Let’s say you’re researching the Christian response to globalization in Latin America and you need some current information on the countries of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Or you’re studying Judaism in contemporary Russia, or Islam in Indonesia, and you need to know more about those countries. Maybe the size of the economy and its major sectors are important, or the legal system and its support for civil and religious rights, or the size of the population and the number of different ethnic groups. For these and other reasons, there is often a need for up-to-date and reliable country information. Temple has just the source for you: Europa World (available from the A-Z database list), an online product based on the print Europa World Year Book which has been published since 1989. This online source covers over 250 countries and territories. Look up the entry for Peru from the dropdown box in the upper right corner of the homepage. You’ll get links to Country Map, Country Flag, Country Profile, Country Statistics, Directory: Government and Politics; Directory: Society and Media; and Directory: Business and Commerce. You can even choose Comparative Statistics to compare Peru to other countries. You can also find country information on the Web by searching for “country studies” or “country information” in any of the major search engines. Two web sites of particular note are Country Studies from the Library of Congress, and the CIA World Factbook.
Category Archives: Library News
The Chron on Refworks
The latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52 Issue 40 Page A29) has an article titled “Toss Out the Index Cards” (free online) on bibliographic management software such as EndNote and RefWorks. The University has a license for RefWorks that allows free use by students, staff, and faculty. Follow the link and sign up to give the software a try. As an addition to the article I will note that many of the library’s article databases (including all EBSCO and OVID products) have the ability to automatically export citations into RefWorks with a simple click of the mouse (and a quick log-in to your account). If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. –Derik A Badman
Index Islamicus
The library has recently added the online version of Index Islamicus to our databases. Index Islamicus Online is the premier database supporting the field of Islamic Studies. An international source for articles, books, and conference proceedings, Index Islamicus is a key resource for anyone studying Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Along with Arabic countries, it includes coverage of Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and other areas of the world with Muslim populations, like the United States, France, and Great Britain. Subject matter goes back to the ancient and medieval world and will be a useful interdisciplinary resource for historians, art historians, philosophers, theologians, and classicists. Over 3000 journals in multiple languages are monitored for inclusion and records go all the way back to 1906. Index Islamicus offers a basic and an advanced search. One of its most useful features is the ability to select subject descriptors from a bibliographic record and perform a new search with just those selected descriptors. Full text linking and links into Temple’s library catalog Diamond are provided, but the database itself has no full text content and no abstracts. Records can be easily exported to the bibliographic utility Refworks.
L’Annee philologique arrives!!
At long last, the library has access to L’Annee philologique, the most important database for the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. L’Annee reflects the international and multidisciplinary nature of classical studies, indexing books, articles, and conference papers from around the world in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. (You will often find that the abstract to an article is written in a different language than the article itself.) Whether you’re searching for information on the Presocratics, the Homeric Hymns, the archaeological remains of Pompeii, or ancient science and technology, you will find highly relevant and dependable sources here.
L’Annee philologique online is based on the print index of the same name that has been a standard for years among classics scholars. Current online coverage is from print volume 30 (1959) to volume 74 (2003). You can search by Modern Author, Ancient Author, Full Text, Subjects and disciplines, Date, and other criteria. In the case of “Full Text”, this does not mean that you can search the entire contents of articles–this is NOT a full text database. Rather, it means that you can search the entire contents of the article records. This is unusual terminology for users in the United States and reflects L’annee’s European origin.
There are some other important features that might be surprising to non-classicist American users. For the Ancient Author search, you need to input the latinized version of a name, so for instance “liuius”, not “livy”. To search for “livy”, do the Full Text search. Complex searches are also handled differently. You have to build up your search step by step. To combine a Modern Author search with, say, a Subject search, you have to first do the author search, then the subject search, and finally combine the two searches using the boolean operator AND. Once you’ve done all the simple searches describing your topic (and you can have many), the combining and recombining of search sets–using AND, OR, and NOT–is made easy and efficient.
Unfortunately, the Help pages to this database are sparse. Below I’ve listed a bunch of academic library tutorials that I found useful:
Biblical and Other Ancient Manuscripts Online
I was recently trying to track down online images of ancient Christian and Jewish manuscripts. I found quite a few imaging projects that are making ancient Mediterranean manuscripts more and more available to the scholar and layperson. The briefly annotated list below highlights some of the more interesting sites I ran across. (By the way, if anyone knows of any other good sites with images of ancient manuscripts, please let me know. Thanks.)
- APIS: Advanced Papyrological Information System–”APIS is a collections-based repository hosting information about and images of papyrological materials (e.g. papyri, ostraca, wood tablets, etc) located in collections around the world.” Browse and search the database. Note:Search system gives you the option to “Show records w/images first”. The five collections immediately below are included in APIS.
- Center for the Tebtunis Papyri–UC Berkley collection from the town of Tebtunis Egypt. “…largest collection of papyrus texts in the Americas.” For images click on “The Collection” and “On-Line Exhibits” on the left-hand side of the page.
Image Content: from 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD; administrative, legal, business, and religious documents; literary fragments (Homer, Xenophon, Pinder, Euripides) - Duke Papyrus Archive–Very easy site to navigate. Search or browse by topic or language. Catalog records included with each image.
Image Content: “1400 papyri from ancient Egypt.” Includes Old Testament (used by christians), New Testament, and other early Christian manuscripts - Princeton University Library Papyrus Homepage–Scroll down the page and click on “Digital Images of Selected Princeton Papyri”.
Image Content: administrative, religious, literary manuscripts in Greek (including New Testament), Latin, Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic - University of Michigan Papyrus Collection–Well-designed site with lots of information on ancient writing. To see images click on “Exhibits” or “APIS” in menu bar at top..
Image Content: Greek (including New Testament) and Latin papyri - Yale Papyrus Collection–Search Yale’s Papyrus Collection Database to view images.
Image Content: many genres, many languages, many locations, many time periods
Image Content: New Testament, Old Testament, Hebrew Scriptures
Image Content:very sharp images of New Testament manuscripts.
Image Content: Greek literary and philosophical documents
Image Content: from 1st century BC to 6th century AD, Greek papyri,wide range of genres including classical authors and New Testament
Image Content: ancient religious documents including pages from Leningrad Codex and Dead Sea Scrolls
Encyclopaedia of Islam Online now available
The Encyclopaedia of Islam is a great work of reference covering the many-sided nature of Islam and the Muslim world, with articles on art, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and more. The user can browse the alphabetical entries, or peruse and select from the Subjects index or the Names index. Searching options include using English or transliterated terms to query Full Text, Headwords (article entries), Keywords, bibliographies, or Contributors.
- Interested in the famous library at Cordoba created by the Umayyad caliphs that “contained some 4000,000 volumes, described in a catalogue of 44 volumes, each containing 40 leaves”? What was its fate? Check out the article entitled MAKTABA (Arabic for “library”).
- What about the spread of Islam in China, where the “military forces [of Kubilay Khan], used for the overunning of both North and South China, were built largely upon the thousands of Muslim soldiers which he brought with him from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian campaigns.” Look at the article on CHINA (al-SIN).
- Want to find books and articles on modern Turkey? Search the Bibliography field for “modern turkey” and you’ll retrieve the bibliographies of 81 articles. If you’re just interested in the early state period, you could add the term “world war” and reduce the set to 5. (You can even search the bibliographies for “temple university” and find that two Temple dissertations have been cited.)
- And what about a comprehensive article on the Koran (al-KURAN), with sections on Etymology and Synonyms, Muhammad and the Kuran, History of the Kuran After 632, Structure, Chronology of the Text, Language and Style, Literary Forms and Major Themes, The Kuran in Muslim Life and Thought, and Translation of the Kuran?
The Encyclopaedia of Islam covers the main precepts of Islam at the same time that it reveals the rich interplay between Islam and other world civilizations going all the way back to the late antique world. This encyclopedia will prove very useful, whether you’re studying the core of Islam or just nibbling at the interdisciplinary edges. There are some challenges, however, that the user needs to deal with. For one, you will need to download Brill fonts for handling Arabic terms in transliteration. You can find links to the fonts in the upper right corner of the main search page. For serious scholars and students of Islam the many Arabic terms are one of the encyclopedia’s great advantages. For the uninitiated, however, it does take some getting used to (but after a little while it becomes fun). Don’t wait. Check out the Encyclopaedia of Isalm today! BTW, more good news: the second edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica will be released in the fall in print and online (as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library). I hope we can get both versions. This will fill a big gap as we do not currently have a major online Jewish/Judaism encyclopedia. –Fred Rowland
Philosophy books on Google Book Search
With the help of our excellent student workers in the Reference and Instructional Services Department, I carried out a small study of Google Book Search (GBS). Curious to know just how deep it was with regards to philosophy, I took a random sample of 381 titles out of the 4244 philosophy titles Temple bought between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2005. It turns out that 35% of the philosophy books sampled are contained in GBS, including the following percentages from a number of top academic publishers:
- 39% of Oxford (21/54)
- 66% of Routledge (25/38)
- 70% of Blackwell (7/10)
- 76% of SUNY (13/17)
- 88% of Cambridge (28/32)
None of the books in my sample from Harvard (5), Cornell (8), MIT(5), Princeton (3), Stanford (3), or Yale (4) university presses were found, although books from all these publishers do show up in GBS (the Advanced Search allows a publisher search). Sample books from the large European academic presses Ashgate (9), Brill (3), Continuum (5), and Palgrave MacMillan (7) also did not turn up. With the exception of Brill, this latter group does not appear to be participating in GBS. According to Google, books make it into GBS through two different routes, as part of the Partner Program or the Library Project. With the Partner Program, publishers (or authors) provide GBS with the full-text of books. Presumably, most are using this service as a means of marketing their books. By contrast, for the Library Project GBS scans in books from a number of major research libraries like those at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Depending on the copyright status of a book and on the agreements between publishers and Google, there are four different views of books that users see–the Snippet View, Sample Pages View, and Full View, and No Preview Available (which I ran into a number of times but for which Google gives no explanation).
- The Snippet View shows your keyword(s) in a few sentences of context. Books showing this view come from the Library Project and are still under copyright.
- All the books in my sample presented the Sample Pages View. These books come from either the Partner Program or the Library Project. On the search results screen, books showing the Sample Pages View will contain the label Limited Preview. In either case, the publisher has given permission to display only a certain portion of the work. Many of the pages in this view will either require a login (free to set up), or will be inaccessible. For instance, when I searched inside the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief for “wagner”, six pages required login and six were inaccessible. (Of course, you are only asked to log in once per session.)
- Full View books are entirely accessible. And whereas you can’t print pages out from the Snippet View or the Sample Pages View, you can print out pages from Full View books. You can also limit your search to just Full View books. These works either come from the Library Project and are in the public domain, or the author or publisher has given permission to view an entire copyrighted work.
- No Preview Available books look a lot like the Snippet View except without the snippet. These probably come in as part of the Library Project and, appropriately, look a bit like library catalog records.
It is important to remember that despite which view you’re given, your search is querying the full-text of these books, not just the the book record as you would with, say, a library catalog. It’s also important to remember that Google intends this as a search service that will allow users to identify books that they will eventually borrow from libraries or buy in bookstores. It’s not meant as a provider of electronic books. Clearly, there are enough philosophy books in Google Book Search to make it a useful tool of discovery. Among its many uses are citation searching, identifying an obscure person, place, thing, or event, or just plain old full-text searching. Next time you’re doing philosophy research (or any other kind of research), try it out. BTW, Temple has quite a few subscription databases of full-text searchable books that might be of interest to the student of philosophy, some of which are listed below:
International Medieval Bibliography Online
Temple now has access to the premier database for medievalists, The International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB), which contains over 300,000 articles in thirty different languages. The articles come from journals, conference proceedings, essay collections, and festschriften chosen by a “worldwide network of fifty teams to ensure regular coverage of 4,500 periodicals and a total of over 5,000 miscellany volumes”. Extensive indexing–including separate indexes for subjects, people, places, repositories, and time periods–allows for precise searching. The IMB covers the period from 300 to 1500 CE and the geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, making it relevant to scholars of classics, religion, philosophy, art and archaeology, history, literature, and Islamic studies. In addition to the IMB, here are some other electronic resources relevant to the study of various aspects of the Middle Ages: Encyclopedias:
- Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages;
- Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium;
- Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance;
- Encyclopedia of Philosophy;
- Encyclopedia of Religion;
- New Catholic Encyclopedia;
- New Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Databases:
- ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance;
- Index Islamicus;
- ATLA–the database of the American Theological Library Association;
- Bibliography of the History of Art;
- Philosopher’s Index;
- MLA International Bibliography–the database of the Modern Language Association.
–Fred Rowland
Historical Newspapers
The library is pleased to announce our new access to Proquest Historical Newspapers, encompassing complete full-text coverage of the New York Times, 1851-2003 (more recent access available through LexisNexis Academic), and the Wall Street Journal, 1889-1989 (more recent access available through Factiva). The papers are available cover to cover (including advertisements) in digital images. They are full-text searchable and searching can be limited to date ranges as well as type of article from news and editorials to editorial cartoons and photos to obituaries and marriage notices. Electronic access to these newspapers adds a range of historical news that was previously only available to us on microfilm. Students will be particularly aided by access to the New York Times of the mid-twentieth century, an era which is frequently requested by undergraduate researchers. –Derik A Badman
LexisNexis Congressional and United States Serial Set now available
Paley Library has purchased the combined LexisNexis Congressional and United States Serial Set research databases. LexisNexis Congressional is the most comprehensive electronic index currently available for United States legislative information. Congressional publications comprise an extremely wide variety of information that reflects the needs and concerns of an evolving nation. They impact virtually every aspect of the curriculum and are particularly important for the Departments or Schools of Business Administration, History, Economics, Law, Political Science, Social Administration, Communications, Criminal Justice, Sociology, Education, Geography and Urban Studies, Journalism, American Studies and, African American studies. The LexisNexis Congressional interface allows users to simultaneously search the Congressional reports and documents that comprise the Serial Set as well as prints, bills, the Congressional Record, selected testimony in hearings before Congress, Public Laws, Statutes at Large, the United States Code Service, the Federal Register, and the National Journal. It also provides information about Congressional Committees, Congressional biographies, recent legislative activities, and public policy issues such as voting records, financial data, and regulatory information. Much of the material is linked to full text. Congressional publications from as early as1789 are available in their entirety as are the text and status of proposed current legislation and recently signed laws. Additional resources offered by LexisNexis Congressional includes a keyword searchable Code of Federal Regulations, and the full text of the Washington Post’s Section A from 1977 to the present. LexisNexis Congressional’s legislative publications online and Paley Library’s collection of legislative publications combine to provide the Paley Library community with a complete set of the official congressional publications. The link to this resource is now available via the library electronic resources web pages. Here’s the A-Z database list. We hope you will find this resource useful. If you have any questions about its content or if you have any difficulty using it, please contact me or one of my colleagues in Reference and Instructional Services at Paley library. –Susan J. Golding