SLRC News & Updates

Update 9/1/20, 4:35 p.m.: The databases and chat are both working as expected! Hooray!

As OTS's email(s) informed all LSC users, the System Office is being impacted by power outages, which in turn impacted various services, including LoneStar.edu. This has including our Chat With a Librarian service (which is hosted on LoneStar.edu servers) as well as our research databases' ability to process through the proxy authentication (and therefore to let you in!).

Update 8/31/20: Chat is back but the databases are still down. We hope things will be repaired by 9/1 (apparently the loss of power damaged some equipment).

Grammarly has been renewed for another year, giving students access to the premium grammar, spelling, and style checking it offers.

Even before the pandemic, the LSC Libraries were having to make some tough decisions to reduce our database budget. Subscription costs tend to increase each year or so, while our portion of the budget has remained flat. In order to balance the budget, we elected to discontinue the following databases:

1. Statistical Abstracts
   1. Limiting Google searches to .gov and .org are helpful in targeting these
   2. Some subject guides, like #Sociology and #Criminal Justice, have specific pages for statistical sources. Let us know if your subject needs these resources (or send us an assignment to build a supplemental guide for)!
2. History Student Center
   1. America: History and Life, JSTOR, Project MUSE remain available for secondary research.
   2. See also our Primary Sources guide
3. eHRAF World Cultures
   1. Recommend JSTOR and Project MUSE as alternatives; possibly Humanities Full Text as well.

And we have downgraded the access level of:

1. Vocational Studies Complete (will be Vocational Studies Premier instead)

These databases were selected based on a combination of cost-per-use (total subscription cost divided by logins to the database), unique value (i.e. equal or superior content existing in other databases or on the open web), content relevance (supporting freshmen/sophomore level work), and interface (ease of use).

These changes will be effective Sept. 1, 2020.