Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Sustaining Scholarly Publishing

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In September, I sat down with the director of the Temple University Press Alex Holzman to speak about an AAUP report entitled “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing”, which he helped to organize during his tenure as president of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP). The 2011 report tries to make sense of recent changes in scholarly publishing. Though increasingly fractured by the proliferation of business models, the current publishing environment also provides excellent opportunities for future scholarship.

[The report is available from two different sources.]

The interview with Alex Holzman provides an excellent overview of the Temple University Press as well as the contemporary business, economic and academic environment in which university presses operate. Although we use the report as a touchstone for our conversation, there a lot of details included in the report that we do not cover. I strongly recommend taking the time to read the comprehensive and clearly written report.

Listen to the audio of Part I

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Audio Download Link (for later)

Listen to the audio of Part II

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Audio Download Link (for later)

 

—Fred Rowland

Library Prize: eligibility expanded

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The eighth annual Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and the second annual Library Prize for Undergraduate on Sustainability & the Environment will be held in the Spring 2012 semester. The purpose of the prize is to encourage the use of the Libraries’ resources and to highlight the best research among Temple undergraduates. This year’s prize submission deadline is Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 5 pm.

This year the eligibility requirements have changed to include students participating in the McNair Scholars Program, The Creative Arts, Research and Scholarship (CARAS) Program, and students who finish their coursework in December 2011 and graduate in January. Below are the complete eligibility requirements.

To be eligible to win the 2012 Prize, applicants must:

  • be Temple undergraduates at any class level and in any discipline, and be enrolled, i.e. taking a class or classes, in the Spring 2012 semester or having completed all undergraduate coursework during the Fall 2011 semester (i.e. graduating in January 2012).

  • have completed their research project for a credit course at Temple during the Spring 2011, Summer 2011, Fall 2011, or Spring 2012 semesters, or began The Ronald McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program in the Summer of 2011 or received funding for The Creative Arts, Research and Scholarship (CARAS) Program during the Spring or Fall of 2011.

  • agree to contribute to a display about their research in theLibrary during the year following receipt of the Sustainability Prize

  • agree that all winning prize materials will become permanent property of the University Archives and may be displayed on the Library’s website

  • agree to attend the Library Prize Awards Ceremony during the week of April 30 to May 4, 2012.  (You need to attend the Awards Ceremony in order to win the Library Prize.)

We look forward to another great year for the Library Prize. If you have any questions about the new eligibility requirements, or any other questions, please email the libprize@temple.edu. 

Try Our New Search Engine, Summon

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Easily discover the world of library content with Temple University Libraries’ new search engine, Summon. Summon simultaneously searches the Diamond catalog, the Libraries’ digital content and millions of public domain e-books offered online by the Hathi Trust.

Screen shot of the new Summon search box on the Libraries' homepage, (linked to larger version). Type a keyword in the Summon searchbox on our homepage. Once you get results, refine them through categories listed on the left-hand side of the screen. Eliminate superfluous results and select your content based on library location, publication date, topic, content type and other options. For example, if you only want print books available at our library locations, click “book” under “Content Type.” You can also select “e-book,” “journal article,” “dissertation,” or “book review” and combine categories for various results. If you already know exactly what you are looking for there are, of course, advanced search options. Summon can quickly tell you what content is available and in what format. The “full-text” icon specifies which material is available electronically through the Libraries. Summon entries even indicate which books are on loan and when they are due back! Screenshot of a Summons search result page, (linked to larger version).
 We hope you find Summon as easy to use as we do. It’s a one-stop search for an amazing breadth of content accessible through Temple University Libraries. We are always open to suggestion, however; so let us know what we can do to improve Summon. Please note that the Summon searchbox replaces the Diamond searchbox on our homepage. You can still access the Diamond Catalog from the homepage, under “Books, Movies & More.”

Google Scholar Introduces New Citations Metrics Tool

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Faculty members and researchers are always interested in how many times their articles are cited. Temple University Libraries provides access to the Web of Science, a useful database for obtaining citation counts. Now Google Scholar is offering a service called Google Scholar Citations that will provide scholars with a profile page that monitors their articles’ citation counts. It appears to be based on institutional affiliation, so if a scholar has published at several instituitons it may be necessary to have multiple profiles on the service. Right now the service is available in limited supply. If you are not able to obtain a profile you can sign up to be notified when the service is officially launched for general consumption. But you can take a look at the profiles created by others to get a sense of what it will offer. That’s right. You can make your profile (the list of your articles and their citation counts – along with a few metrics) public – and then share it with your friends. Won’t they be thrilled to see how many citations you’ve amassed.

John Raines, Freedom Rider

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From May to December 1961, the Freedom Riders fanned out on buses and trains across the deep south in order to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia which determined that segregated vehicles and facilities in interstate travel were illegal. Organized by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), Freedom Riders consisted of groups of blacks and whites traveling together and refusing to recognize any barriers placed between blacks and whites. They would sit together on buses and trains, wait together in terminals, and eat together in restaurants. They met with resistance, often extremely violent, but were committed to responding nonviolently.

Temple religion professor John Raines, who will be retiring on June 30, 2011, was a Freedom Rider. From July 8-15, 1961 he traveled by bus with black and white companions from St. Louis, Missouri to Little Rock, Arkansas to Shreveport, Louisiana and finally to New Orleans, Louisiana.

Recently, in his office in Anderson Hall, he told me the story of his freedom ride.

A Million e-Books Added to Summon, Our New Search Engine

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Summon, our new search engine, is now being previewed in its Beta version on the Libraries homepage. We are very pleased to announce that the Summon search now includes the public domain books offered by the Hathi Trust in full-text online format. These are books digitized by Google and numerous research library partners.

Hathi Trust, a non-profit cooperative centered at the University of Michigan, claims more than 2.3 million volumes are being served. That works out to about 910,000 titles at the moment, give or take. By the end of the year, we expect that total could reach 1 million titles all available 24/.7 in full-text online.

These Hathi Trust titles are for the most part in addition to the over 517,000 full-text online e-books which the Temple University Libraries already offered within the online catalog and Summon.

Amazing.

A great many of the Hathi Trust works date from 1923 or before. All books published prior to 1923 are now in the public domain and no longer prohibited from free reproduction by original copyright. However, there are tens of thousands of later works included because they are government documents or were found to be in public domain. Most are in English, but over 200,000 foreign language titles are included as well.

At present, Hathi Trust titles can be retrieved through Summon by author or title. For example, search Summon using the keywords Russell Conwell and limit the content type to ebook. Now you can read original works by Dr. Conwell, the founder of Temple University, or early biographies of the man.

Later this year Hathi and Summon promise to add full-text keyword searching to deliver a Google-like experience.

Please try Summon and let us know how it works for you.

– Jonathan LeBreton, Senior Associate University Librarian

Winners of 2010-2011 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment Announced

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Temple University Libraries would like to congratulate the student winners and honorable mentions for this year’s Library Prize for Undergraduate Research and Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment. The winners of the Library Prize are:

  • Melissa Garretson, “The Dancing Intelligence of the Age: Women of the Institute of Colored Youth, 1852-1903,” for History 4296 with professor Bettye Collier-Thomas
  • Karl McCool, “A Pornographic Avant-Garde: Boys in the Sand, LA Plays Itself, and the Construction of a Gay Masculinity,” for LGBT Studies 3400 with professor Whitney Strub
  • Cara Rankin, “Cracking Consensus: The Dominican Intervention, Public Opinion and Advocacy Organizations in the 1960s,” for History 4997 with professor Petra Goedde Winners of the Library Prize for Sustainability and the Environment are:
  • Tom Gallen, Jennifer Huber, Paloma Vila, “Harvesting Stormwater for Urban Farm Irrigation,” for Engineering 4296 with professors Joseph Picone and Robert J. Ryan
  • Derek T. Lichtner, “Can the Global Economy Afford to Preserve Biodiversity? The Econosphere-Biosphere Connection,” for Earth and Environmental Sciences 2096 with professor Laura Toran Congratulations also to our honorable mentions.

These noteworthy papers for the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research are:

  • Wajeeha Choudhary, “The Loose Threads of ‘Rag Head’ Phobia,” for American Studies 2900 with Professor Kelly Shannon
  • Anna Dini, “Reconciling Faith and Astrology in Early Modern Europe: Marsilio Ficino’s Influence on John Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’,” for English 4597 with Professor Susan Wells For the Library Prize for Sustainibility and the Environment:
  • Bonnie Evans, “Correlates of Intrinsic Extinction Risks of Lemur Species,” for Biology 4391 with professor Brent Sewall

Please join us next Tuesday, May 3 at 4PM in the Paley Library Lecture Hall to hear more from all of this year’s winners and celebrate the accomplishments of all of the 2010-2011 applicants. The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research on Sustainability and the Environment is made possible by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

We would like to thank John H. Livingstone, Jr., SBM ’49 for his generous support of the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research.

West African Muslims of Harlem

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Zain Abdullah is a professor of Religion at Temple University who recently published Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem(Oxford University Press, 2010). It is an ethnographic study of francophone Africans from Guinea, Senegal, and Cote d’Ivoire who have made a home in Harlem, radically transforming this section of New York City. On Monday, February 28, 2011 he stopped by my office to discuss his new book.

The Interview is in two parts.

Black Mecca Interview with Zain Abdullah, Part 1

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iTunes U link (for downloads)

Black Mecca Interview with Zain Abdullah, Part 2

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iTunes U link (for downloads)

Subscribe to this podcast series

—Fred Rowland

 

Delphine Khanna joins Temple University Libraries as Head of Digital Library Initiatives

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I am delighted to welcome Delphine Khanna to Temple University Libraries, where she will take on the role of Head of Digital Library Initiatives beginning today, December 1. Delphine will create a Digital Initiatives Department, where she will oversee the digitization of special collections and other library materials in text, image, and video formats. She will also lead the development of digital repository systems to preserve and make accessible the intellectual output of Temple University, and the implementation of discovery tools related to these initiatives.

Delphine comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, where she served as the Digital Projects Librarian for over ten years. Prior to that, she held several digital librarianship positions at Rutgers University. Delphine earned her MLS from Syracuse University, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science from the University of Paris.

Please join me in welcoming Delphine to Temple University Libraries.

With warm wishes,

Larry P. Alford

Temple University Libraries Fall Public Programming Schedule Expanded

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Temple University Libraries Fall Public Programming Schedule Expanded The Libraries have added three new programs to the fall 2010 schedule:

November 1, 7PM Philadelphia Sound and Vision Ibrahim Theater @ International House, 3701 Chestnut Street Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives presents a look at hidden stories of music and sound in Philadelphia. It features some of the more distinct characters, traditions and venues in the city’s recent history. The screening will feature: free-jazz performer Sun Ra and his Arkestra, David Bowie visiting Veterans Stadium, synthesizer expert Gerson Rosenbloom, Philadelphia International soul legends McFadden & Whitehead, punk/…new wave stalwart Ken Kweeder at the Hot Club, the organist at the Spectrum sports and entertainment venue, jazz-vibraphonist Khan Jamal, Mummers new years string bands, the original Electric Factory concert venue and more! The program consists of unique footage from the Urban Archives’ collections including unaired news footage, television broadcasts, news magazines and documentaries from local networks WPVI 6 and KYW 3. This highlights recent preservation and digitization work done on our film and video holdings. Open to the general public and FREE!

November 2, 5:30 PM Nancy Heinzen on Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 South 18th Street Take a look inside Philadelphia history with Nancy Heinzen, author of The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square. (Temple University Press, 2009). Author Nancy Heinzen will discuss the growth and development of Rittenhouse Square, illustrating that not only is this urban space unique, but so too is the combination of human events and relationships that have created and sustained it. This program is presented by Temple University Libraries, the Temple University Press and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Come early to explore PAAs newest exhibition, The Sitting Room: Four Studies, in the first and second floor galleries.

December 1, 3:30 PM In Conversation with Andrew Lam East Eats West: The unexpected Consequences of Asian Immigration to America Paley Library Lecture Hall, 1210 Polett Walk, Ground Floor From cuisine and martial arts to sex and self-esteem, East Eats West shines new light on the bridges and crossroads where two hemispheres meld into one worldwide “immigrant nation.” In this new nation, with its amalgamation of divergent ideas, tastes, and styles, today’s bold fusion becomes tomorrow’s classic. But while the space between East and West continues to shrink in this age of globalization, some cultural gaps remain. Andrew Lam, the award-winning author of Perfume Dreams, continues to explore the Vietnamese diaspora, this time concentrating not only on how the East and West have changed but how they are changing each other. And he’ll talk about what it is like to thrive in the West with one foot still in the East.” Andrew is a writer and an editor with the Pacific News Service, a short story writer, and, has been, for 8 years, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” He co-founded New America Media, an association of over 2000 ethnic media organizations in America. His essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. His short stories are also anthologized widely and taught in many Universities and colleges. This program is part of the Language and Linguistics Speaker Series organized by the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Program. Support also provided by CIBER in the Fox School of Business and Management, GenEd, Vietnamese Studies, Department of English and the Faculty Senate Lectures and Forums Committee.