Resources for Witchcraft

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Fred Rowland

Let’s say you want to study witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Where would you look for resources?
Step 1: Find synonyms from Oxford Reference Online (it contains a bunch of thesauruses).

witchcraft noun
sorcery , (black) magic , witching , witchery , wizardry , thaumaturgy , spells , incantations ; Wicca ; Irish pishogue .
(From The Oxford Paperback Thesaurus in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)

witchcraft noun
witchery , sorcery , black art/magic , magic , necromancy , wizardry , occultism , the occult , sortilege , thaumaturgy , wonder-working.
(From The Oxford American Thesaurus of Current English in English Dictionaries & Thesauruses)
Step 2: Databases

Academic Search Premier—can use this for most things

Historical Abstracts/America: History and Life—search these two databases together to pick up the Salem stuff of 1692

Wilson OmniFile—includes lots of important content, especially for the popular and scholarly literature between 1900 and 1950

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—use this biographical source to search for individuals who in some way were connected to witchcraft, its study, practice, or prosecution. Amazing source of info on British history

International Medieval Bibliography—main source for medieval history

JSTOR—will find plenty here

Gale Virtual Reference Library–for encyclopedia articles, New Catholic Encyclopedia might be interesting, also Encyclopedia of Religion, Encyclopedia of European Social History, Europe: 1450-1789, Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World

Oxford Reference Online—all kinds of good stuff here

Diamond: Library Catalog—find books at Temple

WorldCat—find books outside of Temple

Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO)—most of the books printed in Britain during the eighteenth century, all online, hard to believe something like this exists

Project Muse
Like most things regarding research, there’s a ton of other stuff, but the above sources would at least get you started

—Fred Rowland

RefShare for RefWorks

Posted on July 10, 2007 by John Schoolar

The Library is pleased to announce the activation of the RefShare module for RefWorks, the online bibliographic manager. While RefWorks allows users to save and organize citations, as well as output bibliographies or formatted papers (in hundreds of citation styles), this has previously been a closed personal system. Sharing your bibliography with students, classmates, or colleagues has required you to export or output your citations in some way. With RefShare it only takes a click or two to make your bibligraphy viewable by anyone. RefShare allows you to make selected parts of your RefWorks library available to others, including:

a stable URL accessible by anyone even non-Temple or non-Refworks users
optionally allowing users to export, print, or create bibliographies from your shared citations
RSS feeds for new citations
optional commenting on citations
add your bibliography to the Temple Shared Folder Area for others at Temple to discover
Statistics on number of views of your shared citations

With this new feature:

Professors can share reading lists with students
Faculty and Researchers can share bibliographies with colleagues at Temple or anywhere
Students can share bibliographies with classmates (i.e. for group/team work)

You can view a web tutorial on using RefShare here. See the Temple Shared Folders Area for some sample shared bibliographies. Feel free to send any comments or questions. —Derik A Badman

Three great new databases

Posted on July 6, 2007 by Fred Rowland

Periodicals Index Online (PIO), Periodicals Archive Online (PAO), and British Periodicals Online are now available at the Temple University Libraries from theAll Databases list. These are superb additions for arts, humanities, and social science students and researchers. Coming from Proquest, the three databases are all related. Periodicals Index Online (formerly known as Periodicals Contents Index, or PCI) is the primary database because in addition to its own content it indexes and provides links to Periodicals Archive Online (formerly known as PCI Full Text) and British Periodicals Online.

Periodicals Index Online is a growing database that currently provides access to over 16 million articles from 5000 journals in over 40 languages going back as far as 1665. Every journal or magazine indexed by PIO starts from volume 1 issue 1 so there are no gaps in coverage. The PIO interface is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. When you search PIO, you are also searching PAO and the British Periodicals Index. PIO also provides links toProject Muse and JSTOR journals.

Periodicals Archive Online provides full-text access to 450 journals and magazines from 1665 to 1995 as well as 160 from British Periodicals Online. In all, PAO provides over 1.8 million full-text articles plus the full-text content from British Periodicals Online. As with PIO, there are links to Project MUSE and JSTOR journals.

British Periodicals Online can be searched separately. It comes in two modules. Module I is currently available and module II will add an additional 300 journals and magazines in the latter half of 2007. Here is a description of it from the website:

“British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian ‘age of periodicals’ and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of almost 500 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.”
Here are a few sample articles to pique your interest:

ATROCITIES OF BONAPARTE, IN 1797, Anti-Gallican: or Standard of British loyalty, religion and liberty , 1:12 (1804:Dec.) p.457

A Conjecture concerning the Peopling of AMERICA, Arminian Magazine consisting of extracts and original treatises on universal redemption, 13 (1790:Nov.) p.599

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON THE USE OF OIL AT SEA, Chambers’s journal of popular literature, science and arts, 934 (1881:Nov.) p.752

DANIEL DERONDA, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 52 (1875:Dec.-1876:May) p.425

Germany and Austria, Current History (New York), 22:4 (1925:July) p.653

Israel’s Place in America Hispana, Contemporary Jewish Record, 6:1 (1943:Feb.) p.5
If you do any research in the humanities and social sciences, you should get to know these databases very well. For students, they will help to save time and get better grades. For faculty and researchers, they will broaden the scope of your research and reduce searching time.

—Fred Rowland

Blackwell Reference Online

Posted on July 6, 2007 by Fred Rowland

The Temple University Libraries now offers electronic access to 80 Blackwell companions, guides, and dictionaries in the subject areas of philosophy (59 volumes) and religion (21 volumes), as part of Blackwell Reference Online. For a complete list of the philosophy and religion titles go here. These works offer great topic overviews and nicely complement the recently acquired Cambridge Companions. While Cambridge Companions predominantly focus on individual philosophers and theologians, Blackwell companions and guides focus on subject areas, i.e. epistemology, logic, religious ethics, political theology, etc.

Most of the titles in this collection are heavily used in print at Temple. Like the Cambridge Companions they are superb overviews written by prominent scholars, essential for faculty in unfamiliar disciplines, graduate students studying for classes and preliminary exams, and undergraduates researching papers. The searchable bibliographies take users right to the heart of current scholarship in a topic area. Like the Cambridge Companions, this electronic content will serve as excellent course material, most likely substituting in many instances for print texts.

There is quite a bit of overlap between Blackwell Reference Online and our print collection, but the print and the electronic versions of these works will likely be used in different ways. While the print versions are great for the focused study of individual topics, Blackwell Reference Online will allow users to search broadly over all the philosophy and religion volumes, discovering associations and linkages not apparent from the separate print volumes.

You can search Blackwell Reference Online using either the simple or advanced search. The simple search, which searches the full-text, offers post-search limiting by Subject, Place, Period, People, and Key Topics. It’s pretty slick, much like the way Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy does it. In the Advanced Search you can search authors, chapter titles, bibliographies, and full-text, as well as limiting to a particular book or subject area. You can also browse individual works. All results are presented as chapter titles or dictionary entries and are printable in full.

Another great source from the Temple University Libraries. Don’t wait. Start searching now!

—Fred Rowland

E-ZBorrow Unavailable on Thursday July 5th

Posted on July 2, 2007 by

As Diamond, the Libraries’ catalog, will be unavailable on Thursday, July 5th, beginning at 8 a.m. for a major hardware upgrade this will mean that E-ZBorrow will also be unavailable. Assuming the upgrade is successful E-ZBorrow will once again be available on Friday July 6th. —–Penelope Myers

Seven Things about Wikipedia

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Steven Bell

What more do you need to know about Wikipedia? It’s the sometimes controversial online encyclopedia of the people, and its content dwarfs that of conventional encyclopedias. What we also know is that college students all too often rely on Wikipedia entries without fully evaluating the accuracy of the content. Then perhaps there is something new to learn – how to leverage Wikipedia as an instructional technology to better equip students to read and gather information with a critical eye. To help educators and librarians to better understand the issues related to the use of Wikipedia by students, EDUCAUSE has focused the latest addition to the “Seven Things You Should Know” series on Wikipedia (pdf). The series introduces web and learning technologies and identifies how they might be best used for better pedagogy. The new Wikipedia document identifies how it can be used in this way:

In higher education, wikis have been put to use in courses ranging from humanities to science to business. With Wikipedia, students can take part in a collaborative process of creating and revising content in a global context, moving the opportunities for learning beyond the walls of the classroom or the university. An important part of academic training is seeing how knowledge is created and understanding that it is dynamic, evolving over time based on the contributions of many individuals.

Rather than banning the use of Wikipedia, faculty and librarians are working together to develop creative assignments and research exercises that engage students in the information creation process by having them create or edit Wikipedia pages. Through these learning experiences students come to understand that anyone can add to or edit Wikipedia and what the consequences are for those who base important decisions on this information. Faculty who would like to further explore how Wikipedia can be used to help students become more effective researchers should contact their Temple University Libraries subject specialist to begin the discussion. –Steven Bell

Journal Finder Enhancements Now In Place

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Gerald Doyle

The Journal Finder enhancements announced earlier this month are now in place. We hope you’ll agree that the new Journal Finder, powered by Serials Solutions, combines a cleaner, more responsive user interface with enhanced search and navigation capabilities.

Serials Solutions is the name of both a company and the e-journals management system used to power the new Journal Finder. Put another way, Journal Finder is simply Temple’s branded name for the back-end Serials Solutions management system. For all the geeky technical details read Serials Solutions AMS page. Temple librarians work diligently with Serials Solutions to ensure that Journal Finder provides the most accurate, up-to-date record of the Libraries’ serials holdings.

There are two ways to track down journals in the new Journal Finder: Search and Browse. Each of these functions is contained inside its own light blue box on the Journal Finder home page. The Search function allows you to search for a complete or partial title (the default) or for a word or words in any part of the title (“Title contains all words”). You can also search for a title by its ISSN or International Standard Serial Number. The greatly enhanced Browse function, located in the lower of the two light blue boxes, allows you to retrieve an alphabetical list of titles by subject. This can be helpful if you’re trying to get an idea of the journals Temple subscribes to in a particular academic discipline, for example archaeology or film studies.

—David C. Murray

Standard Rate & Data Service

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Kristina Devoe

The Library is pleased to announce the addition of Standard Rate & Data Service (SRDS) to its suite of electronic databases.

Considered the Bible of directories when it comes to finding publications by category, SRDS is the largest and most comprehensive database of media and marketing information.

Cataloging media properties and marketing lists, SRDS provides media rates and data for more than 100,000 U.S. and international media properties, including both traditional and alternative marketing media. Advertising rates, contact personnel information, as well as circulation figures for Radio, TV and Cable, Business Publications, Consumer Magazines, and Newspapers are included. Demographic information is also provided.

In terms of functionality, SRDS allows users to search, create contact reports, and obtain additional information with direct links to media kits.

SRDS is updated frequently. In fact, each listing is verified up to 20 times per year, and more than 21,000 listing updates are made every month.

—Kristina De Voe

New Social Work Abstracts Access

Posted on June 18, 2007 by John Schoolar

The library’s access to Social Work Abstracts has changed over to a new interface through EBSCO. What does this mean for the user?

1) The interface is easier to use and familiar to most users already through Academic Search Premier or the numerous other databases we access through EBSCO.

2) With the EBSCO interface comes links to hundreds of full-text journals directly from citations in the database.

3) Users can set up search alerts for new issues of journals or ongoing searches. This means that you can get automatic announcements (email or rss) when a new issue of a journal is available in the database or when articles are specific topics (or by specific authors) are added to the database. (See EBSCO’s support page on setting up search alerts.)

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me.

Derik A Badman

4 New History Journal Databases

Posted on June 14, 2007 by Gerald Doyle

The Libraries have acquired four new full-text journal databases, all of which contain significant history content.

Blackwell Synergy – Provides access to 20 history journals including Diplomatic History, Gender & History, Journal of Religious Studies, and The Journal of the Historical Society.

Cambridge Journals Online – Provides access to 26 history journals including Central European History, The Historical Journal, The Journal of African History, and Urban History.

Sage Journals Online – Although known primarily for its science publications, Sage Journals provides access to eight important history journals: European History Quarterly, German History, Indian Economic & Social History Review, Journal of Contemporary History, Journal of Urban History, The Medieval History Journal, Studies in History, and War in History.

History Compass – This “database” is in fact a peer-reviewed journal written by historians with undergraduates in mind. In this regard it is unlike the other databases discussed here, all of which cover multiple journals. What makes History Compass truly unique is the inclusion of little extras such as RSS feeds, lists of most read and cited articles, podcasts, and teaching and learning guides. Cambrdige Journals also has RSS feeds.