Welcome to Naz!

We are so excited to welcome all the new students arriving on campus this week!

We are at the Naz Services Expo in the Arts Center until 2 pm today (August 24), so come say Hi!

We have some fun giveaways!  

Come guess how many M&Ms are in the jar (Hint:  It's the number of NazFlix DVDs checked out last year) and win the M&Ms and the jar!

Like us on Facebook or Instagram and automatically be entered into a raffle to win one of the brand new books that we picked up over the summer--some aren't even available for sale yet!

Tomorrow (August 25) is our Open House--from 9-1045 in the morning we'll be offering tours.  We will have lots of information about how to make the most of the library.  Plus Barkley the Therapy Dog will be here!

We hope to see you soon, and welcome to Naz!

An introduction to demonstrating scholarly impact

*** In our Faculty/Staff user survey in Spring 2017 our respondents requested information on vanity publishers and scholarly impact.  This is our first step in sharing what we know about this topic.  Feel free to contact us for more information! ***

Measuring scholarly impact is a complex process, including both qualitative and quantitative factors.  Some of the essential pieces include:

• identifying high-impact publishers, 
• avoiding predatory/vanity publishers, 
• crafting your online scholarly presence, and 
• understanding the ever-evolving world of alternative metrics (altmetrics).  

Picking the right publisher

This video from Think.Check.Submit offers advice on choosing trusted journals to publish your research.



If you are interested in publishing in the highest ranking journals, Scimago Journal Rankings are helpful.  Another option is Eigenfactor.org, which uses an alternative algorithm to rank journals.

If you're looking at open access publishing, the Directory of Open Access Journals is reputable.  DOAJ reviews contents to make sure that publishers meet their criteria for inclusion, and sometimes removes publishers that are not making the grade.

Here is a list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals.  Some common characteristics of low-quality vanity publishers are:

• publication of low quality material
• a business model in which the author pays the publisher
• mass e-mails to academics in unrelated fields
• very general calls for publication, including both subject area and type of content
• grammar and spelling errors in email or other communications and in the journal itself

Crafting your online scholarly presence

Taking a look, and making improvements when necessary, in how your work is represented online can be very influential in increasing your scholarly impact.  Here are some helpful links for managing your presence on social media:

• How to improve your Google Scholar profile--easy and quick! 
• How to increase the scholarly impact of your LinkedIn Profile (the information is a little dated, but most of it is still relevant)
• From Inside Higher Ed:  A Beginner's Guide to Establishing a Professional Online Presence

Understanding metrics

Traditionally, scholarly metrics (bibliometrics) focused on publishing in academic journals.  Places like Google Scholar can help you get citation metrics that demonstrate the impact of your work in most journals, books and book chapters, dissertations, and conference proceedings.

Due to the ever-changing world of scholarly publishing, researchers have looked for new ways to measure their output in non-traditional avenues, such as blogs and social media.  Altmetrics are different ways of measuring the impact and usage of scholarship.  Some examples include:

• social media sharing
• library holdings
• citations in blogs and wikis, 
• views and downloads in online repositories (source)

You can find more information at these links:

• A great guide to demonstrating impact in the Health Sciences from Bernard Becker Medical Library.
• A comprehensive guide to journal rankings, altmetrics, and other ways of demonstrating impact from Portland State University. 
• The library has recently purchased a number of books on scholarly/academic writing.  You can see them here.

Please contact the library if you have comments or questions!

New additions to our political and Middle Eastern collections

This year the library has been happy to receive multiple donations from Professor Carl Max Kortepeter, including titles from his extensive collection of Middle Eastern and political histories.  Some of his donations include:

Keeping the tablets : modern American conservative thought / edited by William F. Buckley, Jr. and Charles R. Kesler

Neither East nor West : Iran, the Soviet Union, and the United States / edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Mark J. Gasiorowski

Trade and traders in Muslim Spain : the commercial realignment of the Iberian peninsula, 900-1500 / Olivia Remie Constable.

A Thousand Days:  John F. Kennedy in the White House / Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

          

Iran and Islam: in memory of the late Vladimir Minorsky / C.E. Bosworth editor.

The return of consciousness / by Tawfiq Al-Hakim ; translated from the Arabic by Bayly Winder.

The selected writings of Eqbal Ahmad / edited by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani ; foreword by Noam Chomsky.

He has also recently donated his newest book, 12 Muslim Revolutions, and the Struggle for Legitimacy Against the Imperial Powers.  Kortepeter has long been a respected scholar in the field of Middle Eastern studies and political history.  Here is a short biography from his most recent publisher:

"An avid traveller with a gift for foreign languages, Professor Max Kortepeter spent decades studying and teaching about the Middle East. He taught at New York University for three decades and held faculty appointments at the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He has lectured around the world, often in his adopted languages. Other works written or edited by Kortepeter include: Ottoman Imperialism During the Reformation; The Ottoman Turks: Nomad Kingdom to World Empire; Atatürk and the Transformation of Turkish Culture; Oil and Economic Geography in the Middle East; The Modern Middle East: Literature and Society; and The Human Experience, a popular world history text.

Professor Kortepeter holds a B.A. in American Studies from Harvard University, an M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University, and a Ph.D. in Middle East History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London."

You can find more of his published work by searching for Carl Max Kortepeter in Primo.

Doing some academic writing this summer?

The library recently purchased a number of books on academic writing and productivity.  Here are some highlights!

Silvia, P. (2007). How to write a lot : A practical guide to productive academic writing (1st ed.). 

Goodson, P. (2017). Becoming an academic writer : 50 exercises for paced, productive, and powerful writing (Second ed.).

Silvia, P. (2015). Write it up : Practical strategies for writing and publishing journal articles.

You can find more in Primo, which has replaced our old library catalog.  If you want print books, make sure to limit your search to 'books" (under Resource Type) and "available in the library".

Let us know if you have any questions!

Primo: Our New Library System

Primo is a new powerful single search box which allows you to search for books, ebooks, journal articles, and more in the Nazareth Library collections and beyond!

Essentially, Primo allows you to search the old library catalog (print books, journals and media holdings within the library) in conjunction with all of our databases (such as JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, and CINAHL).

Primo is designed to save time and increase productivity by combining all of our library resources into one search interface.

Primo has replaced EBSCO Discovery Service and the previous library catalog.

Primo incorporates a number of requests that we have had from faculty and students, including:

• One search box for all library materials
• NazNet ID and Password access--no more library barcodes!
• Easier access to items from St. John Fisher College Library

                                

If you'd like to see some training materials on Primo, please visit our Help and Support page.

If you are experiencing difficulty with Primo, please contact the library at 585-389-2129 or answers.naz.edu. 

New music for opera lovers

This spring the library happily received a large donation of compact discs from the family of Judy Columbus.  Most of the CDs are recordings of operas, opera excerpts, and collections of recordings by various opera stars.  There are also some DVD recordings of opera performances.

Once they are processed, the CDs will be available in our CD collection (located next to the IT service desk on the 1st floor of the library).  They will be arranged by call number, so if you are looking for a particular opera or artist you should search the catalog first.

If you want to see all our items related to opera, try a Subject Heading search for Operas.  Check the icons on the right to see what type of item you're looking at.

If you prefer to listen to music online, you can find quite a bit of opera in our Classical Music Library database.

Please let us know if you have any questions--enjoy!

Our e-books have a new look!

If you've looked at any ebooks from Naz today, you might have noticed that the interface looks different!

The Ebrary platform, which is where the majority of our ebooks reside, has migrated to Ebook Central.

When you click on an ebook link in the catalog, you'll arrive at a page that looks like this:

You can do several things on this page.  You can search for more books using the search box at the top of the screen.

You can also view, download and print the book (either the entire book or a certain number of pages, depending on the title):

You can jump to a particular chapter by clicking on it in the Table of Contents.

If you go straight to Ebook Central via the A-Z Database List, you'll see this starting page:

To download books, make notes or annotations on books, or save books to read later, you will need to create an account with Ebook Central and log in.  If you had an ebrary account previously, you will need to sign in and bring it into your new Ebook Central Bookshelf.

When you've started reading the book online, you have options to search for keywords, get citations, and more.

If you have any questions about finding and reading ebooks, please contact a reference librarian at answers.naz.edu.  Enjoy your reading!