A current topic of interest and one that has an impact on the lives of all Americans is affordable health care. There are usually government documents at the core of every important issue in the United States, and a colleague, Steve Beleu (Oklahoma Department of Libraries, U.S. Government Information Division) posted two items of interest.

He writes…

In light of town-hall meetings about H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ it might be useful to have this…and also a summary of the bill from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO): a one page Summary of bill from Thomas and a cost analysis from the CBO [Congressional Budget Office](17 pages)

In addition to what can be found on the Internet, our online catalog BearCat provides hundreds of government publications on the topic of health care and many of those publications are freely available, online, full-text documents. To search for government documents in BearCat, enter in the subject you are looking for in the quick search box, and when your screen of results comes up, click on the button at the top of the page that says “Modify Search.” On the next page, you can limit your results several ways, one of which is by “location” – find the choice that says “Government Documents” and click “submit search.” There you go! Lots of great great primary source government materials on your topic!

I just learned about PubMed-EX, a new Firefox Addon which performs text-mining on any record in PubMed and provides additional background information on key terms in little pop-up boxes. A great feature if you regularly search PubMed, and especially if you sometimes get overwhelmed with all the scientific terms you find as you search PubMed.

Below is a screenshot of what this great addon can do as you search PubMed:

The newly redesigned Baylor University Libraries web page has our “Ask a Librarian” widget right up front, making it easy for  you to get answers to questions you might have about doing research, what we have in the Library, and how to find the right sort of articles for your class assignments.  We get questions from students studying abroad and needing to know what they can still get to while they are in Maastricht or at St. Andrew’s and from students and faculty who are at a computer terminal in the Central Libraries but can’t find what they are looking for.

The next time you need to know the difference between scholarly or peer-reviewed journals, how to choose a good paper topic, or how to best find three full-text articles for your next assignment, or where we moved the books starting with “J” call numbers to, ask us online.  It’s anonymous and we’ll get you the answer you need.

Oh, look, the widget is even on the right of this page!