New Science Liaison Librarian at Turitea

Chris Good is the new Liaison Librarian for College of Sciences on the Turitea Campus - he replaces Rae Gendall who move to the Albany Library last year. Chris comes to us from Victoria University where he held a similar position and prior to that he worked at Waikato, also as a science liaison librarian. After completing a BA(Hons) at Otago with papers in earth sciences, computing and statistics he chose Massey for his Masters degree in geography in the early '90s. Chris brings us a wealth of experience as a science librarian and is looking forward to working with staff and students of the College of Sciences. He can be emailed - c.good@massey.ac.nz - or telephoned on extension 7814. Bruce White remains a science Liaison Librarian at Turitea as well.

Digital Commons (Institutional Repository) Demonstration

Turitea Library Training Room, Level 2
Date: Tuesday 14 February 2006
Time: 11am - 12 noon

Hanna Perrett from Bepress (Berkeley Electronic Press) and Dan Hamid from ProQuest will be coming to the Turitea Library to talk about the benefits of an institutional repository and a Digital Commons from an academic staff point-of-view.

The Digital Commons software allows loading of dissertations, research papers, conference papers, pre-prints and even peer-reviewed journals, and making these available over the web to provide maximum visibility for this research. Many of the Australian universities have already developed such a repository.

Examples can also be seen at:
University of Pennyslvania
California Digital Library
University of Surrey

If you would like to attend, please let us know by responding with your name by email to Stephanie Taylor in the Library by 10 February 2006.

FOODnetBASE Now Available!

FOODnetBASE is a collection of electronic books and reference sources in food science, food technology and nutrition. It covers a wide spectrum of food industry topics ranging from safety regulations and quality assurance to packaging, biotechnology and product development and includes publications from CRC Press, Marcel Dekker and Woodhead. FOODnetBase curently consists of 183 titles.

Titles can be browsed from the front page or there is a search box is in the top left hand corner. You need to use a Boolean "AND" if you are searching on more than one term - e.g. campylobacter AND gastroenteritis. Two or more words entered as a string without an intervening AND are searched for as a phrase - e.g. "hazard identification". Navigation to your search results is reasonably intuitive and the individual chapters load as PDF files which can be saved. A disadvantage of FOODnetBASE is that the PDFs are not paginated which may make documents difficult to cite. Please get in touch with us if you are struggling with any of its features.

If you are opening a title from the main list click on the Read It Online! link. In due course individual titles will be added to the Library catalogue so that the electronic books are fully integrated into the Library's collection.

CAB Abstracts Now Back to 1910

Massey Library's coverage of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux database has been extended back in time to 1910 with the addition of extensive backfile to the records which had previously covered the period from 1972 to the present only. While it is generally true that researchers' prime need is for the latest work, the availability of classic articles is exceptionally valuable in the field of agriculture to track the development of a particular technique or to compare different conditions over time. It is now possible for example to locate the early work of New Zealand grasslands pioneer A.H. Cockayne with a CAB search, or to track publishing on leptospirosis in New Zealand from the 1950s to the present.