Category Archives: Library News

First Floor Project Alert – Week of July 7

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Here are a few things you should know about the first phase of our first floor (west side) enhancement project. Much of our furniture and equipment will be moved out of the area starting Wednesday July 9. This will result in considerable disruption for many of our users. You can expect the following to happen this week:

Standup Computer Consoles will be moved out of the area Self-Check

Circulation Terminals will be moved out of the area Computers and associated furniture will be moved out of the area

Reference Desk will be moved to a slightly different location in the same area

All of the Leisure Reading Collection books have already been relocated to the far end of the east side of the first floor (near the Reference Department Office), and all of the New Book Collection has been relocated to an area just opposite the Tuttleman Circulation Desk. While we will have far less computers available during this period, there will still be computers opposite the reference desk and on the upper levels. Next week you can expect a fair amount of carpet removal in the west side of the first floor.

During this period the front entrance to Paley Library on the Bell Tower side will be closed.

The only way to enter the Paley Library will be through the Tuttleman Center entrance.

We will also begin constructing walls for our future cafe. This will create some noise and possible dust in a small area. We will continue to keep our user community updated on this project as the work progresses.

First Floor West Enhancements to Begin

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Starting with the week of July 7 a month-long project to enhance the west side of the Paley Library first floor will result in some service disruptions to the Temple University Community. While this will cause some short-term inconveniences to you, our library users, we greatly anticipate our ability to serve you better in what will be a more functional, comfortable and attractive space. During the next month we will be moving furniture, laying new carpet, creating a consolidated leisure and new book reading area, providing new computer workstations with updated computer equipment, additional scanners, more collaborative work tables, a new reference desk location, a new display area, adding a news/media area and creating a small cafe for beverages and refreshments. As a result there will be times when computers will not be accessible. To minimize the loss of some computer access we will be adding additional computer work areas on the upper levels of Paley Library.

These renovations and additions to Paley Library will result in an even better facility for study, research and collaboration. We do apologize in advance for any inconveniences this may cause for our user community. We greatly appreciate your understanding and patience so that we can achieve a better Paley Library. For daily questions about computer availability we recommend you call our Reference Desk at 215-204-8212. If you do have any questions or concerns about this project please contact Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research and Instructional Services.

Leisure Reading Collection Moving to a New Location

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As part of the first floor renovations happening this summer, we are moving the leisure reading collection today to the shelves at the end of the first floor east across from the windows looking out on the Bell Tower. They will stay there until the renovations are finished. Their new home will be where the current reference desk is. We will have signs pointing to the new location. Please ask staff if you have any questions or need any help.

New Books Have Moved to a New Location

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For the duration of the first floor renovations this summer we have moved the new books to the area in front of the circulation/reserve desk in Tuttleman. You may check out as many new books as you want. We change the displays every Monday and we send all the new books from the previous week to be shelved in the Paley stacks. They will stay in this new location until the renovations are finished. Their new home will be where the current reference desk is.

Open Access Journals

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Beginning in the 1980s but accelerating over the last decade, libraries have been unable to keep pace with the skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals. For both private and publicly-supported research universities the publication “circle” looks something like this: 1) scholar obtains money to conduct research, perhaps through government grants or internal, tuition-supported funding; 2) scholar conducts and then publishes research in peer-reviewed journal; 3) university library “buys back” scholarly research from for-profit or societal journal publishers. The problem? Academic libraries, whose budgets sometimes do not even take inflation into account from year to year, can no longer afford to buy journal titles, especially in the sciences. Did you know, for example, that the annual $19,396 paid by Brown University Library for the journal Nuclear Physics A & B, matches the price of a “new midsize car” (Brown University’s George Street Journal).

Libraries and others who care about open access to scholarly information are fighting back. “SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system… It’s pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communications models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries” (About SPARC). The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is another such initiative. DOAJ defines open access journals as ones that “use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access” (About DOAJ). Explore DOAJ’s list of 110 scholarly, open access journals in history. 

Who benefits from these initiatives? In my view scholars, libraries, small and even large publishers benefit when research is made readily available to industry and the public at large. Think about it this way: It is reasonable to expect that the public will be more willing to support research that is readily available, and that the impact of this research will be greater and longer lasting.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the open access community is scholars’ fear that publishing in open access journals will not advance careers or lead to tenure. After all, academic journals were created in the first place, in part, to promote the careers of authors. Scholars are also often concerned with a journal’s impact factor. Despite these concerns, however, new information technologies and initiatives such as SPARC and DOAJ are here to stay. Consider the benefits of open access today!

Jakobsen Lecture Available on iTunes U

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Distinguished professor of women’s studies, Janet Jakobsen of Barnard College, lectured at Paley on April 7. Dr. Jakobsen is the Director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard. Her research interests include: feminist and queer ethics; religion, gender, and sexuality in American public life; social movements and feminist alliance politics; and global issues of economics. Jakobsen’s research truly crosses disciplinary boundaries, and her engagement with a number of issues crosses the traditional lines established between the academy and activism. This lecture was part of a series presented by the Libraries and the General Education Program, which aims to bring interdisciplinary scholars in a variety of fields to Temple. The departments of Religion and Jewish Studies also played a significant role in sponsoring Dr. Jakobsen’s visit. Dr. Jakobsen’s lecture at Paley Library can be downloaded from iTunes U. When you see the Temple University page, click Paley Library at the bottom, then Janet Jakobsen, then click “Get” and wait for the download to complete. After the lecture, Dr. Jakobsen was interviewed by Professor of History, David Watt, and Professor of Religion, Women’s Studies, and Jewish Studies, Laura Levitt.

See the News with PressDisplay

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TU Libraries is pleased to announce the addition of Library PressDisplay to its suite of online resources!

Visually stunning, PressDisplay provides online access to today’s leading newspapers and magazines from around the world, presented in their traditional format and layout. With more than 650 print publications from 76 countries and in 38 languages, PressDisplay is an indispensable news source for anyone who wants not only multiple perspectives on the news, but also to see the original print layout/format, including color images, editorial content, classifieds, and advertisements.

Readers can browse or search for the last 60 days worth of newspapers by country, language, or title and also perform keyword searches for individual articles. Once inside a newspaper, readers can turn the pages as if holding the actual paper, zooming into individual images and articles.

Articles may be printed, saved, or emailed for later use. Some articles also have accompanying audio files which can be played in Windows Media Player. And, articles from many foreign language publications can be instantly translated into one of several major languages.

While ideal for scholars associated with international studies, media studies, and foreign language studies, PressDisplay promises to hold appeal for all interested in current events.

Please feel free to contact me directly for further information about the resource.

Kristina De Voe Reference Librarian – English and Communications

Email: devoek@temple.edu

Blog: http://blog.library.temple.edu/devoek

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

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