As Temple students head home for the Thanksgiving holiday, thoughts of relaxing with family and friends may be more on the mind than research and final papers. But rest assured, when the calendar hits that last week of November, its the official start of crunch time – the last few weeks of the semester. The big challenge for many students is getting started on those final research papers. The librarians at Temple University know that getting started is the hardest part of any project. That’s why we have created lots of Research Guides to get you started in the right place.

Our Research Guides are designed to provide direct links to the top research databases and resources for students who may not be sure where to begin – and they are equally helpful for students who want to expand their research beyond the same one or two databases that always get used. We have over 600 databases, e-book collections, thousands of full-text journals and much more. Cut through the confusion. Start with a Research Guide. Where else could you get started? How about Summon. That’s our newest research tool for searching a huge amount of the content the Libraries offer – and you don’t have to even think about where to get started. Summon will get you there by providing lightning fast results that offer links to articles, books, and more – and when you follow these links it will lead to new resources – that’s why we call it a “discovery engine.”

Still not sure where to get started. Talk to one of our human discovery engines – your subject specialist librarian. No matter where you start your research, Temple Libraries has you covered for getting through crunch time.

Whew! After the catastrophic failure of our library web site on Sunday, Sept. 11, we had activated our alternative homepage, a slimmed down menu of all our resources. As we explained on our alternate page, after a scheduled power outage ended Sunday morning, our usual webservers and a key backup failed to reboot. Many members of the library technology staff, working with colleagues from computer services, worked many hours to build several servers from clean installs and then restore the library web site from a new physical location less subject to the periodic power outages which afflict Paley Library . Our goal is to make sure the site runs reliably and consistently so that the resources can be reached anytime, from anywhere, 24/7. Owing to equipment failure that was not possible and so we had to make do with a stripped down alternate page that menued our resources. We greatly appreciate how understanding the Temple Community was during this difficult situation. Thank you for being patient – and putting up with our alternate site – until we restored the regular site. As of Thursday September 22, the website is up and we are actively testing and repairing minor issues. For example the text-only version of the site is not working this morning. We have asked our automatic text rendering service to redirect their scripts to the new IP addess of the website and hope the text only version of the site will be restored on Friday. Thank you! Originally posted 9/21/11 by Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian Augmented 9/22/11 by Jonathan LeBreton, Associate University Librarian.

The staff of Temple University Libraries are excited about the start of the fall 2011 semester. We want to welcome all of our returning students back to campus, and we welcome all of our new students as well. Temple University Libraries has some new and exciting things in store for the fall campus, plus lots of interesting events for you to attend. Be on the lookout for our “Guide for Library Users” that will appear as an insert in the Temple Student News a few weeks from now. It’s your one-stop guide to everything you need to make great use of the Libraries at Temple. Keep following our library blog throughout the semester. You can also follow us on Twitter at /templelibraries and on Facebook. What’s new? Give our new Summon search a try. It searches the majority of our electronic research systems simultaneously – and fast! Now you can do one search and find the books and articles you need with one system. You’ll find the Summon search box prominently displayed on the Libraries web homepage. It looks like this:

When you visit Paley Library, take a look at the new flex-study space on the first floor in the computer commons. If you need a spot for your group or team to meet for a project, this is a good place for it. If you haven’t been over to the Science & Engineering Library recently, stop in (2nd Fl. of the Engineering Building). We improved all the furniture over the summer, but the project isn’t finished yet. We’ll be adding more computers during the semester. The staff of the Libraries wishes all our students a successful semester. Don’t forget. We are here to help you succeed. If you need any kind of help with research, finding books or articles, getting data, learning how to become a better researcher – we are the people who can help.