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 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

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?

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.

APA 6th Edition

APA has just published its 6th edition. There are significant changes to APA citation style, including:

• the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) in references to print and electronic sources (when available)
• expanded coverage of online resources

The Library has created an online guide to provide extensive assistance to APA users.

We have also produced a new version of our popular APA handout. The handout is available for downloading from the online guide, or is available in print in the Library.

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

MLA 7th Edition

MLA has just published its 7th edition. There are significant changes to MLA citation style, including:

• Using italics instead of underlines
• All citations now include an indication of the medium of the source that was viewed (e.g. Print or Web)
• Not including a URL when citing Web Resources

The Library has created an online guide to provide extensive assistance to MLA users.

We have also produced a new version of our popular MLA handout. The handout is available for downloading from the online guide, or is available in print in the Library.

Contact your Liaison Librarian if your require more information about MLA 7th Edition.

What if I want to keep using the old edition of APA or MLA?

Handouts for the old editions are still available on the Library website, and one copy of each manual will still be available to students at the Library Information Desk. However, we strongly encourage all instructors to switch as soon as possible. The new versions both contain expanded guidelines for citing electronic sources that will help alleviate some of your students’ frustrations when they’re working on their papers.

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.

He was pleased with many aspects of his web publishing experience:

• his book found a larger readership, and one that was more geographically diverse, than his previous books
• he appreciated the opportunity to receive feedback from his readers
• web traffic software allowed him to track and follow conversations people were having on the web about his work – a kind of “fly on the wall” situation
• he had the ability to find out which parts of the book were being read the most
• it is easier for other academics to use his work in their courses – no permissions, no copyright fees, no library reserves
• he has been able to rewrite and update sections

After describing his expereince, he offers practical tips for others who may want to consider publishing their own material on the web. While this may not be a solution for everyone, it’s an intriguing idea, and perhaps worth a try?

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?

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.

DiRT stands for Digital Research Tools, an interactive wiki created by Lisa Spiro (director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University) to collect information about tools and resources that can help scholars conduct research more efficiently or creatively.

Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. The wiki provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools. The wiki also explores how select tools might be employed most effectively by researchers.

Dig in!

The Library subscribes to many online collections which provide access to thousands of journals and books. These collections are always being updated, and new titles are being added. Here is a sampling of some of the new content over the past few months.

JSTOR has added almost 100 titles to its archives since September. This includes titles in all disciplines, from philosophy to biology, many going back to the early years of the 1900s.

Credo Reference provides online access to thousands of standard reference titles. The e-books in this collection are always up-to-date, with new editions being added constantly.

Our version of e-CPS provides monthly content update – so no need to wait for a new annual edition. e-CPS is available from our Find Books page.

These are just a few examples of new content in our online resources. Check the listing of online reference books and e-books on our Find Books page for many other resources.

Many of you may be familiar with RefWorks, the online citation and research management tool. At RDC, we have obtained a license to this product, so it is now available to our campus community.

For those new to RefWorks, this is a great tool for managing your research. As you search for materials (articles, books), you can export citations to RefWorks (after creating your personal account). Within your personal account, you can create different folders to manage your various research projects. From those citations, you can create bibliographies in the appropriate format (APA, MLA, etc.).

If you are in one of our article databases, you can save directly to RefWorks (works with almost every database we have). If you want to go directly to your personal RefWorks account, find the link on our find articles page. Or you can bookmark the RefWorks Login Centre – this is also the place where you can access the RefWorks tutorial (look in the upper right-hand corner).

If you have any feedback on this tool, please contact Kristine Plastow, Collections Librarian. via email or phone (403-342-3578).