Please Share Your Feedback On Our New Website

After many years of maintaining its current website, the Temple University Libraries is poised to move to an entirely new design for its website.On Thursday, July 12, 2012 the new website made its debut. We hope you find the new design refreshing – and that it makes your experience using our library resources much better. Please use the feedback link in the upper right corner of the homepage to tell us what you think of the site – what can we continue to improve?

For the past several months a preview of the website has been available to the campus community, and we have received encouraging positive feedback about the new look of the website, which is more streamlined, less cluttered with links and makes use of more visual content.

Screenshot of proposed new look for the Libraries' web site.

Temple Libraries New Website Design

The Libraries’ Summon search, which is a great starting point for research in almost any subject area, is the focal point of the new homepage design. A tabbed approach allows for easy navigation to other types of search modes and other sections of the website. We’ve added the daily hours right on the homepage, and an instant messaging tool allows for quick communication with library staff when help is needed.

Please know that some areas of the site are still being refined, and it is possible you will encounter a broken link or some other minor problem. If that happens, please contact us – using the feedback link on the homepage – to let us know of any problem. We hope to keep improving our website so that all of our community members will have the best possible experience using the Temple Libraries.

Library Prize Interviews, April 2012

On the day of the Library Prize Awards Ceremony, May 1, 2012, I spoke with the three library prize winners and their faculty sponsors. We discussed their research, the sources they used, the relationship between student and sponsor, and the winding roads that first brought them to their topics.

Please listen to these engaging conversations below.

Summer Beckley:

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“A Crisis of Identity: Advertising & the British Ministry of Information’s Propaganda Posters of World War II”

Afrora Muca:

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“From Classroom to Battlefield: The Role of Students in the Closing of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1918”

Eugene Tsvilik:

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“No Enemies to the Left:  The Communist Party of the United States and Crises of International Communism, 1956-1968”

—Fred Rowland

1876 & 1976 Centennial Celebrations: The Interview

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On March 28, 2012, Paley Library welcomed Professor Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of 19th and 20th century Art History at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, graduate student at Brown University, to discuss the 1876 Centennial and the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. The program was moderated by Paley Library Director of Communications Nicole Restaino.

Susanna Gold is currently at work on a book on the 1876 Centennial Exhibition for Penn State University Press. Since our interview, Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska completed her dissertation — “Bicentennial Memory: Postmodernity, Media, and Historical Subjectivity in the United States, 1966-1980” — and was awarded her PhD from Brown University. (Congratulations, Malgorzata!)

After the completion of the program, Susanna Gold, Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, and Nicole Restaino sat down with me to discuss Philadelphia’s Centennial and Bicentennial celebrations.

Audio Download Link

—Fred Rowland

Harvard Faculty declare journal price increases unsustainable

A few days ago, the Faculty Advisory Council at Harvard University sent a memorandum to all Harvard faculty concerning the ever-increasing prices Harvard’s libraries must pay for subscriptions to scholarly journals and databases. The Harvard Council declares that the price increases cannot be sustained.

An excerpt from the memo is below, together with a link to the full report.

But first, why does the Harvard memorandum matter to students and faculty at Temple University?

You should know that we face the identical problem here at Temple. Our contracts with the same providers are virtually identical in amount and term, calling for near-automatic increases of 4 or 5% per year.

As Temple’s own budget situation becomes clearer in the next months, we in the Temple libraries will begin to discuss with faculty and administrators our options as an institution. Hard choices will be faced.

Meanwhile, Temple’s faculty and graduate students have options as individuals. I would commend to you the Harvard Faculty Council report for its recommendations as to what individual scholars might do to help break the big providers’ stranglehold on scholarly communication.

Note that the sums referenced in the Harvard report are are actually low and only a fraction of what Harvard as a whole actually pays for all its online journals and databases, so the report is treating only of two or three major packages of online journals to which they subscribe. Temple has these same packages, as do most research universities in the US.

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. Moreover, some providers bundle many journals as one subscription, with major, high-use journals bundled in with journals consulted far less frequently.

Read the whole memorandum at “Harvard Library Transition.”

Jonathan LeBreton
Senior Associate University Librarian

2011-2012 Library Prize Winners!

Here are the winners of this year’s Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability & the Environment.
Please join us on Tuesday, May 1 at 4 PM in the Paley Lecture Hall for the Awards Ceremony. The winners and their faculty sponsors will discuss the prize-winning papers. Refreshments provided.

Library Prize for Undergraduate Research

  • Summer Beckley, “A Crisis of Identity: Advertising & the British Ministry of Information’s Propaganda Posters of World War II”
    History 4997, Advisor: Richard Immerman
  • Afrora Muca, “From Classroom to Battlefield: The Role of Students in the Closing of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1918”
    History 4997, Advisor: Andrew Isenberg
  • Eugene Tsvilik, “No Enemies to the Left: The Communist Party of the United States and Crises of International Communism, 1956-1968”
    History 4997, Advisor: Petra Goedde

Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability & the Environment

  • Anthony Shields, Jenna Fink, Hasan Malik, Nicola Horscroft
    “The treatment of drinking water using polymeric sorbents”
    Engineering 4296
    Faculty: Huichun (Judy) Zhang
  • Brian Davidson, Fiona Farrelly, Thomson Liang, Melissa MacKinnon
    “Sustainable and efficient rope pump”
    Engineering 4296
    Faculty: Robert J. Ryan
  • (Honorable Mention)
    Rachel Maddaluna
    “Mitigation of climate change and species loss through avoided deforestation”
    Biology 4391
    Faculty: Brent Sewall


—Fred Rowland

Nocturnal Rome

Hans Mueller is the William D. Williams Professor of Classics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Professor Mueller is the author of Roman Religion in Valerius Maximus.

On March 23, 2012, he came to Temple University to discuss his preliminary research on nocturnal Rome. What happened at night in the Roman world? What beliefs did people hold of the night? Before he spoke in the Classics Department, he was kind enough to stop by my office for an interview.

—Fred Rowland

Foundations Department at Tyler and Libraries Once Again Partner for Book Giveaway, Artists and Authors Talk

Third Annual Tyler School of Art Foundations/Paley Library Book Give Away and Artists and Authors Lecture Stop by the Paley Library Circulation Desk during the week of April 16 and receive your own copy* of Ellen Harvey’s New York Beautification Project. Between 1999 and 2001, Harvey executed small old-fashioned landscapes in oil on graffiti sites across New York City. New York Beautification Project documents the works and Harvey’s diaristic accounts of painting illegally throughout New York. The narrative of her “beautification project” is both provocative and hilarious, touching on such issues as who is allowed to make art in our society, and what distinguishes art from graffiti, while never losing touch with the frequently comical reality of creating a contemporary art project on the streets of New York.

Don’t miss Harvey’s lecture, Monday, April 16 at 11:00 in Tyler Room B004.

*The fine print:

  • From Monday, April 16 through Friday, April 20, copies of New York Beautification Project will be given away to the first 20 patrons to request a book and show their Temple ID to Library Circulation Staff. Any member of the Temple community can receive a book. Each day the giveaway will begin at a different time to accommodate the variety of schedules of our faculty, staff and students.
  • Monday, April 16, 9:00 AM, Get your copy of Ellen’s book right before she speaks!
  • Tuesday, April 17, 11:00 AM
  • Wednesday, April 18, 1:00 PM
  • Thursday, April 19, 3:00 PM
  • Friday, April 20, NOON

This annual program is sponsored by the Foundations Department, Tyler School of Art and Temple University Libraries.

It is made possible through the use of General Activity Fees.

Portrait of Ellen Harvey standing before paintings on a wall.

[image of Ellen Harvey]

Access to licensed Library subscription resources

The Temple University Libraries purchase at significant annual cost exceeding $5 million a wide array of subscription materials including databases, certain software programs, and online electronic journals and books. We negotiate these annual costs in order to minimize the expense to Temple University. In most cases the costs for these licenses have been based on Temple’s full-time equivalent enrollment although some are based on the number of simultaneous users allowed.

While we would very much like to offer alumni access from home or work to our subscription databases, online journals and ebooks, it is economically infeasible. When we negotiate and pay for licenses based on Temples 34,000 FTE enrollment, we are then contractually obligated to ensure that only current Temple students, faculty, and staff have access to the resource. If we were to allow the 200,000+ Temple alumni access to our licensed resources, library costs would increase an estimated five-fold.

We therefore regularly review with Computing Services staff the protocols such as the Temple Portal by which we together ensure that only current students, faculty and staff are able to access these restricted licensed resources and that alumni and others are excluded. On Tuesday April 10 such a review resulted in resetting access in order to properly exclude from off-campus access alumni with Temple email accounts. A handful of Temple alumni who had earlier been able to get into some of our restricted resources will as a result now encounter turnaways in keeping with our license restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. As always, alumni and other guests are welcome to come to campus and access these resources from within the library where we are allowed by contract to offer on-site access to these resources. As of April 11, we are making provisions for Temple alumni currently enrolled as students in the Senior Scholars program to continue to have access as current students.

Jonathan LeBreton
Senior Associate University Librarian