Tag Archives: Top News

Brian Boling Joins Temple as Media Services and Digital Production Librarian

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I am delighted to welcome Brian Boling to Temple University Libraries. Brian joined us as the Media Services and Digital Production Librarian on Monday, August 1. He will manage Paley Library’s Media Services Unit, including the oversight and growth of a 12,000-item media collection, working with faculty, students and patrons to ensure the collection supports teaching and research at the university. Brian will also provide support for the media viewing area, micromaterials equipment, and the production and editing of digital media, Brian comes to us from the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University, where he provided reference and managed the collection in their media services department. Prior to that, he worked at the Public Library of Nashville and Davidson County, and The Great Escape Online.com, LLC Brian earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Information Science from the University of Tennessee. Please join me in welcoming Brian to Temple. Carol Lang Interim Dean of University Libraries

Fair Use – Separating the Myth From the Reality

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In this useful advice column published at Inside Higher Ed, well-known copyright expert Patricia Aufderheide shares her seven Myths About Fair Use. This is helpful to all faculty who use copyrighted materials in their teaching, and have uncertainties about when fair use applies to their incorporation or distribution of copyrighted works. Temple University’s academic librarians can also help when there are questions or concerns about copyright and fair use. We both understand the copyright law, and have mechanisims to help faculty avoid violating copyright. We are here to help, so get it touch with us. Start by contacting your departmental library liaison.

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

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.”

2010-2011 Library Prize Interviews

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The three winners of the 2010-2011 Temple University Library Prize for Undergraduate Research were interviewed along with their faculty sponsors at the time of the awards ceremony. The interviews are now available, below.

On the Library Prize Web site, you can find links to their research essays and research papers.

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Audio Download Link (for later)

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

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Audio Download Link (for later)

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

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Cara Rankin, “Cracking Consensus: The Dominican Intervention, Public Opinion and Advocacy Organizations in the 1960s,” for History 4997 with professor Petra Goedde

 

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

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

 

Foundations Department, General Activities Fund and Temple University Libraries Annual Book Giveaway

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Foundations Department, General Activities Fund and Temple University Libraries Annual Book Giveaway Stop by the Paley Library Circulation desk between March 30 and April 6 and ask for your free copy of Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. The first twenty people to ask for the book at the circulation desk will receive one—FREE. But only while that day’s supply lasts. Paglen will also speak in Gladfelter Hall on April 6 at 6PM. Paglen is a social scientist, artist, writer and provocateur. I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me shows patches that reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches-which are worn by military units working on classified missions-are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known. The April 6 program is presented by the Foundations Department at Tyler School of Art and the General Activities Fund at Temple. Temple University Libraries, the Departments of Architecture and of Geography and Urban Studies have provided additional support.

Look for New EZ Borrow Interface

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On Monday March 28th we anticipate launching a new version of EZBorrow. This new version is intended to improve and simplify the system, improve the quality of the search engine, and streamline the results and request process. Although the new system has undergone development and testing over the past few months, this will be the first large-scale use of the new interface. While we hope it will go well, we wanted the Temple University community to be aware of the migration to the new interface and the possibility of bugs that might require our attention. We believe you will find this new version of EZBorrow a nice improvement, but please let us know if you encounter any difficulties or problems. Please contact Penelope Myers at pmyers@temple.edu, or call the Circulation Services Desk at 215-204-0744.