The 5 volume Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. James Birx and available in the Paley Reference stacks (GN11 .E63 2006), is now also available online as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library. The Encyclopedia features “over 1000 entries that focus on topics in physical/ biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural/social anthropology, linguistics, and applied anthropology. Also included are relevant articles on geology, paleontology, biology, evolution, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology.” All articles conclude with a short bibliography with suggestions for further reading; many articles also include a sidebar. Articles are available as PDF files, which provide an exact reproduction of pages from the print edition, or as e-books displayed on a webpage. An eTable of Contents, an eBook Index, and a List of Illustrations are available on the main search page of the Encyclopedia. “The contributions are authored by 300 internationally renowned experts, professors, and scholars from some of the most distinguished universities, institutes and museums in the world. Special attention is given to: hominid evolution, primate behavior, genetics, ancient civilizations, cross-cultural studies, social theories, and the value of human language for symbolic communication.” All databases are listed in the A-Z database listing linked from the Temple University Libraries website. Please contact me if you have any questions. If you would like to have the Gale Virtual Reference Library / Encyclopedia of Anthropology and other social science databases demonstrated to a class, please call me at 215-204-4581 or email me to set a date for a Library User Education class. Gregory McKinney

The Library is pleased to announce the addition of Literature Resource Center (LRC) to its collection of databases.

A superb resource for the undergraduate literary scholar, LRC is a complete reference literature database, providing access to not only biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information on over 127,000 literary figures from all time periods in every literary genre, but also a rich collection of full-text critical analyses spanning diverse literary movements.

Integrating Gale Group’s three core literary databases — Contemporary Authors Online, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism Select — LRC also comprises critical material from known literary resources, such as Children’s Literature Review, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism — in addition to over 200 prominent literary journals.

Searching is seamless. The “Authors By Type” search mode permits the most creative searches, allowing users to search by author ethnicity or nationality, genre, literary movement, or time period. Themes may also be searched, ranging in topics from American identity and dystopia to rites of passage and tragic heroes.

Because of its comprehensive biographical and contextual information, LRC is a truly valuable literary resource and complements well with the Library’s subscription to MLA International Bibliography, the premiere bibliographic database for researching literature and language.

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

—Kristina DeVoe

At long last, the library has access to L’Annee philologique, the most important database for the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. L’Annee reflects the international and multidisciplinary nature of classical studies, indexing books, articles, and conference papers from around the world in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. (You will often find that the abstract to an article is written in a different language than the article itself.) Whether you’re searching for information on the Presocratics, the Homeric Hymns, the archaeological remains of Pompeii, or ancient science and technology, you will find highly relevant and dependable sources here.

L’Annee philologique online is based on the print index of the same name that has been a standard for years among classics scholars. Current online coverage is from print volume 30 (1959) to volume 74 (2003). You can search by Modern Author, Ancient Author, Full Text, Subjects and disciplines, Date, and other criteria. In the case of “Full Text”, this does not mean that you can search the entire contents of articles–this is NOT a full text database. Rather, it means that you can search the entire contents of the article records. This is unusual terminology for users in the United States and reflects L’annee’s European origin.

There are some other important features that might be surprising to non-classicist American users. For the Ancient Author search, you need to input the latinized version of a name, so for instance “liuius”, not “livy”. To search for “livy”, do the Full Text search. Complex searches are also handled differently. You have to build up your search step by step. To combine a Modern Author search with, say, a Subject search, you have to first do the author search, then the subject search, and finally combine the two searches using the boolean operator AND. Once you’ve done all the simple searches describing your topic (and you can have many), the combining and recombining of search sets–using AND, OR, and NOT–is made easy and efficient.

Unfortunately, the Help pages to this database are sparse. Below I’ve listed a bunch of academic library tutorials that I found useful:

• http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/useits/annee_phil/annee-philologique.html
• http://www.library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/lannee/index.html
• http://www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/APhGuide.html.

–Fred Rowland