Mid-May New E-Resources

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

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

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

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

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

Library Depository

A number of changes will be underway soon with the completion this summer of Temple’s new Library Depository, a closed-stack shelving and retrieval facility.

Over the course of the summer, thousands of lesser-used volumes will be relocated to the Depository, thus allowing Temple Libraries to centralize a number of collections, expand services, and refurbish Paley Library’s stack areas with expanded study and collaboration space. Many research libraries are already using similar closed-stack facilities to preserve their growing research collections and open up space within the library buildings to meet the varied needs and expectations of contemporary students and scholars.

Materials in the Depository will be listed in the online catalog with a conveniently linked online request form. They will be retrieved by library staff and available within a quick turn-around time.

In conjunction with these changes, several branch libraries will close over the summer, providing the opportunity to expand services and reintegrate collections that have been split for years because of limited space. The Zahn Library’s last day of operation will be Friday, May 12, 2006, the last day of spring semester. Physics Library will be next, followed by Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematical Sciences. An exact schedule has not been set, but it is expected that the closings will be completed and the library materials relocated by the end of the summer sessions.

An FAQ with full details about the Depository and related services is posted on the library website. Advisories and progress reports will be featured in the library blog as the transitions proceed.

For more details about the Library Depository and the related changes, please see the Temple Times article published on April 27, 2006.

depository.jpe

Here’s a recent view of the construction underway as moveable compact shelving carriages are assembled. New photos will be added occasionally as work progresses.

— Carol Lang

Library Prize Winners Announced

Please join the Libraries on Friday, April 28, at 4:30 p.m. in the lecture hall of Paley Library for the awarding of the 2nd Annual Library Prizes for Undergraduate Research. Everyone is encouraged to attend the reception.

Winners of the 2nd Annual $1,000 Library Prize for Undergraduate Research, Temple University (in alphabetical order)

Ryan Drummond
“Interstate Station Stop: A Voyage into the
American Frontier Myth”
Architecture 442
Professors John J. Pron, primary advisor
Sneha Patel, secondary advisor
Kate Wingert-Playdon
Kate Cleveland

Steven J. Horowitz
“As Boundaries Fade: The Social Contract in Cyberspace”
Philosophy 298
Professor Paul Taylor, Philosophy

Symbol Lai
“Defining Abolitionism: Antislavery Resistance among
Philadelphia’s African American Community and Women.”
History W397
Professor Elizabeth Varon, History
Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): 
These will receive $100 bookstore gift certificates.

Denene Michele Wambach
“Crimes Against Civil Liberty: An Analysis of the United
States Government’s Involvement in Guantanamo Bay.”
Political Science 391
Professors Mark Pollack & Megan Mullin, Political Science

Victoria White
“Queer Race in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd”
English 282
Professor Suzanne Gauch, English
The Library Prize was established by the Temple University Libraries to encourage more and better use of its resources and collections, to advance information literacy, and to promote academic excellence at Temple University. Hearty congratulations to all students who submitted their applications into the

CAB Database

The CAB Database is now available as a database from EBSCO Host to all Temple University faculty, staff and students. CAB Abstracts CAB Abstracts is the most comprehensive bibliographic, abstracting and indexing database in its field. CAB Abstracts covers the applied life sciences, including agriculture, forestry, human nutrition, veterinary medicine and the environment. CAB Abstracts includes molecular biology, genetics, biotechnology, breeding, taxonomy, physiology and other aspects of pure science relating to organisms of agricultural, veterinary or environmental importance. Read more about this diverse and content rich resource here. There is something for most people in this database. Those with any questions or comments about this resource are most welcome to contact me at 215-204-4584. —David Dillard

Library Prize Awards Reception

The awards reception for the 2nd Annual Library Prize for Undergraduate Research will be held in Paley Library’s Lecture Hall at 4:30p.m. on Friday, April 28th. The winning students will be present to receive their awards, accompanied by their sponsoring professors. Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Everyone is invited. Direct questions to Gretchen Sneff at 215-204-4724 or gretchen.sneff@temple.edu –Derik A Badman

Historical Newspapers

The library is pleased to announce our new access to Proquest Historical Newspapers, encompassing complete full-text coverage of the New York Times, 1851-2003 (more recent access available through LexisNexis Academic), and the Wall Street Journal, 1889-1989 (more recent access available through Factiva). The papers are available cover to cover (including advertisements) in digital images. They are full-text searchable and searching can be limited to date ranges as well as type of article from news and editorials to editorial cartoons and photos to obituaries and marriage notices. Electronic access to these newspapers adds a range of historical news that was previously only available to us on microfilm. Students will be particularly aided by access to the New York Times of the mid-twentieth century, an era which is frequently requested by undergraduate researchers. —Derik A Badman