Tag Archives: Library Technology

Access to licensed Library subscription resources

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The Temple University Libraries purchase at significant annual cost exceeding $5 million a wide array of subscription materials including databases, certain software programs, and online electronic journals and books. We negotiate these annual costs in order to minimize the expense to Temple University. In most cases the costs for these licenses have been based on Temple’s full-time equivalent enrollment although some are based on the number of simultaneous users allowed.

While we would very much like to offer alumni access from home or work to our subscription databases, online journals and ebooks, it is economically infeasible. When we negotiate and pay for licenses based on Temples 34,000 FTE enrollment, we are then contractually obligated to ensure that only current Temple students, faculty, and staff have access to the resource. If we were to allow the 200,000+ Temple alumni access to our licensed resources, library costs would increase an estimated five-fold.

We therefore regularly review with Computing Services staff the protocols such as the Temple Portal by which we together ensure that only current students, faculty and staff are able to access these restricted licensed resources and that alumni and others are excluded. On Tuesday April 10 such a review resulted in resetting access in order to properly exclude from off-campus access alumni with Temple email accounts. A handful of Temple alumni who had earlier been able to get into some of our restricted resources will as a result now encounter turnaways in keeping with our license restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. As always, alumni and other guests are welcome to come to campus and access these resources from within the library where we are allowed by contract to offer on-site access to these resources. As of April 11, we are making provisions for Temple alumni currently enrolled as students in the Senior Scholars program to continue to have access as current students.

Jonathan LeBreton
Senior Associate University Librarian

Civil Rights in a Northern City: Philadelphia

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Thanks to a state Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant, a Libraries project team has digitized more than 1,500 historical photographs, films, news clippings, manuscripts, oral histories, and pamphlets, documenting two events in civil rights history in Philadelphia: Girard College Desegregation (1954–1968) and the Columbia Avenue Riots (1964).

It’s all available at http://northerncity.library.temple.edu

The content, from the Libraries’ special collections, encourages students to use unique primary sources to study these significant events. Highlights include newly-created oral histories; several hours of local news footage not seen in over 40 years featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Cecil B. Moore, and other movement leaders; and questionnaires that address Black-Jewish community relations in the 1960s.

Emphasizing that there were major events in the North that propelled the Civil Rights movement forward, the project’s consulting historian Matthew Countryman, associate professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, believes that this project exposes students and scholars to new insights on the issues.

Stay tuned for new content—including sample lesson plans for middle and high school teachers and new modules on other milestones in the history of Philadelphia’s Civil Rights movement

Temple Japan library catalog added to Diamond

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Over the weekend of July 30 -31, 2011, we will migrate the online catalog of holdings for the libraries of Temple University Japan (TUJ) into the main campus online catalog system, Diamond. From August 1 forward, when you search either the catalog (Diamond) or our Summon search engine, you may well begin to find some of the 50,000 library books and journals which are labeled as being in either the TUJ Tokyo campus library or that in Osaka. This change culminates several months of planning. It creates ongoing cost efficiencies for TUJ since TUJ will not need to operate a completely separate online catalog and circulation system. Perhaps most Importantly, TUJ faculty and students will now have a single lookup that lets them search simultaneously for print books (in Japan) and online ebooks (of which there are hundreds of thousands linked from the main campus catalog and Summon). For most main campus users of the online catalog or Summon, the change will not be noticeable. For library users at our TUJ campuses, their old library catalog will be discontinued in favor of Diamond. – Jonathan LeBreton Senior Associate University Librarian

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

Refworks 2.0 launched today

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Refworks is the citation management program that the Temple University Libraries offers to the university community that makes it easier to store, organize, annotate, and output citations as bibliographies. On Monday, August 23, the Libraries’ switched over to the new Refworks 2.0 interface, which provides a more intuitive and efficient user experience. Anyone familiar with the first version of Refworks (now called Refworks Classic) should be able to make this transition with relative ease. (The Refworks Classic interface will be available until December simply by clicking on the “Refworks Classic” link in the upper right corner of the Refworks 2.0 interface.) As before, users can access Refworks 2.0 from the Libraries’ homepage under “Find Articles.”

Here are some of the improvements in Refworks 2.0:

  • Shortcuts that allow quick access to important features
  • Reduced menu bar that includes only the most important items
  • Tabs for quick access to (all) References, Folders, and shared folders

In Refworks 2.0 you don’t need to constantly shift from one page to another to perform simple functions, as was often necessary in Refworks Classic. The same great features are now easier to find and use. Take a spin on Refworks 2.0!

Here’s a Refworks 2.0 preview.

ALERT – Library Computers Undergoing Summer Maintenance

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During the summer months when traffic is slower in the Paley Library, our Library Systems Department has an opportunity to perform routine maintenance on our many computers so that they perform well throughout the academic year.

Beginning Tuesday, July 29 computers will start becoming unavailable so that we can work on them. Only specific groups of computers in different areas of the Library will be affected at any time, so that while there will be less computers available, there should be sufficient computers to meet your needs.

In August the computers at SEAL and Ambler will be maintained. The administration of the Temple University Libraries apologizes in advance for any inconvenience this may cause to the University community, but we hope you will appreciate our desire to keep our computers in the best possible condition for your benefit. Thank you. Here is the maintenance schedule:

June 29 – July 2, 2010: Computers in the Paley Information Commons will be reimaged. All 76 computers will be unavailable while the reimaging is in process.

July 6-7, 2010: Computers on the east side of Paley near the windows will be reimaged. All 26 computers will be unavailable while the reimaging is in process.

July 12-16, 2010: Computers on the 2nd & 3rd floors of Paley will be reimaged.

August 17-19, 2010: Public computers in SEAL will be reimaged with the Fall 2010 image.

August 23-25, 2010: Public computers at Ambler will be reimaged with Fall 2010 image.