Tag Archives: Top News

Diamond Library Catalog Gets New Sparkle

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Whether you call it Diamond, the library catalog or that web-thing that lets you look up the library’s books, be prepared for a new experience. On April 12, 2007, the Temple University Libaries will be offering a public preview for Temple faculty and students of an entirely new version of its library catalog – the one we call Diamond. Here are some of the brilliant features of the new Diamond: * A less crowded interface replaces the current tabular-looking screen (see the image below). The new version makes use of horizontal tabs to better display the available search options (e.g., author, title, etc.), and each search screen has improved search examples embedded.

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* Where this new Diamond really shines is the way it delivers and displays results. Working much like familiar search engines, the results are retrieved and ranked according to their relevance to the search. Default results are grouped into categories such as “highly relevant”, “very relevant” and “relevant” as indicators of degree of relevancy to the search topic.

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* It offers searcher customization. If you prefer to see your results by date with the latest book displayed first, click the “date” link to get the results to display as they do in the current version of Diamond. Features for modifying searches and applying a variety of limits are clearly displayed with new icons. We have also improved the content of each entry to eliminate confusing abbreviations. *Searchers can view more content per page. The record results display is expanded to 50 items from the current limit of 12 per page.

During the preview period the current and new version of Diamond will run simultaneously. Users can choose either one, and make comparisons between the two interfaces. We are seeking your feedback on our new version of Diamond to help us fine tune the interface before we permanently migrate to this new version in early summer. Please use the links to our feedback form to share your thoughts with us.

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

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

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:

Enter your email address:

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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

Refworks saves time

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You know how you can finish a term paper at about 8:00pm the night before it is due, only to spend three or four additional hours slogging through the citations and bibliography? By the time the 11:00 news is on you’re wailing and gnashing teeth. Refworks can help end that pain. Just download the citations from the library’s databases into Refworks and output them in MLA, APA, or Chicago style. Doing a dissertation any time soon? Refworks can save you loads of time by organizing your sources. The end will come sooner than you think. Need to send a recently finished article out to five different publishers with five different citation styles? If you’ve been using Refworks along with the Write-N-Cite plugin for Microsoft Word, this task can be performed in a jiffy. You’ll think it’s a miracle.

Refworks, the online database that allows you to download, store, organize, and output references, is getting easier and easier to use because so many scholarly databases are enabling direct exports into it. Just two vendors EBSCO and CSA have enabled this for all of the databases we purchase from them, which comes to about 75 including Academic Search Premier, ATLA, ERIC, Medline, MLA International Bibliography, Philosopher’s Index, Index Islamicus, Criminal Justice Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. Refworks is free to all Temple students, faculty, and staff. Just click on the link above and sign up for a personal account.

Below are five video clips that show how to export references from selected scholarly databases directly into Refworks. You will need Adobe Flash on your computer to watch them (my understanding is that most computers have this now). In each I start from a search results list, select a few records, and then export them into Refworks. 
Philosopher’s Index
Academic Search Premier
JSTOR
Project Muse
Blackwell Synergy

And here’s one last video clip on outputting your bibliography using Refworks.
Outputting Bibliography

Check out Refworks today! You’ll be glad that you did. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.


—Fred Rowland

Whither the university?

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I’ve been reading about the future of the university lately. Detractors think it costs too much, is inefficient, is too politicized, doesn’t properly train the workforce of the future, and is generally out of step with the great demographic changes of the past 25 years. It’s not flexible enough (what is?), researchers don’t teach well and teachers don’t research well. Supporters point out that universities are among the few institutions that have survived from the fifteenth century, that good education is just plain expensive, that education is about more than just posting “content” online somewhere, that Socrates got it right, and that businesses are out to privatize lots of publicly-funded infrastructure as was done with the healthcare industry (there is even talk about Educational Maintenance Organizations, EMO’s). Both supporters and detractors seem agreed that there’s a lot of change ahead for the university.

Of course the development of the Internet plays a huge role in the debates surrounding the future of higher education. Techno-utopians see the Internet as bringing more democracy, more education, more knowledge, more love, new life forms… More practical sorts see the reduced costs of information delivery on the Internet as a great business opportunity, so you see for-profit educational organizations popping up. More traditional sorts see the Internet as improving but not overturning current educational practices.

What interests me the most is the way the Internet (and high-tech in general) produces what can only be described as religious passions in many people. Cyberspace becomes a heavenly realm where information and emotions are transmitted friction-free and conflict melts away. You saw this in the millennial binge of the late 1990′s dot.coms, where profits were suddenly deemed unimportant and market share was everything. The fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Internet, and Y2K (remember that?) made everyone a bit crazy for a time.

Below are some of the sources I’ve been looking at and thinking about:

Digital Diploma Mills–short book, well written and closely argued, author very much against distance education, makes interesting comparisons to the “correspondence movement” in the early twentieth century

Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University–seems a bit too focused on the technology and not enough on the institutions that create the context for the technology

After the New Economy–includes interesting analysis of 1990′s business bubble

Post-Capitalist Society–by Peter Drucker (aka “the management guru”), Drucker began talking about the “knowledge worker” decades ago, thinks the university won’t last

Startup.com–this documentary unwittingly highlights the excesses of the 1990′s dot.com boom

Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer–puts Internet in historical perspective

Death of the University–written in 1987, interesting but makes a lot of sweeping generalizations

The Future of Work

Higher Education in the Digital Age

The University in Transformation

Technology and the Rise of the For-Profit University– authored by Donald Norman, an educational entrepreneur (UNext), says scholars should create content and instructional specialists should deliver it

Undisciplined–by Louis Menand, interesting, about the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in the university

Linkages Between Work and Education?

Dearing Report–influential UK report on higher education

Distance Education and the Emerging Learning Environment–short, interesting article

The Rise and Rise of the Corporate University–good article, part of an entire issue of the Journal of European Industrial Training devoted to corporate education

Surviving the Change: The Economic Paradigm of Higher Education in Transformation–interesting article by a guy with economic training

Educating the Net Generation–from Educause, about learning styles, likes and dislikes of the net generation

—Fred Rowland

ARTstor’s Dunhuang Archive

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The term “Silk Road” was coined in the nineteenth century by German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen to describe the informal network of roads that connected China to Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Along its corridors between 200 BCE and 1500 CE flowed trade goods, technology, and weapons, as well as social, cultural and religious ideas. Religions like Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoastrianism, Manicheanism, Judaism, Islam, and Nestorian Christianity all traveled the Silk Road at different times and different places. Buddhism followed this route to China from India and Central Asia.

The Chinese city of Dunhuang was strategically located along the Silk Road on the western frontier of China at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. It became an important place to stop, rest, pick up provisions, and trade. Between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, thousands of Buddhist cave sanctuaries were carved from the sandstone hills about 25 kilometers southeast of Dunhuang. These caves served the religious and secular purposes of a vibrant Buddhist community. Fortunately hundreds of caves survived intact to the present. Artifacts from the caves include murals, sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, and textiles. After removal of many artifacts to Western countries in the early twentieth century, the Chinese government set up the Dunhuang Research Academy to oversee the study and preservation of the Dunhuang caves.

ARTstor provides thousands of high resolution images of the Dunhuang caves and their contents through its Mellon International Dunhuang Archive collection. MIDA “is the product of a major and ongoing multi-institutional, multi-national effort to create high-quality digital reconstructions of the mural paintings and related art and texts associated with the several hundred Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang, China”. Images come from the caves themselves, from artifacts found in collections worldwide, and from the Lo Archive at Princeton University.

Each image comes with a complete description that allows for easy access. You can browse the Dunhuang Archive by Object Type, Cave Number, or Contributor. The Advanced Search lets you perform complex keyword searches while limiting your search by Collection and Object Classification. I’ve created a few Image Groups below to give you a small taste of what’s in this collection. You will have to disable your popup blockers to view the images.

Image Groups
Dunhuang Buddha paintings
Dunhuang Bodhisattva, Buddha sculptures
More Dunhuang Bodhisattva, Buddha sculptures

Other Links
Historic Maps of China (click on the timeline to see the borders of China during each dynasty)
Buddhist Art in China
Buddhist Art in Central Asia
Buddhist Art in India
Silk Road (saved search from Oxford Reference Online)

 

—Fred Rowland

Darwin Exhibit at the Franklin Institute

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There’s a Darwin Exhibit running at the Franklin Institute from October 6 to December 31 that I will try to get to. Darwin is arguably the most influential thinker of the past two centuries and his theories continue to be a rich source of inspiration and controversy. I’m not sure the exhibit will be as “astonishing” as the Franklin Institute self-reports but certainly worth seeing. Museums have become a bit like theme parks so get ready for plenty of rides, games, and make-believe as you enter Chuckie D’s world. Getting back to the real world, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities is hosting The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online, described as the “largest collection of Darwin’s writings ever published”. Thanks to science librarian Kathy Szigeti for pointing this site out for me. Check it out, it looks very impressive.

You might also take a look at some of the books the library has from Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, two scientists who have done much to make Darwin accessbile to popular audiences. William A. Dembski has written a lot in support of Intelligent Design. Here’s a review in the Skeptic magazine of five different books (including one edited by Dembski) that challenge evolutionary theory. As the name suggests, the Skeptic is all about debunking, in this case Creationism/Intelligent Design. Here John C. Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, critiques “Darwinian thinking” run amok. Mary Midgley is a philosopher who has written some interesting stuff on the religion in science.

Finally, we are often romantically inclined to see Big Ideas as the result of some lone genius working his magic, the paradigmatic cases in science being Newton and Einstein. It’s important to remember in this case that Darwin was not the only one who was thinking about the principles and lines of evidence that would lead to the theory of evolution. Alfred Russell Wallace came up with the mechanism of natural selection about the same time that Darwin did, which just goes to show that Big Ideas are often “in the air”.

Also, take a look at my Science and Religion subject guide for more resources on the intersection of science and religion.

–Fred Rowland