Featured Friday: New Research Guides!

You may already be familiar with the library’s Research Guides — pages curated by research librarians here at Allegheny to guide students and faculty in their research. These guides offer links to library databases, online services, and other tools, typically with a focus around a particular academic discipline (such as Art, Mathematics, or Political Science).

Over the coming months, we’ll focus on bringing the coverage of our Research Guides more in synch with the majors and minors offered here at Allegheny. Toward this end, we’ve added two new Research Guides this summer: one for Business and one for Community and Justice Studies.

Let us know if there’s a particular guide you’d like to see!

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Tech Tip Tuesday: Your Library Account

Your Allegheny account includes full access to all resources available through Pelletier Library and other libraries across campus. You can check your library account to view what you have checked out and when it’s due. You can also ask for renewals, check to see if you have any fines or fees, and see the status of any of your requests.

Screenshot of the tabs in the "My Library Account" page in AggreGator

If you’re logged into your library account, you can also track your searches in AggreGator. Our Interlibrary Loan system also uses your Allegheny account so you can request items from other libraries if you don’t find what you need in Allegheny College’s collections.

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Tech Tip Tuesday: Searching AggreGator

Are you familiar with AggreGator?Green silhouette Illustration of an alligator

As the name suggests, AggreGator searches through the aggregated library content available to Allegheny College from a single search box. Books, ebooks, journal articles, digital collections, video, newspaper articles, and more from almost all of the library’s databases can be found through AggreGator.

If you’re already familiar, you will be interested to know that the AggreGator search interface has recently been updated with new enhancements.

For both experienced and new users, LITS librarians have created a new AggreGator guide where you can learn the ins and outs.

Also, check out our playlist of videos on searching AggreGator!

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Reflections on Social (In) Justice: A Digital Collection

If you are a member of the Allegheny community (students, faculty, staff, and alumni), the Allegheny College Archives invites you to share your reflections about social (in)justice in light of the inequities revealed by the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic, recent acts of racial violence, and the related protests by submitting creative works for the College’s digital collections. Individuals telling their stories is part of our entire community being seen, heard, and valued and is part of our joint commitment  to creating an inclusive, respectful and safe residential learning community that actively confronts and challenges injustice. This project intends to help us share our stories as a way to build understanding, strengthen our community, foster human connection, and preserve personal accounts of these troubling events for future generations and scholarly research. Visit our website to learn more about submitting your work or submit directly here. We will accept your essays, poems, photographs, videos etc., that share your reactions and feelings about the life-changing events of recent weeks. Tell us how these historic events in this turbulent time have impacted your life. We will accept your creative reflections at least through 2020. If you have any questions, please contact Ruth Andel, Archivist (merrick@allegheny.edu) or Beau Smith, Digital Resources Librarian (bmith3@allegheny.edu).

Allegheny Strong: A Digital Collection of Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic

If you are a member of the Allegheny community (students, faculty, staff, and alumni), the Allegheny College Archives invites you to share your personal reflections on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted your life and those around you by submitting your creative works to our new digital collection.  Visit our website to learn more about submitting your work or submit directly here. We will accept journal entries, essays, photographs, and videos as well as other digital output documenting your experience during this difficult time.  We envision the project as a way of strengthening our sense of community and human connection while preserving personal accounts of this global event for future generations and scholarly research.  If you have any questions, please contact us at merrick@allegheny.edu.

Web of Science Citation Counts Restored

Web of Science citation counts have been missing from off-campus AggreGator search results for the past two weeks. The problem can be fixed simply by logging in.  After conducting an initial search in AggreGator, look for a message in the upper right corner of the screen (small white font in a dark grey banner) beginning with the words “Off Campus?” Follow the instructions to log in with your Allegheny Username and Password.  After logging in, the Web of Science citation count will appear in the search results.

Screen shot of banner reading "Off Campus? Log in with your Allegheny Username & Password to access full text."

ProQuest scheduled maintenance

Dear Valued Customer:

ProQuest will be taking up to a 12-hour maintenance window beginning Saturday, February 8 at 10pm to upgrade infrastructure, enhance security, and maintain reliability on many ProQuest products. During this maintenance window, many ProQuest products provided by Allegheny will be temporarily unavailable, including RefWorks.

If you experience difficulties persisting after 10am on Sunday, February 9, please open a Web Help Desk ticket.

HathiTrust login update

LITS has updated the authentication method for HathiTrust accounts. This may cause some temporary difficulties with logging into your HathiTrust account over the next few days. We expect these difficulties to be resolved by January 20 at the latest.
Most functions of HathiTrust are unaffected.
If you experience difficulties logging into HathiTrust after January 20, please contact the InfoDesk at 814-332-3768, or open a Web Help Desk ticket.

Scheduled Ebook Central Downtime

To ensure our ebook platforms remain updated and secure, ProQuest will be performing maintenance on Ebook Central in October 2019. During this time, resources from this service may be unavailable.

This maintenance will take place Saturday, October 19 from 12:00pm to 3:00pm EDT.