Tag Archives: Top News

Imaging Culture – Latest Exhibit in Paley

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“Imaging Culture” is the title and visual anthropology is the subject of the current exhibit on the main floor of Paley Library, from April 10 — May 31, 2006. Photography books, cameras, stereoscope photos and other items from the library’s collections and from the Visual Communication Laboratory of the Department of Anthropology are on display. The exhibit was designed to accompany the Mediating Practices conference held at Temple University on April 11-14, 2006 and was prepared by Anabelle Rodriguez Gonzalez, a Visual Communications student, in collaboration with librarian subject specialists Jenifer Baldwin and Gregory McKinney, and Tom Whitehead and Carol Ann Harris of the library’s Special Collections department. The Mediating Practices conference sponsors are Temple University’s Graduate School, The College of Liberal Arts, the School of Communications and Theater, the Center for the Humanities, and the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar (PCMS). — Carol Ann Harris

Wednesday’s New E-Resources

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Another round of new and expanded resources:

—Kraus Curriculum Development Library: An index of over 6000 curriculum materials for K-12 and Adult Basic Education, more than 200 in full-text. Includes curriculum, standards, frameworks, educational objectives, instructional strategies, and evaluation techniques. (Updated monthly)

—American Periodicals Series Online: The publisher describes the resources: “This unique and valuable collection contains digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals that originated between 1741, when Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine were launched, and 1900. Deriving from the acclaimed American Periodicals Series microform collection, APS Online features over 1,100 periodicals spanning nearly 200 years-from colonial times to the advent of American involvement in World War II. Titles range from America’s first scientific journal, Medical Repository, to popular magazines like Vanity Fair and Ladies’ Home Journal.” See this longer description.

—CINAHL and Pre-CINAHL: The library has added access to CINAHL through EBSCOhost. CINAHL indexes articles on nursing and allied health from over 1,600 journals dating back to 1982. Pre-CINAHL provides access to articles that are being added to the CINAHL database. These are articles that do not yet have complete indexingt and that will be added to CINAHL upon indexing completion.

—MEDLINE: The library has also added EBSCOhost and Web of Science access to MEDLINE, each providing its own attendant extra features, such as linking between full-text in other EBSCO databases or Web of Science links to open source journals.

—IEEE Explore: Expanded access to IEEE has increased our access to over 120 full-text journals, as well as transactions, conference titles, and standards from 1988 to the present with some items going back as far as 1950.

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

—Derik A Badman

Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum

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Educators face the challenge of helping students master a set of abilities collectively termed “Information Literacy” by the library profession – see ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, Information Literacy Defined. The push to promote information literacy within libraries is part of a larger educational reform movement that sees the need for new ways of reaching students and assessing student learning. The ultimate goal is to help students become effective users of information in any format and place.

In brief, information literate persons are able to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” (ibid.). Note that “locate” is only one small part of this definition. Information literacy involves so much more than instructing students on how to access a book in the Diamond catalog, or showing them how to search theHistorical Abstracts. Rather, true Information Literacy involves an entire set of critical thinking skills that can only be developed over time and through direct engagement with the academic curriculum. It involves practice and lots of hands-on work.

Librarians see the need for information literacy more keenly than most, since we interact informally with students every day at the reference desk. Librarians, in other words, experience first-hand the inability of many students to evaluate and contextualize the increasingly massive amounts of data now available online, in print, and in other formats. Roy Rosenzweig, historian at George Mason University, recently wrote that “for many students, the abundance of primary sources can be more puzzling and disorienting than liberating and enlightening” (“Digital Archives Are a Gift,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2005). He goes on to say that students often see large amounts of primary sources as “transparent reflections of a historical ‘reality’; not, as a historian would, as imperfect refractions” of a specific place and time (ibid.). Prior to about 1990, students were forced to consult a prescribed set of resources assigned to them by the professor (or suggested by a librarian). Today this is often no longer the case, and regardless of how many times faculty and librarians insist students not use random hits generated by Google, many just aren’t “getting it”. Thus, as Rosenzweig says, “we have done much better at democratizing access to resources than at providing the kind of instruction that would give meaning to those resources” (ibid.).

Classroom discussion and activities around these (and other) themes and outcomes promote information literacy:

1) The importance of seeking out background information to help contextualize a topic;
2) The difference between primary vs. secondary sources in history and other disciplines;
3) Popular vs. scholarly publications, and why the difference is important;
4) The appropriate use of different types of information media, such as books, journals, and online resources; and
5) Evaluation of information resources to assess appropriateness for college-level work.

Again, none of this will likely “stick” with students unless such discussions and activities take place in the classroom and are integrated directly into the curriculum. If you are a Temple faculty member in history who wishes to work more closely with the library on ways to further integrate these ideas into the classroom, I would certainly welcome hearing from you. Instructors in other disciplines should feel free to contact their own librarian subject specialist. Typically, the best opportunity for collaboration between instructor and librarian is “at the point of need,” or at that point when a student needs information for a specific research paper or project.

A big thank you to the many capstone (and other) instructors who have already worked hard to develop information literacy skills in their students. For a great deal more on this subject, including additional outcomes and specific assignment suggestions, please visit Integrating Information Literacy into Temple Courses.

—David C. Murray

LexisNexis Statistical Universe

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The Library has added to its subscription databases a new source of statistics. It is called Statistical Universe (from LexisNexis Academic). For many years we have had the print indexes and the accompanying microfiche collections, and now we online access. Is it the combined product of three different resources: American Statistics Index (U.S. Federal government statistics) (1973-), Statistical Reference Index (U.S. private sector statistics – organizations, commercial publishers, businesses, university research bureaus, states)(1980-), and Index to International Statistics (statistics from major intergovernmental organizations). The combined database allows searching across all types of producers of statistics and online viewing of most results. Here is the list of publishers and most recent contents of the database (we have acquired BOTH the “Basic Collection” and the “Research Edition”). I urge you to take a look at some of the resources that are offered from the publishers – just click on the name of the agency/publisher, and the list of the most recent titles is displayed. Some extraordinary statistical resources are available from publishers like the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Electronic Industries Alliance, eMarketer Inc., Employee Benefit Research Institute, National Restaurant Association, Plunkett Research, Strategy Research Corporation, Television Bureau of Advertising, and the Urban Institute. —Barbara Wright

Friday’s New Resource Round-up

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The Library is acquiring access to new electronic resources (not to mention all the new books) faster than we can announce them. Here’s a bunch of recent resources with brief descriptions (taken from the Library’s database description page). There are plenty more coming.

—International Bibliography of the Social Sciences includes nearly two million bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951. It is unique in its broad coverage of international material and incorporates over 100 languages and countries. Over 2,700 journals are regularly indexed and some 7,000 books are included each year. (Updated quarterly)

—MIT CogNet subtitled “The Brain Sciences Connection” is a collection of resources in the cognitive sciences. It includes 7 full-test MIT journals, searchable abstracts of 30 other journals, 6 full-text MIT reference works, and over 400 full-text cognitive science books from MIT Press. Also included are conference proceedings, open courseware materials, job information, calls for papers, and information about gradiate programs in the cognitive sciences.

—Safari Tech Books Online is a full-text library of over 800 information technology books from publishers including O’Reilly, Que, New Riders, Addison-Wesley, and Sams.

—The Encyclopedia of American Studies “brings together a wide range of disciplines related to the history and cultures of the United States, from pre-colonial days to the present. It features broad, synthetic articles covering areas such as history, literature, art, photography, film, architecture, urban studies, ethnicity, race, gender, economics, politics, wars, consumer culture, and global America.
Interdisciplinary in its coverage of the American experience, this comprehensive reference has been written by hundreds of internationally renowned scholars who present their topics in clear and lively prose.
With over 660 online, searchable articles and bibliographies, the Encyclopedia of American Studies provides an integrated approach to problems, themes, and issues that cut across disciplinary lines. The breadth and depth of disciplines, topics, and issues featured in this resource support research and study in a wide range of courses and assignments at all levels.”
The Encyclopedia’s editor in chief is Temple’s own Miles Orvell.

—Current Protocols Series provides hundreds of basic to advanced research protocols and overviews covering areas of interest in the life sciences. Each protocol contains a materials list, and the units feature commentary and guidelines written and edited by experts. All protocols are carefully selected for maximum applicability, lab-tested in leading laboratories, and then thoroughly scrutinized by expert editorial boards to make sure you can easily duplicate them in your own labs. Temple University subscribes to Current Protocols in: Bioinformatics, Cell Biology, Cytometry, Human Genetics, Immunology, Microbiology, Molecular Biology, MRI, Neuroscience, Nucleic Acid Chemistry, Pharmacology, Protein Science, and Toxicology.

—Hospitality & Tourism Complete covers scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. The database combines the records of three collections: Cornell University’s former Hospitality database, Articles in Hospitality and Tourism (AHT), formerly co-produced by the Universities of Surrey and Oxford Brookes, and the Lodging, Restaurant & Tourism Index (LRTI), formerly produced by Purdue University. Together, this collection contains more than 500,000 records from more than 500 titles, with coverage dating as far back as 1965. Hospitality & Tourism Complete contains full text for more than 200 publications. Sources are both domestic and international in range and scope, with material collected from countries and regions such as Canada, Australia, Europe and Asia. Of special importance is the inclusion in this database of the “Cited Reference” search feature which supplements and complements the results found in Social Science Citation Index.

If you have questions about any of these resources, please Ask a Librarian.

–Derik A Badman

xreferplus: electronic reference collection

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One of the library’s latest purchases is xreferplus, a collection of over 200 reference books in electronic form. This full-text searchable collection is cross-referenced between the sources, allowing users to move not only within books but between books and disciplines. The included sources are in a variety of subjects: Art, Bilinguals, Biography, Business, Conversions, Dictionaries, Encyclopedia, Food, Geography , History, Language, Law, Literature, Medicine, Music, Philosophy & Psychology, Quotations, Religion, Science, Social Sciences, and Technology. And come from publishers such as Barron’s, Blackwells, Cambridge, Cassel, Columbia, Elsevier, Penguin, Routledge, Sage, Gale, and Wiley. See a list of all the included books.

The advanced search allows limiting a search to longer articles on subjects as well as articles that contain images or sound files. Each entry also includes a citation for itself in MLA, APA, and Chicago styles. The special visual search option called a “Concept Map” graphically represents the connections between different articles and sources. The image below shows the beginning concept map for a search on “Duchamp.” Even at this level one can see the connections made from Duchamp (the artist) to other artists, art movements, and art concepts.

xreferplus concept map

Each node on the map represents an article in the xreferplus collection. The interface allows users to zoom in on parts of the map and more directly see the connections between the nodes. xrefeplus is a valuable resource for quick answers, general overviews of a topic, and students beginning research and looking to better negotiate their topic. If you have any questions, feel free to direct them to me or your librarian of choice.

—Derik A Badman

LexisNexis Congressional and United States Serial Set now available

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Paley Library has purchased the combined LexisNexis Congressional and United States Serial Set research databases. LexisNexis Congressional is the most comprehensive electronic index currently available for United States legislative information. Congressional publications comprise an extremely wide variety of information that reflects the needs and concerns of an evolving nation. They impact virtually every aspect of the curriculum and are particularly important for the Departments or Schools of Business Administration, History, Economics, Law, Political Science, Social Administration, Communications, Criminal Justice, Sociology, Education, Geography and Urban Studies, Journalism, American Studies and, African American studies. The LexisNexis Congressional interface allows users to simultaneously search the Congressional reports and documents that comprise the Serial Set as well as prints, bills, the Congressional Record, selected testimony in hearings before Congress, Public Laws, Statutes at Large, the United States Code Service, the Federal Register, and the National Journal. It also provides information about Congressional Committees, Congressional biographies, recent legislative activities, and public policy issues such as voting records, financial data, and regulatory information. Much of the material is linked to full text. Congressional publications from as early as1789 are available in their entirety as are the text and status of proposed current legislation and recently signed laws. Additional resources offered by LexisNexis Congressional includes a keyword searchable Code of Federal Regulations, and the full text of the Washington Post’s Section A from 1977 to the present. LexisNexis Congressional’s legislative publications online and Paley Library’s collection of legislative publications combine to provide the Paley Library community with a complete set of the official congressional publications. The link to this resource is now available via the library electronic resources web pages. Here’s the A-Z database list. We hope you will find this resource useful. If you have any questions about its content or if you have any difficulty using it, please contact me or one of my colleagues in Reference and Instructional Services at Paley library. —Susan J. Golding

Music Index Online!

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For information, research, cultural enhancement, classroom enrichment, and study and research, Temple University Libraries are pleased to announce the addition of Music Index to our electronic resources. Indexing over 775 journals in music, Music Index provides the gateway to a vast amount of information in music. The Ebsco Interface is an easy-to-use and familiar format for searching for information. Full-text links to articles in JSTOR are supplied. This online version of Music Index covers journals from 1976 to the present, and is updated quarterly. Music Index provides indexing to a wide array of periodicals and subjects. International in scope, Music Index includes periodicals from over 40 countries in 22 languages. Every aspect of music is covered. There is indexing to classical music, composers, and performers. But, there is also indexing for book reviews, obituaries, new periodicals, and the music industry. In addition, Music Index is a fine resource for finding information in music education, music therapy, ethnomusicology, and jazz. For help using this service, questions, and/or feedback, contact Anne Harlow.

Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876

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Temple Libraries on March 23 acquired Early American Newspapers, Series I (1690-1876), a third major component of the Archive of Americana. “In 1690, Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences, the first newspaper in America. The British colonial governor immediately suppressed it, and only one issue was ever published. However, beginning with the Boston News-Letter in 1704, the early American newspaper industry thrived, experiencing particularly strong growth following technological advances in the 19th century. Early American newspapers, published often by small-town printers, documented the daily life of hundreds of diverse American communities, supported different political parties and recorded both majority and minority views” (Readex). “Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876 offers fully searchable, cover-to-cover reproductions of more than one million pages from more than 650 historical American newspapers, focusing on titles published in the 18th century” (Readex). EAN, Series 1, is based on Clarence Brigham’s famous History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820. —David C. Murray