Post contributed by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head, Humanities and Social Sciences and Librarian for Literature
The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetrywas originally a print index (first edited by Edith Granger in 1904) with thirteen editions. Though the online resource has many enhanced features, you can still search by poet, title, and first line. The word “world” in the title is apt because the poets represented span many countries.
Why Should You Use This?
This database is a reliable resource for locating a specific poem. Though there are great online resources like the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets that you can also use, some of what you will find online isn’t accurate or is incomplete. There are over 300,000 poems in full text and 450,000 citations in Granger’s. These numbers mean that frequently you can read the poem right there.
If the full text of the poem isn’t available, you can learn where it was published. You can then locate that publication in Duke Libraries. As shown in the example below, the poem “America I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope” is available in the book Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness in our collection.
Cool Features
Since I firmly believe that hearing a poem read out loud enhances the experience, one of my favorite features is the Listening Room. Most of the poems included are classics, but you can listen to contemporary poets or actors. For example, you can listen to Rita Dove read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’sSonnet 43. I also like the Compare Poems feature where you can look at two poems side-by-side.
Database Tips
In many cases the quick search box for “poet” and “poem” is sufficient, but the advanced search options are useful if you don’t already have a specific poem in mind.
Post contributed by Greta Boers, Librarian for Classical Studies
Trismegistos (“An interdisciplinary portal of the ancient world”), is a tool for discovering writings from ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe at any time between 800BC and 800AD. This ongoing project at the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven describes primary texts held by more than 150 institutions, in over 50 ancient languages, and as of March 2024, contained 962,930 entries.
Why Should You Use This Database?
You can use Trismegistos as a discovery tool for ancient writings preserved on papyrus, stone, pottery, and metal, as well as other media, from collections on websites, and in museums, archives, and universities around the world.
By providing systematic metadata for each text, Trismegistos offers both flexible and nuanced ways to search them. The results point to the institutions which house the texts, and in some instances the full text itself. Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and Papyri.info, a project initiated by Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), are among the institutions linked from the database.
Cool Features
You could pass the time discovering that in Alexandria the new moon in January 400 BC was on the 26th by the Julian calendar, but on the 27th of the month of Phaophi in the Egyptian calendar.
If you wanted to learn Old Nubian it is possible to find 565 of the existing texts. You can sort these by material, using the graph. In this case the limit is to texts in stone. If you click on TM 99098 it will take you to another link to commentaries, including the 1927 article in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
Using Trismegistos as your search tool, you can find the earliest fragment (AD01 – AD02) of Dioskorides’ De Materia Medica in papyrus at the University of Cologne, as well as the famously beautiful codex (AD06) at the National Library of Austria.
Tax extensions? A lentil cook requested to postpone his taxes because of unfair competition from pumpkinseed sellers in the 3rd century BC. Trismegistos points you to Papyri.info, which links to an image in Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.
Database Tips
The database has two tiers, one is freely accessible to a general audience. Duke subscribes to the version that offers more sophisticated search capabilities, visualizations (pie charts, tables, maps, word clouds, and timelines), and exporting, with a steeper learning curve. Duke users can access this version of Trismegistos our Libraries’ website.
Post contributed by Jodi Psoter, Librarian for Marine Science
CAB Abstracts searches books, articles, conference papers, and reports from over 120 countries in fifty languages. This resource focuses on the applied life sciences field, including agriculture, forestry, human nutrition, veterinary medicine, and the environment. Date coverage is from 1973 to the present. Additionally, your search results will include references from the archive (1910-1972) for seventeen print journals.
Why Should You Use This?
With an international focus and an interdisciplinary scope, this is a great resource for climate and environmental research topics including ecology, marine science, climate change, aquafarming, forestry, soil science, engineering, and hydrology. The international coverage provides English-language abstracts for all non-English language publications.
Cool Features
When I work with students, I remind them that not everyone describes a concept using the same word. A database’s thesaurus helps to find the single word that will retrieve results even if an author uses a variation of your search term. It’s like finding a keyword #hashtag for your topic. The following screenshot shows that “oyster culture” is the preferred word when looking for information about “oyster farming.”
Database Tips
CAB Abstracts is just one database that DUL purchases from EBSCOhost. Click the “Choose Database” link to replicate your search in multiple databases. Bonus: This works in all the EBSCOhost databases not just CAB Abstracts!
What do business, criminal justice, political science, company dossiers, and patents all have in common?
All of these can all be found on!
Nexis Uni is a database containing over 15,000 credible news, legal and business sources. Need US Treaties? They have it. Need company profiles? They have it. Need news in general? They have it.
NexisUni is a great resource and it’s relatively easy to use so let’s get started!
Of course, you’ll want to sign up/sign in.
This allows you to:
Create, share, & have folders shared with you
Create alerts
Customize display & document settings and search filters
View search history, document history, Shepard’s history, & a Research map
You’re signed in, you’re set up, so let’s get searching!
Enter terms, phrases, companies, questions, whatever you like and it’ll bring you to the results page.
The Results Page
Above the results, you’ll find options to save the results to a folder, print, email, download the list or individual docs, send to google drive or dropbox, export citations, and sort.
On the left is the category (news, law reviews, cases, etc) you’re currently viewing.
Document Page
The document page has different sections depending on the document type, but each page has an “About” and “Notes” section.
The about section will have the source information, related content, and the Shepard’s Signal if it’s a legal document.
The notes section allows you to annotate, copy, highlight, add to a search or folder your selected text.
Other Helpful Tips
If you need help reading the style of their documents:
Go to advanced search from the home page
Choose the tab that applies (All, Legal, Business, or News) and the content you’re looking for under the specific tab
On the right you’ll see a section called, “Search Field Examples,” select to enlarge, and it is a helpful guide on how to read the document in that category.
If you see glasses , you’ve viewed the item before.
Guest post by Amanda Rizki, Cary Gentry, and Sujeit Llanes, practicum students in our Assessment and User Experience Department.
Are you one of the many students who prefer to browse the web for scholarly articles?
Do you use Wikipedia as your starting point for research?
Do you do most of your research before you come to the library’s website?
Maybe you are frustrated by having to relocate each article you find cited on scholarly websites within the Duke Libraries’ databases?
Nomad Plug-In for Chrome is the tool for you! Nomad is a browser plugin for Google Chrome that helps you find journal article PDFs quickly and easily. Nomad connects your Duke Libraries access to articles found while browsing in Wikipedia, PubMed, or directly on publishers’ websites.
Once you install the plugin, it will scan the sites you read online for journal article identifiers. When it sees an article that is available through Duke, it provides easy PDF or link access with a consistent, easy-to-find button. Links bring you to a fully accessible article page – no further login required. PDFs can be downloaded directly to your computer.
Nomad was created by Third Iron, the same company that makes LibKey and BrowZine. The plug-in does not collect any information about you, so the tool is safe to use with your personal information and Duke log-in. While Nomad reads web pages for articles that Duke Library provides access to, it is still your Duke credentials that allow the link or download to move forward.
An example of Nomad at work in a Wikipedia article about cardiovascular disease.
Nomad provides one-click access to articles in PubMed search results.
Need more assistance setting up this plug-in? Keep reading!
Plug-ins are extra bits of software that you can add to your internet browser – in this case, to Google Chrome. Google organizes all of the plug-ins available for their browser on a site called Chrome Web Store. This plug-in, Nomad, is free, but some plug-ins must be purchased.
1. Open Google Chrome. If you have not already installed it, Chrome is available via Google.
2. In Chrome, type “Chrome libkey nomad” in the address bar and choose the first result. Or open this link.
3. Click the “Add to Chrome” button in the upper right corner of the page:
4. A small popup window will appear. The browser will ask for you to verify that you want to add the plug-in (called the extension) to your computer.
5. After the plug-in installs, it will prompt you to select your institution. Choose “Duke University” from the dropdown menu.
6. The plugin is now ready to use. You can close the window and proceed to browse normally.
And your professor said you could use any sources within biomedical or life sciences, as long as the sources are peer-reviewed.
Well we have the database for you!
PubMed is a database full of peer-reviewed articles focused around biomedical and life sciences and here’s how you get to it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
So first let’s and that can be found at the top right.
After selecting Log in, choose Duke as your university and then it’ll prompt you to either create an account with your Duke email or sign into an account you already have, choose whichever is appropriate.
Some benefits of logging in:
View Recent Activity
Create/Manage Bibliographies
Create/Manage Collections
Create Custom Filters
Results Page
And after you’ve logged in and started searching, the results page gives you a helpful bar that look like:
More options for each sections looks like:
But it should be noted that the when choosing “Save” or “Email” you’re saving/emailing citations and not the search or its results.
Helpful hints:
Clipboard expires 8 hours after being added
You can save all the search results to your Collection
On the left is a column containing your filters and if you’re looking to get more specific in your search use this!
Article Page
On this page you’ll find some of the same features listed from the results page, but you’ll also be able to:
Download citations to RIS file
Add articles to favorites
A link to the full text (but beware, some of the links don’t always work)
The bottom of this page also gives you similar articles, a list of articles that cited the one you’re viewing, and a list of MeSH terms to aid you in your search.
And congratulations, you now have the tools you need to start or finish your paper!
Before you start your search there’s two things you’re going to want to do to make your research easier.
First go into the settings (under this button on the top left), and choose library links. You’re going to search for Duke University and choose the “Duke University Libraries – Get it at Duke and then save. This makes it so that any article found on Google Scholar that Duke has access to you’ll be able to go straight to that article. You’ll know it worked when you search an article and see this in the right column.
Secondly, you’ll want to go back into the savings option and make sure that you’re signed into an account so you’ll be able to save your articles into your library.
Now you’re all set to do your research! But just a few more things to make note of:
The star button will save the article to your library
The quotation button will give you the citation for that article in MLA, APA, etc and also allows you to link to several citation management tools (they’re sometimes slightly incorrect so double check your citation!)
The “Cited By” shows how many people have cited that article via Google Scholar
Advanced search is found under the menu option
And that is it! You are prepared to do Grade A research, friend!
“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.
Joanna Murdoch is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department. She taught a Thompson Writing Program first-year writing seminar called “The Art of Writing Letters” in the spring of 2018. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head of the Humanities Section and Librarian for Literature and Theater Studies, served as the course librarian for this class. She had the pleasure of asking Joanna a couple of questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research.
What were your primary goals for your students in working with letter writing in this course?
Teaching for theThompson Writing Program’s first-year writing seminar, I wanted to foreground the tangible longevity of academic writing. The claims we make and the words we use in essays, exhibits, or online forums can last a long time. Against the odds, a lot of written material survives! The assignments in my course ask students to think about their writing and research as taking part in conversations with long histories and long futures, too.
Letter writing, it turns out, is a good tool for cultivating the blend of voice, personhood, and responsibility that is crucial for compelling academic work but isn’t always explicitly handled in writing instruction. In almost any century, letters open with an address to a named person and close with the writer’s signoff. Between those extremities, letters and their composers do everything they can to try to reach their readers. For their part, the letter’s recipients face literal response-ability: they have to decide whether and how they are able to respond. Writing and reading in this view are intimate, implicating activities: words can’t convey ideas unless two human beings have already agreed to connect.
It’s easy to forget this interpersonal grounding when composing a college essay. But even the strictest cautions surrounding intellectual property and the respect and defense of human rights require us to acknowledge the voices of others. That’s why my students have been practicing discerning and responding to the historically situated human voice in other people’s writing over three major assignments—a close-reading analysis of a single letter, a research project on a letter exchange held at the Rubenstein or in Perkins’ collections or databases, and a letter to a public figure, exhibited on the Campus Club Wall for three weeks in April of 2018.
How has the library supported your teaching?
In so many ways! Duke’s subscription to databases like North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Historiesprovided rich exploratory ground for my students in all stages of their writing projects. The library’s collections of World War I letters available in book form in the stacks gave students who stumbled across them the foundation they needed for their research on soldiers’ letters in the Rubenstein’s holdings. Then, in April, the Campus Club Wall in Perkins became a live part of our writing and learning space when students received permission to exhibit some visually enhanced selections from their letters to public figures.
But it was the library’s gifted specialists who really brought Perkins and Rubenstein to life for my class. Our designated Perkins librarian Arianne Hartsell-Gundy very graciously showed us how to use the library guide she had designed especially for our course, and she supported students with exercises for crafting a focused research question and building an annotated bibliography with reputable sources. I’ll always remember Perkins 118 as the place where Arianne showed us the lines from Alexander Hamilton’s letter-esque The Farmer Refuted (1775) that live on in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015).
A major highlight of the semester was when Rubenstein’s Elizabeth Dunn and Mandy Cooper introduced us to the historical letters and letter-writing guides they had hand-picked to match the students’ research interests. The hours these librarians spent selecting, transcribing, arranging, and expertly talking us through the materials were a huge gift to the class. Thank you, Perkins and Rubenstein!
How about your research?
For my research on medieval religious lyric poems, I lean heavily on Duke Libraries and their Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan relationships. My carrel is overflowing with Perkins, Divinity, and Lilly titles, plus others shipped in from Yale, the University of Chicago, or even our basketball competitor down the road. Thanks to the bases covered by Duke and these other library collections, this spring I was free to buy only the works I knew I would return to, rather than every single title on my comprehensive exams’ reading lists. The best part was when Perkins bought a collection of essays on Chaucer’s poetics at my request! I’d better go check it out, now that it’s on the shelves . . .
Another enormously helpful tool has been the library’s subscription toOxford Bibliographies Online. Since I’m still in an early stage of dissertation research, I need all the overviews I can get of major contours in scholarly publishing. OBO is a great place to start.
What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?
I) You’re responsible for sniffing out the stories and scholarly drama behind the materials you see. If you do a lot of reading around for a project, you’ll start to see the same names and references to the same group of 10–30 major academic works. Then it’s like you’re pulling a necklace up out of the sand, revealing the links of a single, if complicated, structure. It’s one of the best feelings early on in graduate school, being not-at-the-mercy of the infinite-seeming database search results.
II) I said above that written material lasts longer than we think it will. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to actually use it once you’ve consigned it to your files. You may have terabytes of notes and essays on your computer or in the cloud, but you’ll never find any of it again unless you’ve tagged it all thoroughly or you like to spend your free time randomly clicking through old files. Some people love reference management software like RefWorks or Zotero. I can’t stand the way those services look, so I build massive searchable folders in an awesome writing program called Scrivener. Whatever you decide, leave yourself a lot of breadcrumbs. Don’t be like me and spend years searching for a half-remembered, haunting line that turned out to be from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem“: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”—I spent so long searching for the note I had made about it back before I learned to cite cite cite even passing references in journal-type notes. The best breadcrumb of all is a full bibliographic citation, including the date you found and read/listened to the material, plus a quick personal note on what you thought about it. The “find” function on your computer will do the rest.
III) If you need part-time work during a heavy course-load year, reshelving books for the library is a fantastic way to find a meditative groove while filling your muscle memory with clues about the way information is structured and accessed in a major university library—which boils down to the shape of academic discourse itself. That’s how it went for me, at least, in the basement stacks of the Yale music library. Maybe Duke will even let you listen to Hamilton or Leonard Cohen while you set some Perkins shelves to rights!
It’s a familiar feeling: you only need one more scholarly source for your paper due at 8:30 the next morning. It may also just so happen to be 2:30 am, and at a certain point, there’s only so much caffeine in the world. However, by knowing how to utilize the number of databases available at Duke, one can seek relief. Even better, utilizing databases will grant you access to full-text scholarly articles, popular sources, and a multitude of additional resources (all without having to leave your dorm room and trek across campus). In this blog series, procrastinators and planners alike will find recommendations, tips, and tricks on how to navigate the amazing range of databases Duke Libraries have to offer- without wanting to tear your hair out.
There are two primary categories of databases you will find in academic libraries: general databases and specialized databases. If you are just beginning to explore your research topic, a general database, such as Academic Search Complete or JSTOR, can help guide your initial research. These databases are multidisciplinary and draw from a wide range of journals. However, once you have started the research process, you may find that general databases no longer offer the content you need. For example, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month; if you had a research assignment related to the history of sexual assault in the United States, you may want to first use a general database such as Academic Search Complete to help guide your research before delving into specialized databases. However, after you have discovered some possibly relevant sources that could help guide your keyword search, you may then want to pursue sources in specialized databases- for this example, specialized databases in History or Women’s & Sexuality Studies.
On Duke Libraries Research Database guide, the most popular general databases are directly linked at the top of the guide. One of those, and indeed one of the most popular general databases in academic libraries, is Academic Search Complete. Academic Search Complete is hosted by EBSCO. Note that EBSCO itself is not a database; rather, EBSCO hosts a multitude of databases, including both general and specialized varieties, and across a variety of disciplines. As discussed above, Academic Search Complete would be an ideal database with which to begin the research process for many of your classes. Through Duke Libraries’ subscription to Academic Search Complete, you can access full-text scholarly articles, popular sources, as well as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
There are a variety of factors you may consider when choosing a database- among them should be exactly what type of source you are looking for. If a database only offers abstracts, but you require a full-text journal article as a source, it would not be an appropriate database option. Finding the right database for your research is not necessarily always a seamless process; however, Duke Libraries have many resources available in order to help you conduct your research and access the best articles and journals.
Quick tip: Know what citation style your professor wants/requires before beginning your research. Many databases will provide formatted citations based on the style needed (MLA, APA, etc), While you should double-check the citation provided in order to ensure it is formatted correctly, using that citation as a foundation should save you some time.
Additional resources:
Be sure to check out Duke Libraries’ Research Guides. These guides, created by Duke University librarians, offer specialized tips centered around your area of research.
As always, if you are ever stumped by navigating databases or wondering where to go next in your research, Duke’s librarians are here to help. Here is a quick link to get help via chat, email, or phone: https://library.duke.edu/research/ask
Duke historian John Hope Franklin (left) and political scientist Samuel DuBois Cook, both of whom are featured in the HistoryMakers database of oral history interviews.
Guest post by Heather Martin, Librarian for African and African American Studies
Looking for oral history interviews of African Americans? Try The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, a new subscription database available through Duke University Libraries.
HistoryMakers contains over 10,000 hours of video interviews with African-Americans distinguished in the categories of education, media, science, politics, law, the arts, business, medicine, the military, sports, religion, entertainment, and other areas of public life. Interviewees discuss memories from the 1890s to the present. The project currently includes original interviews of more than 2,000 individuals, with a goal of collecting 5,000 interviews.
By creating story segments from each interview, HistoryMakers allows users to find relevant discussions on specific topics. Interview transcripts are searchable, but you can also choose from a list of story topics (e.g., leadership, desegregation/integration, public health issues, philanthropy, role models, gender identity, faith, humorous story quality, and arguing a position). You can also create shareable playlists by selecting stories from your search results.
A search for “Duke University” reveals hundreds of interviews with noteworthy individuals, including Paula McClain, current dean of Duke’s Graduate School.
A search for Duke University retrieves 321 stories, including interviews with noted historian John Hope Franklin; Samuel DuBois Cook, the first African American professor at Duke; Vera Ricketts, the first black female pharmacist at Duke University Hospital; and Paula D. McClain, current dean of the Graduate School at Duke.
“Working with the Library” is an occasional series of stories highlighting collaborations between librarians and the people around campus whose teaching and research we support.
Dr. Marion Quirici is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program and a faculty advisor for the Duke Disability Alliance. This semester she is teaching Writing 101: Neurodiversity, Narrative, Activism. Her students are working on projects that fight stigma by educating the public about the social contexts of mental and psychiatric disabilities. Kim Duckett, Head of Research and Instructional Services, has been Marion’s course librarian for three semesters.. She recently asked Marion a few questions about how the library has supported her teaching and research in the area of disability studies.
What are your primary goals for your students working on their neurodiversity activism projects?
Student Sydny Long with her graphic novel, “The Lonely Brain.”
The goal is to train students to communicate an impactful message to a broad audience beyond the classroom. Their message should challenge mainstream assumptions and stereotypes about mental disabilities, and generate deeper understanding of the social contexts that make mental differences meaningful. The assignment is flexible in terms of format and medium. Students have a lot of freedom in figuring out what they want to say, how they want to say it, and whom they want to address. Some of their projects may involve more traditional forms of academic writing (articles, blogs, or op-eds), but students can also communicate their message through visual art, film, creative writing, posters, websites, social media campaigns, and dialogic forms of activism such as canvassing and teach-ins. What every project has to do is take the knowledge and skills cultivated in my course and transfer them into real-world situations. Through this assignment, I want students to come to terms with their own power and learn to use their research and writing skills to enact change.
What unique challenges does this assignment present?
Because my courses are situated in the field of disability studies, there are two main challenges that we reckon with as a group when designing these projects. The first is upholding the mantra of the disability rights movement: “nothing about us without us.” In the “disability rights are human rights” conversation, we must center disabled perspectives. While some of my students identify as disabled and incorporate their own experiences into their activism,
Student Laura Benzing with her visual art piece, “Language of Autism.”
the majority identify as nondisabled and neurotypical. It is therefore essential that students rigorously consider the lived experiences of psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients in order to challenge their own assumptions. In advocacy work and activism, it is important not to place an onus of recovery on the individual. Instead, I ask students to research the social structures and cultural conditions that contribute to the challenges individuals face. To be good allies, students have to resist thinking of “us” and “them” — it’s just “us.”
The second challenge is accessibility. The activism project must be accessible not only to a general audience that is unfamiliar with the neurodiversity paradigm, but also to people with all kinds of disabilities. Students learned to use accessibility software to caption their videos, and create audio descriptions of the visual components of their projects. Some thought about ways to incorporate tactile elements into their artwork, while others created accessible maps and navigational aids to help guide participants to their events. I organized the projects into a website here: tinyurl.com/disabilityart.
How has the library supported your teaching?
The Thompson Writing Program follows a “writing in the disciplines” model, which means that every faculty member designs writing courses within a specific discipline in which they have advanced training and expertise. We each have an assigned course librarian with specialized knowledge of our discipline–you, in my case–who visit our classes once or twice a semester to train students in their research methods. This semester you visited twice: once to discuss non-traditional forms of research for the activism projects, for which students were expected to find first-person perspectives on topics relating to mental health, and a second time to train students to use the library databases to compile and analyze a variety of critical sources for their research papers.
Student work from Dr. Quirici’s class last year featured on the Campus Club wall in Perkins Library.
Duke’s librarians have collaborated on a number of resources that are useful for the teaching of writing, which they organized into a “Library 101 Toolkit.” The toolkit contains worksheets that help students choose a topic, consider their audience by identifying stakeholders, and evaluate their sources. My favorite handout is called “Classifying Sources: The BAAM Method.” It outlines four different ways a student might engage with a source in their writing: Background, Artifact, Argument, and Method. I find that having students organize their sources into these categories during the research process helps them structure their papers, and situate their own ideas alongside the work of others.
A really unique way that the library has supported my teaching has been their willingness to provide opportunities for my students to exhibit their work. Last year, the students who created visual art for their activism projects had their work featured on the Campus Club Wall in Perkins Library for a month, thanks to the help of Meg Brown. This year, librarians in Lilly helped one of my students organize a shelf display of recommended reading for Disability Pride Week and contribute a post to the Libraries’ blog.
How about your research?
The Duke Libraries have an online database called “Disability and the Modern World” that I have found useful for browsing for the kinds of resources I would not have known to search for, including periodicals, film and television sources, and archival materials. Resources are organized by subject, discipline, geographical
Students Jay Patel and Nick Saba with their children’s book, “New Friends.”
location, and people, which always makes for a really generative browsing experience. I was so excited to discover an Australian chat show called “No Limits,” which covers a range of topics on disability representation in the media, and features one of my favorite disability activists, Stella Young.
The Rubenstein Library also has an extensive History of Medicine Collection that has been useful to my research. When I was writing a lecture on Psychiatric Degeneration Theory for the Neurohumanities Research Group this past February, I was able to consult a first edition of Bénédict Morel’s 1857 treatise on the so-called “physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration of the human race,” and study the development of a harmful theory that would later be used to justify eugenics and racial cleansing.
What are three things you think that undergraduates should know about using information and the library?
First, to generate as many questions as possible about your topic before you start searching. It’s important at the beginning of the research process to consider your topic from all angles, and to keep an open mind about what you might argue until you’ve learned what other scholars have already written. The more questions students ask about their topic at the beginning of the process, the more options they will have for taking a unique approach on the subject.
Second, not to be overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. Disability is a topic people initially perceive as marginal, but this is a misconception, and there is scholarship connecting disability to almost anything you can think of. Students can feel daunted by this. But once they take the time to comb through what’s out there by engaging in distant reading, they find more sophisticated ways to articulate what exactly interests them. It can be really exciting to watch them discover the originality of their own ideas.
Third, to be comfortable asking for help. Research should never be done in total isolation. Having a conversation with a librarian, classmate, or professor can help you not only articulate your project to yourself, but also to get feedback on how well others are understanding your ideas. They might raise questions, introduce perspectives you had not considered, and help you define your topic. Think of the librarians as extra professors outside the classroom. They have many years of experience organizing research and gaining access to information, and students should take advantage of all that expertise!
Duke is celebrating Disability Pride Week. If you would like to do research on disability studies, we have a database called Disability in the Modern World. This database features both primary and secondary sources, including videos, diaries, brochures, advertisements, and more. It also has the archive of the publication The Disability Rag and its successor The Ragged Edge. You can browse by title, discipline, general subject, archival collection, place, people, organization, and publisher. Key areas include:
When is the library open? How do I find a book? Where do I print?*
Duke University’s newest students can find the answers to these questions (and more!) on the Library’s First-Year Library Servicesportal page.
Each August, a new class of undergraduates arrives in Durham ready to immerse themselves in the Duke Community. Duke University Libraries serve as the core of intellectual life on campus. On East Campus particularly, the Lilly and Music Libraries have the unique opportunity to introduce our newest “Dukies” to the array of Library resources and research services available.
To help navigate the vast Library resources, we’ve created a portal especially for First-Year students. Through this portal page, new students (and even some not-so-new) can discover all that the Duke University Libraries offer:
Quick Facts: about collections and loan policies Where: to study, print, and … eat! How: to find and check out books & material, and get… Help!: Meet the “who” – Librarians, Specialists, & Residence Hall Librarians Research 101: how to navigate the Research Process Citation 101: how to cite using recommended styles *And when is the Library open?
Find the answer in our list of the Top 12 Questions, developed with input from First-Year Library Advisory Board students.
If you regularly use WorldCat through the Duke University Libraries website, you might notice a small change soon.
Starting Tuesday, June 30, the Libraries will link to WorldCat through a new platform called WorldCat Discovery, instead of FirstSearch, the platform we’ve been using for some time. WorldCat Discovery is available online now at http://duke.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch, and we invite you to take it for a test-drive!
Scopus Training Session for Duke Faculty, Researchers, and Graduate Students When: Wednesday, October 16 Time: 11:00 – 11:45 a.m. Where: Schiciano Auditorium – Side A, Fitzpatrick Center (Click for map) Contact: Melanie Sturgeon, melanie.sturgeon@duke.edu Registration:Please Register to Attend
Note: Lunch to follow in FCIEMAS lobby, 12:00-1:00 p.m. (provided by Elsevier). We will also be raffling off two iPod shuffles for attendees!
Please join us on October 16 for a Scopus training session on campus with Elsevier.
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature from international publishers, open access journals, conference proceedings, and trade publications. Database coverage includes Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering; Life and Health Sciences; Social Sciences, Psychology, and Economics; Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.
This training session will educate science faculty, researchers, and graduate students about Scopus, which was designed to save you time in finding the right articles.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. As they are released, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Ab Imperio Quarterly
Ab Imperio
“Ab Imperio Quarterly is an international humanities and social sciences peer-reviewed journal dedicated to studies in new imperial history and the interdisciplinary and comparative study of nationalism and nationalities in the post-Soviet space… The languages of publication are English and Russian with summaries, respectively, in Russian and English. Manuscripts, subject to double-blind peer reviews, are accepted in five languages (Russian, English, German, French, Ukrainian).” Among the points that form the journal’s stated mission is this: “Providing an opportunity for research and debate on the history and theory of nationalities (including Russian) in the region, an opportunity that should engage academics from all over the world.”(Quote Source)
Region
“Region is a peer-reviewed international journal that explores the history and current political, economic, and social affairs of the entire former Soviet bloc. In particular, the journal focuses on various facets of transformation at the local and national levels in the aforementioned regions, as well as the changing character of their relationships with the rest of the world in the context of globalization, a perspective that stresses both local adaptation to global phenomena and that adaptation’s transnational or even global significance.”
The following topics are most prominently featured:
+ Regional identities in globalized societies
+ Communication and transmission of information
+ Migration and boundaries
+ Transition: politics, economy, society, and culture
+ Theories and methodologies of regional studies in the context of “glocalization”
+ Imagined territories: cyber space, urban vs. rural, center vs. periphery, etc.+ Inter-regional cooperation
+ Identities in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, memories, and nostalgia (Quote source)
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory
“Interdisciplinary Literary Studies exemplifies the diversity, complexity, and rewards of integrating literary study with other methodologies… seeks to explore the interconnections between literary study and other disciplines, ideologies, and cultural methods of critique. All national literatures, periods, and genres are welcomed topics.” (Quote Source) In addition, “The hallmark of research today is “interdisciplinary,” and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies exemplifies the diversity, complexity, and rewards of integrating literary study with other methodologies. Drawing upon a broad base of critical theories and applying these to a wide range of literary genres, contributors reward us with daring interpretations, such as a mathematical reading of triangles in Robert Frost’s poetry or an “engaged Buddhist response to trauma” reading of Le Ly Hayslip’s Child of War, Woman of Peace.” (Quote Source)
Ecotone
“Since a year after its founding, in 2005, Ecotone is one of only two literary magazines in the United States to have had its work reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Science and Nature Writing, PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. It is based at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and comes out twice a year. Each issue contains new fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork.
The magazine bridges the gap between science and culture, bringing together the literary and the scientific, the urban and the rural, the personal and the biological. Ecotone has published original writing by winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award, as well as new work by emerging authors.” (Quote Source)
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB)
“Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (NIB) provides a forum for exploring current issues in bioethics through the publication and analysis of personal stories, qualitative and mixed-methods research articles, and case studies. Articles may address the experiences of patients and research participants, as well as health care workers and researchers. NIB is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of bioethical issues by engaging rich descriptions of complex human experiences. While NIB upholds appropriate standards for narrative inquiry and qualitative research, it seeks to publish articles that will appeal to a broad readership of health care providers and researchers, bioethicists, sociologists, policy makers, and others.” (Quote source.) Submit a personal story here, for the Narrative Symposia.
LexisNexis State Capital
“For the first time, researchers can search for information about one state, any combination of states, or all 50 states—all from a single, comprehensive Web source. Bills and laws, constitutions, proposed and enacted regulations, legislature membership, newspapers of record—they’re all here—most updated daily—in LexisNexis State Capital.
State capitals
Compare law and public policy developments.
Monitor proposed and enacted state laws.
Analyze national and regional trends.
Get facts about state legislators and their staffs.
Academic Video Online
“Academic Video Online brings you content from the BBC, PBS, Arthaus, CBS, Kino International, Documentary Educational Resources, California Newsreel, Opus Arte, The Cinema Guild, Pennabaker Hegedus Films, Psychotherapy.net, and hundreds of other partners. Newsreels, award-winning documentaries, field recording, interviews, lectures, training videos, and exclusive primary footage come together in a vast and powerful collection – 22,000 full-length videos by 2013…Make custom clips at per-second start-point and stop-point accuracy. Create custom playlists with your clips, whole videos, or content selected from anywhere on the Web—anything that has a URL can be put into your playlist. Each of your clips and playlists lives at a permanent URL—so you can cite them all in papers, blogs, and courseware, email them, share them.” Quote source
Subject Categories: Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video; Arts and Humanities – Film/Video
“This textbase is designed to provide basic tools, in the form of texts and lexica, for the study of Armenian from the classical period, with a focus on the oldest states of the language. For texts: the textbase contains Biblical and theological translations and native texts up to the time of Movses Xorenats’i in the late eighth century. Every word in these texts has been lexically analyzed, for its dictionary form and part of speech, and is searchable on each of these. For lexica: four major Armenian dictionaries have been included, complete or in substantial excerpts. Together, these cover the complete range of the classical language down to the latest periods. The four lexica are supplemented by Greek and Armenian wordlists. Uniquely, all words of all texts and all entries in every dictionary have been linked together through a ‘base lexicon’ which allows readers to find every occurrence of every word throughout. ” Quote source
Subject Categories: Arts and Humanities – Religion
Taiwan Electronic Periodical Service
TEPS (Taiwan Electronic Periodical Services) is an on-line database offering the most full-text Taiwan periodicals around the world. Currently TEPS contains more than 900 Taiwan Periodicals in various disciplines… Users are able to easily search, browse, and print articles online….” Quote source
Subject Categories: Area Studies and Cultures – Chinese Studies, Taiwan
Also known as the Naver digital news archive and the Naver news library, Naver News Library provides a Korean digital newspaper archive for articles published between 1920 and 1999 from four major Korean newspapers: Dong-A Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Maeil Business Newspaper and Hankyoreh. For more information about what this resource offers, check out their You Tube video!
American Bench: Judges of the nation
“This is the only directory which contains biographical information on current state court judges. It contains entries for federal judges as well. It also provides information on each court, including location, jurisdiction, method of selecting judges, and maps of judicial divisions. It is arranged alphabetically by state, with a separate section for the Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals. Information on federal district court judges is provided in the state section in which the judge presides.” Quote source
Includes: Legal dictionaries, legal bibliographies, AALL publications series, memorials of Law Librarians and MORE! For more information, see the .pdf brochure.
Bonus Alert and holiday gift suggestion for your favorite researcher!
The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has launched what it claims is the largest academic-based cloud storage system in the country. The system is capable of an initial raw 5.5 petabyte of storage and is 100 percent disk-based with high-speed 10 gigabit Ethernet network interconnections. SDSC’s Cloud uses two Arista Networks 7,508 switches, providing 768 total 10 gigabit Ethernet ports for more than 10Tbit/s of non-blocking, IP-based connectivity. Pricing information for space: https://cloud.sdsc.edu/hp/pricing.php
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
– Audiobooks from Recorded Books Incorporated via NC Live
Duke Libraries will be offering a great selection of downloadable audiobooks later this month, according to NC Live:
“On Monday, September 19th, NC LIVE will disable the MyiLibrary Audio Books platform from use. Beginning September 19th, you will no longer be able to access or download audio books via the MyiLibrary service.” Instead, a new audio book provider and platform – Recorded Books One Click service – will be available later this fall. The new Recorded Books platform will be an improvement with regard to download and searching capabilities.
– Information set free!
JSTOR announced today it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This Early Journal Content includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. To learn more and to watch a video tutorial on how to access Early Journal Content, click here.
NEW databases:
– DRAM – Database of Recorded American Music
From the DRAM website : “DRAM is a not-for-profit resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. Continuing in the tradition of DRAM’s sister company New World Records, one of DRAM’s primary focuses is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings that have been neglected by the commercial marketplace, recordings that may otherwise become lost or forgotten.
Currently DRAM’s collection contains more than 3,000 albums worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 26 independent labels, and we are continually working to add more content. The basis for the current collection is the diverse catalogue of American music recordings by New World Records. From folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and beyond, New World has served composers, artists, students and the general public since its inception in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.” (Quote source and more information from DRAM.)
Contact librarian: Laura Williams
Subject Categories: Arts & Humanities – Music
– Naxos Video Library
From the Naxos Video Library: “more than 250 full-length videos of concerts, operas, ballets, and documentaries from prestigious performing arts labels such as Arthaus Musik, Dacapo, Dynamic, EuroArts, H‰nssler Classic, Medici Arts, Naxos, Opus Arte and TDK. Featuring performances from legendary artists including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Martha Argerich, Gerald Finley, and celebrated conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev and many more, videos are available to stream at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps(high quality) and the service is compatible with both PC and Mac computers.”
Functions and features:
Conductor Simon Rattle
Ability to stream videos at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps (high quality) resolutions
Create custom clips, which can be edited and added to individual playlists
Access to pre-defined video chapters, as well as individual arias and scene breaks of operas
Subtitles in up to 5 languages
The ability to follow along with scrolling libretto text
View video as Full Screen, 2/3 Screen or 1/4 Screen
Advanced search functionality, including the ability to search by category, role, composer, artist, production, personnel, work venue or festival (Quote source and more information)
Contact librarian: Laura Williams
Subject Categories: Arts and Humanities, Music, Film/Video; Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video
– Political Science Complete (PSC)
From EBSCO: “PSC contains full text for more than 530 journals, and indexing and abstracts for over 2,900 titles, (including top-ranked scholarly journals), many of which are unique to the product. PSC has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse.” Topical coverage includes : Comparative politics,Humanitarian issues, International relations, Law and legislation, Non-governmental organizations, Political theory” ( Quote source, title list and more.)
What do librarians think? This database received a “Highly Recommended” rating in a 2010 issue of Choice, the American Library Association’s review magazine.
Contact librarian: Catherine Shreve
Subject Categories: Social Sciences – Political Science
– IPA Source (Transcriptions and Literal Translations of Songs and Arias)
From the IPA site: “Online since 2003, IPA Source is the web’s largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Now with over 5598 texts including 955 aria texts! Using the dropdown menus, search for titles by composer, poet, title, opera aria, or Latin text.” Tip: This resource requires the Aodbe Acrobat reader. (Quote source)
Subject Categories: Arts and Humanities – Music
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
– Changes to OCLC’s FirstSearch:
Though these databases may be available from other sources, beginning June 30th, 2011 FirstSearch from OCLC will no longer offer access to the following databases:
• ABI/INFORM
• Applied Science & Technology Abstracts and Index
• Art Abstracts and Art Index
• Biography Index
• Biological & Agricultural Index
• Biology Digest
• Book Review Digest
• Books in Print and nooks in Print with Reviews
• Business Dateline
• CA Student Edition
• Contemporary Women’s Issues
• Dissertation Abstracts Online
• Education Abstracts
• Education Index
• Essay and General Literature Index
• General Sciences Abstracts and General Sciences Index
• GEOBASE
• Humanities Abstracts and humanities Index
• Index to Legal Periodicals & Books
• Library Literature
• Newspaper Abstracts
• PAIS Archive
• PAIS International
• Periodical Abstracts
• PsycINFO
• Readers’ Guide Abstracts
• SIRS Researcher
• Social Sciences Abstracts
• Social Sciences Index
• Sociological Abstracts
• Wilson Business Abstracts and Wilson Select Plus
– Taylor & Francis Online
“Taylor & Francis’ new online platform, Taylor & Francis Online, www.tandfonline.com, will replace access to the 1,600 Journals and Reference Works currently on informaworld…We are currently in the advanced stages of testing and plan to migrate from informaworld to Taylor & Francis Online over the course of the weekend beginning 25th June 2011…The new site will then be live from 27th June.”
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Database Upgrade –
On Wednesday, 1 June 2011, IEEE will implement an upgrade to the IEEE Xplore digital library. There is no scheduled downtime during this upgrade.
Specific improvements with this upgrade include
One of the largest technical and scientific associations in Europe – VDE VERLAG (VDE) – integrates VDE’s conference proceedings into IEEE Xplore. This includes 3,100 VDE conference papers from 20+ annual conference titles, with 1,000 new articles being added every year.
Sort search results by “Most Cited”: This upgrade includes a new feature to IEEE Xplore that will allow you to sort your search results by “Most Cited”. Also, you will also see the article’s citation count in the article metadata. Find articles of high impact quickly with this new feature.
Quickly and easily perform your search in IEEE Xplore and also see further relevant results from scitopia.org based on your search terms. Sciptopia.org provides a federated search of content from 15 leading scholarly society publishers in science and technology.
eBooks – a dedicated web page has been created for eBooks OPAC that includes both the HTML persistent link list as well as the Excel versions and Customers with OpenURL activated on their account will now find OpenURL links next to eBook chapters. (IEEE information for this post provided by IEEE.)
From the University of Pennsylvania press, “Change Over Time is a new, semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Themes will be examined at all scales, from the global and regional to the microscopic and material.”
This journal can be readily accessed through Duke’s ProjectMUSE database subscription. (Journal description provided from ProjectMUSE.) Here is a link to the journal’s web page, with information on the Spring & Fall 2012 calls for papers.
“The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish. The three major components deliver approximately 200 novels and many hundreds of short stories; 20,000 pages of poetry; and more than 450 plays… Social historians will find much of value in Latino Literature…Authors are indexed for national heritage, gender, birth and death dates, literary movement, occupation, and more.” (Description excerpted from longer description provided by Alexander Street Press.) Free, browse-only access provided here, by Alexander Street Press.
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Outages:
– UNC Libraries online services will be unavailable on Wednesday, May 18, from 2:30 a.m. until noon, because of a critical equipment upgrade. This outage will affect all electronic services, including: the online catalog; digital collections; access to electronic journals, databases, and e-books; request forms;interlibrary loan;
and the University Library website. Both on-campus and off-campus access will be affected.
– For those of you who use WiseSearch (WiseNews, the News archive, is updated every day with items from over 1,600 content providers, including all 18 Chinese and English newspapers of Hong Kong, and a large number of other top-tier newspapers, magazines, newswires, TV and radio broadcasts of Mainland, Taiwan and some Asia Pacific countries) please be informed that a system maintenance will be scheduled on Saturday, 21 May 2011 from 13:00 to 19:00. During this period, the information update on our platform will be temporarily unavailable. The services will be resumed to normal after the maintenance.
New databases –
Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991
“The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 features the complete 62-year run of The Listener, established by the BBC in 1929 as the medium for reproducing radio and later, television programmes in print.”
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Picture Post Historical Archive “The Picture Post Historical Archive comprises the complete archive of the Picture Post from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 – all digitized from originals in full colour.”
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Economy and War in the Third Reich, 1933-1944
“This source provides 30,506 digital page images reproducing… original documents from the London School of Economics and Political Science collection Statistics of the Third Reich analysed, 1933-1944”
Contact person: Heidi Madden, Ph.D.
Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s
“This collection provides digital page images reproducing FBI documentation on a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, cultural, and economic issues.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Democracy in Turkey, 1950-1959: Records of the U.S. State Department Classified Files
“This collection of digital reproductions of State Department documents provides access to unique primary source materials on the political, economic and social development of Turkey during a period of democratization in the 1950s.”
Contact person: Christof Galli
Mountain People: Life and Culture in Appalachia
“This collection consists of the diaries, journals, and narratives of explorers, emigrants, military men, Native Americans, and travelers. In addition, there are accounts on the development of farming and mining communities, family histories, and folklore. ”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Bush Presidency and Development and Debate Over Civil Rights Policy and Legislation
“This collection contains materials on civil rights, the development of civil rights policy, and the debate over civil rights legislation during the administration of President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and during his tenure as vice president (1981-1989).”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Civil War in Words and Deeds
“These first-person accounts, compiled in the postwar period and early 20th century period, chronicle the highs and lows of army life from 1861 through 1865.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800-1824
“This collection consists of the letters received by and letters sent to the War Department, including correspondence from Indian superintendents and agents, factors of trading posts, Territorial and State governors, military commanders, Indians, missionaries, treaty and other commissioners, Treasury Department officials, and persons having commercial dealings with the War Department, and other public and private individuals.”
Contact person: Mark Thomas
America in Protest: Records of Anti-Vietnam War Organizations, The Vietnam Veterans Against the War
“This publication consists of FBI reports dealing with every aspect of antiwar work carried out by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In an attempt to keep this group under close watch, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintained diligent surveillance of the VVAW almost from the inception of the group’s activities and running through 1975, when the United States ended its presence in Vietnam. The collection also includes surveillance on a variety of other antiwar groups and individuals, with an emphasis on student groups and Communist organizations.”
Contact person: Patrick Stawski
German Folklore and Popular Culture: Das Kloster. Scheible
“Das Kloster is a collection of magical and occult texts, chapbooks, folklore, popular superstition and fairy tales of the German Renaissance compiled by Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible, between 1845 and 1849.”
Contact person: Heidi Madden
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
“The records comprising this collection make clear that the National Negro Business League (NNBL) was an important social and economic organization among African Americans in the early years of the twentieth century… This collection documents the rise of the NNBL through 1923 and affords great insight into an important African American social movement and the black middle class after 1900.”
Contact person: Karen Jean Hunt
Welcome to the first post of the Alerts special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
The Garland encyclopedia of world music online is a comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world’s peoples. Each volume contains an overview of a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances. Articles include detailed photographs that show musicians, musical instruments, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Other images include drawings, maps, and musical examples for further study. Contains the full text of the 10 volume print encyclopedia (originally published in 1997), which is searchable all together for the first time.
OntheBoards.TV is a way to view theater performances. According to KUOW radio station news, “A recent study released by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that millions of people watch performing arts online. Seattle’s On The Boards hopes to capture some of that audience through a new project called On The Boards TV.” Here is a link that describes the history and mission of On the Boards: http://www.ontheboards.org/history-mission
“ As a historical resource, these tapes transcend scandalous utterances to provide a compelling, unique window into the American presidency during some of the most pivotal and contentious years of recent American history.” – David Coleman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program. Quoted from the website http://presidentialrecordings.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/essays
Databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
The HathiTrust* partnership with Summon is about finding materials in new ways by taking advantage of technology. HathiTrust is a group formed by the 25 libraries participating in the Google Book Search and book digitization project. The HathiTrust/Summon partnership asks: How can we get more information to more people to enable conversations and solve information problems? The short answer is through digitization and full text searching. Getting more information to more people is rooted in two aspects of the the new norm: If it isn’t online it isn’t accessible and library content access expectations have changed from days to hours to right now. With Summon, currently used at Duke, library patrons will be able to easily search the HathiTrust collection.
HathiTrust –
“Preservation with access” is their tag line and with the Trust, they wish to create a collective space to meet a collective need. Its goal is to be, in essence, a comprehensive repository of published literature, plus access and preservation, primarily thru digitization. HathiTrust emphasizes long term preservation but not without access and sustainability. The scope of their holdings include 12 million digitized volumes in 2011 alone. Of all of the digitized volumes in the HathiTrust, only 26% are in copyright and the rest is in the public domain. Almost 50% of the copyrighted content is material published since 1960. According to the Trust, most major research libraries will be able to find 45% of their content in HathiTrust’s collection by December 2011.
Summon –
In partnership with HathiTrust, Summon increases user access to works in the public domain. Summon is what is called a “discovery layer” that is in front of many different kinds of databases. Summon indexes the contents of databases and other resources so it can quickly return results from multiple collections at once. Though you may not realize it, Summon is the Articles search tab found on the Duke Library front page. Summon is currently ingesting (yes, this is the technical term) HathiTrust’s index. Through Summon, a user’s query will be searched in databases, a local library’s catalog and HathiTrust content, all at the same time.
The partnership hopes to launch this summer coinciding with the American Library Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans, June 2011. However, not every library that has a Summon-powered discovery layer will necessarily search HathiTrust content. A library can choose the following options with regard to HathiTrust’s content: Opt to include all of the information HathiTrust offers, or opt to include just the public domain content on not include HathiTrust content in the results. When searching using the Articles tab, patrons will be able to click a “Search beyond your library” link to access HathiTrust and other content.
Duke libraries would like to know what you think of the increased access to HathiTrust’s content that will be offered this summer. Specifically, how much of Hathi’s content should appear in the Articles tab search results – all of it, just the public domain documents or just the ability to click through to the HathiTrust content?
*Hathi is pronounced either “hottie” or “hah-tee”. Also, Hathi or Haathi means Elephant in Hindi.
Beginning March 28, the New York Times will start charging online readers who want to view more than 20 articles per month. Upon clicking the 21st article, users will be given an option of purchasing an online package.
As a print subscriber, the Libraries are investigating options in how we might offer access to Duke affiliates. Unfortunately, this option is not yet available.
Never fear, although we cannot offer access to current content through nytimes.com, we can offer access via several of our databases:
Factiva – The Newsstand feature of this database allows you to browse today’s edition by sections. Searching older issues is also available using the Search Tab and then choosing Search Builder.
LexisNexis Academic – Gives you a variety of search features for today’s and past editions.
ProQuest – Searchable version of today’s and past editions. Scroll down and click on the year, the month, and then the day to get a list of all of today’s articles.
These options work both on and off campus. If you’re having difficulty with access, please contact the Perkins Reference desk at 660-5880, askref@duke.edu or through instant messaging.
When you return from Spring Break, the articles search from the library homepage will look a little different. There will be no changes to the look of the homepage or the Articles tab, but your search results will reveal an improved system for finding articles.
The big improvements will be speed and a more comprehensive search. The new system creates a single index (like Google), which allows for much faster searching–results will display in around 2 seconds. The new system also includes much more content, searching over 90 percent of our journal subscriptions, giving users access to a much larger (if not complete) slice of Duke Libraries’ resources.
When searching from the Duke University Libraries’ homepage, you’ll be searching only for journal articles (the “Content Type” box on the left will be checked Journal Article.) Any subsequent search from the results page will search across all content types, adding books, newspaper articles, etc. You may search across all Duke Libraries collections simultaneously, but there may be times when you want to see only books, only journal articles, etc. You have complete control over this–-simply check the appropriate box under “Content Type.”
We are excited about this new search tool and welcome your feedback as you begin to use it.
Duke users now have access to the sociology research database SocINDEX with Full Text. This new subscription provides comprehensive coverage of sociology resources, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study.
SocINDEX with Full Text features more than 2,066,400 records; extensive indexing for books/monographs, conference papers, and other non-periodical sources; abstracts for more than 1,200 “core” coverage journals dating as far back as 1895; and provides cited references that can also be searched.
SocINDEX with Full Text offers coverage for topics including: abortion, anthropology, criminology, criminal justice, cultural sociology, demography, economic development, ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage and family, politics, religion, rural sociology, social psychology, social structure, social work, sociological theory, sociology of education, substance abuse, urban studies, violence, welfare, and many others.
In addition, SocINDEX with Full Text features over 25,000 author profiles. Each profile includes contact information, journals of publication, and author’s areas of expertise and professional focus.
There are iPhone apps for just about anything. They’ve got you covered if you need to get Danish handball scores, calculate alimony, keep track of your pet’s vet records, or create and test palindromes. There is more than just fun in the world of apps, though. Here are some great research tools for mobile devices.
At Duke, there are a number of great ways to work in the library wherever you are. You can use the library’s mobile website to find library hours, available computers, directions, contact info and more. If you’re doing medical research, take a look at Duke’s Medical Center Library mobile site. It’s full of features enabling you to do PICO analysis, browse e-journals, and link to many helpful mobile resources.
On the Digital Collections blog, it was recently announced that you can search, browse and view our Digital Collections on your mobile device. Be sure to watch the short video demonstrating the ease of this feature in their post announcing this new tool. Just announced this week, you can now watch vintage ads from Duke Libraries Hartman Center from Duke iTunes U.
There are other nice mobile tools outside of Duke as well. This is just a partial list and some of these are third-party apps, but this will give you an idea of the possibilities out there. Some useful apps include those for WorldCat.org, the arXiv pre-print server for physics, math, computer science, etc, or the Papers PDF organizer software in mobile form.
I’m sure I’ve missed some helpful mobile resources. What others are out there?
For many faculty and graduate students who remain on-campus, the summer is the time to catch up with all those things that got left behind in the end-of-semester rush.
With the deluge of articles and books in your field, it’s sometimes a challenge to keep up-to-date.
Not any more.
If you use Duke’s databases for your research, you can use RSS feeds to send you automatic updates on relevant articles, authors, journals, search results and citations.
These feeds allow you to automatically and effortlessly:
Writing a history paper? Need background information on your topic? Cambridge History Online provides online access to over 250 Cambridge history volumes. These volumes cover a wide range of subjects including American history, British history, economic history, general history, history of science, history of the book, and the history of language and linguistics.
Key Features:
Search and browse full-text content across all subjects and volumes
SimplyMap lets users create professional quality maps for use in presentations, research reports, business plans, or Websites. Data variables can be viewed at the State, County, ZIP Code, Tract and Block Group levels.
Want to know the top 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in your state? How about the top 25 counties with the most elderly residents? These and similar questions are easily answered by ranking locations using any data variable in SimplyMap.
SimplyMap includes access to thousands of demographic, business, and marketing data variables such as consumer expenditure, real estate, crime and many more.
Everything you do in SimplyMap can be exported in multiple formats for further customization and analysis. Create and export large amounts of data or detailed reports as Excel or CSV files. Advanced users can even export shapefiles for use in their own GIS software.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s…it’s…a subject librarian!
I know that some of you think your professors have sent you out into the world of research and writing with no allies and no weapons. I’m here to tell you that you are mistaken. A group of superhero-like librarians have been summoned from the ends of the earth and brought to Duke to equip you with subject specific knowledge and tools.
Trying to figure out if you need a subject librarian? Do you have a really specific topic? Are you looking for data, obscure documents or resources? Do you feel the need for an in-depth research consult? If you answered yes to any of these questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
Astronomy? Got it. Korean Studies? Yep. Music Media? You know it! And that’s only a taste of the subject coverage we’ve got! What’s that? You want to contact them right away? You want to learn more about the subjects they cover? I thought you might feel that way. All the information you need is here.
If you still have questions, don’t forget that the reference desk is always a great place to start. You can always save time and ask a librarian!
UNdata pools major UN databases and those of several international organizations into a single entry point for easy access. Users can easily browse, search and download data from a large number of statistical databases.
Data categories include: agriculture, education, employment, energy, environment, health, human development, industry, information and communication technology, national accounts, population, refugees, trade, and tourism.
Data sources include, but are not limited to: UN Statistics Division, UN Population Division, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Labour Organization, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, World Tourism Organization and UNESCO.
Most of Duke’s e-books are provided by a service called NetLibrary. The 24,000+ e-books can be viewed at the site but not downloaded, and printing is cumbersome.
You can go directly to NetLibrary and search for e-books, or find them in our catalog and click on the link into NetLibrary. Once at the NetLibrary site, you need to create a free log-in and password to access a book. You can then “check out” the book, usually for 4 hours, unless someone else is using it.
If you are off campus you will need to make sure that NetLibrary is recognizing you as a Duke user. Look for the little Duke window at the top left of the page. If it’s not there, you will need to turn on the Duke VPN if you use it, or force our EZProxy server to ask you for a Duke NetID and password. To do this, go back to the library home page and search for NetLibrary using the Databases tab. When you click the link in the results, you should get a pop-up asking for your NetID and password.
(You can also force EZProxy by right-clicking on the page and following the link when you are using the LibX plugin. Just another reason that LibX is so great!)
We’ve heard of several faculty and library staff members who are converts to iGoogle, which is sort of a customizable universal home page. If you use iGoogle and the Duke Libraries, you should certainly add our Google Gadget, which lets you put the tabbed search box from the library home page right into iGoogle. Here’s how it looks:
You’ll notice that Catherine also has her Gmail account, Facebook account, Google Reader (for subscribing to blogs, like Duke’s Library Hacks!), Google Docs, and a news feed (plus other stuff you can’t see like weather and Youtube) all feeding in to her iGoogle page.
You can also create your own free-form “gadget” with links to, for example, e-journals or databases that you search all the time, creating a series of research shortcuts for yourself. Give the Duke Library Google Gadget a try and see if other iGoogle tools work for you. If you have a library or research-related iGoogle Hack, leave us a note in comments!
To get to databases or e-journals from off-campus, be sure to go through the library website in order to be recognized as a Duke user. Going directly to a bookmarked e-resource will not work.
Try logging in using any one of these methods:
Start at the database or e-journal interface, or follow a “GetIt@Duke” link. When you click on a link, a new window will pop up, and you just need to fill in your NetID and password to connect to EZProxy. You should be good to go until you end your browser session or log out!
When entering the library website from off-campus, you might also notice that there is a Yellow box located to the right of the titled database link(s) saying “Your web browser is reporting an IP address that is not within range of authorized AP addresses”. Just click on the link for signing in with your Net ID/password. Once you’re signed in, you can access any number of databases.
If you’re still not being recognized as a Duke user, download and install the Duke Virtual Private Network (VPN). Some resources exclusive to Law, Business, or Medical Center affiliates cannot be accessed via EZProxy. Make sure that the the VPN is open when you access the database or e-journal.
If you’re having any trouble Ask a Librarian, or check through some of the connection issues that might cause difficulties with the VPN.
To install it, go to http://apps.facebook.com/dukelibraries/ and follow the usual method for installing Facebook applications, checking or unchecking the settings you want for this application. Then look for it on your profile page. The box should be able to be moved around on your page and fit in either column. With this app, you should be able to do any of the searches that you can do on the library home page.
Web of Science is probably the most important database for the sciences, and it’s very powerful for humanities and social sciences as well. Yesterday it debuted a new user interface, so don’t be startled when you see its new GREEN look!
A newer Web of Science feature you should try is the Author Finder, which makes it much easier to find papers by a known author, especially one with a common name. To use Author Finder, use the Web of Science tab and click the link under the Author line. There are a number of simple, self-explanatory steps to follow.
Another vital Web of Science tool is the Cited Reference Search. This hasn’t changed in the upgrade. You still need to enter an author, journal title (using the long list of journal title abbreviations) and year – and then you can access a wealth of articles that refer to the initial article you entered.
One down side of the upgrade we’ve noted in the library is that you can no longer limit your search to include only the Science, Social Science, or Humanities subsections of Web of Science – you have to search the entire thing.
Have you discovered any new features of this database? Leave us a note and share!
AccessScience @ McGraw-Hill gives you keyword searchability of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology as well as science biographies, yearbooks, and some news articles.
Blackwell Reference Online has especially strong collections in Business, History, Linguistics, Literature, and Philosophy.
Next in our tour of online reference works we’ll look at some specific titles. If you want an overview of the things we subscribe to, look in the Resource Finder under the subject heading Reference, and look for Encyclopedias and Dictionaries.
Fast overview of a topic
Historical timeline & basic facts
Find out the right keywords for article searches
Find out the main issues in the field
Check for a list of suggested readings to start your real research
Which Encyclopedia?
Wikipedia has quickly become a go-to internet source when you need an encyclopedia. But there have been some concerns about its authority and objectivity, so it should be used cautiously. Use your critical thinking skills – if the article has footnotes, a list of further readings, and feels balanced, it is more likely to be comparable to what you would find in a more traditional encyclopedia. And Wikipedia can be a wonderful source of arcane information: when you really need a list of original air dates for episodes of The Brady Bunch, Wikipedia is the right source!
When your needs are less Florence Henderson-centric, there are other excellent encyclopedias available online. This post will cover the big general ones:
Encyclopedia Britannica online (available by Duke subscription) replicates the authoritative print version but adds web-only tools, including historical timelines and country comparisons.
The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th Edition) is available via InfoPlease.com and Bartelby.com; this is a shorter, one-volume encyclopedia in its print version. Both sites also have various other dictionaries, thesauruses, and almanacs – as well as ads (InfoPlease’s interface is far more busy and annoying, IMO).
Browse the list of Reference resources here for more useful starting places for research – and watch this space for highlights of some excellent subject-specific encyclopedias online.
The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is a remarkable database that contains full-length digital videos of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. This resource that Duke Libraries just recently purchased contains over 50,000 video testimonies.
To get to this database, just click on the database tab on the Duke Library homepage and type “Shoah” in the search box. Once at the site, you will be asked to create a free username and password in order to log-in.
Once you are logged in, you can search for interviews by keyword, a specific person, or by an experience group.
What will you find inside, you may ask?
Extraordinary primary source material to use in your research.
Full-length video interviews taken in 56 countries, in 32 languages!
At the end of many interviews, personal photographs, documents, and artifacts from the interviewee’s family are displayed.
One of the comments on the LibX toolbar post asked about ways we could customize that toolbar to allow searches of specific databases, like JStor.
There is a way to search a database right from your web browser toolbar, using a customized search plugin. Most browsers come with options for searching Google, Yahoo or Amazon, but you can add options like WorldCat, the Oxford English Dictionary, and ProQuest.
We’ve set up a page collecting the plug-ins we’ve found or created here. If you don’t see a search plug-in for the database you want, contact Phoebe Acheson and ask for it. Not every database works with the plug-in generator we’re using, but many do.
The new articles and databases Resource Finder has one functional change from the old: now, you can bookmark your favorite databases or searches as a way to save them. Look for “Save this Search”:
Click on “Save this Search” to see the full explanation:
What’s this Connotea we’re talking about? See this page about ideas for using Connotea at Duke.
The new look of the search interface for articles and databases went live this morning.
The functionality of the interface is almost exactly the same as the old site:
1. a quick keyword search for articles (searching top article databases including ProQuest and Academic OneFile)
2. an advanced article search that allows author and title keywords and allows you to choose a list of top databases for your subject (Arts and Humanities, Government, Life Sciences, etc.)
3. search for an article database by name, or browse an A-Z list of all our databases
4. browse for a database by your subject or discipline
The E-journals interface is unchanged; the new look debuted this summer.
Our first tip: Why log in? I asked the developers and they explained that there’s no real need to log in if you are using the interface from a campus computer, but if you are off-campus, logging in gives you the full access to the databases through EZ-Proxy.
How do you like the new look and feel? Have you discovered any tips or time-savers to make this interface work for you? We’re just getting comfortable with it ourselves, so we’d love a chance to learn from you!
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries is a large collection of international music with full-length audio streams. This database is brand new and was recently acquired by Duke Libraries. It covers voices from people all around the world. Listen to old time country music, blues, recordings from African tribes, Broadway hits and much more!
Reasons to check it out, besides that it is now free to Duke students and staff:
includes complete audio and video selections, media, educational resources and detailed liner notes.
Search by country, culture group, genre, language or even instrument.
Develop your own playlists.
Create a user name and log-in to store favorites in a “My Playlists” folder.
One stop shopping! You can buy albums you like directly from this site.
Enjoy! Browse all different types of music and put off writing that paper for a little while…
I hope many of you are reading my words right now thanks to an RSS feed – you’ve subscribed to this blog through Bloglines or Google Reader or your choice of aggregator. We make the RSS feed of the blog available in DukePass and it may soon be appearing on the Duke Libraries home page. You can add it to your Facebook page using the application FlogBlog.
RSS feeds can do a lot more than just allow you to spend hours procrastinating from your research by reading blogs that other people write as a form of procrastination. Many providers of article databases now allow you to set up repeated searches (often called “alerts”) that will deliver articles relevant to your work via an RSS feed. You can set up a search that sends all new articles from the most relevant journals in your field (a do-it-yourself table of contents service), or all new articles written on a topic, using a keyword search or subject heading.
The University of Wisconsin Library has set up a guide to databases that offer alert services – some of them only have traditional email alerts, which generally require you to register, but RSS feeds are noted when available, and they seem to be an increasingly popular offering. If you’re not sure what vendor provides your favorite database, look up the database in our finder, and click the “i” link for information. The vendor will be noted.
For an example, The Shifted Librarian raves about EBSCO databases’ newly revised RSS feed services – one click of a bright orange link gets you a url for the search that you can drop into your RSS feed tool. EBSCO databases at Duke include Academic Search Premiere, ATLA, ERIC, MLA, PsycINFO, and many others.
Some Gale databases have recently added the same feature: see the RSS4lib blog post for a screenshot. Academic Onefile (until recently called InfoTrac Onefile) is the biggest Gale database at Duke that has this enabled.
Automating searches for new articles in your field is a great way to keep up with what’s new – and RSS delivers it directly to you. Do you have another RSS feed research tip to share? Leave a comment!
If you’re a fan of LexisNexis, you’ve probably noticed some changes in the last few weeks. The interface is more appealing and easier to navigate; its search box is larger and allows for “natural language” searches (the types of searches you do in Google); and you no longer get those annoying error messages when Lexis decides your search is too broad.
If you were put off by the old interface or haven’t used Lexis before, now’s the time to give it a shot. Why bother familiarizing yourself with such a GIANT research tool, you ask? Well, to start with…
Search over 300 newspapers from around the world by date, headline, photo caption, keyword and more. Many are updated continuously, so you’ll never be behind!
It’s not just about news–click “Legal” at the top of the page to access law review articles, legislation, and Supreme Court decisions from 1790
Pull up SEC filings and company profiles, including Standard & Poor’s reports–just click on the “Business” button at the top of the screen.
Find out how the public responds to Gallup Polls (and other public opinion polls)–go to “News” and click on “Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.” You can search polls back to 1935.
Search blogs and web publications–just check those boxes on the “Easy Search” screen.
Track down broadcast transcripts from NPR, CNN, and other major networks by checking the box by “TV and Radio Broadcast Transcripts” on the “Easy Search” screen.
So, next time you need the full-text of a Supreme Court decision for poli sci, a futures report for finance or are just curious how Americans weigh in on their favorite soft drinks, run a search through LexisNexis Academic.
Find a source or discover a trick worth sharing? Post a comment!
Find yourself discouraged and frustrated? Save time, Ask a Librarian!
Library staff often learn as much from our patrons – i.e. you – as they teach. My husband, who is a PhD student in engineering at another local institution of higher learning, said to me, “Why don’t you do a post on your blog about DOIs?” I had never heard of a DOI. So I had to look it up, of course.
What? A DOI – Digital Object Identifier – is a number attached to a piece of online content (Wikipedia has a much more technical definition). In practical terms, it is a unique number attached to a full-text online article, much in the same way every book has a unique ISBN.
Why? Well, suppose your article was published in the journal ‘Nitpicky Things About Oceanography’ by Small Academic Press and appeared on their web site. Six years later, Small Academic Press was purchased by Big International Conglomerate. Obviously they are going to change the (previously stable) url of your journal article. But you can find the new online location of the article easily by putting the DOI into a DOI resolver or the global handle resolver. DOIs can also be easily hotlinked, and some article databases are starting to do this. DOIs are starting to be included as an integral part of bibliographic citations in some fields – instead of searching for the journal title to find an article, just enter the DOI into a resolver and there you are.
Who? DOIs are the result of cooperation between commercial publishers and non-commercial organizations (like libraries, universities, and academic presses). The main site explaining all this is at doi.org, but you may find the information available at CrossRef.org, which is focused on scholarly research applications of DOIs, to be more useful.
It’s back to school time, and that means faculty and instructors all over campus (and sometimes all over the world) are putting books on reserve, setting up e-reserves through the library, and linking from their Blackboard sites to online articles that we have access to through our subscription databases. Perkins Reference and CIT staff have been getting a lot of questions about how to find stable URLs for these articles, so we made up a web page to help: http://library.duke.edu/research/help/databases/stableurl.html
Please Ask a Librarian if your question isn’t answered there!
***I particularly recall how one of my professors tended never to know the *titles* of books she’d recommended to me. She’d say “that new book on Athenian demes by so-and-so.” The authors were all colleagues and friends of hers. … It didn’t help that the titles in academics are often bland affairs, “aiming higher” than their obscure topic in the hope of appealing to a broader audience—”Art, Difference and Culture” subtitled, “16th-century non-guild stonemasons in Malta,” etc.
I recall so vividly the same sensation from my days as an undergraduate and beginning graduate student. You end up with half-remembered titles, badly-spelled (or no) names, and a vague idea that this is all VERY IMPORTANT. Many of us are too shy to simply email the professor and ask for clarification. So where do you go from there?
For books, the place to start is WorldCat. WorldCat is a database – look for it under Popular Databases or search our database finder. It’s the world’s online catalog – it has everything in Duke’s catalog, and everything in UNC’s, and everything in the Charlotte Public Library’s, and everything in Harvard’s – you get the idea. It’s by no means perfect as a universal catalog, but it’s pretty good. Among its many uses:
1. Checking to see that you have a good citation. If searching in Duke’s catalog doesn’t find you a book, maybe it’s not that we don’t have it; maybe you’ve got it a little bit wrong. Check on it by checking WorldCat. If nobody has it, well, maybe that author’s name isn’t really Gnarl after all.
2. Starting to look for books on a topic when you don’t want to limit yourself to just what Duke owns. If your research project is a big one, and you have time to request materials through Interlibrary Loan, why not cast the net wide as you begin? Do a keyword or subject search in WorldCat, not just Duke’s catalog. We can’t own everything! If we do own it, WorldCat will tell you so, and provide the Get It @ Duke link.
We had a flurry of questions at the Reference Desk this spring when members of a Spanish class were asked to write a paper on a pop culture topic of their choosing, using sources in Spanish. How do you find books, scholarly articles, newspaper and magazine articles, or web pages in languages other than English?
As a sample topic, let’s take the (late, lamented) TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” (Note: as far as we know, nobody in the class was actually researching this topic.)
Google has an Advanced Search feature that allows you to search for pages in any one of a vast number of languages.
This is how we learned that in Spanish, Buffy is ‘la cazavampiros.’ The (351,000!!) search hits include a lot of fan sites, so would be a great place to look if we were interested in, for example, Spanish-language fans’ reactions to this show, or how the vampire mythology played in Spanish-speaking cultures.
What about the opinions of television reviewers in Mexican newspapers? How about the database Latin American Newsstand – 326 articles mentioning ‘Buffy la cazavampiros’, from papers from Rio to Monterrey to San Juan!
How about scholarly articles? A database called HAPI (Hispanic American Periodicals Index) is a great resource for current events, politics and social issues. It covers over 400 journals from the entire Spanish-speaking Americas. Many broader databases of scholarly articles allow you to limit by language as well, for example, MLA, which covers a broad variety of topics in the humanities. (Both have lots on women and television, but nothing on Buffy!)
A search of Duke’s library catalog can be limited to just one language, using a drop-down menu in the Advanced Search.
While we discovered that the Buffy DVDs in Lilly Library have optional tracks dubbed in Spanish, sadly there are no books in Spanish that address Buffy (there are a bunch of English language books!). A broader look at books in Spanish on television or popular culture might have better results: we own 173 books in Spanish that cover aspects of popular culture. Surely one of them must mention Buffy!
Written by Phoebe Acheson
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
Post contributed by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Head, Humanities and Social Sciences and Librarian for Literature
!
, you’ve viewed the item before.
and that can be found at the top right.
on the top left), and choose library links. You’re going to search for Duke University and choose the “Duke University Libraries – Get it at Duke and then save. This makes it so that any article found on Google Scholar that Duke has access to you’ll be able to go straight to that article. You’ll know it worked when you search an article and see this in the right column.
“The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish. The three major components deliver approximately 200 novels and many hundreds of short stories; 20,000 pages of poetry; and more than 450 plays… Social historians will find much of value in Latino Literature…Authors are indexed for national heritage, gender, birth and death dates, literary movement, occupation, and more.” (Description excerpted from longer description provided by Alexander Street Press.) Free, browse-only access provided 
