In Every Tongue–Speaking about Gary Tobin

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The Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Jewish Studies Program held its 3rd Annual Symposium on Race and Judaism on November 19, 2009. The day’s program was devoted to themes in memory of the late Dr. Gary Tobin who died on July 6, 2009. Gary Tobin was the President of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, and, along with his wife Dianne, the founder of Be’chol Lashon/In Every Tongue, “a think-tank devoted to the study of Jewish diversity and bringing diverse communities of Jewish people together across the globe.”  (View this short film about Be’chol Lashon.)  Gary Tobin was a social scientist, teacher, and community organizer with interests in Jewish demography, philanthropy, antisemitism, and anti-Israelism.

On the morning of the symposium, librarian Fred Rowland sat down with four of the participants to discuss Gary Tobin, the organizations that he created, the issues to which he devoted his life, and the day’s events. They were Lewis Gordon, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies; Laura Levitt, professor of religion and women’s studies; Rabbi Capers Funnye of the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, and Walter Isaac, graduate fellow for the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies.

Integrating the Library Into Blackboard

Temple University Libraries’ subject specialists create guides to library resources for general subjects as well as for specific courses and assignments. Faculty should contact Subject Specialists to get more information on these. Here are the Subject Guides that are currently available.

Blackboard is a great place to make these guides available to students. View the Screencast below to see how easy it is to embed a library guide into your Blackboard course.

For more information, see Integrating the Library Into Blackboard.

RSS Feeds in Journal Finder

If you search for journals in our Journal Finder, you can now access RSS feeds to get notifications of new issues’ table of contents. What is RSS? We’ve created a subject guide on that very subject called “Current Awareness with RSS Feeds”. It includes information about what RSS feeds are and how you can use them for different purposes. If have you used RSS feeds before, Journal Finder can help you find RSS feeds for the tables of contents of hundreds of academic journals from a wide range of publishers such as: Sage, Wiley, Blackwells, Elsevier, Oxford, Nature, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and many more. When you search in Journal Finder, if a journal in your results has an associated RSS feed, you will see the standard RSS icon, which looks like this:

jf_rss-1.png Clicking on the RSS icon will take you to the url for the RSS feed. Next to the RSS icons are small information icons which will take you to the aforementioned subject guide on RSS. If you have any questions feel free to ask your subject librarian.

Derik A Badman Digital Services Librarian

Stone Reader Interview

Mark Moskowitz sat down for an interview with librarian Fred Rowland after discussing books and filmmaking in an appearance at the Paley Lecture Hall on March 24, 2009. Moskowitz is the producer and director of the non-fiction narrative film The Stone Reader, in which he tracks down the elusive author of The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman, a young writer who slipped into obscurity after publishing his first novel. The Stone Reader won awards at both the 2002 Slamdance Film Festival and the 2003 Philadelphia Film Festival. In this interview, Moskowitz talks about the book, his film, its reception, and his current projects.

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Vampire Huntress Interview

Leslie Banks appeared at the Temple Book Club on March 4, 2009 to talk about her new book, The Thirteenth, and her new projects including a forthcoming graphic novel. In an engaging presentation with many fans in the audience, she discussed the final book of her Vampire Huntress series, as well as her journey to becoming a writer, the publishing industry, and the challenge of writing as a career. Afterward, she kindly agreed to an interview with librarian Fred Rowland, who engaged her on many of these same issues.  Take some time to listen to this interesting interview.

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Interviews: Library Prize Winners 2009

The interviews with the winners of the 2009 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research are now available for download. Take some time and listen to these engaging young scholars.

Interview (mp3, 13:06): Danielle Country and Faculty Sponsor Laura Samponaro

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Interview (mp3, 21:36): George Keddie and Faculty Sponsor Vasiliki Limberis

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Interview (mp3, 15:05): Cara Shay and Faculty Sponsor Diana Woodruff-Pak

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For more information on this year’s winners and honorable mentions, go to the Winners page.

Temple University Libraries Announce 2009 Library Prize Winners

Update: A ceremony to award the prize’s was held in Paley Library’s Lecture Hall at 4:00pm on Thursday April 30th, 2009. Temple University Libraries have announced the winners of the fifth annual Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. As this prestigious award entered its fourth year, 60 outstanding applications were received. Applications represented disciplines, schools and colleges across Temple’s campus. Congratulations to our winners (in alphabetical order):

Danielle Country – “Girl, Translated”- (Latin 4082) Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Laura M. Samponaro

George A. Keddie – “Catholic Eucharistic Theology and the Gospel of Judas: Exposing the Formative Value of Sethian Criticism” (Religion 4882) Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Vasiliki M. Limberis

Cara Shay – “The Neurobiology and Development of Compulsive Hoarding and Its Relationship to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” (Psychology 3306) Faculty Sponsors: Dr. Diana S. Woodruff-Pak (primary) and Dr. Ingrid Olson And our honorable mentions (in alphabetical order)

James H. Baraldi – “Gangliosidosis” – (Psychology 3306) Faculty Sponsors: Dr. Diana S. Woodruff-Pak (primary), Dr. Luis Del Valle, and Dr. George P. Tuszynski

Megan Donnelly – “More than Whores and Housewives: Reconsidering Judith Leyster’s The Proposition” – (Art History 2197) Faculty Sponsors: Dr. Jonathan Kline

The complete papers are available to download and interviews with the winners will be soon posted to the Library Prize site.

Articles in Audio

Audio versions are now available on selected articles in Wilson OmniFile, a full-text bibliographic database from H.W. Wilson, and Library PressDisplay, a database that provides the most recent sixty-day coverage of newspapers from around the world. In the case of Wilson OmniFile, the audio files are downloadable into iTunes and other portable audio players.

Wilson OmniFile

In Wilson OmniFile, just click on links to “Full Text HTML”. Then click on Listen or Download Audio.  The sound quality is surprisingly good.

Wilson OmniFile also provides translations of articles into ten different languages.

 

 

Library PressDisplay

In Library PressDisplay, just select a newspaper or an article and look for the Interactive Radio icon. Not limited to English, audio is available for numerous languages including French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese.

 

 

—Fred Rowland

 

 

 

Library Express!

express-icon-smaller.jpg Library Express! arrives just in time! The new Obama administration is hailing Library Express! as one of the most essential tools in helping to kickstart our economy. The president is lobbying all Temple faculty members to contact their librarian immediately to take advantage of this offer.

As Obama recently commented, “Here’s how it works. Faculty contact librarians. Librarians create customized online course guides for classes. Faculty insert guides into Blackboard. With quick access to excellent sources, students do superior research. Everybody wins…And let me add one more thing: though the current generation of students didn’t get us into this mess, we’ll need everyone to get us out of it. Information is power. Talk to your librarian.”

We are entering terra nova. Students need every possible advantage. Providing quick access to articles, databases, tools and services in Blackboard will lead students to high quality information and improve research quality. Temple’s subject specialists are eager to create customized course guides that fit curricular needs. Integrating them into Blackboard is quick and easy. Subject Specialists // Blackboard Library Sampler // Integrating the Library into Blackboard If you’re a faculty member, contact your librarian. If you’re a student, contact your faculty member. If you are neither faculty, student, nor librarian, just sit back and watch the economy grow.

—Fred Rowland

New Orleans Before & After: author interview

Author Ronald Gauthier visited the Temple Book Club on December 4 to discuss his new book Crescent City Countdown, a mystery which is situated in post-Katrina New Orleans. Gauthier discussed his colorful and nuanced characters, the twists and turns of plot, and the mystery’s connection to real events in New Orleans. He also addressed the profit-driven pressures of the contemporary publishing industry and his current writing projects.

After his appearance at the Temple Book Club, he stopped by for an interview. We talked about his book as well as the odyssey that the winds of Katrina set him on, blowing him from New Orleans to Atlanta and beyond. Have a listen.

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—Fred Rowland