Tag Archives: History News

Enhancements to ABC-CLIO History Databases

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The recently released version 4.1 of America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts includes:

-Cross-database searching between Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life
-User-friendly searching, including inverted author names and punctuation alternatives
-Ability for users to save search histories to a personal profile
-Natural language date searching, in addition to the traditional decade and century searching
-Speed improvements for faster searching
-A display option for expanding all of a user’s search result records at once
-Addition of a “print-this-entry” option for each record in a search results display
-Ability to easily limit searches to English language entries only
-OpenURL-support for book entries in the Historical Abstracts database

–Brian Schoolar (Electronic Resources Librarian)

Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition

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Temple University Libraries has acquired Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (c2006). This resource is available not only online but as a 5-volume print work located in Paley Library’s 1st floor reference stacks. The Millennial edition is a greatly updated and expanded version of the previous 2-volume 1970 edition, which has been available both online and in print for many years.

The online Millennial edition represents a major step forward in the researcher’s ability to gather and compare historical U.S. statistics. “It has now been expanded to include over 37,000 data series, which is three times more than the previous edition. This edition includes dozens of new topics including slavery, American Indians, and poverty” (HSUS Introduction, Cambridge Online). Topics are “placed in historical context by a recognized expert in the field. The fully searchable and downloadable electronic edition . . . permits users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting their own particular areas of interest” (ibid.). Additional features include:

* Save your search criteria
* Search within a chapter or volume
* Bookmark tables or essays
* Searchable term and contributor indexes
* View tables in PDF or HTML format
* Tables online include full documentation, sources, and footnotes
* Select certain years or series of years to view, download, print, or graph
* Download unrounded table data, for more detailed statistical analyses.
* Enhanced table display features: jump to a certain table column (series), skip over blank data cells, highlight table rows and columns for readability
* Toggle table sorting by ascending or descending year
* Create and download colorful charts, graphs, and plots
* Email a table or essay to a colleague

–David C. Murray

London Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)

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The Times Digital Archive, another major newspaper acquisition by Temple Libraries, is a searchable, full-text and full-image archive of every page of the (London) Times from 1785 to 1985. This database has obvious appeal to anyone studying the history of Britain and her Empire. The database complements Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), an important new resource recently discussed in the Library Blog. —David C. Murray

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

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For those of you, like me, who remember libraries prior to the advent of digital resources, ECCO will serve as a revelation. In a world of hype and spin, this is the real deal. Even younger, Web-savvy researchers will be utterly amazed by ECCO. According to Thomson-Gale’s “About” page, ECCO is the “most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken”. It is based on the English Short Title Catalog, and contains the full-text of 150,000 book titles published in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. ECCO provides, “in essence, [easy access to] every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas” (ibid.).

ECCO complements Early English Books Online (EEBO), another Temple database that contains the full-text of nearly 110,000 English-language titles published between 1475 and 1700. It has never before been possible to quickly and comprehensively search the corpus of printed works spanning the entire history of Early Modern Britain. This opens up possibilities for research virtually unimaginable before the creation of ECCO, EEBO, and other primary source databases. Scholars from every conceivable field of inquiry can potentially benefit from access to ECCO. Obvious examples are history (including the history of science & technology), literature, political science, and even music.

Important Note: The undergraduate researcher, especially, should work closely with his or her professor and/or a librarian to identify reference works and other secondary titles that can provide some context for the primary sources discussed in this post. It is important to understand wider social, political, economic, and military contexts in order to make sense of primary documents preserved in the historical record.

—David C.Murray

History News Archive

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Here are the “old” History News entries, originally posted to the Subject Guide. I wanted to remove them from the subject guide while retaining the ability to track history-related library news over the past two years.

New History Blog Category: History News, a new Library Blog category, will serve as a forum for news, events, and discussion of interest to Temple’s History Department. Find announcements about new library databases, trials, search tips, etc. An RSS feed is available. History News replaces this section of the subject guide.
Posted 11/16/05

Trial Databases Page: The Libraries recently created a trial page for electronic databases. Please see the Library Blog entry on this topic for more information.
Posted 11/4/2005

Find Temple History Theses: Use Diamond to find dissertations and theses written by Temple’s history graduate students. For a complete, chronological list of the nearly 300 titles indexed since 1973 (newest to oldest), click here. To search within this list, perform a keyword search in Diamond as follows:

s:History — Temple University Theses. AND [keyword of choice]

Sample searches:

s:History — Temple University Theses. AND military

s:History — Temple University Theses. AND war

s:History — Temple University Theses. AND women

s:History — Temple University Theses. AND mexico

Note that in a Diamond keyword search, “s:” tells the computer to return only those records that match a specific subject heading, in this case “History — Temple University Theses”. See also Digital Dissertations, below.
Posted 9/1/2005

New Database: History Reference Center: Ebsco’s History Reference Center“features cover-to-cover full-text for more than 750 historical encyclopedias and non-fiction books. . . . nearly 60 leading history periodicals. . . . 58,000 historical documents; 43,000 biographies of historical figures; more than 12,000 historical photos and maps; and 87 hours of historical film and video”.
Posted 8/18/2005

New History Databases: PA Gazette & African-American Newspapers: Published in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1800 is often called the New York Times of the 19th Century. African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century includes full-text access to publications such as Freedom’s Journal, the North Star, Provincial Freeman and the Frederick Douglass Papers.
Posted 6/20/2005

New History Database: Early American Imprints: Series I: Evans (1639-1800)and Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819). Based upon the pioneering work of Evans, Shaw, and Shoemaker, Early American Imprints online is the most comprehensive collection of full-text books and broadsides published in the colonies and early United States between 1639 and 1819.
Posted 6/16/2005

Librarian Office Hours in History Department: Catch the history librarian every Monday and Thursday between 10:00 – 11:30 a.m. in Room 937, Gladfelter Hall. Students and faculty can take this opportunity to ask questions about history research, collection development, or any other library-related topic. If for no other reason, please drop by to say hello to your history librarian!
Posted 6/7/2005

Research Guides: Over the course of the next several months look for a number of new history research guides on this site. The first will be guides to Force & Diplomacy and Modern Europe. For those interested in researching the pre-Columbian Americas, please consult Ancient Mesoamerica: A Librarian’s Research Guide.
Posted 1/17/2005

The Encyclopedia of World War II (2004, online version)
An exciting new reference work from ABC-CLIO. Also available in print at Paley Library.
Posted 1/12/2005

New Database Trial: Oxford Scholarship Online
“Oxford Scholarship Online is a groundbreaking online resource, combining OUP’s core scholarly books in four disciplines and powerful research tools into one cross-indexed, fully searchable database. With over 700 classic and newly published titles now available, OSO will be updated quarterly with an additional 200 titles added each year.” Researchers can access Bible-Carrying Christians (2002), the latest book published by the History Department’s own David Harrington Watt.

Trial scheduled to end on 11/13/2004.
Posted 11/15/2004

New Database Trial: History Compass
Offers full-text access to original survey articles published within nine online journals. History Compass also allows the history researcher to access a range of useful reference resources. It allows those involved in the “teaching and research of History to do the following: 1) Teach in a new or unfamiliar area; 2) Keep up with developments in a field and areas related to it; and 3) Ensure that students are exposed only to quality-controlled online content”.

Trial ends on 7/15/2004. Please provide feedback.
Posted 6/21/2004

Evaluating Scholarly Credentials in History
A resource for historians at Temple, this guide details specific tools for determining the quality of a scholar’s academic output. Learn the impact of a journal article or book, or perform a citation analysis on the work of a particular author (who is citing whom, when, and where). Designed primarily for those seeking tenure.
Posted 6/7/2004

Looking for convenient access to history reference material? netLibrary’sReference Center offers full-text access to over 40 reference books in American and world history. Representative titles include A Dictionary of American History, Facts About the Presidents, Encyclopedia of North American Indians, A Concise History of the Middle East, Events That Changed Great Britain Since 1689, The History of India, World Leaders of the 20th Century, and Who’s Who In Ancient Egypt.
Posted 5/12/2004

The War on the Walls is a new online exhibition of historic images taken from the George F. Tyler WWI Poster Collection. Developed by Temple University Libraries, this worthy exhibition features accompanying descriptions and quotations from primary source material, related links to photograph and document images, and powerful zooming capabilities not usually seen in other online exhibits. Jay Lockenour, Associate Professor of History at Temple, wrote one of the essays featured in The War on the Walls. Please remember to sign the guest book.
Posted 5/7/2004

New History Database Trial: Oral History Online
Bring oral history into your classroom! Alexander Street Press’s Oral History Online is the only commercial database of its kind. If you are a member of the history faculty or a history student please provide me with feedback.

Trial ends in May.
Posted 4/30/04

If you haven’t already, take a look at the recently licensed ACLS History E-Book Project. This database contains 1,000 important history books. It will grow in size and become more valuable over time. If appropriate, consider assigning your students readings from this outstanding resource.
Posted 4/30/04

–David C. Murray

Sources for the Study of Early America

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Over the past semester alone, the Libraries have acquired more than eighty databases. That’s an awful lot of new information to keep up with, even for the librarians! The rapid pace of change means that it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint the most appropriate database for a specific research need. One way to keep pace is to consult a discipline-specific subject guide. Another, of course, is to frequently read this blog! And so, in the spirit of “keeping up,” I offer the following list of…

Full-Text, Primary Source Databases Relevant to the Study of Early America

Books

Early American Imprints, Series 1: Evans (1639-1800)
Early American Imprints, Series 2: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)
Making of America Books (University of Michigan)
Pennsylvania County Histories to 1900

Google Books
Many important, pre-1900 monographs are available.

American Memory
Several distinct monograph collections from the Library of Congress: California, First-Person Narratives 1849-1900; The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925; Dance Manuals 1490-1900; Nineteenth-Century Books 1850-1877 (see Making of America, above);Puerto Rico Books & Pamphlets 1831-1929; Sunday School Books 1815-1865;Traveling in America 1750-1920; Upper Midwest Books 1820-1910; and Woman Suffrage Books & Pamphlets 1848-1921.

Newspapers

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
Early American Newspapers, Series 1 (1690-1876)
HarpWeek (1857-1877)
New York Times (1851-present)
Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800)
Wall Street Journal (1889-present)

Journals / Magazines

American Periodical Series Online (1740-1900)
Making of America Journals (University of Michigan)

Ephemera

American Civil War Letters & Diaries
Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970
Early Encounters in North America
Gerritsen Collection: Women’s History Online, 1543-1945
LexisNexis Congressional with the U.S. Serials Set
Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina)
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

—David C. Murray

Trial – Historical Statistics of the United States

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Cambridge University Press has just released the much anticipated Historical Statistics of the United States, Millenial Edition Online. This massive update to the now 30-year-old U.S. Census Bureau title of the same name is already available in Paley Library. A 30-day trial to the online edition has been activated. Please provide feedback. Other sources of historical statistics can be found here. —David C. Murray

International Medieval Bibliography Online

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Temple now has access to the premier database for medievalists, The International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB), which contains over 300,000 articles in thirty different languages. The articles come from journals, conference proceedings, essay collections, and festschriften chosen by a “worldwide network of fifty teams to ensure regular coverage of 4,500 periodicals and a total of over 5,000 miscellany volumes”. Extensive indexing–including separate indexes for subjects, people, places, repositories, and time periods–allows for precise searching. The IMB covers the period from 300 to 1500 CE and the geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, making it relevant to scholars of classics, religion, philosophy, art and archaeology, history, literature, and Islamic studies. In addition to the IMB, here are some other electronic resources relevant to the study of various aspects of the Middle Ages: Encyclopedias:

Databases:

–Fred Rowland

Historical Newspapers

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The library is pleased to announce our new access to Proquest Historical Newspapers, encompassing complete full-text coverage of the New York Times, 1851-2003 (more recent access available through LexisNexis Academic), and the Wall Street Journal, 1889-1989 (more recent access available through Factiva). The papers are available cover to cover (including advertisements) in digital images. They are full-text searchable and searching can be limited to date ranges as well as type of article from news and editorials to editorial cartoons and photos to obituaries and marriage notices. Electronic access to these newspapers adds a range of historical news that was previously only available to us on microfilm. Students will be particularly aided by access to the New York Times of the mid-twentieth century, an era which is frequently requested by undergraduate researchers. —Derik A Badman

Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum

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Educators face the challenge of helping students master a set of abilities collectively termed “Information Literacy” by the library profession – see ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, Information Literacy Defined. The push to promote information literacy within libraries is part of a larger educational reform movement that sees the need for new ways of reaching students and assessing student learning. The ultimate goal is to help students become effective users of information in any format and place.

In brief, information literate persons are able to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” (ibid.). Note that “locate” is only one small part of this definition. Information literacy involves so much more than instructing students on how to access a book in the Diamond catalog, or showing them how to search theHistorical Abstracts. Rather, true Information Literacy involves an entire set of critical thinking skills that can only be developed over time and through direct engagement with the academic curriculum. It involves practice and lots of hands-on work.

Librarians see the need for information literacy more keenly than most, since we interact informally with students every day at the reference desk. Librarians, in other words, experience first-hand the inability of many students to evaluate and contextualize the increasingly massive amounts of data now available online, in print, and in other formats. Roy Rosenzweig, historian at George Mason University, recently wrote that “for many students, the abundance of primary sources can be more puzzling and disorienting than liberating and enlightening” (“Digital Archives Are a Gift,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005). He goes on to say that students often see large amounts of primary sources as “transparent reflections of a historical ‘reality’; not, as a historian would, as imperfect refractions” of a specific place and time (ibid.). Prior to about 1990, students were forced to consult a prescribed set of resources assigned to them by the professor (or suggested by a librarian). Today this is often no longer the case, and regardless of how many times faculty and librarians insist students not use random hits generated by Google, many just aren’t “getting it”. Thus, as Rosenzweig says, “we have done much better at democratizing access to resources than at providing the kind of instruction that would give meaning to those resources” (ibid.).

Classroom discussion and activities around these (and other) themes and outcomes promote information literacy:

1) The importance of seeking out background information to help contextualize a topic;
2) The difference between primary vs. secondary sources in history and other disciplines;
3) Popular vs. scholarly publications, and why the difference is important;
4) The appropriate use of different types of information media, such as books, journals, and online resources; and
5) Evaluation of information resources to assess appropriateness for college-level work.

Again, none of this will likely “stick” with students unless such discussions and activities take place in the classroom and are integrated directly into the curriculum. If you are a Temple faculty member in history who wishes to work more closely with the library on ways to further integrate these ideas into the classroom, I would certainly welcome hearing from you. Instructors in other disciplines should feel free to contact their own librarian subject specialist. Typically, the best opportunity for collaboration between instructor and librarian is “at the point of need,” or at that point when a student needs information for a specific research paper or project.

A big thank you to the many capstone (and other) instructors who have already worked hard to develop information literacy skills in their students. For a great deal more on this subject, including additional outcomes and specific assignment suggestions, please visit Integrating Information Literacy into Temple Courses.

—David C. Murray