The publisher Palgrave Macmillan is offering FREE access to their entire electronic journal catalog for the month of May.  Check out their offerings here:    http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pal/jnlindex.html

Check here for a list of Palgrave titles to which we already subscribe.

We now have access to MEDLINE through ISI Web of Knowledge, in addition to our access via OVID and Pubmed.  This access is a free add-on to our existing Web of Knowledge subscription.  Check it out, and compare the interface and searching to Ovid and Pubmed!

MEDLINE via ISI Web of Knowledge
1950 – Present
MEDLINE is the premier database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It contains over 12 million records of journal articles in all areas of the life sciences, with particular emphasis on biomedicine.

I just fell in love with WolframAlpha; a self-described “computational knowledge engine” that can basically compute, graph, and analyse just about anything you ask of it.

Seriously.

Check out their examples page!

Here are the results when I searched Drexel University.

Results from any query can be downloaded as a PDF, and all include Source data at the bottom of the results.  Check it out from the site, or just try searching something (maybe “Philadelphia” or “30% of $25 USD in Euros”) from the widget below. It’s great fun!

Back in October I mentioned the This American Life series covering our current economic situation.  Well, there is a new addition to the series, and it is equally impressive and informative.

Bad Bank.  “The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team—the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson—are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.”

This series is put together by the folks at Planet Money — an NPR initiative with an extremely useful blog and podcast of their own.  A great resource for understanding the United States’ financial situation as it changes.

Drexel Libraries have offered SFX linking through Google Scholar for a few years now, but there have often been issues with the quality of the linking to Drexel’s resources.  HOWEVER, thanks to Ian Richmond’s investigative work, we can now offer Drexel linking within Google Scholar at a much higher success rate! Take a look!

Students on Drexel’s campus searching Google Scholar will automatically be recognized as Drexel patrons and will see Find it@DREXEL links next to each citation  for which we link to full text.  The ‘Find it@DREXEL’ links will appear in every citation, but for those to which we link to full text the link is much more prominently displayed next to the article title (for the other citations, the Find It link is below the citation and will link patrons to ILL).

From off-campus, patrons may set up their preferences to see results for Drexel when searching Google Scholar.  Complete instructions on using Google Scholar are available here.

We can now much more confidently direct patrons to Google Scholar for article discovery!  Thank you Ian for all your work on this.

Google has teamed up with Life Magazine to offer the LIFE Photo Archive!  Most of these images were never published, and are offered for free.  They are fully searchable by subject.

Check it out here: http://images.google.com/hosted/life

It doesn’t happen to be something in Drexel’s eresource collection, But it is a terrific and entertaining free resource that I highly recommend.   If you are like me, you’ve had a really hard time getting your mind around our country’s current economic fallout and the subsequent government bailout.  Here’s what did it for me:

This American Life is a weekly show out of Chicago on National Public Radio that tells stories centered around a theme.  The show airs on WHYY (Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate) on Wednesday evenings at 10pm and again on Sundays at noon.  In addition to the radio broadcast, This American Life also offers a free podcast and free streaming video on their website, and has recently begun a television series on Showtime.  2 recent episodes have helped me understand the historical and present decisions that drove our economic fallout:

The Giant Pool Of Money is about the history of Predatory Loans and the housing crisis, told through personal stories of victims and predators involved in the debacle.

Another Frightening Show About The Economy covers the fall of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, etc, and the implications of the bailout bill.