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Unlimited possibilities @ your library: celebrate National Library Week April 12-18

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April 12-18, Temple University Libraries joins libraries in schools, campuses and communities nationwide in celebrating National Library Week, a time to highlight the changing role of libraries, librarians and library workers.

The Temple University Libraries are committed to collecting the books, electronic resources and materials that serve our communities in research, teaching and learning. We are also committed to transforming lives through innovative educational resources and forward-thinking programming.

Please join us for a host of activities taking place at Paley Library, the central facility on main campus, throughout National Library Week:

Research Paper Clinics, April 13-16, Noon-5:00 PM, Paley Library Think Tank

 

From Digital Spaces to Real World Change: How Digital Storytelling Can Affect Social and Environmental Justice, Wednesday, April 15, 2:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

 

Great American Songwriter’s Series/Boyer Noontime Concert Series at Paley: Heart and Soul—The Songs of Hoagy Carmichael, Thursday, April 16, Noon, Paley Library Lecture Hall 

 

Temple Book Club Discussion: Ann Petry’s The Street, Thursday, April 16, Noon, Paley Library Room 309

 

Chat in the Stacks—50 Years Later: Voting Rights and Civil Rights, Thursday, April 16, 2:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

 

Film Friday: CitizenFour, Friday, April 17, Noon, Paley Library Lecture Hall

 

Digital Humanities Scholars: Project Presentations, Friday, April 17, 2:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall

 

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

Veterans Day and Temple’s World War I Poster Collection

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While the First World War officially ended at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919,  major hostilities  concluded on November 11, 1918,  at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  November 11 was thereafter observed as Armistice Day  in many of the allied nations, including France, the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth nations.   The day originally served to remember the  9 million combatants who had died  during the war.  After the Second World War, veterans of that conflict pressed in the United States to have November 11 become a day on which all veterans of military service would be honored, irrespective of  when they served in the U.S. Armed Forces.   President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran of both the first and second World Wars,  signed the enabling legislation into effect in 1954.

Today, although all combatants from “war to end all wars”  have died,  we grapple still with the legacy of that terrible conflict which spawned several national revolutions,  reshaped the map of Europe, led  to the Second World War, and  directly or indirectly occasioned the creation of the modern states of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and ultimately Israel.

The First World War is regarded  as a watershed event in the history of warfare, society and culture.  Government powers (taxation, rationing, conscription) significantly expanded in many nations in order to mobilize entire economies to fight a technologically advanced and industrially intensive war of such great geographic extent and duration.   Propaganda reached new heights of pervasiveness and persuasive power as governments increasingly saw the necessity to garner and maintain broad public support  in favor of war policies in the context of  broad literacy rates and mass suffrage.

One of the most prominent manifestations of the new propaganda was the war poster, many of which have survived in the collections of libraries and historical societies, as well as in private collections.   The Special Collections Research Center of the Temple University Libraries hold  a magnificent collection of over 1,500 World War I posters which were donated to Temple in 1937 by George F. Tyler who had been a Major in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during the War.  Temple’s Tyler School of Art is named for Tyler’s wife Stella Elkins Tyler.    Virtually all these posters have been digitized and are now freely available for study in our Digital Collections.      An interpretive online exhibition is also offered at:  http://exhibitions.library.temple.edu/exhibits/ww1/ .  

Jonathan LeBreton, Senior Assoc. University Librarian

While it’s still Spring: A recap of TUL @ Spring Fling

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On Wednesday, April 17th, Temple Libraries joined 200-plus Temple organizations and vendors at Spring Fling 2013.  It was delightful to participate in our second year at Spring Fling. Here’s a little recap, with big thanks to everyone who volunteered.  . . … Continue reading →

Refworks 2.0 launched today

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Refworks is the citation management program that the Temple University Libraries offers to the university community that makes it easier to store, organize, annotate, and output citations as bibliographies. On Monday, August 23, the Libraries’ switched over to the new Refworks 2.0 interface, which provides a more intuitive and efficient user experience. Anyone familiar with the first version of Refworks (now called Refworks Classic) should be able to make this transition with relative ease. (The Refworks Classic interface will be available until December simply by clicking on the “Refworks Classic” link in the upper right corner of the Refworks 2.0 interface.) As before, users can access Refworks 2.0 from the Libraries’ homepage under “Find Articles.”

Here are some of the improvements in Refworks 2.0:

  • Shortcuts that allow quick access to important features
  • Reduced menu bar that includes only the most important items
  • Tabs for quick access to (all) References, Folders, and shared folders

In Refworks 2.0 you don’t need to constantly shift from one page to another to perform simple functions, as was often necessary in Refworks Classic. The same great features are now easier to find and use. Take a spin on Refworks 2.0!

Here’s a Refworks 2.0 preview.

RSS and How You Can Use It

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RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a type of computer language used for sending content to a user. In its own way it is a cross between a website and an email list. It is an easy way to keep up with new updates to websites without having to remember to visit them in your internet browser and without having to sign up to get email updates. In an increasingly busy computer age, information is everywhere. Using RSS allows you to better focus on what you want to read, and it allows you to do it with speed and ease.

Here’s the way it works:

1. A website author creates a file, called an “feed”. This feed contains information about the website’s content, such as links to articles, the full content or summaries of articles, images, or even sound files. This file changes when the website is changed, for example: when our blog has a new article added to the website, it is also added to the feed.

2. The reader (that’s you) needs a program to read the feeds. This is the same way you have an internet browser to read websites or an email client to read email messages. A “feed reader” program is often called a “news aggregator” or a “news reader”. These can be programs you run on your computer (like Eudora or Outlook Express for email) or ones run on a website (like TUMail for email). If you are using the Firefox internet browser or Internet Explorer 7, it will also read feeds.

The most well-known free feed reader online is Bloglines, a great place to start reading RSS and learning more. You might also try Google Reader.

3. Once you have a feed reader, you have to find feeds to “subscribe” to (though most readers will come with a few feeds already loaded). You can find them on all kinds of sites from Time Magazine to the New York Times, from Nature to just about every blog there is (including this one you are reading). Even academic publishers are using feeds for table of contents and/or abstracts: American Psychological Association has feeds for its journals such as American Psychologist, all Oxford Journals have feeds, as do Cambridge Journals.

Links to a feed (it’s like a normal internet address except it usually ends with “.xml”, “.rss”, or “.rdf”) often take the form of an orange button that says “XML”, a link to “syndicate this site”, or a link for “RSS feed.”

The most important part is finding the feeds for the information you want to receive. If you regularly read a website (or wish you regularly remembered to read one) look to see if it has a feed. If you are using the Firefox internet browser or Internet Explorer 7, it will detect feeds for you.

4. Once you’ve got the addresses of feeds, you put their addresses into your feed reader (most easily by using the copy and paste function of your computer). What the feed reader does is go to these addresses and bring back what it finds. At first you’ll get a long list of items, kind of like email messages, with a title, date, subject, and content, as well as a link to the site where the item exists online.

Then, as time passes, the reader will periodically check the feeds again and bring back any new items (and only the new items). If it is an active feed (such as the AP Newswire) you might get new items in your reader every hour. Less active feeds will get you new items less frequently (the New York Times Magazine only appears on Sunday).

5. Read and enjoy.

And please subscribe to the feed for this blog.

If you have any questions or want to know more, feel free to contact Derik Badman.

Some other introductions to feeds:

Librarian Karen Schneider’s RSS Tutorial, a quickstart guide to using Bloglines to start reading feeds.

Fagan Finder’s very detailed explanation.

(Updated: 2/19/07) –Derik A. Badman