Tag Archives: Top News

Paley’s New Leisure Reading Collection

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Are you a mystery buff or a sci fi aficionado? Do you like to keep up with the latest bestsellers, both non-fiction and fiction? Do you love biographies? How about romances, self-help, and how-to books?

Or are you simply looking for a good book to read … to get away from it all? Paley Library”s new Leisure Reading Collection has it all!

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During National Library Week, April 3 – 9, Paley Library is introducing its new Leisure Reading Collection, located on the main floor of the library.

On opening day, the collection will offer approximately 1,300 titles, from New York Times bestsellers to Harry Potter. Within a few months, some 2,000 titles will be available. Thereafter, about 100 newly-published titles will be added each month.

“This is something that students, faculty, and staff have been asking about for many years,” says Larry Alford, Vice Provost for Libraries, “and I am delighted that we are now able to do it.” He adds, “We want to provide books for pleasure as well as for scholarship, and to be the Temple community’s home library in every sense of the word.”

Alford himself will be browsing the collection. “For myself,” he says, “I’m looking forward to keeping up with the latest mysteries.”

Keeping up will be easy. The collection is easy to locate on Paley’s main floor. The books have simple call numbers and are loosely grouped in fiction, non-fiction, and biography categories. They are also fully searchable in the online catalog.

The Leisure Reading books may be checked out for 4 weeks, with one renewal of 4 weeks.

— Carol Lang

FIAF International Film Archive

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The libraries are pleased to announce our subscription to FIAF International Film Archive Database. Produced by the International Federation of Film Archives, the database includes indexing to over 300 international periodicals on film and television, selected bibliographies, and a directory of archives and research centers.

  • International Index to Film Periodicals 72-present
  • International Index to TV Periodicals 79-present
  • Treasures from the Film Archives – finding aid for archival film material worldwide
  • International Directory of Film/TV Documentation Collections
  • Bibliography of FIAF members’ publications

Tips: When in the database, choose the component that you want to search from the red arrow in the upper right, next to the label “change databases.” Please also note that the subscription allows for 4 Temple students, staff, or faculty to search the database at one time. This number can be increased should use warrant it. Please feel free to contact me with any questions about this resource. —Jenifer Lee Baldwin

New EBSCO Features

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A number of new features have been added to our EBSCOhost databases, including Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, ERIC, MLA, PsychInfo, and ATLA. Here is a brief rundown on what’s new.

1) A dropdown list on the search screen enables users to change databases easily.

2) Results “clustering”:When your search results come up, you will see a column on the left side of the screen that lists the top ten subjects of your results. These links allow you to narrow your search to a more specific set of results. See the screenshot below for an example. A search in Academic Search Premier on (“economics” and “america”) brings up these results. Clicking on any of these will narrow the results to items that fit the original search criteria and are also categorized by the subject clicked. This is a quick way to narrow down your results to something more specific.

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3) Search Alerts in RSS: EBSCO’s MyEBSCO features allows users to create accounts and receive search alerts, that is, notification when new articles or citations fitting the user’s search criteria are entered into the database. Traditionally done by email, these results are now available as an RSS feed. An orange icon link appears on the MyEBSCO “Search Alerts” part of the “Folder” (see screenshot). (For more on RSS see this article.)

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4) Visual Search:A visual search groups results in nested circles according to subjects. It is an alternate way to search and navigate results (rather than a list). It’s hard to explain but easy to play around with. Just click on the “Visual Search” tab (it’s blue) at the top of any EBSCO database screen. The screen shot below shows a search on “economics” narrowed to “economic forecasting.”

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5) Citation Output: When emailing or saving citations you can now have them in a few standard formats such as AMA, APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian–a time-saving way to add that citation or bibliography entry to a paper. If you have any questions about these features or would like more information or assistance, feel free to contact me.

—Derik A Badman

ArchiveGrid = NUCMC Improved

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Manuscript catalogs connect advanced history researchers with important primary documents housed in obscure and not-so-obscure collections all over the country. Generations of scholars have turned to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) to track down collections critical to historical research.

ArchiveGrid is a new database from the Research Libraries Group (RLG) that also allows researchers to locate relevant manuscript collections. “Thousands of libraries, museums, and archives have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies” (ArchiveGrid). RLG is providing free access to ArchiveGrid through May 31, 2006. After this date ArchiveGrid will remain free if RLG receives additional funding to continue the project. If funds are not found, ArchiveGrid will be made available to institutions as a subscription.

All records in the NUCMC catalog are said to be available in ArchiveGrid. Given that ArchiveGrid is a brand new resource, researchers should consult both databases for the sake of completeness. Graduate students and senior scholars should cross-check online search results against the print version of NUCMC.

—David C. Murray

Postscript: History researchers might also wish to consult Ready, Net, Go!, an index/guide to archival research on the web created by the Special Collections Division of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

More JSTOR Journals

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Two new collections of full-text journals have been added to our JSTOR content: Arts & Sciences Complement “The Arts & Sciences Complement is intended to offer participants a method to seamlessly add journals related to the core Arts & Sciences I, II, III, and IV Collections. For the Arts & Sciences Complement, journals may be focused in any of the more than thirty arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines covered by JSTOR. Our aim is to introduce important titles that we were unable to include in earlier collections and to capture journals that cross discipline boundaries. A minimum of 150 titles will be included by the end of 2008.” Biological Sciences “The Biological Sciences Collection will include at least 100 titles when it is completed in 2007. This collection brings together the twenty-nine journals available in our existing Ecology & Botany Collection with more than seventy titles new to JSTOR. Coverage in this collection offers greater depth in fields such as biodiversity, conservation, paleontology, and plant science, in addition to introducing new areas such as cell biology and zoology.” Both collections currently including dozens of journals, some going back to the beginning the of the twentieth century. See the complete list at the links above. –Derik A Badman

Classical Music Library

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Classical Music Library: streaming audio of beautiful music!

For listening pleasure, cultural stimulation, classroom enrichment, and study and research, Temple University Libraries are pleased to announce the addition of Classical Music Library to our electronic resources. Classical Music Library provides streamed audio of an extensive array of classical music repertoire. Listeners can browse composers’ works, or search for music by instrument, period, title, genre, or performer. The “folders” feature allows each person to construct their own individualized playlists, or to take advantage of ready-made “themed” playlists. These themed playlists include the major anthologies used to teach the history of music as well as playlists for specific artistic movements, composers, artists, genres, music appreciation, mood music, music for occasions, and period music. In addition, Classical Music Library contains a reference section with information and images about composers, music history, and musical terms.

Classical Music Library is available here.

For help using this service, questions, and/or feedback, contact Anne Harlow.

Enjoy!

—Anne Harlow

PA County Histories to 1900

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The Libraries are pleased to announce the acquisition of Pennsylvania County Histories to 1900. This database provides full-text access to PA county histories written during the late 19th Century. Philadelphia, Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties all receive extensive coverage. Researchers will appreciate the inclusion of beautiful period maps, illustrations, and portraits of individuals. The histories are our main source of information about important local citizens, some of whom received little or no coverage in the regional and national press of the day.

Observes Temple historian Greg Urwin, “Nineteenth century county histories customarily listed the names of all the men who enlisted in volunteer units, and often gave their service records. These books also often contained brief biographies of prominent locals (usually men) and descriptions of prominent businesses.”

For more on the history of Philadelphia and surrounding counties, check out the following titles in the Diamond catalog:

Berks County (Pa.) — History
Bucks County (Pa.) — History
Chester County (Pa.) — History
Delaware County (Pa.) — History
Montgomery County (Pa.) — History
Philadelphia County (Pa.) — History

—David C. Murray

Infomine: A “Library Catalog” for Web Sites

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Instructors usually experience frustration when students turn first to Google and other non-vetted sources of information for papers and research projects. Most history professors, for example, would greatly prefer that students not cite anelementary school project on Abraham Lincoln. (Yes, such things have been known to happen.) Let’s face it: The vast majority of web sites indexed by Google are inappropriate for college-level research. And yet the benefits offered by digital information sources are undeniable. What to do about this dilemma?

Typically, concerned instructors require students to use a prescribed set of sources vetted by them (or by a librarian). Another solution well worth considering, and one that allows for greater student autonomy, is to use a directory of scholarly web sites. Services such as the Internet Public Library, Librarian’s Index to the Internet, WWW Virtual Library, INFOMINE, Internet Scout Project, Argus Clearinghouse, Digital Librarian, BUBL Information Service (U.K.) and others, diligently strive to separate the Internet wheat from the chaff. INFOMINE — whose tag line is “Scholarly Internet Resource Collections” — will be most useful to academic researchers.

“INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information” (Infomine Welcome).

Conceptually it helps to think of directories as library catalogs for web sites rather than print books and journals. Thus, INFOMINE is to scholarly web sites what the Diamond catalog is to Temple’s print holdings. INFOMINE permits access to its records through title, author/publisher, subject (Library of Congress Subject Headings, or LCSH), assigned keyword, description/abstract, and a “full-text” search. What is more, INFOMINE allows users to browse through an alphabetical listing of all titles, authors, LCSH headings, and keywords used in the database! It can be said without exaggeration that INFOMINE’s search and retrieval capabilities are easily on par with those of most modern library catalogs, such asDiamond.

In sum, human-powered directories of the type discussed above provide a respite from the dubious results often obtained through software-based search engines such as Google. The various web directories (or catalogs) do suffer from a lack of standardization in the way metadata is searched and presented; novice researchers might find it difficult to quickly switch from one service to another. Students who make the effort will nonetheless discover the benefits of incorporating directories into their research repertoire. Professors, meanwhile, will just be happy that students are using appropriate sources while simultaneously developing their information literacy skills.

—David C. Murray

Factiva Database, New

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The Factiva database, a product of Dow Jones and Reuters, is now available in the Library’s package of databases. It can be found on the Library Home Page, under “Find Articles”, in the alphabetical list, in the business subject menu, and in the list of new databases. The most important component of the database is the full-text of the Wall Street Journal, but that is only one of 1500 global and local newspapers, 3200 magazines, 500 newswires, 160 media programs, and thousands of Web sites included in Factiva. The database provides company background information from Reuters for more than 42,500 companies. The database is fully searchable by source, company name, industry, region of the world, and time period, using nine different language interfaces, and content is available in more than 20 different languages. An excellent (and brief) online tutorial is available. One important note: The databases is licensed to Temple University Libraries for only SEVEN (7) simultaneous users. This is a significant addition to the Library’s resources, and an important source for business news and information. In addition, the database includes many resources in other disciplines, with numerous journals in the fields of health care, tourism and recreation, sports, the arts (music, film, dance, crafts, literature), agriculture and forestry, and the media, all with global coverage. —Barbara Wright