Tag Archives: Religion

Memory, Counter-Memory and the end of the Monument

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James Young, professor and chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst speaks tonight in Annenberg Hall, Room 3, 5:40-8:30. Young was on the German commission for the “Monument for Europe’s Murdered Jews” and also on the jury for the World Trade Center Memorial competition. Below are a book and two articles by Young. Germany’s Holocaust Memorial problem–and Mine The Holocaust as Vicarious Past The Texture of Memory –Fred Rowland

ARTstor Arrives!

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The Temple University Libraries are very pleased to announce online access toARTstor, a magnificent database of approximately 500,000 high resolution digital images covering “architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture”. ARTstor’s mission is to make great works of art and visual culture available for educational and noncommercial use. It has the potential to revolutionize the relationship between text and image as students and faculty liberally sprinkle images on presentations, research papers, and web pages. Each image comes with a detailed description that allows for effective searching at both a general and fine-grained level. You can even search ARTstor and JSTOR together! Participating institutions include the MOMA Architecture and Design Collection, the Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Archive of Asian Art, and the Schlesinger History of Women in America, among others. It is a growing collection adding new content regularly.

ARTstor was created with both users and content-holders in mind. Users can access and share hundreds of thousands of images that until now were accessible to a relative few. At the same time, controls are in place to satisfy the concerns of content-holders with regards to their copyrighted materials. Each ARTstor image comes in high and low resolution. To view the high resolution images, users must either view the images online in ARTstor or offline using ARTstor’s presentation software, the Offline Image Viewer (OIV). This means that you can only download high resolution images to the OIV, which can itself be downloaded for free on the ARTstor web site. Users can import PowerPoint presentations and their own images into the OIV as well. With the low resolution images, on the other hand, you have much more flexibility as long as the use is for educational and noncommercial purposes. You can download low resolution images to your desktop and use them in presentations, research papers, and web pages.

Within ARTstor users can create Image Groups and Shared Folders to organize, annotate, and share images with other users. Everyone can create Image Groups after creating an ID and password. To use Shared Folders you have to receive instructor privileges. This level of access is reserved mainly for faculty members. You can email your request for instructor privileges to Andrea Goldstein atandrea@temple.edu.

For more information, access ARTstor from the library web site and you’ll find a wide variety of tutorials and explanatory materials. On a more technical note, you will have to disable your popup blockers to use ARTstor. Click on Using ARTstor to see how to do this. To get started, just click Launch and away you go!

–Fred Rowland

Dreaming of the End

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There are strong apocalyptic elements to each of the major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Among the events prophesied are things like the appearance of a messiah, huge cataclysms, a last judgment, and the end of the world. Given the current awful conflicts in the Middle East–home to these religions–and the religious passions involved, the following articles and books might provide some food for thought.

Apocalypse: An Overview // Eschatology: An Overview // Armageddon, battle of// Millennialism // Mahdi // Messiah // Antichrist // Judgment of the Dead //Revelation, book of // Shia: Imami (Twelver) // Jerusalem in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam // Prophecy // Isaiah
Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism // Left Behind Series // Rapture, Revelation, and the end times // Contemporary Muslim apocalyptic literature // The resurrection and the afterlife // Eschatological themes in medieval Jewish philosophy // The fate of the dead : studies on the Jewish and Christian apocalypses // On the road to Armageddon // The battles of Armageddon


Evangelical Solidarity with the Jews // Ideological Roots of Christian Zionism //The Legend of al-Dajjal (Antichrist) // Eschatology: Some Muslim and Christian Data // Time, Culture and Christian Eschatology // Bin Ladin: The Man Who Would Be Mahdi // Waiting for the Messiah // Romance Between Christian Right, Jewish Establishment Seems to Be Cooling Off // Farrakhan: This is time of doom// Jerusalem in Islamic fundamentalism

–Fred Rowland

Dreaming of the End

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There are strong apocalyptic elements to each of the major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Among the events prophesied are things like the appearance of a messiah, huge cataclysms, a last judgment, and the end of the world. Given the current awful conflicts in the Middle East–home to these religions–and the religious passions involved, the following articles and books might provide some food for thought. Apocalypse: An Overview // Eschatology: An Overview // Armageddon, battle of // Millennialism // Mahdi // Messiah // Antichrist // Judgment of the Dead // Revelation, book of // Shia: Imami (Twelver) // Jerusalem in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam // Prophecy // Isaiah Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism // Left Behind Series // Rapture, Revelation, and the end times // Contemporary Muslim apocalyptic literature // The resurrection and the afterlife // Eschatological themes in medieval Jewish philosophy // The fate of the dead : studies on the Jewish and Christian apocalypses // On the road to Armageddon // The battles of Armageddon Evangelical Solidarity with the Jews // Ideological Roots of Christian Zionism // The Legend of al-Dajjal (Antichrist) // Eschatology: Some Muslim and Christian Data // Time, Culture and Christian Eschatology // Bin Ladin: The Man Who Would Be Mahdi // Waiting for the Messiah // Romance Between Christian Right, Jewish Establishment Seems to Be Cooling Off // Farrakhan: This is time of doom // Jerusalem in Islamic fundamentalism –Fred Rowland

Interesting stuff about books

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Here are some interesting books/articles/databases/web sites on the history and evolution of the book, in no particular order. Thanks to librarian Anne Harlow for pointing me to Book 2.0, the source for the first four entries below.

GAM3R 7H3ORY, by McKenzie Wark

Books In Time, Carla Hesse

On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements

Institute for the Future of the Book

Book 2.0 (Temple user name and password for the Chronicle is in Journal Finder)

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein

The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns

Book History Online (BHO)

Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in Modern America: The Early History of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Joan Shelley Rubin

John Playford and the Stationers’ Company, Nicholas Temperley

Learned Publishing (Temple does not subscribe to this journal, but much of the content is free.)

The European physics publications scene: avant-garde and traditionalism, Claus Montonen

Alternative Futures for Library History, Jonathan Rose

The Great Library of Alexandria Burnt: Towards the History of a Symbol, Jon Thiem
–Fred Rowland

Interesting stuff about books

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Here are some interesting books/articles/databases/web sites on the history and evolution of the book, in no particular order. Thanks to librarian Anne Harlow for pointing me to Book 2.0, the source for the first four entries below. GAM3R 7H3ORY, by McKenzie Wark Books In Time, Carla Hesse On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements Institute for the Future of the Book Book 2.0 (Temple user name and password for the Chronicle is in Journal Finder) The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns Book History Online (BHO) Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in Modern America: The Early History of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Joan Shelley Rubin John Playford and the Stationers’ Company, Nicholas Temperley Learned Publishing (Temple does not subscribe to this journal, but much of the content is free.) The European physics publications scene: avant-garde and traditionalism, Claus Montonen Alternative Futures for Library History, Jonathan Rose The Great Library of Alexandria Burnt: Towards the History of a Symbol, Jon Thiem —Fred Rowland

Brill Journals

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The library now has electronic access to most of the journals from Brill, including those from its imprints Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. The Brill list is particularly strong on religion, history, and area studies, while VSP publishes science, technology, and medicine journals and Martinus Nijhoff handles international law and human rights. Access is provided not from the Brill web site itself, but through the journal aggregator IngentaConnect (which is not very user-friendly, unfortunately). You will find links to all of these journals in Journal Finder. Once in IngentaConnect, full-text is available when you see an orange “S” icon next to the journal or article. Coverage goes back in some cases as far as 1995 and extends to the current issue. However there are journals that only offer the most recent few years. In most cases, we already have some electronic coverage of these journals through Academic Search Premier, ATLA, JSTOR, or other databases, but usually not the most recent year. Now you can get all the most recent issues hot off the press! –Fred Rowland

Finding country information using Europa World

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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.

Finding country information using Europa World

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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.

Index Islamicus

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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.