Religion Professor Laura Levitt Interviewed

On February 4, 2008 Associate Professor of Religion Laura Levitt stopped by Paley Library to talk about her new book American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust, published by New York University Press. Below is a link to the MP3 file of the interview. Her book deals with the normal everyday losses that American Jews experience and tries to situate these in the larger context of American Jewish community life and the “grand narrative” of the Holocaust which tends to overshadow so much. During the course of American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust Levitt analyzes and meditates on selected poems, photographs, and films, as well as tells personal family stories. The interview gives a nice sense of Levitt’s new work and her interests. It runs about twenty-one minutes. Have a listen.

[ensemblevideo contentid=GUxCuKb7KkSwNUzk2nJUjw audio=true] (February 4, 2008)

iTunes U link (for downloads)

Subscribe to this podcast series

The Temple University Libraries would like to thank Professor Levitt for taking the time to speak with us. We hope to make this the first of many faculty interviews on topics of interest to the Temple University community.

—Fred Rowland

New: Find Articles by Citation

We have just added a new service to TUlink. The Find Articles by Citation form allows you to enter an article citation (or part of a citation) and let TUlink find the full-text for you.

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As long as you enter at least a Journal Title, ISSN, DOI, or PMID, TUlink will try to get you a link. In many cases you will get a direct link to the full-text labeled “Article”. In some cases, the best TUlink can do is get you a “Journal” link that will take you to our electronic access to the journal where your citation is found. If Temple holds the journal in question in paper, you will get a link, and if TUlink cannot find any results it will direct you to an interlibrary loan form where you can request your article.

(More information on using the TUlink Find Articles by Citation form.)

In conjunction with this new addition we have slightly altered the “Find Articles” section of our library home page. We have added Find Articles “by Citation” to the list. Also, as part of this alteration, the list of “Only Full-Text” databases has been removed. The reasons for this are two fold: a) with the addition of TUlink, even if a database doesn’t have full-text in it, full-text access is a few clicks away through the “Find Full-Text’ icon; b) the full-text database list has gotten so long that it is no longer the small, useful subset of resources it once was.

Derik A Badman,
Digital Services Librarian

Use Google Scholar to Find Full-Text @ TU

Google Scholar has become a useful search tool because it allows you to search across the content of many different databases, including JSTOR, Project MUSE, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge Journals Online, SpringerLink, HighWire Press, Journals@Ovid Full Text, Sage Journals Online, ScienceDirect, and many more. That is not to say that the entire content of these databases is available through Google Scholar (which has never released a complete list of its sources or the extent of its coverage) but at least some of it is there. Google Scholar also includes books from Google Book Search in its search results.

Up till now, one of the problems with Google Scholar for Temple students, faculty, and staff has been the difficulty in retrieving the full-text of articles. You might find a juicy article in Google Scholar but after clicking on the link get a message that the article is blocked, even for many databases that you know Temple subscribes to. Well, this process has just gotten a whole lot easier.

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Now Temple has registered its TUlink service with Google Scholar, which means that you can link directly from Google Scholar into the library’s subscription databases. Look for Find Full-Text @ TU right after the article title and click on it. You will see the TUlink interface pop up with links for full-text if we have it online or in print, or a link to Temple’s Interlibrary Loan Form if we don’t.

From within any of Temple’s campuses, links to Find Full-Text @ TU will appear automatically. From off-campus you need to do one of two things:

    1. Just click HERE and it will automatically set your Google Scholar preferences for Find Full-Text @ TU, or

 

  1. Go into the preferences of Google Scholar and select Temple University fromLIbrary LInks.

You will find that Google Scholar is a nice addition to your research toolkit. Including it when researching a subject often brings some unusual and unexpected results. Set up your Find Full-Text @ TU preference and give it a whirl.

Find Full-Text @ TU will NOT appear for books. For books, click on the link toLibrary Search at the bottom of the citation. This will take you to the record of the book in WorldCat.org, where you can input a local zip code (Temple’s is 19122) to find a local library with the book.

You can set your Google Scholar preferences to use Refworks as your citation manager. In Google Scholar Preferences, just select Refworks as theBibliography Manager.

–Fred Rowland

Index of Christian Art

The library now has The Index of Christian Art, the result of a project begun by Professor Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University in 1917. He believed that the development of Early Christian art could be more deeply understood through the study of themes rather than artistic styles, which during the Greco-Roman period were too “uniform” (more information on the ICA). From a humble beginning of a few shoe boxes of index cards he crafted an indexing system which today falls under five broad thematic groups, FiguresScenesNatureObjects, and Miscellany.

The current online database covers all additions to the collection since 1991 when digitization began and thirty percent of the items indexed before 1991. It grows yearly and the retrospective digitization will eventually bring all pre-1991 content into the database. In addition to indexing Christian art, the database contains over 60,000 images both in color and black and white. For those who need to examine content that has not been digitized, they can still go to Princeton, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Utrecht, or the Vatican to view the entire collection. The Index of Christian Art includes works of art from the early years of Christianity up through 1400 AD and recently the decision was made to expand the coverage up through the sixteenth century.

The Index of Christian Art contains three different record types, which are called “databases” or simply “bases”: Work of Art records (over 57,000), Subject records (over 28,000), and Bibliographic records (over 57,000). The Work of Art records provide detailed descriptions and links to the images. Although there are multiple ways to search and browse, I found it confusing for the novice user (myself) since it’s often hard to distinguish between the actual record types and the individual fields in the records, especially when constructing a search and interpreting the results. I trust that greater knowledge of Early Christian art and more familiarity with the database would ease this burden a little (if not, feel free to let me know). The new user should start with the Multi-Base search because it lets you search across all fields and you can select which record type you’d like to search. Your results are unambiguous: if you search Work of Art records (or Subject or Bibliography records) you’ll get just that type of record in the results set.

Index of Christian Art is a nice addition to our other art bibliographic and image databases, which can be found on the Arts & Humanities database list. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

—Fred Rowland

Islam and the Byzantines

Index Islamicus is a great source for Islam, obviously, but it’s also good for all the lands and peoples that have come into contact with Islam, which is a pretty vast field. Look at the six citations I quickly retrieved from Index Islamicus and downloaded into Refworks.

  • Islam and the Byzantines (Take note of the TUlink icon on the far right of the citations that will lead you to options for obtaining the complete article or book.)

—Fred Rowland

Introducing: TUlink

Have you encountered frustration in fetching the full text of an article when using the library’s research databases? We have some good news for you. We are pleased to announce the arrival of TUlink, a new service of the Temple University Libraries.

With TUlink, the research process is greatly streamlined. TUlink acts as a bridge between a citation in a database and the full-text of the article in a different database–removing a number of formerly necessary steps.

When the citation you find in a database doesn’t have the full-text immediately attached to it, look for the TUlink icon:

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Clicking on this icon will perform a search of our full-text resources and when possible give you an “Article” link directly to the full-text of the article. In other cases you will see a “Journal” link to the electronic copy of the journal in which your citation was published. TUlink can also get you to information on journals held in the library on paper.

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If no full-text is available you will be offered an interlibrary loan link to request the article from another library.

TUlink is a work in progress. Currently enabled databases include all the EBSCO databases (Academic Search Premier, ERIC, MLA, PsycInfo, etc) and CSA databases (Criminal Justice Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, etc) and numerous others. Other databases will be enabled on an ongoing basis.

See more details on using TUlink.

Derik A Badman, Digital Services Librarian

Blackwell Compass Journals

Take a look at the library’s recently subscribed suite of online-only “survey” journals called Blackwell Compass, available from the All Databases list. It’s made up of six journals from the following disciplines: History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Geography, and Language and Linguistics. Each of the journals is broken down by topic area. For instance, Philosophy Compass is broken out into Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art; Continental; Epistemology; Ethics; History of Philosophy, and the like. Religion Compass is divided into African Religions; Ancient Near East; Buddhism; Chinese and Japanese Traditions, etc. One thing to keep in mind as you are using these is that the journals are very recent–in some cases started only in 2007–and that some topic areas do not yet have content. (In fact, just as I was writing this post a new one, Sociology Compass, became available.)

Here’s how Blackwell describes these journals:

“Each Compass journal publishes peer-reviewed survey articles from across the entire discipline. Experienced researchers, teaching faculty, and advanced students will all benefit from the accessible, informative articles that provide overviews of current research.”

As the deluge of information becomes faster, wider, deeper, survey journals are one way to stem the tide and bob for air. They have been popular in science publishing for a few years now (see Nature Reviews from the Nature Publishing Group) where access and currency are at a premium. In the humanities and social sciences, with so much information to choose from and where interdisciplinarity is increasingly common, it’s very important to be able to go right to the heart of the current literature and debates of a topic. It’s a great time saver.

In History Compass, I did a simple keyword search for greek or roman and came upon an article on Ancient Greek Mercenaries (664–250 BCE). It was 16 pages in length, with a bibliography of 19 primary sources and over 100 secondary sources. In Literature Compass, I did a simple keyword search for autobiography and found an article on Victorian Life Writing, which was 17 pages with a lengthy bibliography as well.

Along with the survey articles, there are also “Teaching and Learning Guides”, in which the authors of articles pose a few research questions on their topic and then offer articles, books, and web sites that help address these questions. For instance, Karl Gunther wrote The Origins of English Puritanism and also A Teaching and Learning Guide For: The Origins of English Puritanism. The Teaching and Learning Guides are about two pages in length and are only available selectively.

One gripe I have with Blackwell Compass is that there’s no way to search across all the Compass journals. If you are researching the ancient world, for instance, you would very likely want to search history, literature, philosophy, religion, and language and linguistics. In addition, the loosening of disciplinary boundariesover the past few decades makes this kind of broad search very important. You can leave the Compass journals and go to Synergy, Blackwell’s online journal platform, and select just these journals to search, but this seems unnecessarily complex. Hopefully this is a problem that will be fixed in coming iterations of Blackwell Compass. In the meantime, check out these journals and let me know what you think.


. —Fred Rowland

Resources for Witchcraft

Let’s say you want to study witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Where would you look for resources?
Step 1: Find synonyms from Oxford Reference Online (it contains a bunch of thesauruses).

witchcraft noun
sorcery , (black) magic , witching , witchery , wizardry , thaumaturgy , spells , incantations ; Wicca ; Irish pishogue .
(From The Oxford Paperback Thesaurus in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

witchcraft noun
witchery , sorcery , black art/magic , magic , necromancy , wizardry , occultism , the occult , sortilege , thaumaturgy , wonder-working.
(From The Oxford American Thesaurus of Current English in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)
Step 2: Databases

Academic Search Premier—can use this for most things

Historical Abstracts/America: History and Life—search these two databases together to pick up the Salem stuff of 1692

Wilson OmniFile—includes lots of important content, especially for the popular and scholarly literature between 1900 and 1950

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—use this biographical source to search for individuals who in some way were connected to witchcraft, its study, practice, or prosecution. Amazing source of info on British history

International Medieval Bibliography
—main source for medieval history

JSTOR—will find plenty here

Gale Virtual Reference Library–for encyclopedia articles, New Catholic Encyclopedia might be interesting, also Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia of European Social History, Europe: 1450-1789, Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World

Oxford Reference Online—all kinds of good stuff here

Diamond: Library Catalog—find books at Temple

WorldCat—find books outside of Temple

Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)—most of the books printed in Britain during the eighteenth century, all online, hard to believe something like this exists

Project Muse

Like most things regarding research, there’s a ton of other stuff, but the above sources would at least get you started

—Fred Rowland

Three great new databases

Periodicals Index Online (PIO)Periodicals Archive Online (PAO), and British Periodicals Online are now available at the Temple University Libraries from theAll Databases list. These are superb additions for arts, humanities, and social science students and researchers. Coming from Proquest, the three databases are all related. Periodicals Index Online (formerly known as Periodicals Contents Index, or PCI) is the primary database because in addition to its own content it indexes and provides links to Periodicals Archive Online (formerly known as PCI Full Text) and British Periodicals Online.

Periodicals Index Online is a growing database that currently provides access to over 16 million articles from 5000 journals in over 40 languages going back as far as 1665. Every journal or magazine indexed by PIO starts from volume 1 issue 1 so there are no gaps in coverage. The PIO interface is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. When you search PIO, you are also searching PAO and the British Periodicals Index. PIO also provides links toProject Muse and JSTOR journals.

Periodicals Archive Online provides full-text access to 450 journals and magazines from 1665 to 1995 as well as 160 from British Periodicals Online. In all, PAO provides over 1.8 million full-text articles plus the full-text content from British Periodicals Online. As with PIO, there are links to Project MUSE and JSTOR journals.

British Periodicals Online
 can be searched separately. It comes in two modules. Module I is currently available and module II will add an additional 300 journals and magazines in the latter half of 2007. Here is a description of it from the website:

“British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian ‘age of periodicals’ and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of almost 500 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.”
Here are a few sample articles to pique your interest:

ATROCITIES OF BONAPARTE, IN 1797, Anti-Gallican: or Standard of British loyalty, religion and liberty , 1:12 (1804:Dec.) p.457

A Conjecture concerning the Peopling of AMERICA, Arminian Magazine consisting of extracts and original treatises on universal redemption, 13 (1790:Nov.) p.599

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON THE USE OF OIL AT SEA, Chambers’s journal of popular literature, science and arts, 934 (1881:Nov.) p.752

DANIEL DERONDA
, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 52 (1875:Dec.-1876:May) p.425

Germany and Austria, Current History (New York), 22:4 (1925:July) p.653

Israel’s Place in America Hispana, Contemporary Jewish Record, 6:1 (1943:Feb.) p.5
If you do any research in the humanities and social sciences, you should get to know these databases very well. For students, they will help to save time and get better grades. For faculty and researchers, they will broaden the scope of your research and reduce searching time.

—Fred Rowland

Blackwell Reference Online

The Temple University Libraries now offers electronic access to 80 Blackwell companions, guides, and dictionaries in the subject areas of philosophy (59 volumes) and religion (21 volumes), as part of Blackwell Reference Online. For a complete list of the philosophy and religion titles go here. These works offer great topic overviews and nicely complement the recently acquired Cambridge Companions. While Cambridge Companions predominantly focus on individual philosophers and theologians, Blackwell companions and guides focus on subject areas, i.e. epistemology, logic, religious ethics, political theology, etc.

Most of the titles in this collection are heavily used in print at Temple. Like the Cambridge Companions they are superb overviews written by prominent scholars, essential for faculty in unfamiliar disciplines, graduate students studying for classes and preliminary exams, and undergraduates researching papers. The searchable bibliographies take users right to the heart of current scholarship in a topic area. Like the Cambridge Companions, this electronic content will serve as excellent course material, most likely substituting in many instances for print texts.

There is quite a bit of overlap between Blackwell Reference Online and our print collection, but the print and the electronic versions of these works will likely be used in different ways. While the print versions are great for the focused study of individual topics, Blackwell Reference Online will allow users to search broadly over all the philosophy and religion volumes, discovering associations and linkages not apparent from the separate print volumes.

You can search Blackwell Reference Online using either the simple or advanced search. The simple search, which searches the full-text, offers post-search limiting by Subject, Place, Period, People, and Key Topics. It’s pretty slick, much like the way Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy does it. In the Advanced Search you can search authors, chapter titles, bibliographies, and full-text, as well as limiting to a particular book or subject area. You can also browse individual works. All results are presented as chapter titles or dictionary entries and are printable in full.

Another great source from the Temple University Libraries. Don’t wait. Start searching now!

—Fred Rowland