A New Interface for Empire Online

Empire Online, a database from Adam Matthew Publishers, has a new look! Empire Online offers PDF scans of manuscripts, official documents, photographs, periodicals, and other materials involving empire studies, as well as nearly 20 contextual essays with links to primary source material. With the new interface, you can now access an interactive chronology, browsable by category, empire, country, and commodity. You can also save documents and images to "My Archive" and "My Lightbox."

Empire Online is available via a "Databases" search on the UK Libraries' home page.

Hesseldenz Presents SLA Poster Session

Peter Hesseldenz, the academic liaison for Business and Economics, presented a poster session for the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Business and Finance Division at the recent annual conference in Chicago. The presentation was titled, "Working with Economics Faculty and Students."

Congratulations, Peter!

Where can I find 1940 census records?

Beginning April 2, you can find individual 1940 U.S. Census records free online. You could learn your ancestors' street addresses, occupations, places of birth, home values, their parent's birthplaces, and more. Visit the FAQ at USA.gov for the link, or the National Archives site. --Roxanna Jones

What are SPEC Kits and where do I find them?

SPEC Kits are periodically published reports from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) which "gather information from ARL member institutions on current research library practices and policies. SPEC Kits combine the survey results and documentation from ARL member institutions to guide libraries as they address the ever-changing challenges facing libraries. These guides help libraries learn about current practice in research libraries, implement new practices and technologies, manage change, and improve performance" (http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/index.shtml).

A full list of SPEC Kits dating back to SPEC Kit 1 (published in October 1973) is available from ARL.

UK Libraries has a subscription through the ARL Digital Publications website, which includes the Kits published during and after 2006. Earlier volumes are available via the HathiTrust Digital Library and are open access. At the HathiTrust site, click on "Collections" and type "SPEC" in the search box.

For UK Instructors - Course Reserve Reminders

From Carrie Poll, UK Libraries new Head of Reserves -->

Hello Instructors!

As you may have heard, Miranda Hines has accepted a position as the Professional and Organizational Development Manager at BCTC and is no longer with UK as the Head of Reserves. Effective immediately, I am the new Reserves Supervisor and will be handling course reserves for Young Library. I may already be acquainted with a few of you, as I was previously positioned in the Fines Office at WTYL. I look forward to working with each of you, as well as providing you with the most up to date information on copyright law and fair use practice.

At this time I would like to take the opportunity to remind you of a few important reserve deadlines.

1.      July 18 (Fall): If you would like to place new material on reserve for the fall semester, please submit your requests by this date to ensure that it is available by the first day of class for the fall semester.

2.      November 12 (Spring Renewals): The deadline for renewing fall 2012 course reserves for the winter 2012 and/or spring 2013 semester(s) is Friday, November 12^th. 

3.      November 19 (Spring and/or Winter ): The deadline for requesting new course reserves for the winter 2012 and/or spring 2012 semester(s) is Friday, November 19^th.

Please note that new requests may be submitted after the deadlines above.  However, it may take 2-3 weeks to process late requests depending on the workflow at the time your request is submitted. For information regarding the types of items that may be placed on reserve and how to submit those items, please see the “Introduction” on our website: http://libraries.uky.edu/YLReserves. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Sincerely,

Carrie D. Poll

Head of Reserves

William T. Young Library

500 S. Limestone

Lexington, KY 40506

859.257.0500.2070

Where is SSTARS?

The SSTARS (Social Science Teaching and Research Statistics) Center has moved out of its current location next to the Reference Desk on the 2nd floor of Young Library. For more information, see the Applied Statistics Laboratory page in the Department of Statistics.

Poster file conversion and submission is being discontinued. Resources for formatting and printing posters may be found at http://www.uky.edu/acadtrain/posters.

Child Development Collection

Things just keep moving here at Young! The Child Development Collection is the last of the monographs being moved from the 2nd floor South wing.

This collection is no longer going to be kept together. Some of the books have been sent to Education, some are being sent to Storage and the remainder of the collection will be interfiled in the regular books stacks by call number. New locations are available by checking InfoKat, UK Libraries' online catalog.

Area Handbooks in Ready Reference

Area Handbook volumes have been removed from the Ready Reference Collection and are being
 integrated into the SuDoc shelves on the fifth floor.

The most recent versions of these titles can be found at:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/list.html

--Sandee

FlatCat Social Media Project

The UK Libraries' Social Media Workgroup has come up with what we think is a great idea!

The idea is based on the Flat Stanley literacy project (http://www.flatstanley.com/). We've created our own UK version of Flat Stanley, called Flat Cat. We're going to encourage students to take pictures of themselves with Flat Cat and post them to our Facebook page. The image template (PDF) is available on the page (https://www.facebook.com/uklibraries) but we would also like to encourage campus library locations to make paper copies available at service desks. See the attached photo of the display Jen Martin has set up for Young.

In addition to helping improve the utility of the Facebook page, it's also just a fun way to engage students with the library!

Thank you! -Social Media group (Ruth Bryan, Jan Carver, Susan Foster-Harper, Beth Kraemer, Jen Martin, Kopana Terry)

UK Libraries Celebrates Chinese New Year | uknow.uky.edu

Please see UKnow today for a press release featuring our intern from Tates Creek, Abby Taylor!

UK Libraries Celebrates Chinese New Year uknow.uky.edu

UK Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An update from Pat Wilson, Director of Digital Scholarship

Just a note to update you on where to find the UK theses/dissertations that are available electronically. Go to http://UKnowledge.uky.edu and click on the Theses and Dissertations link.

What you will find:

• Electronic UK theses and dissertations (ETD's)published from 2000-2011
• Please know that not all UK theses and dissertations are available electronically--this is the student's choice. Some students still opt for print. The print are cataloged and available in InfoKAT. The ETD's are also cataloged and in InfoKAT.
• Up until the spring of 2010 all ETD's were made available using DSpace, which is searchable in InfoKAT.
• Library IT recently migrated the ETD's in DSpace to UKnowledge.
• The full text of the ETD's are available in UKnowledge.

Some of the migrated ETD's had supplementary files that did not automatically migrate. We are working on loading individually. If you are working with a document that you think may be one of these, let us know so we can follow up.

A couple of other ways to find ETD's in UKnowledge:

• Click on Colleges, Departments, or Centers link.
• To see what ETD's are available for a particular department click on the department; you will see an ETD link for that particular department.
• On the Sidebar of the UKnowledge home page you will see a link for Authors.