The Benefits of Academia

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Many New York Times readers were disappointed when the Times took away free access to editorials and commentaries and converted this content into the subscription-only TimesSelect. Well those of us who attend and work at higher education institutions are getting a break from the Times. They recently announced that as of March 13 students and faculty with an “edu” email address would be eligible to get free access to TimesSelect. From the press release:

Beginning on March 13, subscriptions to TimesSelect will be available for free to all registered college students and faculty with a .edu in their e-mail addresses. TimesSelect is NYTimes.com’s paid offering that provides exclusive access to 22 columnists of The Times and the International Herald Tribune as well as an array of other services, including access to The Times’s archives, advance previews of various sections and tools for tracking and storing news and information. Current student subscribers will receive pro-rated refunds for their previously paid subscriptions. College students interested in registering for free TimesSelect subscriptions should go towww.nytimes.com/university for more information.

Since the registration form provides options for only students or faculty, this does leave some questions for the rest of us. Are computer services, library, writing center, and other institutional personnel eligible for the complimentary access to TimesSelect? What about alumni who may have an institutional email address from the .edu domain? So far there is no word from the Times on these matters, so for now it may be best to review the registration information when deciding how to proceed.

While having access to the current editorials and commentaries is a tremendous benefit to faculty and students, we recommend that when you need to search the archives of the New York Times you use the library’s version of the archive rather than the Times’ own version (now also being made freely available to faculty and students). The ProQuest Historical Newspaper database offers the full-text of the New York Times from 1851 through 2003. Not only is the search system more robust and functional than the Times’ own interface, but the ProQuest version offers more text, such as classified advertisements. In addition, the Times has placed limits on the number of documents that can be retrieved from the archive. There are no limits for Temple faculty and students when using the Library’s ProQuest Historical Newspaper database.

–Steven Bell

Stuff You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Google

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March 27th, 28th, and 29th at 1pm Tech Center – Green Room 205A “Google gave me 8,956,441 hits. This stinks.” Decrease your frustration with Google by learning how to use it like any other library database. In other words, like a pro! In this session a Temple University Librarian will cover how to find books, journal articles, news, maps, and more through Google. Learn how to use Google’s advanced options to focus a search and get the most relevant results. Questions? Contact David Murray.

Author Reading: Tommie Smith

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Tommie Smith raising his fist upon receiving the gold medal. On Friday, March 23, 2007 the Temple University Libraries, in collaboration with Temple University Press, will host an author appearance by Tommie Smith, one of the most celebrated track and field athletes of all time. He will discuss his book “Silent Gesture: The autobiography of Tommie Smith” written by Tommie Smith and David Steele.

The author appearance is accompanied by an exhibit which reflects on Tommie Smith and his Black Power display at the 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico City. The exhibit includes originals or replicas of historical documents from the Charles Blockson Collection, Special Collections, and Urban Archives about Philadelphia’s response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the history of Temple University. A reception follows the discussion and book signing.

The event will be held in the Paley Library, Lecture Hall, Ground Floor beginning at 2:30 p.m.

For more information, please contact the Urban Archives at 215-204-5750.

Shopping List for the Hungry Mind 3

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(Recommendations from library staff.)

READING: The Medici Effect: What elephants & epidemics can teach us about innovation by Frans Johansson. It’s a business management book (yawn) celebrating the Intersection of ideas that makes me feel pretty good about being in a library (career choice!) — although I don’t think libraries are ever mentioned (hmmm.)

PLAYING: “Lost in Blue” for Nintendo DS. High school senior Keith and nearly blind Skye get tossed on a deserted island and have to keep themselves going with realistic tasks and on the lookout. It’s hard, it’s sometimes tedious, it’s great to stay alive.

LISTENING: The Big Bam : the life and times of Babe Ruth (paper version) by Leigh Montville as an abriged audio book. The guy was a true American phenomena of time and place and this is a great bio that works as a story being told.

WATCHING: The Wire. A David Simon and Edward Burns television creation that continues their amazing documentation and fictionalization of the shadows of urban Baltimore (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood) that have universal appeal and relevance.

–Rick Lezenby

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READING: A companion to African-American Studies edited by Lewis Gordon and Jane Gordon. Essays on the difficulty and installation of African-American Studies in colleges and universities in the USA. We might take it for granted now, but there is still antagonism about this site. Gordon and Gordon (philosophy and political science) are editors, both at Temple University. Introduction by the editors sets up the playing field of this subject matter.

WATCHING: A Street Car Named Desire (1951) film. Janet Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden A must-see film; one of Brando’s first films. The DVD from circulation is a special edition with two discs: disc #2 has outtakes and screen tests of Brando. Do it! (Brando looks like a teen-ager, in the screen test.)

LISTENING: “Sing Sing Sing”. A famous jazz number, popularized by Benny Goodman (1939). I heard a performance from the Lincoln Center, with a contemporary band, and with commentary by Ed Bradle

–Al Vara

Biography resources for your work

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The three biography databases below are very useful and you should not overlook them in your research. One of the amazing things about these online sources is that you can search by religion, gender, occupation and more. So you don’t have to have a particular person in mind to use these databases. You can just have a certain type of person in mind, i.e. a Quaker abolitionist in 18th century Britain; a Baptist African American female teacher from the 19th century; or an Irish American involved in the steel industry in the 20th. All databases below are available on the library’s A-Z database list.

African American Biographical Database
A resource of first resort when you are looking for biographical information, including photographs and illustrations, for African Americans. From the famous to the everyday person, AABD includes profiles and full-text sketches providing both biographical detail and illuminating narratives chronicling the lives of Black Americans.

American National Biography
Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. More than a decade in preparation, the American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
56,000 lives … 63 million words … 10,300 portraits … all on your desktop. For more info, see the blog I wrote on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Also check out Biographies Illustrated Plus and Biography Resource Center.

Fred

Library Prize Info Sessions

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Library Prize for Undergraduate Research Information Sessions.

The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research was established to encourage the use of Library resources, to enhance the development of library research techniques, and to honor the best research projects produced each year by Temple University undergraduate students.

The deadline for submissions for this year’s Prize is April 6, 2007. Please come to one of these four info sessions with your questions and for information about the submission process and requirements.

Location: Paley Library Mezzanine, room 130

Tuesday, March 13
12 noon – 1 p.m.

Wednesday, March 21
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.

Wednesday, March 28
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Tuesday, April 3
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

For more information, click here.

–Gretchen Sneff


RefWorks Fundamentals Webinars

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RefWorks, which is provided free through the library, is a tool to manage citations (import, export, search, create formatted bibliographies). Information on free webinars about using RefWorks follows:

RefWorks will be hosting a series of training webinars in the coming weeks. The sessions are designed to cover the “fundamental” features of the service and are open to any RefWorks user at no cost.

Enrollment is limited to 50 people per session and registration is required.

During the 75 minute session(s), we will cover the following:

– Creating an account and logging in
– Navigating RefWorks
– Getting references into RefWorks:
– from a direct export partner
– from a text file
– from an online catalog or database search in RefWorks
– adding references manually
– Organizing references
– Using quick search to search your RefWorks database
– Creating a bibliography from a folder of references
– Using Write-N-Cite to format your paper

The first three schedule webinars will be held:

Wednesday, 28 March 2007 at 11 AM EDT — attendees click here to register
Tuesday, 3 April 2007 at 2 PM EDT — attendees click here to register
Wednesday, 11 April 2007 at 3:30 PM EDT — attendees click here to register

Digital Beethoven

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The Beethoven-House in Bonn has recently added to its Digital Archives the sketchbooks of Ludwig van Beethoven. The Archives include digitized first-edition scores, manuscripts, letters, and now sketchbooks. The sketchbooks are particularly important for scholars to understand Beethoven’s creative process. Beethoven had two types of sketchbooks. At his home, he jotted down ideas in large hardbound volumes. But, when he was not at home, he carried smaller, soft-bound books to capture ideas as he was on his way. After his death, many of the sketchbooks were taken apart and pages sold separately. Now, cooperation between many libraries has made possible and accessible a nearly complete collection of all of Beethoven’s extant sketchbooks, not only those kept at the Beethoven-House. Detailed explanations in English of each page of the pieces involved, watermarks, and history of the particular sketchbook enhance this already rich and interesting resource.

At the Beethoven-House Digital Archive, one can search for a specific piece of music and find a digitized first edition, perhaps a manuscript, as well as relevent letters and sketches. Letters are linked with sound files of audio versions. Some sound files of musical examples are also included.

Exploring the Digital Archive of the Beethoven-House is truly exciting, made even moreso by the addition of Beethoven’s sketchbooks.

Bravo Beethoven-House!

Beethoven Resources at Temple Libraries

Paley Library has a strong collection of books about Beethoven as well as scoresby him. To listen to music by Beethoven, go to Classical Music Library, a streaming audio service, access provided by Temple University Libraries.

–Anne Harlow

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online

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Hello All, Great news: we now have the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online! It’s available from the All Databases list. REP has both superb content and an equally superb interface. There is also supplemental content online that is not in the print volumes. To give just one example of the excellent documentation in this reference source, the bibliographies of major philosophers give the authoritative editions of the authors’ works, both in the original language and in English translation. Coverage of this encyclopedia is very broad and skips over many disciplinary boundaries. To provide just a few examples, there are articles on Augustine, Martin Luther, Maimonides, Ibn Sina, and Confucius that would be of interest to students of religion. There are articles on ethics, business ethics, and journalistic ethics. If your interest is literature there are articles on katharsis, mimesis, poetry, tragedy, and literature and philosophy. For social scientists, there are articles on the history of the philosophy of the social sciences, the philosophy of the social sciences, and on prediction in the social sciences. For historians, there are articles on the philosophy of history and on Chinese theories of the philosophy of history. Key Features (from REP web site)

  • 2,000 original entries from a team of over 1,300 of the world’s most respected scholars and philosophers
  • Covers an unparalleled breadth of subject matter, including Anglo-American, ethical and political, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, continental and contemporary philosophy
  • Over 25,000 hot-linked cross-references between articles and new links to other editorially reviewed websites
  • An invaluable resource for all levels of users – students and general readers gain a rapid orientation with accessible summaries at the beginning of every in-depth article
  • Regularly upgraded with new material, revisions, and bibliographic updates, REP provides access to the latest scholarship and major developments in philosophical inquiry worldwide

Also, don’t forget about philosophy encyclopedias on Gale Virtual Reference Library: Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. —Fred Rowland

Shopping List for the Hungry Mind 2

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READING: A Prayer for the City: The True Story of a Mayor and Five Heroes in a Race Against Time by Buzz Bissinger. The inside-look at then Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell as he combats budget gaps, unions, and fickle constituents during his first term in office. A story for the city of Philadelphia, especially as it approaches a mayoral election in the Fall.

WATCHING: Igby Goes Down (2002) directed by Burr Steers: In the vein of The Catcher in the Rye, this coming of age satire follows Igby as he stumbles down the paths of self-discovery and self-destruction amid his dysfunctional family upbringing.

LISTENING: Cake’s “Pressure Chief”. Catchy lyrics with a quiet, tongue-in-cheeck kind of humor mixed with multiple musical genres make this Indie band always a delight.

–Kristina Devoe

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READING: Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories: Existential Fiction at its dreariest. Dostoevsky is a master in this genre as well as a master writer in general. He portrays the mannerisms of polite society so well and really knows how to set a scene. These stories are not as involved or active as some of his other works (like The Brothers Karamazov) but they are great for their own reasons.

WATCHING: The X Files, all seasons: This show is the precursor to the types of crime dramas you see all over television now. Before The X Files television shows never bothered to include even portions of the science behind crime and detective work. Now, it’s included in every show. Even though it had a relatively low special effects budget, and took place in the early 90’s, The X Files still does a better job of telling a story and not being too dumb for normal audiences.

LISTENING: Phish and Dave Matthews Band: I happen to read an article in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Rock History about the so-called “Jam Band” phenomena, and it mentioned both of these bands. I’ve always been a fan of both groups but never considered some of the possible philosophical motivations. I have been listening to both, especially the live recordings, and noting the spirit of the improvisations that they embark on while performing. I could listen to these two bands all day and never get tired.

–Nik Barkauskas

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READING: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot (1796) (a translation in English) (the original in French): Inspired by Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, philosopher Diderot wrote this funny novel about a master and his servant who believes in determinism. The real joy here is the author’s experimental approach to narrative, which prefigures the metafictional work of authors from the 20th century. First lines: “How had they met? By chance, like everyone. What were their names? What’s it matter to you? Where were they coming from? From the closest place. Where were they going? Does anyone know where they’re going? What did they say? The master said nothing, and Jacques said that his captain said that all that happens, good or bad, is written on high.”

WATCHING: Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, Sundays at 10pm or download at iTunes): Barring names, this television series bears almost no relation to its campy 70s precursor. The creators have taken up the long tradition of social commentary in science fiction (usually absent from sci-fi television) and shaped an episodic narrative that is not only dramatically riveting but places contemporary ethical, social, and political issues onto a futuristic setting. From presidential elections to terrorism, collaboration, and torturing enemies, Battlestar Galactica is one of the bravest shows on television for allowing us to step back and look at these issues anew. The best show on television, period.

LISTENING: Freedom’s Road by John Mellencamp (2007): Probably best known for his small town pop hit “Jack and Diane”, Mellencamp has been putting out albums for years that blend rock, country, pop, and folk influences into a oeuvre that is often inconsistent but riddled with great songs. His latest album continues his tendency to political commentary with songs that are clearly directed at our current political climate. “Our Country”, which I’m sure you’ve heard on commercials for trucks, taken without its commercial baggage is a great Woody Guthrie-esque tune that harkens back to “This Land is Your Land”. “Freedom’s Road” addresses the glories and dangers of freedom.

–Derik Badman