Global Currents

You may have noticed a change in the catalog interface for CARLI recently.
The new VuFind interface is the place to go to access materials held by both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the 76 other libraries in the CARLI system. All borrowing requests for items not on our campus will have to be placed through this new system. You can still search the classic interface, but you will not be able to request items from other campuses from there.

When you are searching the entire system, the VuFind Union Catalog will display location and holdings information for up to five I-Share libraries randomly selected from among the owning libraries. This will be followed by links to all I-Share libraries that own the item, allowing you to select any available copy to request.

To request items from the University of Illinois Library or other I-Share libraries using VuFind, you must create a user account in the VuFind system. You will need your 14 digit Library ID to set up a new account, but once the account has been created you will logon with a user name and password of your own choosing. We are suggesting, however, that it is possible to use your 14 digit Library ID number as your account password. One advantage to the new account login is the ability to request several items without logging in each time. You can also go to your library account, as in the past, to check on the status of your request, see what you have charged out and due dates, and to renew items.

A few features are not available through the new interface. You cannot access course reserves, do call number searching, limit items by library or directly export to Refworks. All of these features are still available in the classic version of the interface.

Don’t forget to try http://m.library.illinois.edu/ to access the library on your mobile device. Happy searching!!!

Let us know what you think!

Many scientists understand the problems encountered in the dispersion of scientific information and knowledge between countries. The vast majority of works written are in the English language, but there is a great deal of exciting science being published in non-English languages as well. Additionally, there are a large number of non-English speaking scientists who would greatly benefit from the large body of English-only works. In an effort to respond to this problem, the WorldWide Science Alliance has released a beta version of a website that allows the user to search for scientific literature in databases from many countries and have the resulting citations (some with abstracts) translated into one of nine languages.

With the new multilingual approach of the WorldWideScience.org search, the user has the capability of real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed collections of scientific literature. Deep Web Technologies is combined with the translation technology of Microsoft Research, along with the WorldWide Science Alliance databases to provide this exciting and interesting new resource. WorldWide Science allows federated searching of databases in 65 countries. For the full press release go to the U. S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI).