April 24th, 25th, 26th at 1pm in the Tech Center Green Room 205A Save time on your papers, and throw out all those long citation guides. Learn to use Refworks, a web based application (free to Temple students, staff, and faculty!) that allows you to easily and quickly gather your citations and organize them for the creation of bibliographies and in-text citations in almost any format– APA, MLA, Chicago, and more. Questions? Contact Derik Badman.
If any of you are dealing with issues concerning US foreign policy since WW II you need to know about this database, it’s really a wonderful tool. Run out of George Washington University in DC, the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect government documents on US national security policy and then provides those documents in full-text online. It also provides bibliographies, chronologies, and glossaries related to the documents. Of course, many parts of the documents have been blacked-out by the government before they reach DNSA.
They have also put together Collections for easy access. If you are interested in US involvement in Iraq you can search the Iraq-Gate file for national security documents and also retrieve a bibliography, chronology, and glossary on it. If you wanted to limit your search to just those instances of the file that mention Saddam Hussein, you could search the Iraq-Gate file for all instances of “saddam hussein”. 108 documents are retrieved, one of which is a 1980 intelligence report stating that Iranian air attacks make the stability of Saddam Hussein’s government uncertain. You’ll also find six documents related to Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to Iraq in 1983.
Take a look. Let me know if you have questions.
—Fred Rowland
For your listening pleasure (and maybe some more scholarly pursuits), I just wanted to let you know that we now have access to Naxos Music Library and Naxos Music Library Jazz, which include classical, jazz, world, folk, and pop music selections. See the blog post by Temple music librarian Anne Harlow for more information. And don’t forget that you can also listen to the Classical Music Library which I wrote to you about in the fall.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
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.
Tommie 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.
[ensemblevideo contentid=z-xrqSDi30GDm_trSydTIA audio=true] (26:00, 12MB mp3 file)
iTunes U link (for downloads)
Subscribe to this podcast series
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, 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
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)
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
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