Monday, October 18, 2010

Vision enhancement/magnifier for public PC's

Our public PC's have a magnifying option for those who require a visual aid to use a computer. The Information Commons has placed its location at:
  1. "Start" button
  2. Accessibility
  3. Magnifier
Doing the above immediately places a small rectangular section at the top of the screen. This area magnifies whatever the mouse cursor is hovering over.

Alternatively...instead of choosing "3. Magnifier", in the same folder there is a "wizard" that will walk the user through the process of selecting personal visual settings of a greater variety than just a magnifier.
The wizard is a very helpful tool and should be pointed out to all users interested in this type of assistance.

This is a standard component of the existing Windows XP operating system. When this operating system changes to Windows 7 (probably in 2011) the location of this tool may be different.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Library Shelf Browse

Library Shelf Browse is now available in the new catalogue interface. A news item, announcing and illustrating it, is linked from our homepage, here:
http://discover.library.utoronto.ca/news/online-library-shelf-browse

Key features include:
-- the ability to browse shelves at a single library, or across all of our collections, including our online collections
-- the ability to see all of our books, even those that are checked out right now

Shelf browse is available for all of our classification systems -- Library of Congress, Dewey, and the As-Is schema used in our Rare Books collections.
While we still have a couple of issues relating to accented characters to resolve, we hope that you and your users will find it useful! We'd welcome your feedback and suggestions for future development of shelf browse.

Sian Meikle
Oct 13, 2010
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NOTE: if the user selects a specific location (gerstein) the browse search results will not include online material

Monday, October 04, 2010

Locate DOI's in PubMed instead of Ovid MEDLINE

I checked into & was surprised to discover that there were no doi's to be found in the MEDLINE citations I checked.
Below is... ...Ovid's response.
The principal message: if you need to locate doi's, don't do it via OvidMEDLINE; use PubMed or other databases.

Susanne Tabur
Oct. 4, 2010

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I checked with our database production team for information on why some articles had DOI information in PubMed and not in Ovid’s Medline. They told me that the NLM hosts some DOI information on a separate server and the NLM does not provide it to any vendors. I’m including database production’s response to me incase it has useful information that I failed to mention. When I asked for clarification on their statement below I was told that while it was in theory possible to daily data mine the NLM site for data they hold beyond what they provide in the XML feed it was outside the scope of our offering.

We do not receive fields in the set with our XML daily update feeds from PubMed and never will. All Three of the records sighted by the customer the DOI information is only available on the NLM site in the field and is not provided to anyone. NLM’s response is this data lives on another server and will never be provided to outside customers. The only DOI information we receive is in the XML tag from NLM. When they provide us with all of the DOI information they have on their web site we will load it into our OvidSP version of Medline.


Neil Christiansen at OvidMedline
Sept. 30, 2010