Update your email password!

The university has requested that all students and staff update their email passwords to make them more secure. Please remember to do this before November 15th -- there are more details on how to change your password on our main library page.

If you do not change your password before the 15th, you'll be unable to log into the library search tools from off-campus until you do. Please contact the UW Oshkosh reference desk if you run into any problems in this process!

Academic Search - now with more full text!

Those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed that Polk Library's subscription to Academic Search, a multi-disciplinary article search tool, has recently changed from "Academic Search Elite" to "Academic Search Premier". This upgrade was funded by the university's Student Technology Fee and more than doubles the number of full text titles available (around 2000 full text titles in Academic Search Elite, compared to almost 4500 full text titles in Premier). There's something for everyone here, from scholarly, peer-reviewed journals to newspapers, and covering a wide variety of subjects from biology to history to education. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Finding articles on ethics, morals, and philosophy topics

Philosopher's Index is a new article/book search tool now available to students and faculty at UW Oshkosh. "But I'm not a philosophy major," you say. However, this broad search tool covers a variety of philosophy topics that could be useful to many majors -- for example, there are articles on business ethics, ethical and moral decisions in nursing, bioethics, and aesthetics in education. No full text directly available from this search tool, but click on the yellow "Find It" button -- a number of articles can be found online in other search tools this way.

New search tools for health articles

If you're doing any health-related research, check out two new search tools available through the UW Oshkosh library: Nursing Consult and MD Consult. Both are available through the library's Nursing search tools page.

Nursing Consult and MD Consult both contain a great deal of authoritative, full-text information on health topics, including quick definitions from Mosby's Medical Dictionary, prescription drug information, patient handouts, and online journal articles and books. These resources are available to all UW Oshkosh students, faculty, and staff, on- or off-campus.

Change in off-campus login procedure

As of September 1st, 2006, we made a change to the off-campus login procedure. We have moved to a more secure type of server in order to better protect your personal information, such as your Campus ID.

You will now use your campus email username as your username, and your campus email password as the password to log into library search tools such as Ebsco Academic Search Elite, Lexis Nexis, etc. This is also the same username and password you use for logging into D2L.

If you do not typically use campus email or D2L, you can find your username and password this way:

• To find your email username, go to this page and type your last name.
• To figure out what your email password is, go to the FAQ for some instructions.
• If you had a password a long time ago, but forgot what it was, you will need to contact Academic Computing. You may call the Help Desk 920-424-3020 from 7:45 - 4:30 PM. You will need to provide the last 4 digits of your Social Security number, your date of birth and your 7 digit campus ID number. They will reset the password for you.

Please let us know if you run into any problems logging in -- we're happy to help you troubleshoot what's happening. Give us a call (800-574-5041, toll free or 424-4333, local) or send us an email (infodesk at uwosh.edu).

Beyond Google #3 - MSN Search

Want to do a more complex search on the web? MSN Search has a feature that makes it pretty simple – click on the “Search Builder” link under the search box. You can do some of the standard things – search for an exact phrase, limit to a particular domain or language – but one of the more unique features is the “Results ranking” (look for this tab on the left of the Search Builder). In the results ranking area, you can slide the bars up or down to indicate whether you’d prefer to see frequently updated pages or static pages, popular pages or more estoteric pages, or an approximate match to your search terms or an exact match. Play around with different variations; it will change the kinds of results that come up in your search.

Another nice perk of using MSN is the free pass they offer to their online Encarta encyclopedia. Look for the Encarta link above the search box. A nice source for quick facts, or an alternative to Wikipedia for your students or kids as they do web research.

UW Oshkosh weather

Planning to drive in to campus and want to know what the current weather is? Check the new UW Oshkosh Weather Station website for the current conditions on campus. This site, maintained by the Department of Geography and Urban Planning, displays the current temperature, wind speed, wind chill, and rainfall amounts on campus...see quickly whether you need to bring along that umbrella or extra sweater!

Beyond Google #2 – Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves is another larger-sized search engine with some neat features not found in Google. For common searches, Ask Jeeves will give you quick facts at the top of your results. For example, a search for “Oshkosh” will display links to a map of the city, local weather, local school information, the Oshkosh Chamber of Commerce, and more. A search for “Alfred Hitchcock” provides a photo, an excerpt from a biography, and links to where you can find a list of films he’s directed, produced, and appeared in.

Ask Jeeves also has a “MyJeeves” feature, which allows you to easily save websites from your results list to a personal list. Click on the “Save” link next to any of the sites in your results, then towards the top of the list, click “My Saved Results” to view your list, print the results, or email them to a classmate or colleague. If you create an account and log in, you can access your list from any computer; otherwise, it will save your list to the computer you’re using (as a cookie). Great for keeping track of websites you’ve discovered and want to use for a project.

Beyond Google #1 – Yahoo

This post is the first in a series describing alternatives to Google. Check out some of these other search engines! The results you find in these will be different, and there are many unique search features in these you won’t find anywhere else.

Yahoo, of course, is known for its directory of websites selected and organized by editors. However, it also has a large search engine that’s pretty competitive with the size of Google. Try a search or two at http://search.yahoo.com/

Yahoo also has some interesting search categories, listed along the top of the search box – including their video, audio, news, and local searches. Click on the “More” link on the right side of the search screen for even more options. Two particularly of note are the “My Web” search, which allows you to save pages to your own space (or import pages from your bookmarks) and later search just those pages to find them again, and the “Language Tools” option, which allows you to roughly translate words, phrases, or even whole web pages from one language to another.

Social Science Research Network

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is similar to the resource in my last post, EconPapers -- both seek to make access to research articles easier and thus contain abstracts and, in many cases, full text of articles for free. SSRN covers a broader field of topics than EconPapers, however -- besides economics, SSRN also includes articles in a number of business subsets (including accounting, marketing, and management), legal research, and "social insurance" research (including topics such as social security, disability income, unemployment, and health care delivery and financing). Students and faculty in business and public administration programs should find this resource quite helpful!