Hunt for tech books on Safari

Safari Books Online is the premier on-demand digital library providing technology, digital media, business books, and videos online. Safari Books Online, is paid for and licensed by Steen library. Currently a Custom Safari Books Online Library that contains a specially-tailored subset of 115 titles available through Steen library's website and increasingly through the catalog SteenFind. Now when searching for books about Windows 7, your Smartphone, or on more technical topics, you will find the latest titles available online in full-text. For a more thorough search of the tittles, and to search the full text of these books go directly to Safari.

If there is a computer science book you would like to see the library purchase or a specific topic represented feel free to contact Phil Reynolds. New titles both online and in print are acquired by the library on an ongoing basis. Suggestions for the Computer Science Subject Guide are also welcome.

R. Philip Reynolds preynolds (AT) sfasu.edu rm. 202b 936.468.1453 Subjects - Computer Science, Military Science, Philosophy, Religion, Political Science, Geography, Kinesiology

Burn This Book

Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, edited by Toni Morrison

Burn This Book has been chosen as the NetLibrary Book of the Month for October in acknowledgment of Banned Books Week (26 September – 3 October). Banned Books Week is an annual celebration of our First Amendment rights and our freedom to access information through reading.

Burn This Book is a collection of essays by prominent literary artists who discuss the importance of expressing ideas from various social and/or political viewpoints free from the fear of censorship. Emphasis is placed on both the importance of writing about real situations and the difference that writing can make. Contributors to Burn This Book include Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman, and others.

This book is a must-have for librarians, teachers, and aspiring writers! Burn This Book will be available for free through NetLibrary until October 31, 2009 so be sure to take a look!
To Access NetLibrary via Steen Library you should first go to the Steen Library home page at: http://libweb.sfasu.edu then click on the Databases A-Z list on the left side of the page.

Once the database page appears click on the letter N or scroll down the list of databases until you arrive at the listing for Net Library.

Off campus, users will need to access NetLibrary and the library website via mySFA to gain access. After ther first visit to NetLibrary users can set up a personal account that will allow them to access NetLibrary anytime they are off campus without going through mySFA.

Other posts about Net Library on the RIS Recommends Blog include:

The Naked Roommate by Tina Oswald
eAudiobooks,NetLibrary and You by Kayce Halstead
SFA Internet Books by Bernice Wright

Erica Lopez z_lopezer@titan.sfasu.edu rm. 202j (936) 468-6270 Subjects - Anatomy & Physiology, Astronomy, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Geology, Limnology, Math/Statistics, Microbiology, Physics, Zoology

The Naked Roommate

The Naked Roommate: and 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into at College 3rd ed., by Harlan Cohen.

“What an interesting title for a book!” That is what I thought when I saw it listed as the NetLibrary Book of the Month for July. (For information on NetLibrary and how to use it, see below.) This book contains all the information a new college student needs to be able to survive and thrive, during that confusing and challenging first year of college. Your parents will claim that, “I wish I had that information before I went to college.” However, don’t discount the book due to that statement!! There is good information here with funny stories and vignettes to complement the information being given. There are chapters on everything from dorm life to finances. Great information like: always were flip-flops in the community bathrooms, and the fact that you will do better in your classes if you actually go to class! So, go to NetLibrary and see what the book is all about. You may decide that you need a paper copy of this title, either for yourself, or your younger sibling or a friend.

Tina Oswald, Research Librarian

NetLibrary is one of the databases the Steen Library subscribes to and is actually a collection of e-books. Yes, you can get there easily! Follow these steps:

Go to the Library Home Page and click on Databases A – Z.

At the Databases page, click on “N”, or scroll down to the “N” section.

Click on NetLibrary, and you are there!!

Tina Oswald toswald@sfasu.edu rm. 202f 936.468.1861 Subjects - Elementary Education, and Secondary Education/Educational Leadership

eAudiobooks, NetLibrary and You

Check out Steen Library’s new collection of eAudiobooks online. You can view the most current list of titles at NetLibrary’s website. To get there from the Steen Library Home page, select the link Databases A-Z on the left side of the page, then from the list of databases, select “NetLibrary.” Once you are at NetLibrary's web site, select the link for eAudiobooks located on the right hand side of the page. This will take you to a list of over 500 audio books available online. You can search or browse the eAudiobooks alphabetically by Title or by Subject. New titles will appear every month. Eventually, all of the eAudiobooks available from NetLibrary will be added to Steen Library’s catalog, and you will be able to search for them there as well.

You can create your own NetLibrary user account by selecting "create account" on the top right side of the NetLibrary screen. After you create your user name and password, you will be able to access eAudiobooks and all the other online titles available to the SFA community from NetLibrary, with any computer connected to the internet. There is unlimited, simultaneous access, which means several people can have the same eAudiobook “checked out” at the same time.
When browsing the books, if one looks interesting, click on “show details” to find out what portable playing devices can be used and what file formats are available. You can listen to the eAudiobooks on your computer as well as most Mp3 devices.

For more information, concerning content available online or in print we encourage you to contact a librarian. For more information about NetLibrary you can Ask A Librarian or visit the NetLibrary Demo to learn how to create an account, search for eContent, or Download eAudiobooks http://www.oclc.org/netlibrary/demo/.

Kayce Halstead halsteadkay@sfasu.edu rm. 202g 936.468.1574 Subjects - Government Documents, Collection Development

SFA Internet Books

Did you know that Steen Library subscribes to a collection of internet books called NetLibrary? There are almost 30,000 books in this collection. Compared to our general collection of almost half a million monographs, it's a small collection, but still large enough to add significant value. In doing a routine subject or keyword search in our catalog, it's not unusual for one or more of the retrieved titles to be part of the NetLibrary Collection. The oldest titles in the collection are about twelve years old, but most of the books in the collection were published in this decade. While some of the titles are duplicated in our print collection, many are not.

These electronic books are perfect for distance education students. I've never tried to read one of these books from cover to cover, but most books checked out from our general collection, excluding, children's books and novels, are not read cover to cover. One or two chapters in the book is probably all that the average student uses. In one sense, electronic books are more useful than print books. One can do keyword searching of the full text of the book. This allows the user to find the paragraphs in the book containing a particular word or phrase.

The user can print pages from the book, but each page requires a separate print command. In other words you cannot do a print all or print pages 1-50. Another drawback to the collection is that most of these books allow only one SFASU user at a time.

Faculty members who want to make assignments using these books should be aware of the limitations, ask the librarian to write specific instructions for the students, tell the students about the one user at a time limitation, and allow enough time for the assignment given the size of the class.

NetLibrary is listed on our Databases A-Z list linked from the library homepage. After getting into NetLibrary, select title or subject keyword search on your topic to see if there are books in the collection that may meet your needs. If you are off campus, be sure to begin by logging in to your mySFA account, click on myCourses, and then link to the library homepage.

The first time you use NetLibrary, you may want to set up a login for the collection. This will make it easier to use the collection off campus. For class use, you might want to set up a class login and password.

As I mentioned earlier, most of the NetLibrary books are included in the Steen Library catalog. You'll occasionally retrieve one of these titles in a routine search.

Bernice Wright bwright@sfasu.edu rm. 202j 936.468.1528 Subjects - Agriculture, Forestry, Human Sciences, Human Services, Speech/Communication