Web of Science Backfiles Added

Posted on January 11, 2008 by Gerald Doyle

We are pleased to announce that Temple University Libraries has acquired Web of Science backfiles to the year 1900. The breakdown by discipline is:

Arts & Humanities back to 1975
Social Sciences back to 1956
Science back to 1900

Web of Science is a repository of historic, multi-disciplinary journal literature. The backfiles are critical to locating a wealth of useful historic source and citation information. Of the 50 most highly cited items in Web of Science, more than 60% were published over 20 years ago. Via the powerful linking capabilities of the Web, retrospective data becomes easily available and maximizes serendipitous discovery. —Kathy Szigeti

New Platform for ABC-CLIO Databases

Posted on December 8, 2007 by Gerald Doyle

The two ABC-CLIO databases, America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts, are now available on the familiar EBSCOhost platform. Advantages of having these core history databases on Ebsco include multiple database searching; easy linking to full-text databases such as JSTOR; personalized folders, a part of My EBSCOhost, for those who choose to create personalized accounts; the Historical Period Limiter, a way to find articles that discuss an event or events that occurred within a specific time frame; and a new cited reference search encompassing both databases. This last feature can be used in conjunction with Web of Science to more accurately gauge the importance to the field of history of any refereed journal article. —David C. Murray

Get Great Teaching Tips

Posted on November 9, 2007 by Steven Bell

…from The Teaching Professor.

Rare is the instructor who hasn’t encountered a challenge in the classroom. Equally rare is the instructor who couldn’t benefit from proven techniques shared by colleagues who’ve discovered ways to enhance the teaching and learning process. Within higher education, a respected and popular source that faculty use to share their ideas and best practices in teaching and learning is a publication called The Teaching Professor. Published 10 times a year, it incorporates into 6-8 pages of fast reading tips and techniques for everything from better tests and quizzes to improved classroom discussions to effective technology integration.

Temple University Libraries has just made it easy for all University instructors to be up-to-date with every new issue of The Teaching Professor. The Libraries now offer institutional access to the electronic version of the publication, both on and off campus. There is also an audio MP3 version of each issue. You can directly access The Teaching Professor here.

There you can examine the latest issue, any issue in the archive, or you can search for articles on a particular topic (e.g., lectures, quizzes). The November 2007 issue features articles on engaging large science classes, dealing with students who participate too much, and making the syllabus more than a contract.

In addition, interested faculty and administrators can sign up to receive e-mail alerts of the latest issues. To do so, register using this account information:

Voucher code: TEMPLE
PIN Number: 2310

-Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian

Juan Williams Audio Interview

Posted on November 1, 2007 by

On Monday, October 22, Temple University Libraries, the College of Liberal Arts, the General Education Program and the Office of the Provost welcomed distinguished journalist and NPR Senior Correspondent Juan Williams to a packed house.

Williams, one of America’s leading political writers and thinkers, gave his engaging lecture, “Eyes on the Prize: The Truths of American Race Relations” to a capacity crowd in Paley Library Lecture Hall. Williams is a Senior Correspondent for National Public Radio, a political analyst for Fox Television and a regular panelist on FoxNews Sunday. He has written prize-winning columns and editorials for The Washington Post. Williams has also worked extensively in the documentary medium, having won an Emmy Award for his television writing.

After his lecture, Williams sat down with reference librarian Fred Rowland to talk about his most recent book, Enough : the phony leaders, dead-end movements, and culture of failure that are undermining Black America– and what we can do about it. The interview was recorded and is available as a downloadable mp3 file:

Listen to the audio (22:00, 5.2MB mp3 file)

You can also subscribe to our podcast feed for future audio content from the Temple University Libraries.

-Nicole Restaino, Library Communications Specialist

Featured Database: Gale Virtual Reference Library

Posted on October 30, 2007 by Gerald Doyle

A Temple News reporter recently asked me about underutilized library resources. She wanted to know which resources, if more widely known, would have the greatest positive impact on students’ research. At first I thought about JSTOR,Periodicals Archive Online, and other high-profile journal databases. After some additional thought I began to realize that another category of resources receives far too little attention in today’s research environment. I’m talking about general reference material — scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, statistical sources, and bibliographies. After all, finding reliable background information — a primary purpose of reference works — is absolutely critical to good research. Temple subscribes to several databases that provide digital versions of traditional encyclopedias and other reference sources. Among these databases are ABC-CLIO eBooks, Cambridge Companions, Credo Reference (formerly xreferplus), Gale Virtual Reference Library, netLibrary Reference Center, Oxford Reference Online, Reference Universe, and Sage eReference.

For history researchers, each of these databases has something to offer. Here I will highlight the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a database that provides full-text access to twenty history reference works, including these four noteworthy titles:

Encyclopaedia Judaica.jpg
Encyclopaedia Judaica: Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to Americana and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition is important to scholars, general readers and students.

Encyclopedia of European Social History: This six-volume reference includes more than 230 articles, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 words, on everything from serfdom and the economy, to witchcraft and public health.
Modern Middle East.jpg
Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa: The set covers the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, with major sections on Colonialism and Imperialism, the World Wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United Nations involvement in the region. Each country in the region is reviewed, detailing its population, economy and government.
History of Ideas.jpg
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas: A six-volume survey of the history of Western thought and culture, presented through 700 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry explores the origin, cultural interpretations, and historical themes of such subjects as beauty, love, feminism, diversity, and social capital, among many others.

—David C. Murray

New: Find Articles by Citation

Posted on October 12, 2007 by Fred Rowland

We have just added a new service to TUlink. The Find Articles by Citation form allows you to enter an article citation (or part of a citation) and let TUlink find the full-text for you.

As long as you enter at least a Journal Title, ISSN, DOI, or PMID, TUlink will try to get you a link. In many cases you will get a direct link to the full-text labeled “Article”. In some cases, the best TUlink can do is get you a “Journal” link that will take you to our electronic access to the journal where your citation is found. If Temple holds the journal in question in paper, you will get a link, and if TUlink cannot find any results it will direct you to an interlibrary loan form where you can request your article.

(More information on using the TUlink Find Articles by Citation form.)

In conjunction with this new addition we have slightly altered the “Find Articles” section of our library home page. We have added Find Articles “by Citation” to the list. Also, as part of this alteration, the list of “Only Full-Text” databases has been removed. The reasons for this are two fold: a) with the addition of TUlink, even if a database doesn’t have full-text in it, full-text access is a few clicks away through the “Find Full-Text’ icon; b) the full-text database list has gotten so long that it is no longer the small, useful subset of resources it once was.

–Derik A Badman,
Digital Services Librarian

Use Google Scholar to Find Full-Text @ TU

Posted on October 11, 2007 by Fred Rowland

Google Scholar has become a useful search tool because it allows you to search across the content of many different databases, including JSTOR, Project MUSE, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge Journals Online, SpringerLink, HighWire Press, Journals@Ovid Full Text, Sage Journals Online, ScienceDirect, and many more. That is not to say that the entire content of these databases is available through Google Scholar (which has never released a complete list of its sources or the extent of its coverage) but at least some of it is there. Google Scholar also includes books from Google Book Search in its search results.

Up till now, one of the problems with Google Scholar for Temple students, faculty, and staff has been the difficulty in retrieving the full-text of articles. You might find a juicy article in Google Scholar but after clicking on the link get a message that the article is blocked, even for many databases that you know Temple subscribes to. Well, this process has just gotten a whole lot easier.

Now Temple has registered its TUlink service with Google Scholar, which means that you can link directly from Google Scholar into the library’s subscription databases. Look for Find Full-Text @ TU right after the article title and click on it. You will see the TUlink interface pop up with links for full-text if we have it online or in print, or a link to Temple’s Interlibrary Loan Form if we don’t.

From within any of Temple’s campuses, links to Find Full-Text @ TU will appear automatically. From off-campus you need to do one of two things:

Just click HERE and it will automatically set your Google Scholar preferences for Find Full-Text @ TU, or

Go into the preferences of Google Scholar and select Temple University fromLIbrary LInks.

You will find that Google Scholar is a nice addition to your research toolkit. Including it when researching a subject often brings some unusual and unexpected results. Set up your Find Full-Text @ TU preference and give it a whirl.

Find Full-Text @ TU will NOT appear for books. For books, click on the link toLibrary Search at the bottom of the citation. This will take you to the record of the book in WorldCat.org, where you can input a local zip code (Temple’s is 19122) to find a local library with the book.

You can set your Google Scholar preferences to use Refworks as your citation manager. In Google Scholar Preferences, just select Refworks as theBibliography Manager.

–Fred Rowland

CBS 3 Donates Video Archives to Libraries

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Margery Sly

CBS 3 DONATES VAST VIDEO ARCHIVES TO TEMPLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Philadelphia, September 26, 2007 – CBS 3 (KYW-TV) will donate its vast Video archives, a virtual diary of the history of the region during the last thirty years, to Temple University’s Paley Library, CBS 3 President and General Manager Michael Colleran and Temple University President Dr. Ann Weaver Hart announced today.

The station’s collection of more than 20,000 videotapes, which includes daily local newscasts and video clips from the last thirty years of Eyewitness News as well as 15 years of the local lifestyle show, Evening Magazine, will be housed in Temple University Libraries Urban Archives and, once catalogued, will be available to students and local residents alike.

Colleran officially presented the videotapes to Dr. Hart in a ceremony held today at Paley Library.

The station’s archival tape contain many of the most memorable moments in Philadelphia history – from the Pope John Paul II’s visit to Philadelphia in 1979 and the Phillies World Series victory in 1980 to the MOVE bombing in 1985 and the Blizzards of 1983 and 1996. Many national and international stories are also included from the Reagan years in the While House to the fall of Communism in Europe.

“The University is honored to be chosen as guardian of what amounts to a historical record of the last three decades of the 20th century in Philadelphia,” Hart says. “We hope that this collection will encourage others to preserve this type of material, so that future generations will have a first-hand account of the times in which we lived.”

“Anyone interested in the history and culture of 20th century Philadelphia must use the incredible resources held in the Urban Archives,” Dean of University Libraries Larry Alford adds. “Those resources are deepest for the first 80 years of the 20th century because of the archives of The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which ceased publication in 1982. The KYW footage will fill in the gap of that last 20 years.”

Colleran says that, in addition to chronicling local history, the tapes are also a dynamic example of the evolution of local television since the 1970s. “Not only do we see the evolution of news coverage from the anchor desk to live coverage in the field, but we can witness the birth of a whole new genre in television through Evening Magazine, a program that was imitated across the country and became a precursor to such shows as Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and the celebrity journalism of today.”

The station’s contribution of the tapes to Temple University Libraries corresponds with its relocation earlier this year from its 35 year-home on Independence Mall to its new state-of-the-art High Definition studios in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia. Coincidentally, this is not the first time astation relocation has benefited the University. When KYW moved from its Walnut Street studios to Independence Mall in 1972, the company donated its building there to the University which used it as a Center City campus for many years.

CBS 3 is part of CBS Television Stations, a division of CBS Corporation.

Watch the CBS 3 (KYW-TV) coverage of this momentous event in Philadelphia history online.

Index of Christian Art

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Fred Rowland

The library now has The Index of Christian Art, the result of a project begun by Professor Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University in 1917. He believed that the development of Early Christian art could be more deeply understood through the study of themes rather than artistic styles, which during the Greco-Roman period were too “uniform” (more information on the ICA). From a humble beginning of a few shoe boxes of index cards he crafted an indexing system which today falls under five broad thematic groups, Figures, Scenes, Nature, Objects, and Miscellany.

The current online database covers all additions to the collection since 1991 when digitization began and thirty percent of the items indexed before 1991. It grows yearly and the retrospective digitization will eventually bring all pre-1991 content into the database. In addition to indexing Christian art, the database contains over 60,000 images both in color and black and white. For those who need to examine content that has not been digitized, they can still go to Princeton, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Utrecht, or the Vatican to view the entire collection. The Index of Christian Art includes works of art from the early years of Christianity up through 1400 AD and recently the decision was made to expand the coverage up through the sixteenth century.

The Index of Christian Art contains three different record types, which are called “databases” or simply “bases”: Work of Art records (over 57,000), Subject records (over 28,000), and Bibliographic records (over 57,000). The Work of Art records provide detailed descriptions and links to the images. Although there are multiple ways to search and browse, I found it confusing for the novice user (myself) since it’s often hard to distinguish between the actual record types and the individual fields in the records, especially when constructing a search and interpreting the results. I trust that greater knowledge of Early Christian art and more familiarity with the database would ease this burden a little (if not, feel free to let me know). The new user should start with the Multi-Base search because it lets you search across all fields and you can select which record type you’d like to search. Your results are unambiguous: if you search Work of Art records (or Subject or Bibliography records) you’ll get just that type of record in the results set.

Index of Christian Art is a nice addition to our other art bibliographic and image databases, which can be found on the Arts & Humanities database list. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

—Fred Rowland

JSTOR vs. ABC-CLIO

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Gerald Doyle

JSTOR is the premier scholarly journal database. It is a full-text, interdisciplinary archive of only the most highly respected journal titles. By comparison, ABC-CLIO’s two scholarly databases — America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts— seem to be less frequently used, even by historians. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that JSTOR provides direct access to the full-text, full-page image of all articles in the database. Consider, however, the following advantages of the ABC-CLIO databases:

1) America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts between them index over a thousand scholarly journals, including 65 of the 72 history titles available in JSTOR. A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases will thus find nearly all citations to JSTOR articles and thousands of additional citations not available in JSTOR.

2) The Libraries’ new TUlink service enables two- or three-click access to the full-text of thousands of articles indexed by America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts. This means that JSTOR’s previous “full-text advantage,” described above, no longer holds.

3) Citations to articles in America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts contain human-generated subject headings; JSTOR’s article citations do not. Why does this make a difference? A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases could perform a subject search for “Gates, Horatio,” easily finding all 34 citations to articles about the Revolutionary War general. This type of search simply cannot be done in JSTOR.

4) JCR Online assesses the impact of scholarly journals on various academic disciplines. The higher a journal’s “impact factor” the more important that journal is within its discipline. Between them, the two ABC-CLIO databases index all sixteen journals identified by JCR Online as having the highest impact factors in History. These journals are: Environmental History, American Historical Review,Journal of American History, Journal of Modern History, Social Science History,Past & Present, Journal of African History, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, History Workshop Journal, International Review of Social History, Ethnohistory, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Zeitgeschichte, and Mouvement Social. JSTOR indexes only twelve of these same sixteen “high impact” history journals.

It certainly is not my objective to sour anyone on the use of JSTOR, which by any measure is a stellar scholarly resource. The point of this post is rather to say that both databases have much to recommend them. The choice of which to use ultimately depends upon the individual needs and preferences of the researcher. A comprehensive history article search will likely require the use of both.

Do you have a favorite history database?