TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Keeping current with alerts
• Are you a fan of The Economist?
• Donations needed: P.W. Bridgman
• New electronic journals from the Research Library
• Search engine profile: HotBot
• Library visitors
• Holiday closure

Alerts are an automatic current awareness service. Alerts can be a good way to keep up with a topic of interest to you without having to take the time effort to go out and search -- the information is delivered to your mailbox.  Typically you register for the service and then create a search strategy or personal profile which will be matched automatically against each update of the database. An email notification is sent to you on a regular basis.

Uses of alerts are:

• keep current with the latest research on a topic
• track the latest research by a particular author or institution
• receive the table of contents of your favorite journal (from library databases)
• see who has cited a paper or author (SciSearch or Social SciSearch databases only)

Research Library database alerts, offering notification of recently published literature, are:

How to set up an alert in a library database:

1. Go to the database of your choice (you may use the links in the list above)
2. Try out a desired search and review the results. For a topical search a good practice is to do the search with a date limit of one year, and see if the number of search results is a reasonable amount to get in weekly or biweekly alerts. Broaden or narrow the search as needed.
3. Click on alerts in the database toolbar.
4. If this is your first alert, Register as a new user; otherwise, Login with your User Name and Password
5. Select "New Alert" ("New General Alert" or "New Cited Alert" for SciSearch/Social SciSearch)
6. Give your alert a name, select method of receipt, and enter search criteria as tested.
7. Submit the alert.

You receive email each week, either the citations themselves or a URL for logging in to your account to view the results.

There are also other free alert services, available freely on the web or to LANL researchers:

Kathy Varjabedian
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Subscribe to The Economist's free e-mail newsletters, Business this week and Politics this week. Delivered each Thursday evening, they will keep you informed of the week's key events around the world. Here's what else you get when you register for the site at http://www.economist.com/tfs/reg_shortcut_tframeset.html :  full access to The Economist Web edition for 20 sessions; access to the archive, with 5 free retrievals; download of The Economist World Data screensaver free. This one is worth a look, and it's free! If you have any queries please contact ej@lanl.gov.

Anne Menefee
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The Research Library needs copies of the out-of-print volumes from P.W. Bridgman, 1946 Nobel Prize winner in physics. Although the Library contains a few of his classic texts we would greatly appreciate donations of:

The Logic of Modern Physics
The Thermodynamics of Electrical Phenomena in Metals
The Intelligent Individual and Society
Studies in Large Plastic Flow and Fracture
The Way Things Are
A Sophisticate's Primer of Relativity

In addition to his research and teaching at Harvard, Bridgman measured the compressibility of uranium and plutonium for the Manhattan Project.

Donna Berg
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The following new electronic journals have been added to the library collection and are available from your desktop:

• Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jtoc?ID=2517
  This journal provides information relating scientific discoveries and inventions in process biotechnology and chemical technology to their conversion into commercial products. It focuses on the interfaces between chemical technology and biotechnology, especially where these impact on health and safety and the environment.
  
• Review of Economics Dynamics http://www.idealibrary.com/cgi-bin/links/toc/rd
  Publishes original contributions to dynamic economics. The scope of the journal is broad and reflects the view of the Society for Economic Dynamics that the field of economics is unified by the scientific approach to economics. Contributions in any area of economics will be published.

Carol Hoover
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HotBot (hotbot.com) has been named best search engine for 1999 by both "PC Computing" and "U.S. News & World Report" and has been highly rated by a number of other reviews since its debut in 1996.

HotBot's particular strength is its advanced searching capabilities. The default search operation is AND among multiple search terms. Boolean searching is supported: choose 'Boolean phrase' from the drop down menu and you can use the operators AND, OR, and NOT, and nested parentheses. Phrase searching can be done either by specifying "Exact phrase" in the drop-down menu or by enclosing your search string in quotes. + and - can be used to require or exclude words. Wild cards can be used for truncation, or anywhere in the search string, with "*" for one or more characters or "?" for just one character.  Also word stemming is an option in advanced searching.

Several means are available to narrow down large search results to manageable proportions.  Searches can be limited by date, language, special media types, or words in page titles.  One other, unique, limit is the Page Type limit, with choices of Any, Top Page, Personal page, or Page Depth. Top Page can be very useful for identifying a primary site for an organization or topic. Page Depth requires a number, with the default of 3, that will limit how far down a subdirectory hierarchy HotBot will display results.

Note that searches are case sensitive if any letter in the search string is upper case; then results will be restricted to only records that exactly match the specified case.  Searches in all lower case will retrieve all results.

Results are sorted by relevance. Top 10 results are determined using clickthrough data, that is the frequency with which sites are chosen by users in search results.  The default display is 10 records at time, although you can request displays of more at a time, and less information per record.  From a results screen you can use Related Search, Search Within These Results, and Revise Search.

HotBot also has the HotBot Directory, a manually compiled Web site directory, organized according to hierarchical categories. Categories can be browsed from the home page, or category matches from the HotBot Directory will appear before the Web results on a search results page.

Kathy Varjabedian
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The Research Library recently hosted Dr. Ben Bowman, microbiologist and information specialist from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany and Nancy D. Gomez, Director of the Central Library of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. After learning about the Research Library from the recent ONLINE magazine article on the library and conference talks by library staff, they wanted to base projects at their institutions on our model of the library of the future.

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The Research Library will be accessible to badgeholders during the holiday closure, until December 31st at 5 p.m, so please plan any library visits before the weekend. During the week library staff will be off but the copiers and computers will be left on for use by our customers. The unclassified elevator in the Study Center, SM-207, will be operating. As of December 31, 1999 at 5 p.m. the building will be closed, and re-opened for badgeholders after Y2K impacts are resolved.

Happy Holidays from the Research Library!

Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Jack Carter, Lou Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian.

The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter Editor, Kathy Varjabedian.

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