Tag Archives: Top News

AnthroSource

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AnthroSource joins the list of more than 300 databases which Temple University Libraries provides to Temple faculty, students, and staff for research. Developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), it is “the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists”. AnthroSource provides online access, with full-text, keyword, phrase, and Boolean searching, to the current issues of 15 of AAA’s peer-reviewed publications through the end of 2006; these include American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. AnthroSource also serves as an electronic archive, with more than 100 years of anthropological material online, for all of AAA’s 31 journals, newsletters and bulletins. Click here to view holdings information. AnthroSource uses CrossRef to dynamically link article PDF files to other publications within and without AnthroSource. All databases are linked from the Temple University Libraries website. Please contact me if you have any questions. If you would like to have AnthroSource and other social science databases demonstrated to a class, please call me at 215-204-4581 or email me to set a date for a Library User Education class. —Gregory McKinney Subject Specialist for Anthropology Temple University Libraries Temple University

Thanks to all our student assistants

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As another academic year ends it’s time to appreciate and praise the work of the hundreds of student assistants who work for us in all of our libraries and make it possible to do everything we need to do to serve our Temple community. There are students working in our libraries every hour we’re open. In the case of many of the branch libraries student assistants keep the libraries open on evenings and weekends. In Paley Library students work in every department. They performs tasks as varied as answering phones during staff lunch hours; delivering important documents to the Provost’s Office; delivering mail; helping ship items going to the bindery; staffing the help desk and installing software and hardware in the Systems and Technology department; working in the current periodicals,government documents, and micromaterials unit, including staffing the ground floor desk, processing government documents, and refiling micromaterials. With our special collections, including rare books and Urban Archives, students help with many projects to make these collections accessible to our users. In the Access Services areas of Paley – circulation/reserve, interlibrary loans, and the stacks – student assistants make it possible for us to offer such critical services as e-reserves, and PALCI E-ZBorrow, activities where we rely heavily on students to do processing and scanning. In the stacks, students shelve thousands of books a week and are involved in year-round shifting projects. In interlibrary loans, students are processing and filling requests and wrapping hundreds of books a day to be shipped to libraries all over the country. Thank you to all our student assistants. We couldn’t do it without you. –Penelope Myers

International Bibliography of the Social Sciences

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Temple University Libraries is now providing access to the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, an “essential online resource for social and interdisciplinary research”. As with the previous print volumes, the primary focus of IBSS is on the 4 core social science subjects of anthropology, economics, politics and sociology for each of which it “provides one of the most comprehensive and specialist online databases with an impressive breadth and depth of material”. In addition, IBSS promotes the interdisciplinary and comparative nature of contemporary social science research by including selective complementary material in the related subjects of development studies, human geography, environment, gender and sexuality. The more than 2 million bibliographic records in the database encompass a variety of formats: journal articles from more than 2800 journals (including electronic) from all over the world, and from 1020 journals which are no longer being published, with records dating back as far as 1951; more than 370,000 book records; and more than 24,000 selected chapter records from multi-authored books. More than 60 languages and 100 countries are represented in IBSS, with abstracts in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. The database is updated weekly, with 100,000 new records added annually. IBSS uses the CSA Illumina platform which provides a simple, user-friendly search interface for novice users and powerful searching options for experienced users. The interface is also used by numerous other databases, including Sociological Abstracts, PAIS International, and Criminal Justice Abstracts, to which TU Libraries provides access from their web site. All CSA databases can be searched individually or simultaneously. Although the IBSS database has no full text, it does provide links from IBSS records to the full text of articles in online journals to which Temple University Libraries subscribes. Please contact me if you have any questions. If you would like to have the IBSS database and other social science databases demonstrated to a class, please call me at 215-204-4581 or email me to set a date for a Library User Education class. All databases are linked from the Temple University Libraries Web Site. —Gregory McKinney Subject Specialist for the Social Sciences Temple University Libraries Temple University

Encyclopaedia of Islam Online now available

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The Encyclopaedia of Islam is a great work of reference covering the many-sided nature of Islam and the Muslim world, with articles on art, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and more. The user can browse the alphabetical entries, or peruse and select from the Subjects index or the Names index. Searching options include using English or transliterated terms to query Full Text, Headwords (article entries), Keywords, bibliographies, or Contributors.

  • Interested in the famous library at Cordoba created by the Umayyad caliphs that “contained some 4000,000 volumes, described in a catalogue of 44 volumes, each containing 40 leaves”? What was its fate? Check out the article entitled MAKTABA (Arabic for “library”).
  • What about the spread of Islam in China, where the “military forces [of Kubilay Khan], used for the overunning of both North and South China, were built largely upon the thousands of Muslim soldiers which he brought with him from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian campaigns.” Look at the article on CHINA (al-SIN).
  • Want to find books and articles on modern Turkey? Search the Bibliography field for “modern turkey” and you’ll retrieve the bibliographies of 81 articles. If you’re just interested in the early state period, you could add the term “world war” and reduce the set to 5. (You can even search the bibliographies for “temple university” and find that two Temple dissertations have been cited.)
  • And what about a comprehensive article on the Koran (al-KURAN), with sections on Etymology and Synonyms, Muhammad and the Kuran, History of the Kuran After 632, Structure, Chronology of the Text, Language and Style, Literary Forms and Major Themes, The Kuran in Muslim Life and Thought, and Translation of the Kuran?

The Encyclopaedia of Islam covers the main precepts of Islam at the same time that it reveals the rich interplay between Islam and other world civilizations going all the way back to the late antique world. This encyclopedia will prove very useful, whether you’re studying the core of Islam or just nibbling at the interdisciplinary edges. There are some challenges, however, that the user needs to deal with. For one, you will need to download Brill fonts for handling Arabic terms in transliteration. You can find links to the fonts in the upper right corner of the main search page. For serious scholars and students of Islam the many Arabic terms are one of the encyclopedia’s great advantages. For the uninitiated, however, it does take some getting used to (but after a little while it becomes fun). Don’t wait. Check out the Encyclopaedia of Isalm today! BTW, more good news: the second edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica will be released in the fall in print and online (as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library). I hope we can get both versions. This will fill a big gap as we do not currently have a major online Jewish/Judaism encyclopedia. –Fred Rowland

More May E-Resources

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Another bunch of new electronic resources are available to the Temple community.

—Books 24×7: Online library of approximately 5,000 titles on information technology topics. Users can annotate books and create personal bookshelves of favorite titles.

—Gale Ready Reference Shelf: Provides integrated access to over 300,000 entries culled from the databases of fourteen of Gale’s most popular reference directories:

  • Directories in Print
  • Directory of Special Libraries and Information Centers
  • Encyclopedia of American Religions
  • Encyclopedia of Associations: National Organizations of the U.S.
  • Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations
  • Encyclopedia of Associations: Regional, State and Local Organizations
  • Encyclopedia of Governmental Advisory Organizations
  • Gale Directory of Databases
  • Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media
  • Newsletters in Print
  • Publishers Directory
  • Research Centers Directory
  • International Research Centers Directory
  • Government Research Centers Directory

 

—Women Writers Online: Hundreds of texts written by women between 1400 to 1850. All of these texts can be browsed, searched, and analysed using tools which provide access to the full SGML encoding.

—Justis (UK Legal Texts): Justis provides online access to the following:

English Reports: “The English Reports brings together all the important English case reports from 1220 until 1873, just after the official Law Reports were published for the first time.”

UK Statutes: “Justis UK Statutes contains all Acts of Parliament for England, Wales and Scotland dating back to the Magna Carta (1235). The full text of the legislation, including repealed Acts, is provided as originally enacted.”

—Inspec Archive: (Physics, Computing, Electronics, 1884-present). Covers all aspects of these subjects, in approximately 4,200 journals and 1,000 conferences as well as books, reports and dissertations. (Updated weekly). Now includes the Inspec Archive. Including over 800,000 records, the backfile covers the literature of physics, electrical engineering, and computing from 1884-1968. Corresponds to the print General Science Abstracts.

—Engineering Index Backfile: This is the electronic version of The Engineering Index, the world’s premier link to the engineering literature. The database adds about 500,000 records yearly. Compendex covers over 5,000 engineering journals, conferences, and reports. All areas of engineering are represented. Approximately 22% of the database is conference literature, and 90% of the source documents are in English. About half the citations (from 2,000 journals and conferences) include abstracts and indexing. (Updated weekly) The new backfile contents covers the engineering literature from 1884-1968.

Questions? Ask a Librarian.

(Descriptions are all taken from our database descriptions page.)

–Derik A Badman

Mid-May New E-Resources

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More new e-resources:

—GeoScience World: A comprehensive Internet resource for research and communications in the geosciences, built on a core database aggregation of peer-reviewed journals indexed, linked, and inter-operable with GeoRef.

Highlights:
Full text of 30 peer-reviewed high impact journals published by 7 earth sciences societies/institutes, nonprofit and independent geoscience publishers.
Links to major indexes – GeoRef, Web of Science
Search by – keyword, thesaurus, bounding coordinates (longitude and latitude)
Download references to citation management software – EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager.

Questions? Contact me.
Laura Lane
Science Librarian

—ASM Alloy Center: Search ASM property data, performance charts, and processing guidelines for specific metals and alloys.

The Alloy Center contains five content areas:

Data Sheets & Diagrams
Features thousands of documents in PDF format, including material data sheets from Alloy Digest and other ASM publications; heat treating data sheets from the Heat Treater’s Guides; and time-temperature curves, creep curves, and fatigue curves. All organized by alloy and fully searchable.

Alloy Finder
Features alloy designations and trade names from around the world. Find key information, including composition, producer, tensile properties, and similar alloys.

Materials Property Data
Features mechanical properties, physical properties, and processing characteristics for most industrially important alloys. Find data plotted over a range of temperatures.

Coatings Data
Features detailed information for commercial coating processes. Search by trade name, manufacturer, process type, coating type, or key words.

Corrosion Data
Features corrosion information for specific alloys in specific environments. Search by alloy or environment.

—ASM Handbooks Online: Online access to the complete content of 20 ASM Handbook volumes plus the Engineered Materials Handbook Desk Edition and the Metals Handbook Desk Edition.

—Business & Management Practices: Business & Management Practices (BaMP) is a full-text resource with a focus on the practical aspects and approaches of business management. Updated weekly and providing coverage back to 1995, Business & Management Practices offers highly-focused coverage of more than 300 core management journals and trade publications. Also included are specific management-related articles from over 300 additional respected business sources. (Updated weekly)

—Clase and Periodica: Indexes articles, essays, book reviews, monographs, conference proceedings, technical reports, interviews and brief notes published in journals edited in 24 different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as from publications that focus on Pan-American issues. Clase indexes journals in the social sciences and humanities, while Periódica indexes journals in the sciences and technology. Together, they provide more than 400,000 bibliographic citations from documents published in 2,600 scholarly journals published in the Spanish, Portuguese, French and English languages.
—PsychiatryOnline: Online access to the full-text of the DSM-IV TR as well as five journals from American Psychiatric Publishing, including the American Journal of Psychiatry.

—TableBase: Contains tables drawn from over 900 titles in the Business & Industry database and privately-published statistical annuals. Coverage includes: Company and brand rankings, Imports and exports, Industry and product forecasts, Market share, Number of users/outlets, Production and consumption statistics, Trends and demographics,and Usage and capacity.
Except where noted, descriptions are taken from our database description page.

—Derik A Badman

Philosophy books on Google Book Search

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With the help of our excellent student workers in the Reference and Instructional Services Department, I carried out a small study of Google Book Search (GBS). Curious to know just how deep it was with regards to philosophy, I took a random sample of 381 titles out of the 4244 philosophy titles Temple bought between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2005. It turns out that 35% of the philosophy books sampled are contained in GBS, including the following percentages from a number of top academic publishers:

  • 39% of Oxford (21/54)
  • 66% of Routledge (25/38)
  • 70% of Blackwell (7/10)
  • 76% of SUNY (13/17)
  • 88% of Cambridge (28/32)

None of the books in my sample from Harvard (5), Cornell (8), MIT(5), Princeton (3), Stanford (3), or Yale (4) university presses were found, although books from all these publishers do show up in GBS (the Advanced Search allows a publisher search). Sample books from the large European academic presses Ashgate (9), Brill (3), Continuum (5), and Palgrave MacMillan (7) also did not turn up. With the exception of Brill, this latter group does not appear to be participating in GBS. According to Google, books make it into GBS through two different routes, as part of the Partner Program or the Library Project. With the Partner Program, publishers (or authors) provide GBS with the full-text of books. Presumably, most are using this service as a means of marketing their books. By contrast, for the Library Project GBS scans in books from a number of major research libraries like those at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. Depending on the copyright status of a book and on the agreements between publishers and Google, there are four different views of books that users see–the Snippet View, Sample Pages View, and Full View, and No Preview Available (which I ran into a number of times but for which Google gives no explanation).

  • The Snippet View shows your keyword(s) in a few sentences of context. Books showing this view come from the Library Project and are still under copyright.
  • All the books in my sample presented the Sample Pages View. These books come from either the Partner Program or the Library Project. On the search results screen, books showing the Sample Pages View will contain the label Limited Preview. In either case, the publisher has given permission to display only a certain portion of the work. Many of the pages in this view will either require a login (free to set up), or will be inaccessible. For instance, when I searched inside the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief for “wagner”, six pages required login and six were inaccessible. (Of course, you are only asked to log in once per session.)
  • Full View books are entirely accessible. And whereas you can’t print pages out from the Snippet View or the Sample Pages View, you can print out pages from Full View books. You can also limit your search to just Full View books. These works either come from the Library Project and are in the public domain, or the author or publisher has given permission to view an entire copyrighted work.
  • No Preview Available books look a lot like the Snippet View except without the snippet. These probably come in as part of the Library Project and, appropriately, look a bit like library catalog records.

It is important to remember that despite which view you’re given, your search is querying the full-text of these books, not just the the book record as you would with, say, a library catalog. It’s also important to remember that Google intends this as a search service that will allow users to identify books that they will eventually borrow from libraries or buy in bookstores. It’s not meant as a provider of electronic books. Clearly, there are enough philosophy books in Google Book Search to make it a useful tool of discovery. Among its many uses are citation searching, identifying an obscure person, place, thing, or event, or just plain old full-text searching. Next time you’re doing philosophy research (or any other kind of research), try it out. BTW, Temple has quite a few subscription databases of full-text searchable books that might be of interest to the student of philosophy, some of which are listed below:

Zahn Library Closing on May 12, 2006

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Zahn Library, located on the first floor of Ritter Annex, will cease operation at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, May 12, 2006. Over the summer, the materials in Zahn will be distributed to Paley Library and the Library Depository. Once the items are moved, their locations will be updated in the online catalog. During the transition, if you need journal articles from Zahn, use the intra-library loan article request form. Within 24 hours of your request (Monday-Friday), the article will be delivered to your email account as a PDF. If you need books from Zahn, use the intra-library loan book request form and you will be notified by email when the book is available for you to pick up at the location you specify. We appreciate your patience and understanding during this transition. Shirley Boyd, the Clerk at Zahn, will assume new responsibilities in the Urban Archives Department in Paley Library on May 15th. Additional information about the Library Depository: FAQ Temple Times article, April 27, 2006 — Carol Lang

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

Monday E-Resource Medley

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Another bunch of new electronic resources available for your research needs:

—Science of Synthesis: “Provides online access to one of the most in-depth authoritative information sources available on synthetic methodology. Information is available on 18,000 generally applicable experimental procedures, including 180,000 reactions and 800,000 structures. Also included is the searchable full-text of the various editions of the highly esteemed, almost 200 year-old Houben-Weyl.”

—International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text: “This database comprises a fully indexed, cross-referenced and annotated databank of over 60,000 journal articles, books, book articles and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance in 126 countries, as well as full text for 100 titles, including Canadian Theatre Review, Dance Chronicle, Dance Teacher, Modern Drama, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Research in Dance Education, Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater, and many more. Additional full text available includes more than 50 books & monographs such as Art and the Performance of Memory, Avant Garde Theatre, British Realist Theatre, Community Theatre, History of European Drama and Theatre, Learning Through Theatre, Opera, Performance Theory, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth Century France, Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, Sourcebook on Feminist Theatre and Performance, Theatre and the World, Twentieth-Century Actor Training, Who’s Who in Contemporary World Theatre, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and many more.”

—AnthroSource: “Full-text of 32 current and past journals from the American Anthropological Association.”
—Columbia Earthscape: “This interdisciplinary resource connects the Earth and environmental sciences with their social, political, and economic dimensions. Students, teachers, and librarians will find a dynamic, inquiry-based educational resource, featuring illustrated lectures, animations, video and image banks, exercises and labs, syllabi, and basic textbook readings. Columbia Earthscape also gives policy makers and professionals a robust, carefully selected and assessed collection of environmental legislation, regional studies, international environmental documents, and white papers. And it offers scientists an educational venue in which to incorporate their research as well as a growing archive of journal articles, journal abstracts, conference literature, full-text monographs and selected chapters, and online data sets.”
—Mental Measurements Yearbook Online: “Produced by the Buros Institute at the University of Nebraska, the Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY) provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments. Designed for an audience ranging from novice test consumers to experienced professionals, the MMY series contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. All MMY entries contain descriptive information (e.g., test purpose, publisher, pricing) and edited review(s) written by leading content area experts. To be included in the MMY, a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new or revised since it last appeared in the series.” MMY Online covers Volume 9 to the present.
—National Journal’s Policy Central: “Includes the following resources from the National Journal Group:

  • National Journal – Read the leading nonpartisan weekly on politics, policy and government.
  • The Hotline – Track American politics and campaigns with coverage of each day’s political news.
  • CongressDaily – Follow the key players and legislative process on Capitol Hill.
  • TechnologyDaily – Monitor important news and trends in information technology politics and policy.
  • Almanac of American Politics – Get analysis and data on every member of Congress and their states and districts.
  • Markup Reports & Bill Status – Get complete coverage of every congressional markup session, as well as constantly updated reports on key legislation.
  • Ad Spotlight – Explore political and issue television ads with streaming audio or video.
  • Poll Track – Start your research with a database of public opinion surveys from across the country.”

 

Please direct any questions to your departmental librarian or Ask a Librarian.

—Derik Badman