Statista is the first statistics portal in the world to integrate over 60,000 diverse topics of data and facts from over 10,000 sources onto a single professional platform. Categorized into over 20 market sectors, Statista provides business customers, researchers, and the academic community with direct access to relevant quantitative facts on agriculture, finance, politics, and many more areas of interest.

• Issues: Controversy and Society
  This database helps students develop an in-depth understanding of how society shapes and is shaped by controversy, providing authoritative historical context, expert perspectives, and carefully selected primary and secondary sources on today's most important issues. Idea Exchange sections offer students the opportunity to model their research writing upon thesis-driven, peer-reviewed scholarly essays, and includes s wide variety of primary sources that provide historical context for each issue.
  
  
• World Geography: Understanding a Changing World
  Provides online tools that develop students' global literacy, focusing on the geographical, political, social, economic, and cultural forces that are increasingly important in our globalized world. Information is presented in a highly visual format that engages users and helps them gain understanding and become informed citizens of the world. Contains almost 200 overviews of countries around the world, the Analyze sections provide everything needed to conduct a historical inquiry lesson, and more 1,700 biographies of important political and cultural figures are provided.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online web site has been completely revamped. You'll find it quite different from the old site in many ways (new design, new functionality, etc.), but with a strong element of continuity in the form of the editorial content.

The site has been tilted more towards the English language than towards the dictionary as an end in itself. Search results move from simple lists to visualizations/timelines. They can also be filtered according to a number of categories, allowing you to start off with big numbers (e.g. all English words derived from Italian), and reduce them by steps down to small, significant subsets (e.g. all English words derived from Italian from the field of Music which are first recorded in English in the 18th century). That's 167 words, starting with adagio.

Other new features include pages (updated each quarter from the dictionary data) on the OED's most-cited authors and texts, plus links to other online resources—such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—offering more on those who've shaped the language. There's also an ‘Aspects of English’ section, a series of descriptive articles on language, past and present, which will be updated regularly.

Perhaps the most important new feature involves the Historical Thesaurus to the OED, published in book form in 2009. The entire text is now integrated with the OED Online, so that you can follow semantic links throughout the dictionary. Go to the OED's entry for utopia, for example, and follow the Thesaurus links to the entries for heaven (Old English), Cockaigne (c1305), El Dorado (1596), nonesuch (a1618), Fiddler's Green (1825), never-never land (1900), the Big Rock Candy Mountain (1917), etc. ‘Utopia’ means different things to different people!

As ever, the core of the dictionary is its content. But with the new web site this content is opened up to an extent we couldn't imagine ten years ago when the OED first went online.

A valuable index for libraries, scholars and individuals interested in European works that relate to the Americas. This database contains more than 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750.

With one of our recent eBook purchases, we also were able to get 19 eAudio books.  As you know, we have had audio books on CD for several years now.  These are the same, but different.

Accessing eAudio books.  You can get to the complete list from NetLibrary  (under Research Databases). 

1. When you select an eAudiobook to download, if you have not yet done so, you will need to create an account on NetLibrary.
2. Select a title, click Download this eAudiobook & then Manual Downloadfrom website to My Computer.
3. You can download the eAudiobook to your computer (save in WMA or iTunes).
4. Check out times are 21 days (you can't return them early, they just expire and are no longer playable).

Titles include:

Absolute Surrender by Murray, Andrew.    Attributes of God. Volume 1, A Journey Into the Father's Heart by Tozer, A. W.   Grief Observed Unabridged. by Lewis, C. S.   Home Tonight: Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son by Nouwen, Henri J. M.

Evangelical Theology: an Introduction by Barth, Karl. Getting to Know Jesus by MacDonald, George.    Heaven by Mood y, Dwight Lyman. Practice of the Presence of God: Being Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Hermann of Lorraine by Lawrence.

I just got a new phone last week and soon realized that there are a whole suite of applications and widgets that I am going to have to investigate if I am going to use more than 20% of its capabilities.  It can just do so many things.

Today's libraries are like the new phones.  They fulfull their traditional roles and then add more.

Each week I am going to feature a different aspect of our library: databases, websites, techniques for research -- a "more" that you might find useful.

Today's featured resources is: OAIster.

It is described as "A union catalog of more than 19 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,000 contributors."  What this means is that it is a specialized Worldcat.org tool free to locate Open Access digitized books, dissertations, theses, reports, papers, etc.

This subset of Worldcat allows you to search the digital collections on the internet for freely accessible full-text materials on your research topic.  This takes you beyond the traditional book, article, website citations in your bibliography/works cited lists and into some interesting sources.

Our Systems Librarian is doing some needed maintenance on the ebook catalog records.  We are also trying to fix the icon problem.   So, you will not see them in the Library's catalog for a few days.  All ebooks are still available through their home databases:

• ATLA Historical Monograph Collection Series 1
  Presents more than 15,000 titles from 13th Century through the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. The collection covers a wide range of material and includes many volumes documenting the recovery of languages used during the biblical era.
  
  
• ATLA Historical Monograph Collection Series 2
  Consists of nearly 15,000 titles published from 1894 through 1923. It presents a comprehensive picture of religion in America at the turn of the century.

• Cambridge Histories Online
  Currently offers 258 ebooks from trusted printed volumes published since the 1960's and adds immense value to nearly any aspect of historical research; includes extensive bibliographic reference linking and personal archives; CHO covers many subject areas including music, philosophy, religion, liberal studies, history, literature, science and economics; an average of 5 new titles will be added each year.
  
  
• ebrary (e-book collection)
  A collection of over 30,000 full text electronic books, covering a wide range of subject areas including business, computers, technology, humanities, education, social sciences and fiction. You can search the library’s entire e-book collection through the library catalog.
  
  
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
  A collection of 114 reference eBooks combining the convenience of an online search engine with the publisher’s accuracy and authority. You can search the library’s entire e-book collection through the library catalog.

• netLibrary (e-book collection)
  An electronic book collection of over 9,500 titles representing many subjects areas including - American history, sociology, medical science, business, literature, education computer science, technology, psychology and religion. You can search the library’s entire e-book collection through the library catalog.
  
  
• Oxford Reference Online
  Over 175 fully-indexed, cross-searchable dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press, including detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions Series. You can search the library’s entire e-book collection through the library catalog.
  
  
• PsycBOOKS
  A e-book database of more than 21,000 chapters in PDF from over 1,400 books published by APA and other distinguished publishers. It also includes 700 classic books of landmark historical impact in psychology dating from 1806, and the exclusive electronic release of more than 1,500 authored entries from the APA/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Psychology. PsycBOOKS is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®. You can search the library’s entire e-book collection through the library catalog.
  
  
• SAGE e-Reference Handbook Collection
  A full-text collection of 80 of Sage's highest rating handbooks covering a range of subjects across the social sciences.

Academic Search Premier and the like have improved the results list, detailed view (of a citation), default rankings, and the pdf viewer.

Results List  (see sample screen shot )

• The limiters and date slider have been moved to the left column.
• The right has folder items and related information.
• A 'breadbox' tracks the numbers of results, your search terms, search options, and clusters applied to your search

Detailed View

• Detailed record, fulltext on the left
• New toolbox on the right (email, print, folder, etc.)

Default Rankings & Proximity Operator (W5)

• Result List sort now defaults to Relevance (it was date)
• The default search option has changed from phrase (as if enclosed in quotation marks) to terms within five words of each other (proximity).

PDF Viewer

• Can navigate to other articles in an issue or chapters in a book.
• For a short demo, click here.
  

Fixing the PDF Viewer
If the PDF opens up in a new screen, you can fix this by the following steps:
Open Adobe Reader | Edit | Preferences | Under Categories, select Internet | Web Browser Options | checkmark Display PDF in browser.

EBSCO has improved the viewing experience for items viewed in pdf.  This special viewer streamlines the browsing of an entire issue, or all available volumes and issues, from one screen. Other helpful features include a table of contents column with instant access to citations with title, author and subject detail, Hyperlinked access to full text issue contents, by article or chapter titles, etc.

To view a short demonstration of this new feature, click here.

The Barna Group has just published a new report, "Most Americans Consider Easter a Religious Holiday, But Fewer Correctly Identify its Meaning."  Of the adults polled, 67% consider Easter a religious holiday, while 42% tie the holiday with Jesus' resurrection. 

For the group Barna identifies as Mosaics (18-25), 58% consider Easter to be religous, while just 37% tie it with the resurrection of Jesus, which shows "the increasingly secular mindset of young adults."