Tag Archives: Top News

Temple Book Club Reading List for 2005-06

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The Temple Book Club calendar and selections for 2005-2006 are listed below. Discussions are open to anyone who is interested and generally run from 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. in Paley Lecture Hall, which is located on the ground floor of Paley Library.

It’s always a lunchtime event, so you’re welcome to bring your lunch if you wish. Beverages and very light snacks are provided. If you would like to be added to the book club’s listserv or would like more information, contact Margaret Jerrido, mj@temple.edu or 215-204-6639.

September 22, 2005
West of Kabul, East of New York, by Tamim Ansary
A resource guide is available here.

October 27, 2005
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

November 17, 2005
The Honey Thief, by Elizabeth Graver

December 15, 2005
Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

January 26, 2006
Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

February 23, 2006
Freedomtown: A Novelette, by Jacqueline T. Small
(Ms. Small will be our guest author)

March 23, 2006
Family Resemblances, by Tanya Maria Barrientos

April 27, 2006
The Forbidden, by L. A. Banks
(Ms. Leslie Banks will be our guest author)

May 25, 2006
To be determined.

— Margaret Jerrido

Temple Librarian Speaks at Van Cliburn Concert

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a_harlow.jpeOn August 18th, Temple librarian Anne Harlow gave a presentation entitled “Musicians: Ambassadors for Peace” at a pre-concert talk for the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She is a member of the Reference and Instructional Services Department in Paley Library and also serves as the library’s subject specialist in music, dance, and theater. Anne’s presentation was coordinated with a rare concert appearance of Van Cliburn with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Cliburn became a national hero when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, in the midst of the Cold War, only a few months after the successful launching of Sputnik.

Anne’s research into cross-cultural communications, particularly music, between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, was inspired by her early love of Russian music. “Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Borodin, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov … I loved all of them since I was a little girl,” she says. “As a child, I spent endless hours listening to this music and wore out my records! But, in the midst of Duck and Cover drills, I could not understand how a nation that produced such beautiful music could not be our friends.” Traveling to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Kiev to pursue her research interests, she discovered how deeply the Russians love music, and how important these musical exchange concerts were during this stressful and dangerous time of World History. She hopes that her research inspires further musical exchange beyond political, social, and cultural boundaries, and believes that such endeavors are important to promote peace.

— Carol Lang

Latin American Women Writers

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We now have access to Latin American Women Writers from Alexander Street Press. When completed it will contain approximately 100,000 pages of prose, poetry and drama by women writers from Mexico, Central, and South America. In this prototype version there are about 4200 pages of prose and poetry. Drama will be added in the next release.

Nature Journals – Back Files

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We have added substantial back file access to Nature and several Nature Research Journals. Our online coverage for Nature is now from 1987 through the present, adding more than 37,000 articles that can be obtained online. Nature is the top ranked* multidisciplinary science journal. Nature Publishing Group journals are some of the world’s premier information resources for the basic biological and physical sciences.

The Nature research journals are:

Nature Biotechnology. v.1, 1983- present. Ranked #1 in Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology.

Nature Genetics. v.1, 1992 – present. Ranked #1 in Genetics and Heredity.

Nature Medicine. v.1, 1995 – present. Ranked #1 in the Medicine, Research and Experimental category, #2 in Cell Biology, and #2 in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. v.1, 1994 – present. Ranked #3 in Biophysics, #10 in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and #10 in Cell Biology.

All journals may be accessed via Journal Finder and Diamond.

*Rankings based on impact factors in the 2004 Journal Citation Reports.

–Laura Lane, Science Librarian

Reference Universe

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Many of the Libraries’ electronic databases index newspapers, magazines, and journal articles. One unique database, Reference Universe, indexes thousands of print reference works such as dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias. The database now also indexes web-based reference works. Why is this important?

Suppose you are assigned a research paper on the impact of religion during the Han Dynasty. Maybe you’ve heard that the Han period represents a “Golden Age” in Chinese history. Beyond that, though, the Han are a mystery. Obtaining background information now becomes critical to both your understanding of the topic as well as your ability to properly research it. That’s where Reference Universe comes in! A quick search of the Reference Universe database for the phrase “Han Dynasty” reveals citations for Temple-owned reference works including the Encyclopedia of Religion and War. Even better, Reference Universe indicates that there are no less than 15 entries in the back-of-the-book index to the Han Dynasty. Examples include “Confucianism, Han Dynasty” on pp. 82-87, and “Legalism and Confucianism–Han Dynasty” on pp. 83, 84, and 106. The next step is simply to walk into Paley Library’s reference stacks and retrieve the encyclopdia in question.

As mentioned above, Reference Universe now goes one step further by both indexing and providing direct links to Temple-owned online reference works from ABC-CLIO, Oxford, and netLibrary, among others. It’s never been so easy to search and retrieve the important background information critical to good research.

–David C. Murray

Grokker Brings Information Visualization to the Masses

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Information visualization is an effective means of communicating information on large quantities of data. It allows the user to quickly identify patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain buried in long stretches of sequential alphanumeric data. The financial services industry uses this method to make sense of reams of data on companies and markets. Information scientists also use this method to make sense of citation patterns among scholars. Take a look atthis document posted on Drexel University’s web site. It shows multiple visuals of “co-citation networks”.

Now a company named Groxis has brought its information visualization software,Grokker, to the free web through an agreement reached with Yahoo. There’s also a more advanced version for a fee. Grokker provides “A New Way to Look at Search”. The principle behind Grokker is that the sequential lists of web sites that search engines provide are ineffective for complicated, multi-faceted searches because relevant web sites are often buried on the 9th, 23rd, or 64th page of results and few have the time or patience to scroll away the day. Instead, Grokker provides a visual “lay of the land”, an overview in pictures that helps you to understand the different angles of your topic. Once you get an initial results screen, you can drill down on the areas that you’re most interested in. It functions a bit like a table of contents in a book.

So take a look and play around with Grokker. This product will probably be followed by many more like it because information visualization has the potential for making web searching more intelligible and efficient.

Our Virtual Reference on the Web

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Speaking of wikis, the Libraries new instant message (IM) reference serviceAskTULibrary is one of only a handful of libraries doing such listed on Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.

Another place our virtual reference services are appearing on the web is in records for OpenWorldCat. This project comes out of the WorldCat database of library holdings (accessible from here). OpenWorldCat opens up the records in this database to discovery by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Searching for terms that match books will bring up results labeled “Find in a Library” that link to an OpenWorldCat record with information on libraries that hold the book in a specific region (based on zip code). When Temple University appears in these records the information link takes the reader to our Ask a Librarian page. Hopefully this will allow a few more Google searchers to discover their local library and its wealth of holdings.

To see an example go to this pre-made search and click on the first or second result.

–Derik A Badman

Wikis and the Classroom

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An interesting article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education (51.45 (15 July 2005): A35) (the online version may require a password, inquire from one of us and we can give it to you) about using wikis in the classroom. It focuses on professor Mark Phillipson’s use of a class wiki to get his students writing about Romantic poetry. The article briefly discusses the uses and benefits of a wiki for annotation, discussion, writing, and class participation. If you don’t know what a wiki is (and that article doesn’t explain it well enough for you) check out this article from the most famous wiki, the Wikipedia. Wikipedia has garnered a lot of media attention (especially from librarians) because it is a publicly editable (anyone can edit it) online encyclopedia. Like any other reference source it has its pluses and minuses, but many fear that the lack of traditional peer-review negates its utility as a reference for information. –Derik A Badman

Exciting New Online Encyclopedias!

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Temple has just purchased electronic access to seven excellent encyclopedias, mainly on religious topics, through The Gale Virtual Reference Library, which is accessible from TUL homepage on the A-Z database list, the eBooks list, and in the Library Catalog. These specialized encyclopedias are great places to start research on unfamiliar topics, providing nice overviews, bibliographies, and linked cross-references. In addition to the great content, The Gale Virtual Reference Library interface is much more user-friendly than those of other e-book vendors, and each encyclopedia can be searched or browsed. Check out the links below! 1) Contemporary American Religion 2 volumes, 1999

2) Encyclopedia of Buddhism 2 volumes, 2004

3) Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World 2 volumes, 2004

4) Encyclopedia of Religion 2nd ed., 15 VOLUMES, 2005

5) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion 2 volumes, 2003

6) New Catholic Encyclopedia 2nd ed., 15 VOLUMES, 2003

7) New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 6 volumes, 2005

New NIH Database Stirs Controversy

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The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) plays an important role in fostering biomedical research and providing publicly accessible databases like PubMed, PubMed Central, and the genetic resources of NCBI. It funds research in-house as well as in the academic and private sectors. All in all, it plays a vital role in encouraging basic biomedical research. Recently, NIH has come into conflict with The American Chemical Society (ACS), the largest professional chemical society in the US and a vendor of important subscription-based information products, over a new NIH database called PubChem. In 2002 NIH created a framework known as the NIH Roadmap in order to optimize biomedical research. PubChem is the chemical informatics component, containing information on small molecules that may be used in areas such as drug discovery and the study of gene function. ACS is concerned that PubMed replicates and therefore unfairly competes with its own CAS Registry, a database that provides curated substance identification of small molecules. They have asked the NIH to avoid any significant duplication of the CAS Registry. ACS has also asked Congressional supporters to put pressure on the NIH, but the House Appropriations Committee has approved NIH’s annual budget and asked both parties to work together to settle the dispute. For more information, see The American Chemical Society and NIH’s PubChem from the University of California, Office of Scholarly Communication. –Kathy Szigeti