Until the end of this month we have a trial to the Leadership Development streaming video collection from the vendor “SkillSoft” as enjoyed by the majority of the Fortune 1000 companies and many leading universities. Over 2,700 streaming videos, ranging from 2 to 90 minutes in length, featuring speakers such as Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, etc. from sources such as DeLoitte Consulting, CEO Exchange and Cornell’s Johnson School of Management.

Skillsoft delivers content via the Books 24×7 platform on which we have enjoyed e-books for over a decade. Log into their platform directly and see the navigation on the right hand side for links to videos. [Browse Topics/ View by / Leadership Development Topic]

Below I will include the browse menus of categories to give you an idea of the coverage.  As with all trials, YOUR FEEDBACK will determine if we purchase this! So please send me any comments, including the course numbers for which you would see this being useful.
Best,
Tim
siftar@drexel.edu
Change Management
Adapting to Change
Leading Change
Managing Change
Communication
Delivering Presentations
Effective Personal Communication
Email Messaging
Listening
Globalization & Emerging Markets
Human Resources
Attracting Talent
Learning & Development
Preventing Sexual Harassment
Reducing Stress
Retaining Talent
Safety and Wellness
Valuing Diversity
Leadership
Behaving with Values
Building Teams
Coaching & Mentoring
Collaborating
Empowering Others
Leading Others
Managing Performance
Managing Virtually
Faculty Announcement Newsletter
Motivating Others
Personal Effectiveness
Behaving Ethically
Emotional & Business Intelligence
Managing Projects
Managing Time & Priorities
Navigating Corporate Culture
Self Motivation
Producer Picks
Programs with Subtitles
Recommended Meeting Starters
Advance Management Skills
Generate Customer/Client Insights
Improve Sales Performance
Improve Team Performance
Increase Revenue
Inspire and Energize
Overcome Adversity
Spark New Ways of Thinking
Work Smarter
Sales & Marketing
Managing Customers
Marketing
Selling
Strategy & Innovation
Creativity & Problem Solving
Leading Growth
Operational Management & Process
Strategy & Execution
Sustainability and Social Responsibility
Compliance
Corporate Social Responsibility
Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

WoK’s Conference Proceedings Citation Index along with the just released “Book Citation Index” will be available as part of a trial from December 1^st through the 31st. Find them activated under the regular link for our Web of Science subscription on the front page of the Library website.

A few questions for faculty reviewers.

• Drexel users can already use Summon to search for much of the content covered by the WoK proceedings index. How important is the citation information for proceedings?
• The WoK books index covers titles since 2005, about 30,000 in all that they plan to grow by 10,000 per year. It’s roughly 40% sciences, and 60% social science and humanities. Would citations of this literature make a difference to you? (Partial list of participating publishers available by request.)
• We did *not* request a trial of the Chinese Science Citation Database. Should we have? Why?
• Please send feedback to siftar@drexel.edu

For those who don’t know, the Gartner Group is the gold standard IT industry analyst firm used by Fortune 500 companies and others to keep track of current opinions on information technology vendors, products and developments.  They have great high level reports such as “hype cycles” and “magic quadrants” that summarize lots of information.

Unfortunately, our usage did not warrant its continuation. By chance, the Library became aware of the more hands-on IT analyst service called “Burton Group” used by our campus computing department. Students had access to individual Burton reports through the iSchool Librarian who acted as a gatekeeper.

Then Gartner purchased Burton and integrated all the content under the Gartner.com portal. So once again, Drexel gained access to the combined version of their content.  Imagine my surprise when our campus computing department recently decided to drop their Burton subscription. So all Drexel access will cease at some point in November 2011. Until then, enjoy the content you find at Gartner.com. Feel free to email me if you are unable to retrieve full text.

Alternatives to Gartner include the following:

Faulkner Advisory for IT Studies – great short, basic background on technology and vendors
IGI InfoSci – wide array of academic books, journals, encyclopedias and case studies
Summon – our multi-disciplinary discovery layer that searches ALL Drexel’s online databases

See the  Information Systems & Technology research guide for all our IT resources.

Please get in touch if you would like an introduction to any of these additional great resources!

best,
Tim Siftar

Trial extended through June 15th!

Hugely improved with intuitive “wizards” to guide queries, SimplyMap 2 makes business and demographic information accessible to non-experts through a mapping visualization interface.  Included in this trial is temporary access to the amazingly deep Simmons LOCAL and Claritas PRIZM (Nielson) data sets with consumer and opinion data points such as religious and political views that you cannot otherwise find in Census data.  This data is excellent for market research, justifying new product development, business location decisions as well as political and electoral strategy planning, with zip code, census tract and often times block group level data.

Aside from the updated interface, many new features have been enabled on the new version, such as full-text Boolean searching of metadata descriptions for all variables.  Also included for GIS geeks is the new ability to export data as shape files.

The same new interface will go live on our main subscription in July. But this temporary access to the fancy datasets is not likely to return without strong advocates – so try it while you can!

(Want to preview the PRIZM psycho-graphic profiles by zipcode? Try them  on the open web here.)

Thoughts & comments always welcome: siftar@drexel.edu

Nice to get a moment for a blog post here, especially when more than a few students ask about the same assignment.

As I understand this, you’re seeking aspects of the information environment a particular foreign country, including who is publishing, setting policy, technology infrastructure, and cultural aspects about information user.  Because we don’t have any research guide with a strictly international focus (yet) I offer you the following list of resources to help you get started:

Encyclopedia of library and information science – e-copy might mention aspects of your country. The older hard copy edition in the circulating collection has an entry for most countries, only it’s out of date by 20 years or so.

CountryWatch has a short sketch of a few dozen aspects for each country’s infrastructure and economic indicators, etc.

Global Road Warrior – for the business traveler has some cultural indicators.

IGI Info Sci - has case studies and random aspects of ICT in various countries.

CQ Researcher Global – has short pieces on  selection of controversial issues worldwide.

United Nations World Development Indicators among other publications, along with the World Bank and international NGO publications.

Summon - that cuts across so many of our databases – be sure to use the left hand side “Subjects –> more options” links on the page listing your retrieved articles to quickly narrow your results.

The top recommended literature databases in the Culture & Communication area may have a mention of cultural patterns particular to your country as well.

The same goes for the Library Science databases.

Last but not least you might want to try searching in the English language newspapers found in most foreign countries and hosted by Factiva – just browse through the “region” menus to select the country you want. Then keyword search as desired.

And as always, don’t overlook www.worldcat.org and www.books.google.com and www.scholar.google.com for whatever those resources have to offer.

Please let me know if you have questions or find any of this helpful!

Best,

Tim

UPDATE as of 9/1/2010 Drexel no longer carries Gartner Research –

Instead we recommend:

Faulkners for basic definitions and market awareness

Burton Group for in-depth tactical decision support on technology management issues, or

IGI Global for extensive handbooks and encyclopedias on specialty information use domains

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions about any of these.

Tim Siftar  -  siftar@drexel.edu

When LIS graduate students ask me about job-hunting, they are all guaranteed to hear one piece of advice in common, regardless of their professional goals.  “Are you a member of the X association?” (where X=the professional association that best matches their desired field of employment).  This advice is based on more than conjecture.  Time and time again, I have heard stories where a key factor in a graduate’s successful job hunt was related to their association involvement, such as:

• a contact made at an association event,

• a reference supplied by a mentor or senior colleague with whom candidate had done association committee work,

• the fact that a candidate’s resume showed a history of professional association involvement opened doors.

Today on the way to work I heard yet another anecdote from a recent graduate who’s job hunt I have followed over the past year.  The back-story is that she had an art history masters degree before starting at Drexel’s iSchool. She had also volunteered for a nonprofit art-related vendor for the duration of her time in graduate school. Unhappily, her volunteer work did not translate into a full-time offer after graduation. So graduation was followed by a period of fielding resumes while holding down a full-time tech-support position at a university library in the area.

To make a year-long story short, she finally connected with a university library that was seeking a visual arts subject specialist librarian. In addition to her stellar self-presentation and highly relevant second masters, what she said turned out to be the clincher was her longstanding participation in the arts librarian association ARLIS.  The person who had the position before her was also active in ARLIS. From the sound of it, her hiring committee saw her continued participation in ARLIS – even when she was not directly employed in that specialty – as a distinguishing mark of professionalism, and a good indicator of her potential for success in the position.

What? You want *more* specific details about how association involvement helped? OK, here is the lowdown.  By going to local chapter meetings, attending the national conference, and even just reading the listserv, she gained a lot of knowledge about the highly specific field of art librarianship.  So when she was asked to give an interview presentation on the role of the arts librarian in a research intensive university, she was already well versed in the major issues and had lots of specific stories to draw on as examples.  This helped  tremendously, not only with landing the job, but also with setting her up for success once she starts her position.

So there you have it. Another warm-fuzzy story about why every LIS graduate student should keep active in their preferred association. Please recall – most offer student memberships at a steeply discounted rate!  Check out this starter list of associations for more ideas if you’re not already involved!

The latest online edition of this core reference work “The Encyclopedia of L&IS” has just been released.

Of special note are several contributions by Drexel iSchool faculty.  Enjoy!

• Business Information and Its Users by Eileen G. Abels
• Citation Analysis by Howard D. White
• Information Visualization by Xia Lin and Yen Bui

Graphic novels are like comics for grown-up’s or kids or anyone who prefers reading stories in an animated form instead of plain linear text. As part of an effort to build our collection here at Drexel,  I am delighted to collaborate with Drexel iSchool alumna, author and long-time Library Journal columnist Martha Cornog on producing a special topic research guide on graphic novels.

Our modest effort includes reviewing a representative sample of individual books from a dozen or so categories across the vast and growing genre of graphic novels. We are borrowing liberally for these guides from Martha’s book “Graphic Novels: Beyond the Basics” and supplementing with weblinks to related resources.  As long as my budget holds out, I plan to purchase all the reviewed items for the Library’s collection.

Starting at the top of our list of categories, the first is for parents and professionals who are facing reluctant readers. Future additions to the guide will include sections on African American, Manga, and historically-based graphic novels, among others.  For the benefit of readers who would like additional references, we plan to include links to full reviews published for many of these books in Library Journal.

We hope you enjoy this online resource as well as all of the new titles we are adding to our Drexel Library collection!

Tim Siftar and Martha Cornog

Earlier this year an iSchool PhD student requested a book for the collection that was really a collection of data models related to e-commerce scenarios from Wiley. In support of her request she sent the following description of how she planned to use it. After she had time to work with it she also sent the review that follows. This sort of purchase pushed the limits of what we typically collect – machine readable files instead of text. But with a good business case and a faculty recommendation for a topic that is actively taught here in several disciplines, we were willing to go the extra mile. The collection is housed on a CD on Reserve for INFO607. If you have an interest in the logical design of databases, please take a look at this great resource (LINK) and let me know what you think!

Best, Tim Siftar
PS -  Want to use it but are not on campus? Want to recommend or review other resources for this blog? Please get in touch! siftar@drexel.edu

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Recommendation:

The main contribution of this research is to provide effective and efficient solution approaches that can improve the designer’s performance in conceptual data modeling.

With the Wiley tools models I plan to:

-        construct EIP’s (Entity Instance Pattern) and RIP’s (Relationship Instance Pattern) as new type of reusable artifacts for conceptual model design automatically, which can be used as the patterns to create database conceptual design.

-        develop KBS (Knowledge-based systems) with EIP and RIP repositories for case studies to explore that a proposed methodology is effective and help the expert/novice designers develop database designs.

-        validate proposed methods; that they are sufficient to create correct conceptual models;

-        demonstrate the usefulness of KBS (Knowledge-based system) by human subject experiments.

Also, professors can use this e-commerce resource developing many projects and course assignments. Students can use this resource as a case study to help understand their courses. The students who have ideas but lacks domain knowledge and technical programming knowledge can use this resource to see the overall scope of this domain (this resource also provides the domain diagrams ) and link the available SQL codes stored in this resource to develop a Web application.

=========================

Review of Wiley Data Modeling Resources
I have found that the models provided are re-usable, and of high quality. Actually, translating the database design models from abstract concepts into real-world applications is not always easy. These data model resources provide a logical perspective view that is important for a database implementation. However, these resources are not meant to be exactly right straight out the box for a given problem statement; they are meant to be customized. I think the reason is that the authors want to make their data model resources flexible in order to be used widely. The usage of these data model resources can provide 3 major advantages:
1. High quality and accurate data models.
These modeling resources are developed and tested by knowledgeable and well-known data modelers based on their experiences. Actually they represent practical data modeling resources.
2. Decreasing implementation times and costs for the database design.
The time required to design and implement a data model can be reduced by using these data model resources. These resources contain physical database designs (SQL codes) that are ready to implement. They include entities, keys (primary and foreign), relationships, attributes, and indexes that help increasing the performance of the database design. The SQL schemas are also well organized, so it is convenient for database reverse engineering.
3. Providing dimensional (star schema) models for data warehouse design.
Since these data model resources are in e-commerce domain, students, who have business ideas but lack of either domain knowledge or database programming languages, can use these data modeling resources to see the overall scope of this domain business, and to promote their products and services on the Web by maintaining needs, subscriptions, payment, Web site visits, etc.
The properties of these data model resources (e-commerce domain):
1. The total numbers of entities (tables) in this domain are 97 and the total numbers of attributes are 357.
2. Relationships are connected to the highest level entity type in a hierarchy that makes sense. All supertype/subtype relationships follow the specialization. Relationships can be renamed and eliminated as need for the specific problem statement. All relationships are 1:M, and there is an entity type in which to store intersection data. Intersection data are often dates, showing over what span of time the relationship was valid. So, these data model resources are designed to allow tracking of relationships over time.