Dark Copy: A Place To Clear One's Mind

It happens to the best of us. While researching, we may realize our chosen topic is not sufficiently defined and/or supported by acceptable sources. This can be a discombobulating situation that may require a clean mental slate as we refocus.

Dark Copy is a text editor that can be used for such occasions.
Its beauty lies in its simplicity.
A dark page fills the computer screen thus allowing one to clear one's mind and type distraction-free. With the focus now on writing, it can assist in reformulating thoughts or refining a topic.
It is a simple yet powerful concept. Give it a try.

Dark Copy can be found at: http://darkcopy.com/.

Alcohol Studies Database

A newly-improved alcohol studies database is now available online. The database contains approximately 80,000 bibliographic citations indexed by the Rutgers University Center for Alcohol Studies. The scope of the database is research and professional materials that focus on alcohol use and related consequences.

In addition to research documents, the database also includes what the creators call "some educational and prevention materials, including audiovisuals, suitable for students and educators K-12, parents, community workers, and the general public."

The Alcohol Studies Database web address is: http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/alcohol_studies/alcohol/index.htm

Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens)

In search of images that will add visual interest to your work?
Interested in visual researching?
Cooliris can help.
This Firefox add-on is easy (and fun) to use. Once installed,
images are presented as a 3D wall that you can effortlessly zip along.
Just click on the image to bring it to the fore and zoom in.
Each picture has a small globe icon which you can click on to
jump to its corresponding website.You can easily share the images by clicking the envelope icon which allows you to email them to others. Cooliris is a great time saver as it taps into the image resources of many popular websites and search engines including Google, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, deviantArt, Photobucket, and Yahoo.

Firefox can be downloaded free from: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.
The Cooliris add-on can then be installed from: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=cooliris&cat=all .

Professionalize: Create a Blog of Your Own

Weblogs or "blogs" have become an easy and fun way to publish ideas to the Web. You can publish a short and finite collection of posts to promote your business/career, or you can decide to create a topical or research focus to which you continue to add to daily or weekly. Either way, you are creating something that you can share with others in your professional life.
Here at the library, we have been tremendously happy with Blogger/Blogspot, a free blogging and hosting service owned by Google. There are many more, like Vox.com, typepad.com, and wordpress.com to name a few. The services are either free with ads or very inexpensive.
As a professional resource, think about how this fits your "brand" and your vision for your career, whether clinical, academic or entrepreneurial. You can always decide to upgrade to a more formal site later, start additional blogs for different topics or talents, or delete your blog when it no longer serves its purpose.
Talk to a librarian if you want to learn more about how to get started.

Following the Citation Trail

Finding who has cited a particular article has always been useful in the process of research. We have two database collections that do just that: CSA and now ProQuest. If an article has been cited in other articles, a "Cited By" link will appear, allowing you to link to the other articles.
ProQuest recently added this feature and there are two reasons why this feature is so useful.
-A heavily cited article in a given field is proven to be influential and important.
-The "cited by" link gives you access to more articles which may be related to your topic.