Author Archives: Fred Rowland

Temple University Libraries Announce 2009 Library Prize Winners

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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

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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!

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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

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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.

[ensemblevideo contentid=Qa0mA0ZkUkiBFdIjX0GrYw audio=true] (mp3, running 15 minutes)

iTunes U link (for downloads)

Subscribe to this podcast series

—Fred Rowland

Exploring Race in Contemporary Judaism

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On October 6, 2008, The Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University held its Second Annual Symposium on Race and Judaism in the Paley Library Lecture Hall. The program was entitled Exploring Race in Contemporary Judaism: A Symposium on Jewish Diversity [click here for PDF of flyer].

Before the symposium began, Professor Lewis Gordon, director of The Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, sat down with three of the presenters, Edith Bruder, Avishai Mekonen, and Shari Rothfarb Mekonen to discuss their work. Edith Bruder has written a book entitled The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity and her symposium presentation was entitled “African Judaism: Ancient Myths and Modern Phenomena”. Avishai Mekonen and Shari Rothfarb Mekonen screened and discussed their work-in-progress documentary, 400 Miles to Freedom, a “film [which] explores racial and ethnic diversity in Judaism through the story of Avishai Mekonen, whose disappearance in Sudan as a boy launches a quest that leads him to other African, Asian and Latino Jews in Israel and in the U.S.” John L. Jackson, who also presented at the symposium (“The Bodied Politic: Ethnobiology, Anti-Religiosity and the Reckoning of Black Hebrewism”) was not present for this recording (but we hope to record an interview with him at a later date).

[ensemblevideo contentid=mgtrjIiXtk6zj3iKadF-TQ audio=true] (mp3, 22 MB).

iTunes U link (for downloads)

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Library of Latin Texts online

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The Temple University Libraries is pleased to announce online access to the Library of Latin Texts (Follow link, scroll down to Library of Latin Texts and click “Go”), an online collection of primary sources in Latin from the periods of the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the late antique, medieval, and early modern worlds. You’ll find works by Julius Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, Horace, Virgil, Augustine, Tertullian, Boethius, and Bede, as well as lesser known authors like Hermes Trismegistus, Minucius Felix, and Widricus Cellensis.  Thousands of texts are available.  

You can search by author, title, period, and century. Find a word or word form of interest and you can search the database for it by the same categories, a very powerful way to track changes in style and usage over many genres and centuries.  This is not an easy database to use, however, as the searcher must know the Latin author names and titles in order to search.  Various browselists make access somewhat easier, but this is certainly not database for the faint of heart.  (The classics resources available in Oxford Reference Online might provide some linguistic and historical aid [Latin dictionary, Oxford Classical Dictionary, and more] in finding relevant terms).

Temple users now have access to online primary sources in both Latin (Library of Latin Texts) and Greek (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae).

If you have any questions about this resource, please let me know.  Fred Rowland

 

New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics now online!

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The Temple University Libraries is pleased to announce that the The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics is now available online. This second edition is updated from the 1987 edition and “contains over 1,850 articles by more than 1,500 of the world’s leading economists” (go here for a more complete publishing history). In addition to the great content, the online interface is superb, providing a table of contents on the left side of each entry linking to the abstract, keywords, article sections, See Also references, and a bibliography. Below the table of contents are links to related articles. Using TULink, you can go straight from items in the bibliography to available online full-text content or to the library catalog. You can browse entries alphabetically, by topic (classification scheme from Journal of Economic Literature), or search (simple or advanced). To learn more about this great resource, take the Tour.

Other Economics Reference Sources:
Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History
Dictionary of Economics
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences

—Fred Rowland

Continue reading →

2008 Library Prize Winners Interviewed

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The 2008 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research winners and their faculty sponsors kindly agreed to be interviewed on their award winning research papers by librarian Fred Rowland. Each of the three students are as articulate and intelligent as the papers they’ve written. Listen to them talk about their research in their own words.

  • Peter Leibensperger (interviewed with faculty sponsor Edward Latham)
    “Musical Ambiguity as Poetic Reflection: Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, No. 1, ‘Nunn will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n!'” (Music Studies)
    [ensemblevideo contentid=jGGyjQC8AUqT_Top-AHzFQ audio=true] (MP3, 13 minutes)

  • Natalia Smirnov (interviewed with faculty sponsor Paul Swann)
    “Before and After Photography: The Makeover Method to Discipline and Punish” (Film and Media Arts)
    [ensemblevideo contentid=GRV7xQNjuE27TxTTK8mPog audio=true] (MP3, 14 minutes)

  • Maureen Whitsett (interviewed with faculty sponsor Elizabeth Varon)
    “Fenianism In Irish Catholic Philadelphia: The American Catholic Church’s Battle for Acceptance” (History)
    [ensemblevideo contentid=bbZIDZMb8EG4WRu6x7vN7w audio=true](MP3, 13 minutes)

And, returning faculty and students, start thinking about the 2009 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research!

Philadelphia’s Waterfront Wobblies

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ourbigunion.jpgOn April 17, after visiting the Temple Book Club to discuss his new book Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia (University of Illinois Press, 2007), author Peter Cole was interviewed by librarian Fred Rowland. In the interview, he provides a fascinating look at Progressive Era Philadelphia, an industrial dynamo of American capitalism whose busy port along the Delaware River gave rise to a successful interracial multiethnic union (IWW Local 8) that was able to overcome employer resistance to control work on the docks from about 1913 to the early 1920’s. While discussing Local 8 and its unique success in bringing together white Protestant, black, and immigrant Catholic and Jewish longshoremen, he talks about the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)and their relationship to the rest of American labor, the nature of work on the docks, local labor and race relations, the effects of World War I and Bolshevik Revolution on the port of Philadelphia and the IWW, as well as lessons to be learned from Local 8’s rise and fall.  If you’re interested in Philadelphia history, you’ll like this interview.

[ensemblevideo contentid=c75xRq8Td0yEQGOogwLuqQ audio=true] (MP3, 20 minutes)

iTunes U link (for downloads)

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For a brief overview of the Industrial Workers of the World, go here (Temple-only).

Daddy Grace and His House of Prayer

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Daddy Grace was a flamboyant preacher of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s who created a religious organization with churches situated mainly up and down the east coast of the United States, including Philadelphia. His church was pentecostal in orientation and known for extravagant rituals, parades, and festivals. Until now, Daddy Grace and his United House of Prayer for All People has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of religious studies. Temple’s Adjunct Associate Professor Marie Dallam has gone a long way in filling in the gaps in our understanding of this fascinating figure in American religious history with her new book, Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer, published by New York University Press.

On March 10, Marie Dallam stopped by Paley Library to discuss her new book with librarian Fred Rowland. Below is a link to this audio interview.

[ensemblevideo contentid=E4c0dOhHEEiIIXC7gdeGMQ audio=true] (mp3)

iTunes U link (for downloads)

Subscribe to this podcast series

Don’t forget that if Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer is checked out from Paley Library, you can request it through E-ZBorrow.

—Fred Rowland