Oxford English Dictionary Online

Te latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary Online is available at www.oed.com!
OVER 1,300 NEW AND REVISED WORDSThe revised material in this update includes words in the range of "ran" to "reamy." In his latest article, John Simpson, Chief Editor of the OED, discusses these revisions, noting that the entries at the beginning and end of these ranges tend to be rather inconsequential terms -- in this instance, when's the last time you referred to something frothy as "reamy?" Nonethless, Simpson also mentions that in addition to the monumental prefix "re-," the list of revised words also includes more significant terms like ranch, rancid, ransom, rational, ravage, and read.
Principal Editor of New Words Graeme Diamond highlights notable new words ew, plus-one, podcasting, and Rashomon in a commentary written for this update. New words also added to the OED include the quite colorful time suck, skeezy, brewski, and frenemy, among others.
THREE LAPS TO GOWhat will be the 3rd edition of the OED is now a quarter complete with this December update. At the quarter mark of this revision process, the OED now contains a staggering 263,917 entries (741,153 meanings), illustrated by 2,931,547 quotations!
THE OED IS CELEBRATING ITS 80TH ANNIVERSARYIf you’ve always wanted a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (or if your current copy has seen better days!), don't miss your chance: the magnificent 20-volume printed set is only available through January 31, 2009 at the special offer price of just $895.

How to Read a Citation

If you have trouble finding a journal article or book in the library catalog, even when you have a complete citation, you might benefit from our latest tutorial How to Read a Citation.

RefWorks Webinars for August

RefWorks is a citation management service that allows you to import citations from online article indexes and databases, organize and manage these references within folders, automatically format them within papers and create instant bibliographies in a variety of styles. Learn how to use RefWorks and discover its many benefits!

Sign up for a free account now (be sure you use your utd email address) and join one of these RefWorks webinars in August:

RefWorks Advanced Features
RefWorks in 15 Minutes
RefWorks Fundamentals
RefAwareWrite-N-Cite III for Windows
RefShare

Westlaw's Campus Research

McDermott Library is pleased to announce the availability of WestLaw’s Campus Research database, a valuable addition to the Library’s collection of electronic resources.

WestLaw’s Campus Research provides federal and state case law, including cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Code Annotated, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal Register, American Jurisprudence 2d, American Law Reports, some law materials from the European Union, and content from over 800 law reviews and journals.

You may access Campus Research immediately, both on campus and remotely (a valid UTD-ID is required for off-campus access), using the Library’s electronic legal resources page.

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is a global teaching and learning network of free-to-use resources. It includes K-12 lesson plans and college courseware for you to use, tag, rate, and review.

Here’s just one example of the great content in this site:
Looking for open resources on Climate Change?
Climate Change is a 5-minute video with lesson plans about the difference between weather and climate, for grades 6-12.
Climate Change Course is a college-level unit exploring the science that underpins climate change and global warming.

Dictionaries, free online

Here are some free, online dictionaries from Oxford University Press:

Compact Oxford English Dictionary http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/compact_oed/?view=uk

Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2nd Ed.) http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/quotation_dict/?view=uk

Concise Dictionary of First Names
http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/name_dict/?view=uk

STAT-USA/Internet & Daily Composite Quotations for U.S. Securities.

As of July 1, STAT-USA will no longer carry the Daily Composite Quotations for U.S. Securities. They have also removed the archives of these files from their site. However, they have obtained new files on government securities trading that may be of value:

Weekly reports on primary transactions in U.S. government securities, by type and by dollar value
Quarterly reports on primary securities dealers, ranked by their share of market activity
Year-to-date reports, updated quarterly, on the primary dealers’ trading in government securities

Business & Company Resource Center

Two major enhancements are now available to users of Business & Company Resource Center.

1) The addition of 35 new investment report providers.
· Over 1.5 million reports are available with a 3-year rolling backfile

2) A new & improved "Financials Tab." Now you can:
· Analyze a company across time
· Compare a company's financials to their competitors, or choose specific companies to compare
· Review annual or interim financial information, looking back up to 6 years or 5 interim periods
· Export the data

Interested in learning more? Attend a FREE webinar.

Citations and Style Manuals

The librarians have collected some helpful sites to help you prepare your bibliographies and works cited lists. From the library home page select Useful Web Sites (it is under Resources), then Citations and Style Manuals. I like the 3rd site in the list called Citation Style for Research Papers (Long Island U.) It gives good advice on plagiarism and it covers APA, Turabian, MLA, Chicago and AMA styles.

Visuwords Online Graphical Dictionary

Here's a resource that's not only fun to use, but useful too.

Visuwords: http://www.visuwords.com

Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary can be used to help students understand ways research topics can be divided and/or organized. It’s a great tool when starting a research paper and will give you ideas as how to develop your research topic.

Prelinger Archives

View nearly 2,000 films from the Prelinger Archives! http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives holds approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Getty Images represents the collection for stock footage sale, and almost 2,000 key titles are available here. As a whole, the collection currently contains over 10% of the total production of ephemeral films between 1927 and 1987, and it may be the most complete and varied collection in existence of films from these poorly preserved genres.
Some titles include:
About Bananas, 1935
USDA : A Step Saving Kitchen, 1949
Chevrolet Leader News, 1937
And my favorite so far Television Commercials from the 1950s and 60s

Company Dossiers from LexisNexis Academic

Do you need the addresses of all the software companies from Anchorage, Alaska to Zulch, Texas with more than 50 employees? Or maybe you need a list of companies with home offices in the Dallas area? And do you want financial or personnel information for those companies?

Create a Company Dossier, new from the database Lexis Nexis. Just follow the instructions from the How to Create a Company Dossier guide created by the librarians at McDermott Library.

Statistics

The use of statistics in your paper that back up your assumptions and conclusions can be a great addition that makes your papers more credible. Use the database Statistical Universe then select Search Abstracts. We’ve also compiled a list of statistics sites on our Useful Web Sites. From the library home page under Resources, select Useful Web Sites, then Statistics. Statistics from the World Bank, the Roper Center and Gallup Poll are included.

Dictionaries and Thesauri

Don’t write your papers without a dictionary or a thesaurus; keep these online versions readily available – Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Merriam-Webster Thesaurus. Follow the links or go to the Library Home Page – under the heading Resources, click on the link Useful Web Sites then Dictionaries, Grammars and Thesauri.

Country Commercial Guides

Here are the latest Country Commercial Guides from the US Department of Commerce:
+ Doing Business in QATAR: A Country Commercial Guide for U.S. Companies
+ Doing Business in BELGIUM: 2008 Country Commercial Guide for U.S. Companies
+ Doing Business in UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: 2008 Country Commercial Guide for U.S…
+ Doing Business in LIBYA: 2008 Country Commercial Guide for U.S. Companies
For a full listing of Country Commercial Guides, see the National Trade Databank (NTDB) in the library’s list of databases.

World Development Indicators Online Database

The database World Development Indicators (WDI Online) now has 854 indicators available for 209 economies and 18 groups from 1960 to 2007, where data are available. This is an increase of over 100 indicators from 2007!
World Development Indicators, developed by the World Bank, provides online access to financial and demographic data for over 228 countries and regions of the world. Data retrieved can be manipulated by adjusting output parameters and downloaded as an Excel file. Coverage begins with 1960.

RefWorks

RefWorks has introduced two new components, RefShare and RefAware.RefAware is a web based current awareness service designed to provide researchers and other members of the academic community with immediate access to new research and publications in their field - all within hours of being posted online. Covering over 8,000 peer-reviewed sources and other non-refereed sources of information, RefAware provides a comprehensive, up-to-the minute picture of today's global research.RefShare provides users with a quick and easy way to share their RefWorks databases. RefShare allows subscribing institutions to make available central, customizable Web pages where users can post their RefWorks databases or folders. The databases are easily accessible from the site; users can also easily share access to this information with anyone via e-mail.
I just signed up for 3 seminars – RefWorks Advanced Features; RefShare and RefAware, and thought that some of you might like to try the seminars as well. http://refworks.com/content/webinars/default.asp#RefShare will give you more information, and registration details.
McDermott Library provides free access to RefWorks through the library’s home page.Create your account at http://www.utdallas.edu/library/resources/refworks/index.htm (be sure to use you UTD email address), then use RefWorks to import citations, manage citations in folders, format them within your papers and create instant bibliographies.
RefWorks provides easy to follow tutorials, a Quick Start Guide and HELP screens. If you need help getting started, you can call me at 972-883-2627, or email me at carol.oshel@utdallas.edu, or contact RefWorks at support@refworks.com or 775-327-4105.

Marquis Who's Who on the web

Marquis Who’s Who on the Web is one of our newest databases. It provides access to over 1.4 million brief biographies from 21 Marquis titles including Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in the World and Who Was Who in America. This database provides full text content from 1985 and allows users to create specialized searches for individuals based on criteria such as occupation, geography, religion, and hobbies.

Interlibrary Loan

I just noticed one of the reference librarians returning her Interlibrary Loan book (ILL). I urge you to take advantage of this fast and efficient service, if you haven’t done so already. The staff will borrow books and journal articles for you, and if you live outside Collin, Dallas, Denton, Rockwall, or Tarrant counties they will mail the books to you (most journal articles are delivered electronically to your ILL account). To find books on your subject that are in other libraries, check the WorldCat Database. For more information about Interlibrary Loan, click here.

Book Reviews

If you need a book review, and you’ve already tried the obvious databases Book Review Digest and Book Review Index Online and your book wasn’t included, you might want to try the Book Review Guide that the McDermott Librarians have put together for you. Either follow the links or go to the Library Home Page -- How To -- then Guides and Tutorials.

Citation Tracker in Scopus Database

If you need to know if your article has been cited and when and where it was cited try the database Scopus. Its Citation Tracker service will provide the information that you need.

Gas Prices

Nobody is happy at the gas pump these days. So here are some tips at fueleconomy.gov from the Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It's an excellent source of timely, practical, and authoritative information about gas prices, alternative fuels and vehicles, and much more.

Oxford Reference Online

The award-winning Oxford Reference Online database has recently been upgraded to include seven new titles plus four new editions of reference titles. The database contains the full text of over 200 reference books and dozens of English and bilingual dictionaries, plus 50,000 in-depth articles, hundreds of links to valuable web resources, and thousands of maps and illustrations, all produced by the authoritative Oxford University Press. ORO provides efficient one-stop-shopping for facts, definitions, biographies, and dates in one scholarly, full-text database.
The upgrade includes the following new titles:
Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, Oxford Companion to Black British History,
A Dictionary of Law Enforcement, A Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford Companion to Scottish History, and the Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia.
For the computer science student, Oxford Reference Online includes A Dictionary of Computing and A Dictionary of the Internet.
For the business and economics students the database contains: A Dictionary of Economics, A Dictionary of Business and Management, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, A Dictionary of Economics, A Dictionary of Finance and Banking, A Dictionary of Human Resource Management, The Handbook of International Financial Terms and A Dictionary of Statistics.
You can access Oxford Reference Online by clicking on the 0 in the alphabetical list of databases or by typing the individual title into the catalog.
We have a limited number of seats in this database, so if it’s busy when you try it, just try again later. As always, if you need further help or clarification, please let me know carol.oshel@utdallas.edu

Swot Analysis

Follow these newly updated instructions to find a SWOT ANALYSIS,
prepared by Loreen Phillips, our Management Librarian.