Digital Scholars Essay Contest

Cengage Learning, a major education publisher, is sponsoring an essay writing contest for anyone enrolled in a SUNY school during the Fall 2013 semester. Two $250 prizes will be handed out in the undergraduate category and submissions must be submitted electronically by December 15th.

The contest's  purpose is to encourage students  to use advanced databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), so Cengage is providing free access to those resources, as well as other digital collections of primary sources through its new search platform for the humanities, Artemis.

More information on the contest is at 2013 SUNY-wide 18th and 19th century digital scholars essay contest. Links to the databases are on that page.
 

Need clinical health info fast? Try STAT!Ref

Getting up to date and accurate clinical information is probably  the most important part  of doing research for nursing and allied health classes. To make that job easier, the Ritz now has STAT!Ref,  a  healthcare reference service which integrates core titles with evidence-based resources and innovative tools on one site.

Containing 27 ebooks covering nursing care plans, laboratory testing, nursing diagnosis and other medical topics, STATRef! contains links to nursing podcasts and medical news sources. Try it out here.

Apps to search  STATRef! through tablets, smartphones & other handheld devices are available for Android, Apple & Blackberry products.  Access is through  username/ password combo. Initial authentication must be on campus. More info, including links to apps, is at STATRef! Mobile Access.

New databases at the Ritz

The library has gotten two new databases for you to try this summer. The first is Gannett Newsstand. It contains the full text of 85 newspapers from around the country. Many of the papers are from medium sized cities and they provide a good perspective on both local issues and how national and international events are reported locally. This databases contains a number of New York State newspapers, among them:

• Poughkeepsie Journal,
• Journal News (White Plains, N.Y.),
• Ithaca Times
• Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
• Press & Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, N.Y.)

Coverage for most of these titles begins in 2001.

The second database is designed specifically for elementary school students. ebrary Elementary contains almost 400  magazines, newspapers, books, and transcripts. The system also contains thousands of maps, images, educator-approved websites from Homework Central®, and audio/video titles, all selected as appropriate for elementary school studies.

Both of these databases are being supplied by NOVEL, a service of the New yor State Library.

Phoning in PDFs

Not that long ago scanners were big and bulky and required special software to tell text from photos. Now you can  use your phone or tablet  to scan items directly to PDF using a new app called Cam Scanner.

 Available for both Android and IOS mobile devices,  it  features  batch scanning, editing of images and easy uploading to DropBox or Facebook.  Besides creating PDFs from scans , you can also save a scan as an image in jpg format.

Best of all, the producers of Cam Scanner will upgrade the free version of  Cam Scanner to a full version of the app  if you register with an .edu address.

For more info on this product, and to download the app, start at Cam Scanner

Watch 2013 graduation events live

Can't make it to graduation? Both the college's 2013 convocation & commencement are on the web this year this year. at 2013 DCC Graduation Live Streaming  

Cite That Tweet!!

Trying to use social media sources, like Facebook & Twitter, for research papers has been pretty difficult due to a lack of standards for documentation. Recently both APA and MLA have taken care of that problem by providing basic rules for citing major types of social media.

And Aditi Rao, who blogs at TeachBytes  has made it even easier by compiled that information into this handy table.

 

 Please note that for Twitter, you must include the entire Tweet for both APA & MLA. More information on documenting your research is available at the Ritz Library's Citation Style Guide.

Plagiarism

Wondering if you are plagiarizing?  Take a look at this simple flowchart to decide.