Category Archives: Library News

eHREF (Electronic Human Relations Area Files)

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HRAF is an acronym for Human Relations Area Files, a non-profit institution founded in 1949 at Yale University. HRAF is a consortium of educational, research, and cultural organizations, and government agencies; its mission is to encourage and facilitate the study of human culture, society, and behavior. This mission is accomplished mainly through the compilation, indexing, and distribution of a collection of ethnographic and other texts that are indexed by culture and subject. eHRAF brings these files to the online environment.

Look here for information on the cultural practices (marriage, fertility, death, birth, work, family, etc.) of different religious and ethnic groups. For instance, a search for “reproduction and judaism” leads to an article titled “Reproducing Jews: a cultural account of assisted conception in Israel”. A search for “marriage and iraq” leads to an article titled “The Kurdish woman’s life: field research in a Muslim society, Iraq”. A search for “masculinity and puerto rico” leads to an article titled “In search of masculinity: violence, respect and sexuality among Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem”. Browsing the cultures lists, choosing “Maasai FL12″ leads to 20 articles on the Maasai, one of which is “The Masai penal code”.

You get the idea. Do a little exploring if this sounds like something that would add to your research.

—Fred Rowland

Tommie Smith Audio Interview

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1916_reg.gifTommie Smith is best known for his protest on the victory stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, for which he and John Carlos were banned forever from the Olympics. He came to Temple on Friday, March 23 for a lecture and book signing and spoke to a standing room only crowd in the Paley Library Lecture Hall. His recently released autobiography Silent Gesture is written with Baltimore Sun sports columnist David Steele and published by the Temple University Press. Before the lecture, Tommie Smith and David Steele sat down with librarian Fred Rowland and discussed their new book.

Audio Download Link

Audio Embed Code

—Fred Rowland

Biography resources for your work

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The three biography databases below are very useful and you should not overlook them in your research. One of the amazing things about these online sources is that you can search by religion, gender, occupation and more. So you don’t have to have a particular person in mind to use these databases. You can just have a certain type of person in mind, i.e. a Quaker abolitionist in 18th century Britain; a Baptist African American female teacher from the 19th century; or an Irish American involved in the steel industry in the 20th. All databases below are available on the library’s A-Z database list.

African American Biographical Database
A resource of first resort when you are looking for biographical information, including photographs and illustrations, for African Americans. From the famous to the everyday person, AABD includes profiles and full-text sketches providing both biographical detail and illuminating narratives chronicling the lives of Black Americans.

American National Biography
Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. More than a decade in preparation, the American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
56,000 lives … 63 million words … 10,300 portraits … all on your desktop. For more info, see the blog I wrote on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Also check out Biographies Illustrated Plus and Biography Resource Center.

Fred

RefWorks Fundamentals Webinars

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RefWorks, which is provided free through the library, is a tool to manage citations (import, export, search, create formatted bibliographies). Information on free webinars about using RefWorks follows:

RefWorks will be hosting a series of training webinars in the coming weeks. The sessions are designed to cover the “fundamental” features of the service and are open to any RefWorks user at no cost.

Enrollment is limited to 50 people per session and registration is required.

During the 75 minute session(s), we will cover the following:

– Creating an account and logging in
– Navigating RefWorks
– Getting references into RefWorks:
– from a direct export partner
– from a text file
– from an online catalog or database search in RefWorks
– adding references manually
– Organizing references
– Using quick search to search your RefWorks database
– Creating a bibliography from a folder of references
– Using Write-N-Cite to format your paper

The first three schedule webinars will be held:

Wednesday, 28 March 2007 at 11 AM EDT – attendees click here to register
Tuesday, 3 April 2007 at 2 PM EDT – attendees click here to register
Wednesday, 11 April 2007 at 3:30 PM EDT – attendees click here to register

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online

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Hello All, Great news: we now have the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online! It’s available from the All Databases list. REP has both superb content and an equally superb interface. There is also supplemental content online that is not in the print volumes. To give just one example of the excellent documentation in this reference source, the bibliographies of major philosophers give the authoritative editions of the authors’ works, both in the original language and in English translation. Coverage of this encyclopedia is very broad and skips over many disciplinary boundaries. To provide just a few examples, there are articles on Augustine, Martin Luther, Maimonides, Ibn Sina, and Confucius that would be of interest to students of religion. There are articles on ethics, business ethics, and journalistic ethics. If your interest is literature there are articles on katharsis, mimesis, poetry, tragedy, and literature and philosophy. For social scientists, there are articles on the history of the philosophy of the social sciences, the philosophy of the social sciences, and on prediction in the social sciences. For historians, there are articles on the philosophy of history and on Chinese theories of the philosophy of history. Key Features (from REP web site)

  • 2,000 original entries from a team of over 1,300 of the world’s most respected scholars and philosophers
  • Covers an unparalleled breadth of subject matter, including Anglo-American, ethical and political, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, continental and contemporary philosophy
  • Over 25,000 hot-linked cross-references between articles and new links to other editorially reviewed websites
  • An invaluable resource for all levels of users – students and general readers gain a rapid orientation with accessible summaries at the beginning of every in-depth article
  • Regularly upgraded with new material, revisions, and bibliographic updates, REP provides access to the latest scholarship and major developments in philosophical inquiry worldwide

Also, don’t forget about philosophy encyclopedias on Gale Virtual Reference Library: Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. —Fred Rowland

Cambridge Collections Online

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I am very pleased to announce that Cambridge Collections Online (CCO) is available. Featuring the highly regarded Cambridge Companions, CCO is currently comprised of 144 Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics and 93 Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion, and Culture, with new volumes added each year. The material covers authors, like Augustine, Maimonides, and Hemingway, and topics, like American Modernism, Crime Fiction, and Arabic Philosophy. Cambridge Companions have become essential to faculty and students who want good general introductions and overviews of subjects in the humanities.

Each volume features contributions from major scholars in their respective fields. Take the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law as an example. Of the twenty authors who contributed chapters, seventeen had at least one book in Temple’s library catalog from a major university press (and in most cases several). CCO will prove useful to undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Faculty will use it to study areas outside their specialties, to help prepare for lectures, and to assign to students as course material. Graduate students will use it to write papers and to prepare for preliminary exams (Temple offers masters and PhD degrees in English, Philosophy, and Religion, to name just a few of the relevant degrees). Finally, undergraduates will use it to write papers and to study for tests.

CCO is available from the All Databases list on the library homepage. Check it out today!

—Fred Rowland

Sources for Economic Statistics

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Today I want to mention some sources for economic (and social) statistics. The only advice I’d give for using economic statistics is to try to find a statistic from multiple sources because they can be reported so differently depending on source. Historical Statistics of the United States I really like this source. Covers recent few decades as well as past centuries. Statistics are easy to find and easy to use. International Financial Statistics Online Statistics from the International Monetary Fund Source OECD Development sources from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development World Development Indicators Online Statistics from the World Bank

—Fred Rowland

Email Subscriptions and Comment Feeds

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We’ve enabled a new feature for the library blog, email subscriptions. Now you can get all the posts about library news, new resources, events, and more sent directly to your email account. Just put your email address in the box below (or at the right side of any blog page). You’ll receive an email at that address to confirm your subscription, and then you’ll start receiving the posts by email. At most, one email will be sent a day (if any posts went up that day). Subscribe by email:

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— Also, now available, is a feed for comments to the blog. You can use this to follow what people have to say about our posts. For more on feeds, see this post. –Derik A Badman

Sage eReference, Blackwell Compass, and more

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Sage is one of the academic and professional market’s major social science publishers. Sage eReference is a collection of 45 online encyclopedias. Here’s a complete list of titles. Accessible from the All Databases list. Other Reference Databases Don’t forget about our other reference databases. You’ve never had it so good. Gale Virtual Reference Library; Oxford Reference Online; xreferplus. Accessible from the All Databases list. Philosophy Compass and Religion Compass These are very new review journals in philosophy, religion, and other areas. Access via Journal Finder. Each article is a broad review of a particular topic with a discussion of the literature. They are supposed to be current and very relevant. Review journals have become very big in the sciences where new literature comes out at a crushing pace. These two for philosophy and religion are great tools for faculty that are approaching a new field, for graduate students who are studying for exams and dissertations, and for advanced undergraduates. Take a look and let me know what you think. —Fred Rowland