Dr. Taikang Huang donates to Alliant library

The Alliant library is pleased to accept from Dr. Taikaing Huang a copy of his monumental Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  For more about Dr. Huang, read on:

Dr. Taikang Huang

Gender: Male
Employer: State Food and Drug Administration, PRC

Short Summary:

1994—Led the Research of Chinese Herbal Medicine Engineering System

1990—Led the Study of Compiling and Editing Chinese Herbal Medicine Dictionary

1990-1992—Led the Study of Establishing Systematic Goals of Pharmaceutical Related Education

1989-1991—Led the Study of Chinese Patent Medicine

Awards Won:

1992—Winner of 3^rd Prize for Science and Technology Progress from The Chinese People’s Liberation Army based on the Research of The Medical Usage of Herbal Plants in Yili Mountain Area.

1989—Winner 3^rd Prize for Science and Technology Progress from The Chinese People’s Liberation Army based on his Study of Telling Differences of Real and Fake Ginseng.

1984 — Winner of 3^rd Prize for Science and Technology Progress from State Food and Drug Administration based on the Study of Curing Migraine Pain

Work Experience:

1976-1979: Technician, Xuzhou Pharmaceutical Factory

July 1983-Feburary 1987: Pharmacist, Xuzhou FDA

March 1987: Researcher, China Pharmaceutical University; Deputy Director, Department of Pharmaceutical Education, China Pharmaceutical University; Visiting professor, Singapore Institute of  Chinese Herbal Medicine Study; Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Asian Pharmacy; Visiting Professor,  American Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences; Visiting Professor , Shenyang Pharmaceutical University

Bio:

Dr. Huang took a major role in compiling and editing the Modern Compendium of Materia Medica and 58 other books, actively joined in editing six other books, and has published 118 articles in various publications.

He is the First Deputy Director of the Journal of Herbal Medicine’s editing committee, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Chinese New Medicine, Consultant of China Medical Herald, editor-in-Chief of Journal of Asian Societies Pharmacy. 17 people graduated with doctoral degrees in drug management and administration and societal pharmacy with Mr. Huang being the advisor and guidance. Mr. Huang has also been a visiting professor at six different foreign educational institutions, including universities in China, U.S., Japan, and Singapore. He was awarded with a special compensation for being expert from the State Council of People’s Republic of China in 1993. His new theory of “Geography of Natural Drugs” and his personal successes have been recorded in the 1992 Yearbook of People’s Republic of China.

Dr. Huang has invented six new drugs. He was also awarded with the LA International Traditional Chinese Medicine Gold Prize in 1994 and is the winner of many other prizes.

Useful post on library catalogs

http://www.profhacker.com/2009/10/23/using-loc-subject-headings/

Student ID as temporary barcode

In effort to make the back-to-school adjustment easier, the Alliant library is pleased to announce a simpler way for you to log in to access library resources.  Effective immediately, you may use your Alliant ID number (whether you are a student, staff or faculty member) instead of your fourteen-digit library barcode.

Please note that you will still need to obtain an ID card with a fourteen-digit barcode in order to check out books!  The use of ID as an alternative to barcode is simply meant to provide everyone with easier, more immediate access to *online* resources, not to act as a long-term substitute for the ID card and barcode.

So, the bottom line is that you can log in with your student ID instead of your barcode, but if you plan on using your campus library in person, you will still need to get your ID card.

Our thinking is that this will be a major convenience for online students and those studying at international sites, but it should also benefit anyone who has trouble memorizing a fourteen digit number (I definitely place myself in that category!).

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us with feedback about this or any other library service.  The best way to do that is by emailing library@alliant.edu.

Link+ Adds Media Lending

In a move sure to be popular in these trying economic conditions, the Link+ consortium, of which Alliant is a member, has now made it possible for users to borrow not just books, but also audiovisual media — DVDs, CDs, and so on.

The process is similar to borrowing a book through Link+.  You search the Link+ catalog, locate the item you want, and then log in with your name and Alliant library barcode to place a request.  It’s a great way to have movies and books on CD delivered right to your Alliant library location.  Please try it out and let us know how it goes!

Make RSS feeds from Alliant library databases your personal research assistant

Some of you may be familiar with a tool called RSS, which allows one to receive updates about new content posted to blogs and other sites.  Instead of checking the same twenty to thirty websites each day to see if anything new has been posted, one simply subscribes to the rss feed of each site using a “rss reader” such as Google Reader (http://reader.google.com).  Then all that is necessary is to check your reader for new content, which will have been automatically downloaded.  If you haven’t used rss feeds in the past, you might want to give it a try, as it is a great way to keep up with news from lots of different sources.

An additional advantage, and the main purpose of this post, is that many of the databases available through Alliant’s library support rss feeds of search results.  What does this mean?

Let’s say there is a student working on her dissertation, and her area of interest is the psychology of pet owners.  She could go to the library databases, choose PsycINFO, and after some trial and error determine that by searching the descriptors “Pets” and “Ownership,” she can find results relevant to her work.  If she wanted to stay current with her topic on an ongoing basis, she could make a note reminding herself to run this search once a week, twice a month, or however often seemed appropriate.

Or, if she is a savvy user of rss feeds, she could make things much easier on herself, by setting up an rss feed which will automatically notify her any time new records matching her search appear in the PsycINFO database.  To do this, one must simply click on the small orange box (the logo for rss) on the search result screen.

This will open a popup which includes the details about the rss feed or “alert” being created:

The URL circled above can be copy/pasted into an rss reader.  After this is done, the reader will now contain a new subscription which will be automatically updated any time the database in question receives new records which match the search criteria originally defined (“DE pets AND DE ownership,” in this case).  Reading this new feed looks like this:

The “beauty part,” as they say, is that our patron can now sit down each day to go through her news feeds, checking the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and so forth, and at the same time find out if there are any new scholarly articles relevant to her interests.  It’s somewhat like having a personal research assistant feeding one new material as it becomes available.

This has been a very brief introduction to how rss works and how you can use it to assist you with your research.  For more information, the BBC has a very nice overview of the concept, or feel free to contact library@alliant.edu.   Finally, please note that the examples used here will not work on all of Alliant’s databases, as some database providers have not yet implemented this functionality.

Chat with a librarian

As a great way to start blogging about developments at Alliant’s library, I’m happy to announce that chat-based reference is now available.  Librarians are always happy to assist by phone, email or in person, but we understand that more and more of us live online, particularly when it comes to academics.  So, this is a way for people to get the help they need in a medium they are comfortable with.

To start chatting, head over to the library’s site and, in the top banner click Ask-a-Librarian.  This will take you to a page describing all the ways you can get a hold of a librarian, and if one is available, you’ll also see a chat window like this:

Try it out, and let us know what you think!