New Database: LGBT Life with Full Text

Interested in Queer Studies/Queer Theory as a scholarly field? Or are you simply interested in reading about the lives and concerns of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and intersex people, as represented by the writings of these communities? Then you will want to make use of a new database Sawyer Library has added called LGBT Life with Full Text.

Ebsco, the publisher, calls LGBT Life with Full Text "the definitive index to the world's literature regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues." With its mix of activist and scholarly literature, it is certainly the most extensive resource that I have seen in this multifaceted subject area.

The database contains indexing and abstracts--in the familiar EbscoHost interface--for more than 140 LGBT-specific core periodicals and over 290 LGBT-specific core books and reference works. Ebsco has also gone after "data mined from nearly 40 priority periodicals and over 2,400 select titles." With the assistance of the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the publisher was able to index (and in some cases reproduce) many materials that show the progression of gay rights in this country, and beyond. The Lesbian Herstory Archives of the Lesbian Herstory Education Foundation is also assisting Ebsco in further developing content for the database, which is clearly a work in progress.

Scholarly materials and research studies can be found here. So, too, you will find an abundance of popular, cultural and political publications like The Advocate and Lesbian News. In addition, other source-types such as monographs and reference book entries as well as grey literature, newsletters, case studies, and speeches are identified or reproduced. LGBT Life has also loaded some 50,000 bibliographic records from NISC’s Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS) .

The database now includes more than 120 Full-Text Journals and more than 140 Full-Text monographs and books. And more additions are planned. I was happy to see that Bay Windows, New England's "largest GLBT newspaper," is indexed and available full-text here. But although a Gay Community News is also available in the database, it is not the well-remembered "GCN" published here in Boston from the early '70s to the early '90s, but rather a publication of the same name still being published in Dublin, Ireland! All the better to expand our global understanding of gay topics and issues, perhaps.

For more information on what is indexed or available full-text in the database, take a look at this title list from Ebsco.

The file also includes a LGBT Thesaurus providing a specialized set of LGBT terms, used to enhance the indexing beyond what is found in standard (Library of Congress based) subject headings. The LGBT Thesaurus will be an evolving project, with new terms added as needed. Currently, the thesaurus includes over 6,400 terms. It's great that Ebsco is trying to expand the vocabulary for the database. But I must admit that I am currently disappointed in the number of subject terms and the amount of abstract information available in many of the records here.

Still, it is impressive that much of the indexing and some of the full-text goes back as far as the 1950's; well before the Stonewall Riots and the designated birth of the gay liberation movement in 1969. And speaking of Stonewall, the types of community remembrances and debates that you can find on a modern "historical" subject like this one make it clear how valuable this database can be in supplementing and expanding the materials you might be able to find in more familiar databases.

Obviously, it could be worthwhile exploring current events topics like the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy here. But, heck, it's even fun to take a general pop culture subject like Dolly Parton for a spin through a fascinating resource like LGBT Life with Full Text!

[FIND LGBT Life with Full Text on the "Databases by Subject" List for Social Sciences, on the second column. ]

New Database: Boston Business Journal / Bizjournals Online

Sawyer Library users have always had many options when it comes to searching through business news sources. We have the Wall Street Journal as a current database (as well as a deep--back to 1889!--archive). Business and industry news sources are available through general databases like Business & Company Resource Center, and the massive LexisNexis Academic has a specific search page just for "Business & Industry News." These are all good options for the national and international scene.

As for regional business news, our excellent Business Source Complete has a specific adjunct database called Regional Business News (RBN) that claims to provide an added component of "comprehensive full text coverage for...more than 80 regional business publications covering all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States." BUT, sadly, the regional business news of New England and Massachusetts has never been the strong suit of this database, despite its claims. RBN does include New Hampshire Business Review, the Rutland (VT) Business Journal and Valley Business Journal (also of Vermont), and a few New York State publications like Hudson Valley Business Journal, but it does not have the key business paper of eastern Massachusetts, the Boston Business Journal (BBJ), which we have always subscribed to as a current-reading paper and for which we have microform backfiles (with gaps) back to 1981.

Since newsprint falls apart and no one wants to deal with microform (even when someone bothers to produce it!), we have always wanted a reliable online source for the BBJ that would provide access wherever our library users have an internet connection. And now we have it. Sometimes called "bizjournals" or BBJ, we list in on our database list as Boston Business Journal/Bizjournals Online. This online file will likely be a valuable resource for both researchers and job-seekers here in Massachusetts and also for those interested in other business markets throughout the country.

Our opening screen for the database offers towards the upper left, the "featured local publication" of the BBJ. Click on the title link to the Boston Business Journal, and you will be offered the latest issues as either a PDF or a digital newspaper. Note, too, that the latest issue of the Book of Lists will be available here. These rankings of local companies and nonprofits can be handy in many situations. For example, here's the very top of a page on accounting firms:

Besides coverage of the current BBJ and Book of Lists in digital (sometimes a bit slow to load and navigate, according to your machine specs) editions, there is also a news archive in quick-to-load HTML available back to 1996. If you are looking for articles on a local company, this is probably your best option. Look for the "Search Archive" box to the right of the opening screen.

And if you are not interested in Massachusetts, but instead are interested in other US markets, the Boston Business Journal/Bizjournals Online also includes similar digital editions and archives for the other forty or so papers published by American City Business Journals. A few other "regional" business papers like Albany and Buffalo, New York are available here. The others are as wide-ranging as South Florida, Phoenix, Puget Sound and Honolulu.

The Boston Business Journal/Bizjournals Online should fill a real gap in local business research. We hope you find it useful. And if you need to expand your research of Massachusetts business topics, you might want to run your topic through Massachusetts Newsstand, as well. This database covers most of the general newspapers of the state, including the Boston Globe and Herald.

[FIND Boston Business Journal/Bizjournals Online on the "Databases by Subject" List for Business & Management, on the first column, right above Massachusetts Newsstand. ]

Library Systems Alert--Evacuation Day Proxy Shutdown

Update: 7pm, 3/17/10-------The proxy server is back up and database access, off-campus, has been restored.

Please be advised that major electrical work is being done at Sargent Hall (the Law Building) on Evacuation Day/St. Patrick's Day, Wednesday, March 17th. This will result in an outage that is expected to start around 11pm on Tuesday the 16th and last until computer equipment is brought back up on the morning of the 18th, at approximately 9am. Why does this matter to Sawyer Library users? Well, our proxy server--the computer server that authenticates Suffolk users off-campus--is actually located at the Law Library. If this server is shut down, as it must be on the 17th, all of our databases will be unavailable off-campus.

Since this is a legal Suffolk County holiday, as well as the middle of Spring Break week, we are hoping that this will have little impact on our researching students and faculty. But please be warned of this disruption, and plan your research accordingly. We apologize for any inconvenience.

RSS Feeds and Periodical Databases

Those little square orange boxes with the radiating white rings, the symbol for RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication), have quietly advanced over much of the internet. RSS ennables the automatic gathering of the latest updates to online news sources, blogs, and other websites. Once established, the user may view their personal collection of RSS feeds in one place, such as: Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and Google reader, or browser customization, such as Live Bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox.

However, making use of RSS feeds in an academic setting is not necessarily seamless. Users who wish to access RSS feeds of scholarly journals and subscription news publications may be faced with several hurdles:

1. The publishers of many scholarly journals provide RSS feeds of the table of contents of their most recent issues. The logical next step is to want to go directly to the full text of a featured article. However, RSS feeds obtained directly through a publisher/journal website (or through a service such as
   ticTOCs Journal Table of Contents service), are likely to require either a paid subscription to the journal, or payment for the individual article, when the user follows the link to an article. The user then has to check to see if their university/college library has access to the journal, and assuming the answer is yes, the user must go through the library's system to reach the journal.



2. Many periodical databases offer 'journal alerts' (or RSS feeds of the most recent table of contents) for the journals contained in their databases. Theses alerts may be sent to an email address (where they may rapidly fill up an email box with new mail), or the user may subscribe to the alerts as an RSS feed. However, when users capture the feed URL and put it into a feed reader, they may receive an error message. This is because the URL code for feeds obtained through a periodical
   database are likely to include code that includes the library's proxy server (the system by which libraries authenticate their current students and faculty.) One solution is for the user to identify and delete the portions of the URL which designate the proxy. The RSS feed should then be legible to the feed reader, and as long as the links to the individual articles remain proxyized, then the user should also be able to reach the full text of the article, once (s)he is verified as a current student or faculty.

For example, to create a journal alert RSS feed for the journal Computers in Libraries, one could do the following:

• Check the online catalog, or the Electronic Journals List to see if the journal is contained in any of the periodical databases that the library subscribes to. This journal is available through several databases. For this example, the Ebsco database Academic Search Complete was chosen.



• From the record for that journal in Academic Search Complete, click on the Alert/Save/Share link.



• Choose "Create an Alert" from the pop-up screen.



• Copy the RSS Feed URL.



• Before you submit the URL to your feed reader, edit out the parts of the URL that refer to the proxy server. A feed URL that started out as:
  
  http://0-rss.ebscohost.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=2346435
  
  will be changed to:
  
  http://rss.ebscohost.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=2346435
  
  The initial 0- (zero hyphen) and the .library.law.suffolk.edu are removed.



• The advantage to using the Ebsco databases as a source for an RSS feed, is that the links to the individual articles retain the proxy code, thus enabling users to reach the articles from off campus through the usual authentication procedures.

Many periodical databases, notably Ebsco and Gale Cengage, offer 'Search Alerts' whereby a search strategy can be saved and captured as an RSS feed. All of the same problems (and possible solution) that 'journal alerts' have apply here as well: users must remove the proxy parts of the feed URL in order for a feed reader to properly interpret the code.

With a little bit of initial effort, RSS feeds can be an effective way of keeping current with specific publications and/or customized search topics. And for those who are willing to invest some extra effort, there are services such as Yahoo! Pipes that ennable the creation of
'mash-ups' of multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. There is a truely excellent post about this using Pipes on the Library TechTalk blog, by Michael Shochet, a Systems/Reference Librarian at the University of Baltimore.

Technical Issues: Scary Browser Warnings When Accessing Databases

All internet browsers are increasingly conscious of security challenges these days. They want to warn people who use their software of any possible scams like phishing schemes (wherein a crook tries to steal sensitive information from you by creating a fake website that pretends to be a legitimate one). But in an attempt to protect internet users from cyber-thieves, browser developers have ended up frightening nice, unsuspecting library users who only want to do a bit of online research!

How? Well, many security warnings are based on the browser spotting a mismatch of a known URL (web address) or a website's recognized secure (SSL) certificate. This looks like a evil phishing masquerade to the browser software, but--in the case of library databases--is completely innocent. Libraries authenticate users by sending them through a proxy server. A proxy server redirects the user, verifying their bona fides (when they not at a campus IP) before sending them into the database. To do this, the shortcut/link is altered.

As an example, the base URL for Ebsco's Academic Search Complete is http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=asp

but if you write this for our proxy server, it looks like http://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=asp

There are extra bits to the address. In other words, there is a mismatch. This causes warning triggers in some browsers in some situations. We at Sawyer Library see this problem most often with Firefox.

What sometimes happens is that you click on a link at our Library database lists or other resource links and all of a sudden you get a scary screen:

Understandably, when a browser offers a button that says "Get Me Out of Here!" many people are going to click it. But in the case of using our library links to get to a database, this is not the right choice. (Not if you really want to do some research!) Instead, look for the bottom option on the error message that reads "I Understand the Risks"

When you click that option, the area expands underneath the statement. It says that if "you understand what's going on," you can add an exception that gives the browser permission to make the connection. See below:


The thing to do is to click the button to add an exception for connecting to the database. This brings up yet another scary screen. The URL is indicated, and the option at the bottom is to "Confirm Security Exception."


Click that button, making sure that the little box is clicked that says "Permanently Store This Exception." (That will keep you from having to go through this procedure again for this database.)

Since most libraries use proxy servers, other libraries have experienced similar issues. For example, to see this page from Bowling Green State University's Librarie. And here's a support blog entry from Firefox on the "This Connection is Untrusted" error that has a bit more information on this message.

To state the obvious, there are times when you do not want to go to an untrusted site--like when you receive an email purporting to be from your bank, and it instructs you to verify your password! But the Sawyer Library links to our databases can be trusted. Do not fear! Confirm the exception. Login in with your name and Suffolk ID if you are off-campus. And Happy Research!

RIA Checkpoint

RIA Checkpoint offers primary tax documents and secondary analysis for federal, state, and local taxation, estate planning, pensions, international taxation, and more. RIA and Warren, Gorham & Lamont (WG&L), two top names in primary and analytical research publishing, anchor this database.

RIA Checkpoint is organized by tabs: Research, Newsstand, and Tools. Within the Research section, the user may search RIA analytical and editorial material, legislation (including archives), primary tax resources (codes, regulations, etc.), and news/current awareness (including WG&L publications). From the Newsstand tab, the user may access the latest editions of daily tax updates, such as RIA Federal taxes Weekly, Cummings' Corporate Tax Insights, and State & Local Tax Weekly. The Tools tab offers the user calculators from various categories, including mortgages, taxes, and retirement savings.

To begin a search, select the Research tab. The categories included within RIA's well-known Editorial Materials are Citator, Coordinator, and Handbook, as well as annotations and explanations which accompany the United States Tax Reporter. Tables and rates and form/line finders are also available.

Primary source material includes the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, Congressional Committee Reports, Current Pending/Enacted Legislation, Federal Tax Cases, IRS Practice materials (RIA's), IRS Publications, IRS Rulings and Releases (starting in the 1950s), U.S. Tax Treaties in Force.
Legislative materials include annual analysis of major tax acts starting in 1996 through the current year. Committee Reports, enact legislation, General Explanation of Tax legislation Enacted (Blue Books), pending legislation, and Table of Code Sections Amended are provided beginning with the 104th through the current Congress.

News/Current Awareness includes daily news plus the searchable text of WG&L's Journal of Corporate Taxation, Journal of Taxation, and Practical Tax Strategies/Taxation for Accountants.
Research Hint: RIA Checkpoint allows searching by citation. (The default search is keyword).
-Choose the Research tab.
-From the left column, select the appropriate source type. For example, Code & Regs, Cases, or Rulings/IRB.
-Appropriate boxes with sample citation formats open for the user to input.

[FIND RIA Checkpoint in our "Databases by Subject" List on the first column of the "Business and Management" page.]

Notable E-Book: Market Share Reporter

Market share, the proportion of total sales of a product accounted for by an individual brand, is one of those benchmarks business folk like to look at to get a sense of how one company stacks up against their competition. Actual data is often embedded in reports and articles, and so it is not always that easy to come up with. One excellent source, since 1991, has been Gale's Market Share Reporter (MSR), an annual printed compendium that Sawyer Library has had since its earliest days.

Just recently, we moved this from a print subscription to an e-book standing order, to allow students and faculty to make use of the resource 24/7, from wherever they happen to be. Available on Gale's "Directory Library" platform, we have profiled the MSR so that you can search that alone.

The default option is to search only the latest volume. But if you want to search several years at once, simply control-click several years in the Editions box in the lower middle of the page. (I have selected both the 2009 and 2010 editions in the screenshot above.)

Once you have selected the years you wish to search, just put search terms into the yellow Quick Search box to the left. Do multiple brands (for example, ford and general motors), a type of product (for example, soft drinks), or whatever else seems appropriate. Note that once you click on a results item, you will see not only a table or chart with information, but also active links below that allow you to explore the SIC or NAICS [government industry] code that might get you more useful hits--ones that don't come up with a keyword search.

Our online file goes back to 2000, so any figures of recent vintage should be available online. We also have older volumes in the Reference stacks, should you be interested in consulting them for older figures. And if you'd like a publisher description of MSR, you can find one here.

MSR is a very valuable resource, but since it is only produced once a year, the data will not be the VERY latest. So keep in mind that there are other ways to get market share information. These include going to a major database like Business Source Complete and searching for your company or brand and market share (for example, nike and market share). The TableBase module in RDS Business Suite is also a good source of market share data in a relatively clean form. The unwieldy database from Euromonitor called Global Market Information Database (GMID) is also chock full of useful data....once you find it.

When you are searching for market share information, explore all of your options, including the now-available online version of Market Share Reporter.