Grab bag!

This week we feature a grab bag of goodies and it’s not even Halloween! Featured: 1) trial databases…take one for a whirl, 2) news @ The BRAIN, 3) plagiarism resources @ the facultyspace, 4) more about the ERIC education database, and 5) new Desktop Search tool from Google.

1) Trials galore!
Try out some of the databases that we have for trial until the end of this month. These are databases that we are considering for purchase so let us know what you think. Currently on offer is Book Index with Reviews, Canada Info Desk, (directories and quick facts), Data Monitor (reports, rankings and business news), Faulkner Library (news and reports from the IT field), IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, Material ConneXion, (information on cutting edge materials and applications), and Newspaper Direct Press Display (pdfs of newspapers from around the world!) These databases are not available remotely. Please ask Library staff for passwords and take one for a whirl!

2) News @ The BRAIN
The latest news @ The BRAIN is that you can now get to popular resources such as the Hours page, Contacts page, Course Support and facultyspace easier than ever. The blue band at the top of our navigation bar that appears on every page now has links to these pages.

3) Plagiarism Resources @ the facultyspace
Just a reminder that the new facultyspace has links to heaps of useful resources! A popular section on the facultyspace is �plagiarism�. Here you will find links to information about how to avoid plagiarism, online paper mills (so that you can get an idea of the papers that are available on the Internet that your students can download, yes it�s true!), discussion of the issue, etc. Click on �facultyspace� in the navigation bar of The BRAIN, go to the �Class Corner� and select �plagiarism.�

4)More about ERIC
More than 105,000 full-text documents were added to ERIC on October 1, 2004. In the last BRAIN_blog we let you know that the ERIC database (The Education Resources Information Center, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education) had come back online. Just a reminder that on October 1, for the first time, more than 105,000 full-text non-journal ERIC resources (added to ERIC from 1993-July 2004) became available for FREE as PDF files via the ERIC web site. These documents were previously sold via E*Subscribe from the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). Access these documents via ERIC on the Internet or via the Library�s online databases through the EBSCOhost interface.

5) Google Desktop Search
Finally, a way to search through all of your email messages (within Outlook or Outlook Express), all of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, every page you�ve viewed in your (IE) browser, all of your plain text files, all of the filenames of images, your IM chats (AOL only)�. yes, it has arrived�.desktop search!! The Google Desktop search tool launched in beta on October 14th. Not only can you search web pages you have viewed and documents you created but versions of the web page (if the web page changed each time you viewed it) and versions of the document. You can search cached copies of documents and view different versions of the same document. Read more about the tool at Search Engine Watch!