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To stay up-to-date with new library resources, news from the Web and information of interest to the RRU community, please see our Twitter feed.

Ebooks tracking readers' behaviour

From The Wall Street Journal: Your E-Book Is Reading You

"Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them."

Google tips and tricks from a Google scientist

How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques
"...advice directly from someone at Google who offers you his favorite search tools, methods and perspectives to help you find the impossible."

This is a good tip:

Use the intext command to force Google to find a keyword in the body of a webpage.

intext:[keyword]

Saving endangered languages

Endangered Languages Project

"is an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages..."

No more longitudinal data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics

From Economics for Public Policy: Statistics Canada cuts long data short: another longitudinal survey is cancelled

As of the release of 2011 data next year cross-sectional estimates will be available.

Come back long form census

From University Affairs: Long-form census remains hot topic for Canadian researchers

"More than 98 percent of Canadian households responded to the 2011 short-form census, a larger percentage than in 2006. But the response rate to the 2011 voluntary National Household Survey, which replaced the mandatory long-form census, was just 69.3 percent."

Where is the Google Scholar advanced search?

The Google Scholar advanced search option has been moved!  To access it click on the down arrow on the right side of the search box.

New EDUCAUSE ebook: Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies, edited by, Diana G. Oblinger

Contents include a chapter by Mary Burgess, Royal Roads University: Using Synchronous Web Conferencing to Maintain Community at a Distance
"Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education’s mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations."

Libraries and data management

From Public Library of Science Biology (via) DocuTicker: Dealing with Data: A Case Study on Information and Data Management Literacy

"Libraries have traditionally been the place to acquire information; now they have become the place to learn how to manage it. The eagle-i Consortium, a collaborative resource sharing network, is designed to address both the researcher's data-sharing needs and the modern library's new mandate to facilitate and accelerate the discovery of new knowledge."

New Census data released

From Statistics Canada's The Daily: 2011 Census: Age and sex

"...seniors accounted for 14.8% of the population in 2011, up from 13.7% in 2006"

Cross border cloud computing - some policy considerations

From Journal of International Commerce and Economics: Policy Challenges of Cross-Border Cloud Computing
by Renee Berry and Matthew Reisman
"...the shared nature of cloud services may provide a way for a business to access applications or computing power that would otherwise be unaffordable...The potential benefits of cloud computing need to be weighed taking into account the organization’s needs in terms of privacy, security, regulatory compliance, existing hardware/infrastructure, and many other factors."

When is the best time to tweet?

From Search Engine Watch: When to Post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr for Maximum Effect

"The best time to post content with a link on Twitter is 1 to 3 p.m. EST Monday to Thursday. Over on Facebook, between 1 and 4 p.m. mid-week is the sweet spot..."

Battle for the Internet

From The Guardian: Battle for the Internet

A series on the future of the Internet.  Highlights include:

• Big Data age puts privacy in question as information becomes currency
• Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?
• The online copyright war

Student services are a challenge in an online environment

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Distance-Learning Survey Shows Growing Concern for Student Services

"...student services, like library services, student orientation, tutoring, and counseling are needed to provide a well-rounded education.”

Indicators of financial inclusion

From The World Bank: Measuring Financial Inclusion

 by Asli Demirguc-Kunt & Leora Klapper

"... presents the first round of the Global Findex database, a new set of
indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments,
and manage risk."

New Survey of Household Spending

From Statistics Canada: Survey of Household Spending, 2010
"Provincially, the highest average spending on goods and services was by households in Alberta ($61,134), followed by households in British Columbia ($56,812)."

Students are tasked with finding information that ISN'T online

From The Note on my Door: Counterintuitive digital media assignments

"students are asked to turn their digital expertise and expectations upside-down: to use online search tools specifically for the purpose of figuring out what's not available to them with the click of a mouse... most students turned to human assistance for this assignment, or what one student referred to as the old fashioned technique, or search engine, if you will, of asking a librarian."

Latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review Magazine available

EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 47, Number 2, March/April 2012

Contents include:

• Connecting Two Worlds: Collaboration between Higher Education and Corporate Learning
• Harnessing the Power of Information Technology: Open Business Models in Higher Education

Snow cover trends in Canada

New from Statistics Canada: Study: Snow cover trends in Canada, 1972 to 2010

 
Highlights:

• mean annual area of snow cover in Canada has declined by 5.1% from 1972 to 2010
• lowest average snow cover occurred in 1998

Where is Google's Advanced Search?

From Online (March/April 2012): Advanced Search in Retreat, by Greg R. Notess

"Google has been making many interface changes over the past few months, and advanced search has been bounced around to various locations. For years, the advanced search link had been near the main search box. With design changes in 2011, the direct link to the advanced search was moved to be a drop-down choice when clicking the gear icon for options in the upper right-hand corner. Many of Google’s databases have separate advanced searches. Not all are linked in the same way."

Calculating Geozones

From Statistics Canada's Health Reports: Geozones: An area-based method for analysis of health outcomes

"Geozones is based on population proportions and the comparison of different populations within specified areas, the results of which are used to create a typology of population concentration for a given level of geographic aggregation."

Innovation in Canada's natural resource industries

From Public Policy Forum: Towards a More Innovative Future: Insights from Canada's Natural Resources Sector
"In all of our roundtable discussions, participants stressed the need for greater collaboration across industries and regions. This was seen as a key first step in generating ideas and strategies to fuel innovation across the whole of the sector and build the capacity it requires. Effective collaboration on a wide range of non-competitive areas offers significant opportunities to address challenges all industries face..."

A Blended Learning Toolkit!

From EDUCAUSE Quarterly: The Blended Learning Toolkit: Improving Student Performance and Retention, by Thomas B. Cavanagh

"... the Blended Learning Toolkit, a comprehensive resource for individuals and institutions to draw upon to develop and deploy blended learning initiatives."

Social networking and politics - new Pew report

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project: Social networking sites and politics

"Some 38% of SNS users have discovered through a friend’s posts that his/her political beliefs were different than the user thought they were."

New database: Simply Map

Simply Map is a great addition to the RRU Library online collection! With Simply Map users can create professional quality thematic maps using various data sources such as NAICS codes or demographic information. 

 

Simply Map can be accessed via the Article Databases tab on our webpage.

Oxford University Press Journals database

The Oxford University Press Journals technical issues have been resolved.

SRMO is fixed!

The Sage Research Methods Online database technical issue has been resolved.

Database technical issues

We are experiencing technical platform problems with the Sage Research Methods Online and Oxford University Press Journals databases.  Hopefully they will be resolved soon!

Corporate Ecosystem Assessment

From The World Resources Institute: The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review: Guidelines for Identifying Business Risks & Opportunities Arising from Ecosystem Change
"Ecosystem degradation is highly relevant to business because companies not only impact ecosystems and the services they provide but also depend on them. Ecosystem degradation, therefore, can pose a number of risks to corporate performance as well as create new business opportunities."

2011 Census - population data released

From Statistics Canada: 2011 Census - Population and dwelling counts

Highlights: 

• Canada's population grew by 5.9% between 2006 and 2011
• Alberta's population growth rate is the highest among the provinces at 10.8%
• 7 Canadians in 10 are living in one of Canada's 33 census metropolitan areas

Sustaining Canada's Marine Biodiversity

From The Royal Society of Canada: Sustaining Canada’s Marine Biodiversity: Responding to the Challenges Posed by Climate Change, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

"This report’s descriptions of the impact of climate change, the fisheries and aquaculture on biodiversity, and our projections of their future impact, do not present a positive vision of the future. Climate change and its consequences will take hundreds of years, possibly much longer, to reverse. We believe, on the other hand, that the consequences of mistakes in the fisheries and in aquaculture can be fixed more readily — if the effort is made." (From Report in Brief)

New Cansim!

Statistics Canada has released a new research tool for Cansim data:

http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/home-accueil?lang=eng

Alternative metrics for measuring research impact

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online

"the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn't reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social Web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter."

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Thanks for your patience!  Contact us if you need research assistance.

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We are working on resolving the error message: Connection refused by dx.doi.org, please try again later.  

In the meantime use the Journals by Title tab above the main search box on the RRU Library homepage http://library.royalroads.ca/ to look up the journal name. You will then be given a link to the journal homepage in one of our databases, at which point you can browse to the specific volume and issue number for your article.  You can also search by DOI via the box at the bottom of this page: http://wp6eu6tz5x.search.serialssolutions.com/ 

New ebooks and databases

RRU Library now has access to over 1000 new ebooks from a large number of university presses via Project Muse.  They are part of the Global Cultural Studies and Political Science and Policy Studies collections.

The LGBT Life database is part of the EBSCOHOST platform and includes 130 fulltext journals and 170 fulltext ebooks in the area of queer and gender studies.

Also new to RRU Library is Gale Business Insights, which has lots of comparative company and industry information, market research report and business case studies.

All RRU Library databases are accessed via the Article Databases tab on our webpage.

New database: Films on Demand

Films on Demand includes streaming videos for business and economics topics.  Access Films on Demand via the Article Databases tab on the RRU Library webpage.