from OA journals valid sources for papers?).  Also, some granting agencies are starting to make OA publishing of results a condition of funding.

Where do you stand in the debate?

To tweet or not to tweet?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users (“Twitterers”) to send and read other users’ updates (“tweets”). Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters which answer the question, “What are you doing?”

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with post secondary education? To find out about Twitter and its potential place in post secondary education, have a look at 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter, published by ELI (Educause Learning Initiative).

RDC Library is tweeting. Follow us.