Two Major New Business Resources

The library has added two new business resources to our database collection:Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage and Global Insight.

Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage is a major addition to the databases that support company-and-industry research. This database is especially important as Standard & Poor’s is already phasing out their print publications. In the future, almost all of their titles will be in digital formats only.

This database is useful for more than purely business research. The inclusion of the Mutual Fund Reports in the package allows for extensive research of and comparisons among mutual funds. The Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Executives and Directors facilitates extensive research for job hunters, with information on public and private companies. A separate glossary is included and an excellent “Learning Center” that covers the basics of investing, has a retirement tutorial, and covers current tax issues.

Almost all of Standard & Poor’s (traditionally) print publications are included in the database. One of the most important components is the Industry Surveys, and the Global Industry Surveys – which we have not had before. Additional products that we have not had before include the mutual fund profiles and several news letters.

NetAdvantage recently added Compustat Excel Analytics and Compustat International Fundamental Reports with five (5) years of extensive data and charts that can be downloaded directly into Excel.

The following products are in NetAdvantage:
Bond Reports Company Profiles; Corporation Records Fund Reports (more than 14,000 mutual funds are included); Industry Surveys (back to 1998) with Trends and Projections (back to April 1999); Global Industry Surveys (back to 2004); The Outlook (back to 1996); Register – Executives and Directors; Register – Private Companies; Register – Public Companies; Security Dealers of North America; Stock Reports

The Global Insight database was formed by the merger of DRI (Data Resources, Inc.) and WEFA (Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates), combining two well-respected financial and economic information services. It has recently integrated into its package the World Markets Research Centre (WMRC), enabling it to combine same-day analysis and risk assessment of more than 200 countries and industry and market analysis into a single database.

Global insight provides “comprehensive economic and financial coverage of countries, regions, industries, and markets” in a single platform. Historical country-specific data dates back to 1970 and forecasts predict 25 years into the future. Please use Internet Explorer as your browser to access the Excel spreadsheet downloads in the database.

For countries it provides “economic analysis, data and forecasts; political analysis; regulatory analysis; tax laws and impacts; operational conditions; security risk analysis”. This is the first database that we have been able to acquire that provides country risk analysis and forecasting.

Its collections of economic and financial data, updated daily, include “global economic data; global financial data; U.S. economic data and press releases; energy data; industry and sector data; forecast and analysis”.

Global industries covered are: Automotive Industry; Energy Industry; Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Industries; and Telecommunications.

Fields of study supported by the Global Insight database include all departments within the Fox School of Business, Advertising, Political Science, International Health, Geography, and Law.

Barbara Wright

2007 Library Prize Award Recipients Announced!

The Library Prize panel of judges has selected the recipients for the 2007 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research.

The judges were impressed with the variety of topics, the reflective essays on the library research process and the quality of research submitted.

$1000 Award Recipients in alphabetical order:

Joseph Basile
“Ending the ‘Inhuman Traffic;’ The Role of Humanitarianism in the British Abolition Movement.”
History W387
Dr. Travis Glasson, History

Clay Boggs
“The Jews and the Pharisees in Early Quaker Polemic”
History 399
Professor David Watt, History

Matthew M. Rodrigue
“Rethinking Academia: A Gramscian Analysis of Samuel Huntington”
History H385
Professor Kathy Le Mons Walker, History

In addition, the following students were selected to receive Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order):

Michael Gieda
“The Civilian Conservation Corps; Conserving Discrimination”
History W386
Professor Sharon Ann Musher, History

Cherice D. Gordon
“Cervical Cancer: A Silent Threat in African-American Women”
Public Health W3321
Professor Sarah Bauerle Bass, Public Health

Stephanie L.S. Sikora
“The Great Escape: 21st Century American Politics and the Kyoto Protocol”
History W397 and H385
James Rogers, Political Science

Penelope Waite
“The Struggle for an Inclusive Vision of America: Lorin W. Brown, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Definition of American Identity”
American Studies 393
Professor Lisa Rhodes, American Studies
Please join us to celebrate at the Awards Ceremony and Reception this Friday! Come Meet the 2007 Winners and their sponsoring professors!

Date/Time: Friday, April 27th: 4:00 p.m. Awards Ceremony, 5:00 p.m. Reception

Location: Paley Lecture Hall

Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres will be served.

Gretchen Sneff

African American Experience

The Library is pleased to announce online access to The African American Experience. The resource is described as:

The widest-ranging and easiest-to-use online collection on African American life ever assembled, The African American Experience is the definitive electronic research tool for African American history and culture from one of the most respected publishers in the field. The two primary goals: to provide rock-solid information from authorities in the field, and to allow African Americans to speak for themselves through a wealth of primary sources. Drawing on over 300 titles, and designed under the guidance of leading librarians, this database gives voice to the black experience from its African origins to the present day.

It includes:

*Brand new material from major multivolume print reference sets, such as The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Civil Rights, African American Religious Experience in America, and Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture
*A deep backlist of reference books and monographs, many now available in electronic format for the first time
*A vast collection of hundreds and hundreds of primary documents: manuscripts, speeches, court cases, quotations, advertisements, statistics, and other papers
*Over 4,000 interviews with former slaves—the WPA slave narratives—from the acclaimed The American Slave: A Composite
*Autobiography, now re-indexed and for the first time fully searchable
*Sixty-seven Negro University Press texts from the late 1700s to the early 1970s—classics in black scholarship.

Enjoy! —Al Vara

POIESIS: a full-text philosophy database

Much of the scholarly communication in philosophy takes place in small journals run on a shoestring out of academic departments, scholarly societies, and associations. Although there’s a lot to be learned from philosophy, there’s not much money in it unless you leave it to, say, get a law degree. Online resources are rather slim compared to many other disciplines. But there are some good ones turning up and the Temple University Libraries is working to make them available to faculty, staff, and students.

Our most recent new resource is Poiesis, a full-text database that makes many of those small underfunded philosophy journals available online. To my knowledge, it’s the only full-text database that narrowly focuses on philosophy. In order to have access to the online editions in Poiesis, a library has to also hold a print subscription to the journals as well. Temple subscribed to around forty new philosophy journals this year in order to bring Poiesis to the campus.

Here’s a list of the journals available through Poiesis. From the Temple web site, Poiesis can be accessed from the All Databases or the Arts and Humanities list. Individual titles are available through Journal Finder. Poiesis currently contains 50 journal titles for a total of 2200 issues and 330,000 pages. Eventually it should contain 100 journal titles. The primary users of this database will be philosophy faculty and students, but there is also relevant content for students of related disciplines like religion and literature. The interface of this database is a bit quirky and takes a bit of time to get used to, so better start using it today! Please contact me with any questions.

Our other new electronic resources for philosophy are the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Cambridge Companions Online. All together these three new resources make philosophy research at Temple quicker and easier.


—Fred Rowland

Citations Without Tears (RefWorks)

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.

Digital National Security Archive

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

More Online Music Resources

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.

—Fred Rowland

Diamond Library Catalog Gets New Sparkle

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.

image003.jpg

* 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.

image004.jpg

* 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.

eHREF (Electronic Human Relations Area Files)

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.

—Fred Rowland

D. Washington Appointed Director of External Affairs

I am very pleased to announce that David Washington has accepted the position of Director of Library External Affairs and Advancement for the Temple University Libraries, effective April 10, 2007.

David brings a strong background in institutional advancement, fund raising, marketing, and community relations to the libraries. Most recently he has worked as Director of Planning and Development for the Partnership School Program at Temple University. At the Partnership School program, he was responsible for planning and implementing a comprehensive development program as well as for developing alliances with individuals and organizations within and outside of Temple to bring in-kind services and funds to the program.

Prior to his appointment at Temple, David was Senior Program Officer for seven years at The Philadelphia Foundation, a $300 million public charity. While at the Foundation, David was responsible for reviewing and evaluating grant applications submitted by non-profit organizations seeking grant support. In addition, David provided technical support services to nonprofits in an effort to help them build their capacity and enhance their overall programming. David also informed donors and prospective donors of the Foundation on a variety of issues and trends impacting our community to help ensure that the Foundation’s grantmaking remained relevant, strategic, and had a long-term impact.

Prior to his appointment to the Foundation, David was Assistant Vice President and Public Affairs Manager at PNC Bank for nearly a decade. At PNC, David was responsible for the oversight of its $3.4 million corporate contributions program, which supported non-profit organizations throughout the greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey region.

David holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. I am very pleased that David is joining us and look forward to working with him to develop external funding sources and build community relations for the Temple University Libraries.

Larry P. Alford
Vice Provost for Libraries and University Librarian