Category Archives: Noteworthy Resources

Exploring the Cost of Course Materials for Undergraduates: Toward an Affordable, Equitable Duke Education

Post by Ella Young, Research and Public Services InternCartoon illustration of people's hands holding up books, notebooks, and other printed materials.


In order to explore the true cost of a Duke undergraduate education, the Duke University Libraries are conducting a survey of teaching faculty to assess course materials costs for undergraduate students. By soliciting faculty responses, we seek to understand what types of materials are assigned in undergraduate courses across disciplines and their costs for students. The price of traditional textbooks and single-use online codes for homework has been rising for over 20 years, and students across the U.S. have reported struggling to afford their course materials alongside daily expenses. At Duke, if every undergraduate purchased every assigned textbook for their classes, they would cumulatively pay upwards of $1.4 million per academic year.

The Libraries plan to use data from the survey to assess how we can better support student access to course materials and to gauge interest in Open Educational Resources as a cost-effective alternative to traditional textbooks.  Surveying faculty about their interest in OERs moves Duke one step closer to implementing affordability initiatives and expanding OER availability on campus.

Have you taught an undergraduate course within the past 5 years? Click here to complete the survey!

What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are “openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users” (The OER Starter Kit). This includes textbooks, searchable repositories, images, artwork, and even online college courses.

OERs benefit students by reducing college costs, and instructors can tailor OER to fit their needs. People who otherwise would not have access to college-level materials also can gain an education with open access materials.

How do OERs work?

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are copyright licenses that give users permission to reuse, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon someone’s original material. All OERs are made available under some type of open license. There are six levels of license types with varying permissions, which you can explore here.

Learn more about OERs

To get started using Open Educational Resources, Duke Libraries has a guide to OERs with introductory information and links to open resources for instructors. For questions about OERs or how to make your courses accessible and affordable, contact Haley Walton, Librarian for Education and Open Scholarship, at the Duke University Libraries.

Open Education Week, a worldwide event for celebrating and promoting OERs, will take place this year the week of March 4th—8th. During OER Week, organizers across the globe will be hosting in-person and virtual events to showcase and discuss open education initiatives. A calendar of events can be found here.

We invite teaching faculty at Duke to click here to complete the survey!

All responses are anonymous.

“The Water Defenders” Wins 2021 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press, 2021), by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, is the winner of the 2021 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

This is the thirteenth year of this prestigious award. The award is supported by the Duke Human Rights Center@the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Human Rights Archive at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscripts Library.

The Water Defenders tells the story of courageous El Salvadorans who fought together to combat the exploitation of their country’s natural resources. As the writers note, while this story is about El Salvador, as importantly, it is “also about how global corporations—be they Big Gold or Big Pharma or Big Tobacco or Big Oil or Big Banks—move into poorer communities in countries all over the world.”

Broad and Cavanagh will accept the award and talk about their work at a virtual event on Tuesday, February 22, at 5:00 pm EST.

Robin Kirk, chair of the selection committee and co-director of the Duke Human Rights Center, noted that the book is both timely and representative of long-standing conflict around natural resources in Latin America. “Since Europeans first began exploiting the region’s wealth, native populations have fought back,” Kirk said. “But rarely have we been so well and intricately guided on how these fights take shape in villages and towns that rarely make the news. It is there, to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, that human rights takes shape and gains real power to make positive change.”

The judges were unanimous in their praise. Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist at Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, noted:

Broad and Cavanagh address how international global capital, particularly Big Mining, connects climate change and human rights in its pursuit of profit extraction at the cost of local communities. The authors tell this story by focusing in on a singular set of communities in El Salvador and the individual lives impacted by these vast processes. I liked how the authors historically situated the current fight for clean land and water as an extension of the long human rights struggles in Central America, and how those struggles created a very capable indigenous human rights movement. I was particularly drawn to the autochthonous nature of the activism that confronted the insurgent mining interests. The book underscores the agency of these activists, their intelligence and sophisticated understanding of the issues confronting their communities, as well as their agile deployment of human rights strategies to defend their communities.

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch and a former Méndez winner, noted that “This is an inspiring story about how people with limited resources were able to organize and protect their community. It’s well told, and highly relevant to current events, including protest movements over mining and environmental harm throughout the region.”

For Prof. Kirsten Weld, also a former Méndez winner and professor of history at Harvard University, the story was important and “told with brio, very readable and inspiring. It engages the politics of extractivism in a way that resonates beyond the Salvadoran case.”

When notified of the award, Broad and Cavanagh stated, “We are deeply honored by this Award which we accept in the names of the hundreds of environmental defenders who are murdered each year around the world for fighting for the most basic of human rights. So too are we honored by the fact that the Award is named for the venerable human right champion, Juan Méndez. May the victories of the Salvadoran water defenders inspire us all to rethink the possible.”

First awarded in 2008, the Méndez Human Rights Book Award honors the best current non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America. The books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism, human rights, and public policy circles.

See the Méndez Book Award website for more information and previous award winners.

Witness to Guantanamo Interviews Now Online

Post by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Screenshot of a video interview with Mourad Benchellali, a French national who was detained in Guantanamo from January 2002 until July 2004, when he was returned to France. One of 153 interviews now available in the Witness to Guantanamo Digital Collection.

As the nation prepares to mark the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Duke University Libraries are excited to announce the launch of the Witness to Guantanamo Digital Collection. Witness to Guantanamo includes 153 video interviews with former detainees and other individuals—attorneys, chaplains, guards, interrogators, interpreters, government officials, human rights advocates, medical personnel, and journalists—who witnessed the impact of the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the post-9/11 years. An additional 346 short clips from the full-length interviews are also included. English language interviews are accompanied by transcripts, and we are working to transcribe those in other languages as well.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, became the site of the detention center for suspected al Qaeda and Taliban operatives. Peter Jan Honigsberg, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, began Witness to Guantanamo (WtG) in fall 2008, after realizing that no one was collecting and preserving the voices and stories of “Gitmo.” He modelled the project after grassroots truth commissions and the Shoah Foundation’s collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Professor Honigsberg’s book, A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices from Guantanamo, narrates many of the extraordinary, powerful, and rare stories he filmed over the course of a decade and across 20 countries. His book is a tribute to the humanity we all share.

The full set of interviews are now archived at the Rubenstein Library’s Human Rights Archive and available through the digital repository. Witness to Guantanamo is unique. No one else has done this work. While there are many collections and projects dispersed around the world containing documents, case files, and data about Guantanamo and the U.S. War on Terror, WtG is the only collection that foregrounds the voices of the individuals detained there and whose lives were forever changed by the experience. The video interviews cover a wide range of topics, including physical and psychological torture, lawlessness, religious faith, medical care, interrogations, interminable detentions without charges, sham hearings, women at Guantanamo, and acts of courage.

In one interview, former detainee Mourad Benchellali reflects on his efforts to turn his imprisonment from 2002 to 2004 into something positive, in the hope that by hearing his story, young people will not join ISIS or participate in suicide attacks. “I simply tell them my story, telling them, ‘This is what I found out. This is what I saw in Afghanistan,’” Benchellali says. “I tell them about being tortured. I tell them about bombings. I tell them how groups enlist you… I tell them all of this, and I say, ‘Be careful, here are the dangers you may run into over there, as I did. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to you, but you have to decide for yourself.’”

In another interview, detainee attorney Alkha Pradhan discusses the process of trying to defend her client, Ammar al Baluchi. At one point in her interview, she reflects on how the CIA deployed its classification policy to control her client: “You know, even though these are his memories, these are his experiences, the government continues to classify them and continues to prevent him from being able to tell the world about them… by virtue of being him, by virtue of being again, brown, non-citizen, Muslim detainee in the CIA system, everything he says is classified. Everything he thinks is classified.”

These first-hand testimonies reveal the physical, emotional, and political scars inflicted by Guantanamo. They also underscore how the treatment of detainees and the use of extra-legal procedures hobbled rather than enabled the rule of law and the quest for truth and justice. They are an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and people around the world to reflect on the path taken by the U.S. in the years following 9/11. The Human Rights Archive is planning an exhibit based on the Witness to Guantanamo collection for January 2022 at the Power Plant Gallery in downtown Durham to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the first detainees arriving at Guantanamo in 2002. More information about the exhibit will be coming soon.

7 Back-to-School Library Pro Tips (You Won’t Believe Number 6!)

 


Okay, that headline was total clickbait. We admit it. We’ll stoop pretty low in order to seize a teachable moment. But now that we have your attention, we really do want to convey some important info about using the library this semester. Things are getting back to nearly normal, and the more you know ahead of time, the smarter you’ll look in front of all your friends. (Depending on your friends.) So here we go.

1. No more Library Takeout. Book stacks are open!

Despite the funkalicious earworm it inspired, Library Takeout is history. You no longer need to request books online and schedule a time to pick them up. That’s so 2020. Library stacks are open again, so help yourself and browse all you like. Duke faculty and grad students can still have books delivered to the library of their choice by clicking the green “Request” button in the catalog.

2. Our hours have changed.

In pre-COVID times, certain Duke libraries used to be open 24 hours during the week. This semester we’ve had to scale back, due to pandemic-related budget cuts. Our busiest libraries (Perkins, Bostock, and Lilly) will still be open until midnight most days. And if you really want to keep burning the midnight oil, we’ll have study spaces available in the von der Heyden Pavilion and Rubenstein Library. See our posted hours online for the most up-to-date info.

3. You can still reserve a seat (but you don’t have to).

Last year, if you wanted to study in the library, you had to book a seat in advance. Not any more. Study areas are available again on a first-come, first-served basis. However, one thing this past year taught us was that some students actually liked booking a seat, because they didn’t have to wander around to find a place to work. So we’ve kept a limited number of reservable study seats available. They’re in the Ahmadieh Family Commons on the second floor of Rubenstein Library, just outside of the Gothic Reading Room. 

4. We have textbooks! 

Every semester, we purchase the textbooks for the 100 largest classes at Duke, so that you can check them out for free. Left your textbook in your dorm room? Or want to try before you buy? Borrow our copy for up to three hours at a time, then return it for someone else to use. How great is that?

5. In a hurry? Dislike personal interactions? Check yourself out. 

Several libraries across Duke’s campus have self-checkout stations, where you can quickly and easily check out your own books without having to wait in line or deal with an actual human being. (We get it―ew.)

6. There is no number 6.

Gotcha.

7. We’re actually very friendly people who just want you to be happy.

People who work in libraries are some of the most approachable and service-oriented individuals you’ll ever meet. We genuinely want to help you. We also have a bunch of different ways you can get the help you need, whether by chat, email, phone, in-person, or Zoom. So don’t be afraid to ask us any question. We’re smiling at you under these masks. 

Access to the New York Times Part 1


Access to digital resources is a moving, changing situation and we take this opportunity to update you on what we have access to in the NYT.

The Duke Libraries provide various modes of access to this and other newspapers, magazines, and journals best found through the Online Journal Search.

This includes:
New York times from 1857 to the present in a variety of databases

We also have access to the
New York Times Magazine
1985 to Present; click on Full Text-PDF for printed page facsimile


The New York Times Book Review
1988 to Present; click on Full Text-PDF for printed page facsimile


New York times (Online only)
1996 to Present

You can find this and other journals and newspapers through the Online Journal titles search from the library home page.

Hint: use the Exact Title or Title Begins with search to avoid being overwhelmed by too many hits.

Find Your Seat at the Libraries

Post written by Brittany Wofford and Angela Zoss

Seat yourself! This semester, Duke University Libraries has made over 200 individual study spots available for reservation in Lilly, Perkins, Bostock and Rubenstein Libraries so you can still have the library experience you’ve come to know and love.

Want to (virtually) explore? Check out some of the different spaces below. We know you’ll find something you love!

For more information on the reservations, check out this handy guide.

West Campus

The Perk (Perkins Library, Floor 1)

Get your brightest ideas in the brightest spot in the library! Enjoy single tables and plenty of power in The Perk. With all of the library’s office plants keeping you company, it will be like your very own greenhouse. (PERK 001-014)

The Edge (Bostock Library, Floor 1)

Are you a wild child at heart? Live it up in the evening and nights with a seat in first floor of Bostock with bright lights and colors and plenty of seating options.

The Edge Booths and Meet-ups

The booths and meet-ups give you a little privacy–not to mention comfy padded seats–as you power through your work.  (Booths 101-107, Meet-ups 22 & 123)

The Edge Open Seating

To see and be seen, pick some of the some of the open seating options throughout the floor (Seats 108-121, 131-32, 145-54)

The Edge Rooms

Want the classroom or study room experience with (bonus!) windows as you work? Find your study spot in the Murthy Digital Studio (Murthy/Bostock 121 Seats 125-130), Project Room 7 or 8 (Seats 133-137) or Bostock 127 (Seats 155-172)

The Edge Counter Stools

For the coffee shop experience, check out the counter stools. We provide everything but the latte! (Counter Stool 140-144)

Rubenstein Floor 2

Looking for classic and quiet? The second floor of Rubenstein blends plentiful seating with gorgeous spaces and lots of natural light.

Gothic Reading Room

The Gothic Reading Room offers old-school elegance and modern conveniences – most seats have access to power! (Gothic Reading Room Seats 214-243)

Rubenstein 249

Rubenstein 249 is the Carpenter Meeting Room, giving each seat plenty of table space and a quiet room to concentrate ( Rubenstein 249 Seats 244-248)

Open Seating

The second floor of Rubenstein also has 13 seats in open spaces, if you like good lighting and a little activity while you work (Seats 201-213)

Rubenstein Floor 3

The third floor of Rubenstein Library is great for anyone looking for a sort of garret/co-working vibe – glass-walled rooms tucked along hallways with soft colors and minimal traffic.

Project Rooms

Three project rooms line a windowed wall, giving the perfect balance of privacy and openness. (Rooms 353-357, Seats 301-306)

Conference Rooms

For a distraction-free zone, check out a seat in one of the conference rooms along the hallway. (Rooms 350-351, Seats 307-317)

Rubenstein 349

With tall windows and individual tables, the Breedlove Meeting Room (Rubenstein 349) has an open feel with plenty of privacy. (Seats 318-326)

East Campus

Lilly Library

Live it up at Lilly! Get the East Campus experience at these lovely literary locales.

Few Reading Room (1st floor)

Natural light and plenty of power; what else do you need? How about private study carrels (F01-F07) and long tables for safely studying with your peers. (F08-F19)

Carpenter Reference Room (1st floor)

Want that old-school library experience? Surround yourself with books in the reference study area with socially-distanced seating at long tables. (C20-C41)

North Mezzanine (2nd floor)

Talk about a room with a view! Grab a soft seat or table and enjoy one of the most beautiful overlooks on campus. (M42-45)

Music Library

With plenty of natural light, these seats are music to our ears! Enjoy your choice of carrels (Carrels 1, 3, 5) or personal tables (Study Table Seat 6-7). Whatever you choose sounds great!






Putting the ‘Global’ Back Into Global Pandemic, Part I

This is the first in a series of blog posts on global pandemics, edited by Ernest Zitser, Ph.D., Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, library liaison to the International Comparative Studies Program, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University.

Pandemics, by their very definition (< Greek pandēmos = pan ‘all’ + dēmos ‘people’), affect everyone in the entire world.  They expose the permeability of border walls and remind us of the invented nature of all geopolitical boundaries.  They also provide us with an opportunity to learn something about the lived experience of people from around the globe, those external ‘others’ whom it is all-too-easy to stereotype as strange, exotic, or dangerous.  That is, pandemics invite us not merely to recognize the humanity of, and suffer alongside perfect ‘strangers,’ who speak ‘foreign’ languages and write in ‘squiggly’ scripts, but actually to draw lessons from the way human communities in other parts of the world are dealing and/or have dealt with the same issues as us.

In order to help foster a more informed and compassionate approach to the current global health crisis, the subject specialists of Duke Libraries’ International and Area Studies Department have decided to devote a series of blog posts to the topic of plagues, epidemics, and pandemics in each of the world regions for which they collect materials and about which they offer reference and library instruction.  Our goal is not to provide exhaustive coverage of the topic, but merely to suggest one or two resources—preferably those available online and in English—that each subject specialist has found particularly meaningful or useful in helping him or her to understand the role that infectious diseases have played in the countries, continents, and world areas for which s/he is responsible.

If you would like to get more information about a particular world region or recommendations for additional resources on the topic, please feel free to contact the appropriate IAS librarian.  And do let us know if you have your own recommendations!  Simply leave a reply in the “Comment Section” at the end of this blog post.

___________________________

Holly Ackerman
Head, International & Area Studies Dept. and Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies

When the editors of the IAS blog proposed the idea of publishing a series of posts recommending readable, digitally-available, English-language resources on plagues/infectious diseases/moral panics in world literature and/or film, I approached the selection in my role as the Department Head, responsible for covering many world areas. I tried to recall a popular history with global reach that dealt both with politics and medicine. I wanted something that was deeply researched but also genuinely engaging.  And, perhaps not surprisingly, one that would also highlight the other role that I play in IAS, namely, the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino/a Studies.

John Barry’s panoramic history of the so-called “Spanish” Flu of 1918—the ruthless influenza pandemic that is estimated to have claimed 50-100 million lives (adjusted for population, that would equal 220 million to 430 million people today)—came immediately to mind. I had read it back in 2004 when it first came out and was that year’s winner of the National Academies of Sciences prize for the best book on science or medicine. A re-read this week confirmed its currency.

Barry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, seems to be speaking directly to the present when he says that medicine and politics cannot be separated in a pandemic and one is as significant as the other. He describes political leaders in 1918 lying to the public about the severity of the situation in order to maintain the World War I economy and their control over the electorate.  And also of blaming a particular foreign country for being the source of the outbreak, in an effort to shift the blame for their handling of the public health crisis onto a foreign country.  Sound familiar?

The good news in Barry’s sweeping account is the role of medicine in developing vaccines, public health officials broadcasting simple preventive measures (posters read, “Wear a mask; Save your life), the rise of “modern” medical schools such as Johns Hopkins, and the organization of the Red Cross. He offers case examples of communities that suppressed the disease (e.g., San Francisco) and those that failed to do so (e.g., Philadelphia). The “winners” combined truthful leaders, inspiration in public messaging, and stern demand for compliance with best practices. The “losers” combined denial with blaming (calling it “just a common cold” as corpses outnumbered coffins, attacking immigrants as “natural carriers,” and demanding legislation for mass euthanasia of domestic pets).

Anyone wanting to see how pandemics change history will find much to admire here.

___________________________

Sean Swanick
Librarian for Middle East and Islamic Studies

The issue of plague in the Middle East context has not received the scholarly attention that it deserves.  However, there are some excellent books and works-in-progress out there for anyone interested in the topic.

For example, Christopher S. Rose, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, has written an article about how the Egyptian government handled a pandemic in the past, at least partly in order to contextualize the criticism of the way the current Egyptian government has handled the COVID-19 crisis. Rose’s article has been accepted by the Journal of World History, but is unlikely to appear in print until 2021; and Rose’s book will not be out until sometime in the next decade.  That is why it is so great that this young scholar is willing to share some of the results of his research in a WordPress blog post on The “Spanish Flu” in Egypt. Rose argues that “for most of the war, civilian medical needs were a far distant second behind military medical needs” of the colonial occupiers of this strategically-important British protectorate. Consequently, when the pandemic hit, the Anglo-Egyptian government was “caught with its pants down”: hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed; physicians (who were mostly Egyptians, Greek, or Syrian) were overworked; agricultural production (on which the entire economy depended) ceased; religious services were suspended; and at least 130,000 people died. The fact that the flu pandemic—the worst health crisis during World War I in Egypt—came after the end of the war made everything worse. Rose argues that this was one of the “non-political events” in early 20th-century Egyptian history that prepared the ground for the political changes in the years that followed the pandemic.

An even earlier period of environmental, epidemiological, and political history of what is today’s Middle East is the subject of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: the Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600, by Nükhet Varlik of Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina.  This thorough, ground-breaking book explores the impact of plagues on Ottoman lands beginning with the Black Death, which ravaged the world from 1347 to 1351. One aspect of the work I found particularly interesting is the development of public health vis-à-vis the state. The Ottoman state was very conscious of the need for clean drinking water, hence the development of fountains throughout the empire—including the imperial capital, Istanbul—and the imperative to bury those who had died of the disease outside the city walls, so as to ensure that as much clean air as possible circulated within the city. Varlik’s book is not only well-researched, but also provides fascinating historical insight into a topic that has contemporary resonance, not least because of its insistence on the Western origins of the Plague, as well as its discussion of the pandemic’s effect both on physical bodies and the body politic.  After reading this book, you might also want to visit the Ottoman History Podcast for a discussion on Plague in the Ottoman World, featuring Nükhet Varlık, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Pugliano, and Edna Bonhomme.

___________________________

Luo Zhou
Chinese Studies Librarian

William C. Summer’s book on the Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911, will be an enlightening (and inspiring) read for today’s audience. The Manchuria (Northeast China) plague, which broke out in fall 1910 and killed more than 60,000 people by spring 1911, was caused by transmission from marmots to humans. It spread quickly both among the native Chinese inhabitants and the Russian, Japanese, American, and British diplomats and administrators stationed in Manchuria, a new center of global transportation and fur trade that was of strategic importance to the world powers.  Summer demonstrates that geopolitics—China’s political weakness and Russian and Japanese colonial aspirations in the region—shaped how the plague was contained and managed.  He also highlights the work of individual medical practitioners, such as Dr. Wu Lien-teh—the first medical student of Chinese descent to study at the University of Cambridge—who led the Chinese effort to end the plague.  Dr. Wu promoted the use of cloth facial masks, which were to be worn by doctors, nurses, patients, and anyone else whenever possible: the very first time that such an epidemic containment measure had been attempted and proven effective in the field.  In the end, the “Great Manchurian Plague” highlighted the importance of multinational medical responses and helped to promote the (eventual) establishment of the World Health Organization – an unintended, but welcome by-product of the epidemic.

In order to get a sense of the lived experience of COVID-19 in China today, it is best to turn to non-traditional outlets (e.g. WeChat, Weibo, Twitter, Facebook) and freely available electronic resources.  For example, in The Virus Diaries (疫境日記), a 10-minute YouTube video (in Cantonese, with English subtitles), from late January 2020, ordinary citizens of Hong Kong share their experiences of life during quarantine.

For mainland China, the most obvious (and most controversial) choice is Wuhan Diary (武汉日记) by Fang Fang (方方), the pen name of Wang Fang (汪芳; born 11 May 1955), an award-winning, contemporary Chinese writer. Although this fascinating, first-person account of life at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis is now available as an e-book, in an English-language translation by Michael Berry, Director of UCLA Center of China Studies, it began life as a series of posts on Fang’s social media page.  The author’s regular, daily entries on WeChat—a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app—offered her personal (and mildly critical) comments on the effects of the deadly epidemic during the government-imposed lockdown. Almost as soon as they were posted, however, each of Fang’s entries about the effect of the coronavirus on Chinese society was consistently deleted by China’s internet censors.  But usually not before the latest entry had itself gone viral, having been shared by millions of WeChatters, both within China and abroad.  That has not slowed Chinese government efforts to stop the spread of the virtual virus unleashed by Fang Fang’s media posts.In an effort to dissuade overseas readers from purchasing the diary, the Global Times—an English-language newspaper published under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily—claimed (falsely) that Fang “fell from grace in late March when many netizens and scholars began to question the authenticity of her diary.”  As if anticipating such politically motivated criticism, the last entry in Fang’s diary was entitled: “There is no tension between me and my country” (我和国家之间没有张力).






Find Article PDFs Faster with This Browser Plugin

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.

 

Get Nomad for Chrome today!


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. 






Take the Library Home with You

handout

As you are preparing for your much needed break, I hope you remember that the library will still be here for you!  Maybe you already know that you can access many of our online resources from home or that you can check out books to take home with you.  We also have movies and music that you can stream and some e-books that you can download to your devices.  Here are some of the resources we have to do this!

Streaming Videos

Alexander Street Video Collection: Find and watch streaming video across multiple Alexander Street Press video collections on diverse topics that include newsreels, documentaries, field recordings, interviews and lectures.

Docuseek2 Collection: Find and watch streaming video of documentary and social issues films.

Films on Demand: Find and watch streaming video with academic, vocational, and life-skills content.

Kanopy: Watch thousands of award-winning documentaries and feature films including titles from the Criterion Collection.

SWANK Digital Campus: Feature films from major Hollywood studios.

Go to bit.ly/dukevideos to access these video collections.

Streaming Music

Contemporary World Music: Listen to music from around the world, including reggae, Bollywood, fado, American folk music, and more.

Jazz Music Library:  Access a wide range of recordings from jazz classics to contemporary jazz.

Medici.tv: Browse an online collection of classical music, operas and ballets.

Metropolitan Opera on Demand:  For opera fans, a large selection of opera videos from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

Naxos Music Library:  Huge selection of classical music recordings—over 1,925,000 tracks!

Smithsonian Global Sound: Find and listen to streaming folk and related music

All of these streaming music sources can be accessed at library.duke.edu/music/resources/listening-online

Overdrive Books

Go to duke.overdrive.com to access downloadable eBooks and audiobooks that can be enjoyed on all major computers and devices, including iPhones®, iPads®, Nooks®, Android™ phones and tablets, and Kindles®.






August 2019 Collection Spotlight: Microhistories

microhistory sign

This month’s Collection Spotlight is featuring microhistories.  In order to create what we hope is a far ranging and interesting selection of titles for people to browse, we decided to approach microhistory both from the academic and popular side of things.  We hope you will forgive us if in our enthusiasm we stray into some titles that might not meet the strict definition!

Here is a selection of some of the titles that we are showcasing:

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

To Free a Family: The journey of Mary Walker by Sydney Nathans

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay

Poverty and Piety in an English Village by Keith Wrightson and David Levine

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

If some of these titles spark your interest, consider getting involved with Duke’s own MicroWorlds Lab this year!  They even have a section called “What is Microhistory” if you want to explore further what this method of study means.

Please check out the Collection Spotlight rack near our Perkins Library Service Desk on the first floor of Perkins to find your next read!

microhistory book covers






Locus Collection Tracks the Stars and Universe of Sci-Fi

The Locus collection includes some 16,000 rare and noteworthy monuments of science fiction and fantasy, many in their original dust jackets.


The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University has acquired the archives of the Locus Science Fiction Foundation, publisher of Locus, the preeminent trade magazine for the science fiction and fantasy publishing field.

The massive collection—which arrived in almost a thousand boxes—includes first editions of numerous landmarks of science fiction and fantasy, along with correspondence from some of the genre’s best-known practitioners, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Octavia E. Butler, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Dean Koontz, Robert A. Heinlein, and hundreds more.

Locus started out in 1968 as a one-sheet science fiction and fantasy fanzine. Since then, it has evolved into the most trusted news magazine in science fiction and fantasy publishing, with in-depth reviews, author interviews, forthcoming book announcements, convention coverage, and comprehensive listings of all science fiction books published in English. It also administers the prestigious annual Locus Awards, first presented in 1971, which recognize excellence in science fiction and fantasy.

Over the course of five decades in print, the magazine’s editors and staff have collected and saved correspondence, clippings, and books by and about science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers. What emerges from this trove of material is a tapestry of a diverse and thriving community of writers, publishers, and editors, all working to create new and modern genres of speculative literature.

This rare advanced reader’s copy of the first edition of Game of Thrones has a distinctly different look and feel from the popular HBO series.

Of the magazine’s original three co-founders—Charles N. Brown, Ed Meskys, and Dave Vanderwerf—only Brown remained after the magazine’s first year. He would continue to edit the publication until his death in 2009, earning the magazine some thirty Hugo Awards in the process and becoming a colorful and influential figure in the publishing world. A tireless advocate for speculative fiction, Brown was also a voluminous correspondent and friend to many of the writers featured in the magazine. Many of them wrote to him over the years to share personal and professional news, or to quibble about inaccuracies and suggest corrections. The letters are often friendly, personal, humorous, and occasionally sassy.

Reacting to a recent issue of Locus that featured one of her short stories, the science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler wrote, “I am Octavia E. Butler in all my stories, novels, and letters. How is it that I’ve lost my E in three places in Locus #292? Three places! You owe me three E’s. That’s a scream, isn’t it?”

One also finds frequent remembrances and retrospectives of departed members of the Locus community, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s poignant reflections on the passing of Philip K. Dick. After Brown’s own death, the magazine continued publication under the auspices of the Locus Science Fiction Foundation, a registered nonprofit. The magazine launched a digital edition in January 2011 and has published both in print and online ever since.

In addition to the correspondence, story drafts, and other manuscript material (which has now been processed), the collection includes some 16,000 rare and noteworthy monuments of science fiction and fantasy from Brown’s extensive personal library, such as first editions of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and hundreds more.

“Historical literary treasures abound in the Locus collection, from full runs of the pulps to vintage first editions to contemporary works,” said Liza Groen Trombi, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Locus Magazine. “And its preservation is deeply important. It is the product of decades of collecting and curating, starting in the 1940s, the Golden Age of science fiction, when Locus’s founding publisher Charles N. Brown was an avid reader with a deep love of genre, through his time working within the science fiction field, and up to the present day under the current Locus staff. Housing those core works in an institution where they’ll be both accessible to scholars and researchers at the same time as they are carefully preserved is a goal that I and the Locus Science Fiction Foundation board of directors had long had. I am very happy to see them in the dedicated care of the curators and librarians at Duke.”

In its new home in the Rubenstein Library, the Locus collection complements existing collection strengths in the areas of science fiction and popular literature, including the Glenn R. Negley Collection of Utopian Literature, and the Edwin and Terry Murray Collection of Pulp Culture.

“The opportunity to acquire the Locus Foundation library is a tremendous one for Duke,” said Sara Seten Berghausen, Associate Curator of Collections in the Rubenstein Library. “Because it’s a carefully curated collection of the most important and influential works of science fiction of the last several decades—most in their original dust jackets, with fantastic artwork—it complements perfectly our existing collection of utopian literature from the early modern period through the mid-twentieth century.”

Locus started out as a one-sheet science fiction and fantasy fanzine and grew into the most trusted news magazine in science fiction and fantasy publishing.

Berghausen notes that Brown and Locus created not only this collection, but a community of writers, and those relationships are documented throughout the archival collection as well. “The research and teaching possibilities are almost unlimited,” she said. “From political theory to history, art, anthropology and gender studies, there are materials in the collection that could enrich the study of so many topics.”

The collection is already being used in courses at Duke. This semester, English professor Michael D’Alessandro brought his class on utopias and dystopias in American literature to the Rubenstein Library to examine some of the Locus materials first-hand.

“It’s a curious strength Duke has that I didn’t expect,” said D’Alessandro. “I taught this course previously at Harvard, and even the archives there didn’t have anything like this collection, which adds a whole new breadth and depth to the class.”






Celebrate Black History All Year Round with “The HistoryMakers”

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.

HistoryMakers complements Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South and other oral history materials in the Duke Libraries’ collections. It is a substantial addition to our primary source collections.

To learn more about the creation of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, visit the organization’s website.

 






Expanded Access to Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)

We are pleased to announce that the Duke University Libraries have greatly expanded access to the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE)!

This comes in response to numerous requests over the last few years. We have a new deal for all current JoVE titles (see title list and details below). While the official start date is January 2019, JoVE has already opened up full access to Duke IP addresses.

What is JoVE?

JoVE publishes peer-reviewed videos of people doing real-world scientific experiments. By letting you watch the intricate details of experiments rather than just read about them in articles, JoVE helps you understand how to recreate those experiments, thereby improving research productivity, reproducibility, and student learning outcomes.

How and why to use it

JoVE funded a study of the impact on student performance of watching their videos prior to lab classes. A description of the study and a link to download the resulting whitepaper can be found here.

The JoVE blog also has a number of posts giving examples of how faculty are using JoVE in their teaching and research. For example:

  • Dr. Dessy Raytcheva at Northeastern University uses JoVE videos as pre- and post-assignments in her undergraduate biology course, in order to save class time for higher impact teaching activities.
  • Marilene Pavan, manager of Boston University’s DAMP lab credits publishing video protocols in JoVE with significant increases in experimental success rate and reduction in errors.

You can see all of those case studies here.

Assessment

Given the high subscription costs for this product, we will be looking at usage statistics and impact stories to determine whether to continue after an initial three years. So if you use JoVE in your research or teaching, please let us know!

Journal Title List

  • Behavior2
  • Biochemistry3
  • Bioengineering2
  • Biology1,2
  • Cancer Research2
  • Chemistry3
  • Developmental Biology2
  • Engineering2
  • Environment3
  • Genetics2
  • Immunology & Infection2
  • Medicine3
  • Neuroscience1,2

Science Education Collection List

  • Advanced Biology1
  • Basic Biology1,3
  • Chemistry
  • Clinical Skills3
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Physics
  • Psychology

1 Previously subscribed
2 Perpetual access
3 Temporary access (2019 only)

Details of our access

Our new deal includes perpetual access to video articles published under most of the JoVE journal titles, even if we don’t continue subscribing to new content. For a few titles (those that are more clinical in focus or for which we have received the fewest requests), we will only have access through December 2019, unless we decide to expand even further. For the remaining titles, we will have access as long as we continue to subscribe.

Please contact DUL science librarians at askscience@duke.edu if you have any questions or comments. We are also happy to provide links to support documentation, such as instructions for embedding JoVE videos in Sakai.






Take Our Survey. You Could Win a Library Tote Bag and Journal!

Here in the library, we’re taking the summer months to evaluate some of our communications efforts.

In particular, we’re asking for your feedback on our email newsletter, which goes out every other week during the academic year. (What’s that? You don’t subscribe to our email newsletter? We can fix that right now!)

You know you want these!

Will you please take 3-5 minutes to complete this short anonymous survey?

Your responses will help us make sure we’re sending you the most interesting and relevant library news from Duke.

At the end of the survey, you’ll have the option to enter a drawing for this handsome Duke University Libraries tote bag and journal. Guaranteed to make you look even smarter!

Thank you for your time and valuable feedback. The survey will close on July 20, 2018.






“The Red Cape”: Film Screening and Discussion with Director Nelson Oliver, Apr. 18

Images courtesy of Nelson Oliver


Director Nelson Oliver has spent the past decade working on a narrative retelling of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot, the only violent government overthrow in U.S. history. In a free film screening coming to Duke on Wednesday, April 18, in Perkins Library 217, Oliver’s The Red Cape will explore the conspiracy, riot, and ensuing racially-motivated massacre that went largely ignored by historians until a 2000 historical commission by the North Carolina General Assembly.

The Red Cape follows the fates of a young black boy and his father in what was then North Carolina’s most progressive city. Incensed by the biracial makeup of the newly-elected city legislature, a group of white businessmen stage a coup—publicizing a “White Declaration of Independence,” replacing democratically-elected officeholders with white supremacists, and massacring untold numbers of black citizens in the resulting chaos.

The film is 40 minutes in length, and it will be screened twice: once at 4:00 p.m., and again at 5:30 p.m.

The Duke University Libraries and John Hope Franklin Young Scholars invite you to join us in Perkins 217 on April 18.

Learn more

For further information on the topic of the Wilmington Race Riot, the Libraries also offer the following resources:

John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun: A Novel 

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism

Speller Street Films, Wilmington on Fire

Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898

North Carolina 1898 Race Riot Commission, The Wilmington Race Riot Report

LeRae Umfleet, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot

Timothy B. Tyson, The Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy

David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy

Andrea Meryl Kirshenbaum, Race Gender, and Riot: The Wilmington, North Carolina White Supremacy Campaign of 1898

Rhonda Bellamy and Si Cantwell, Moving Forward Together: A Community Remembers 1898

Charles Torrence Nesbitt papers, 1899-1947 and undated

For further information about this screening, contact:

David Stein
John Hope Franklin Young Scholars Program Director
Duke University Libraries PepsiCo Education Technology Partnership Coordinator






Disability Pride Week at Duke: A Reading List

Guest post by Cady Bailey, a student in Dr. Marion Quirici’s Writing 101 course Neurodiversity, Narrative, and Activism.


It’s Disability Pride Week at Duke! Two years ago, the name of this week changed from Disability Awareness Week to its current name. This represents an important shift from simply taking a week to say, “Hey, people with disabilities are here,” to sending a message of acceptance and celebration. We certainly know that a significant portion of the people that surround us have a disability, whether visible or not, but there is strikingly little representation of disability in literature, and even less in the way of positive representation. It is vital that conversations about diversity in literature and other forms of media include disability. Seeing positive representations of disability is a major way to encourage disability pride and acceptance just as Duke is doing this week.

Below is a list of recommended books with positive representations of disability. There are a wide range of genres to choose from: personal narratives, fiction, scholarship and history, poetry, and anthologies. While it is impossible for one work to encompass the experience of disability as a whole, these books are notable examples of positive representations of disability.

Many of the books below are available here in the Duke University Libraries. Any titles not available at Duke or currently checked out can be requested through Interlibrary Requests.

* Denotes author with a disability


Personal Narratives

Personal narratives, including memoir and autobiography, are one of the most powerful forms of disability representation. While it is not impossible for non-disabled authors to write well-done characters with disabilities, personal narratives come from a place of experience. They are real, raw stories that tell truths about life with disability and the societal constructs surrounding them. There are a wealth of personal narratives out there written by people with disabilities, so this is certainly not a comprehensive list, but here are some suggestions to get started.

  • Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare*:
    Drawing on the variety of experiences at the intersection of disability, race, and gender, Eli Clare explores his relationship with the societal need to cure bodies and minds that are labeled as other. A combination of personal narrative, history, and theory, there is much to be learned about the intersectional nature of disability and the impacts of societal views from this book.
  • If you are interested in other personal narratives like this, check out Moving Violations by John Hockenberry* and Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha*

Fiction

While fiction isn’t always the best place to look for deep societal messages about disability, it is vital that people with disabilities are represented in fiction. On one end, disabled readers can find inspiration and comfort in reading stories with characters they identify with. On another end, representing disability in fiction can help to dismantle stigma surrounding disability by showing non-disabled readers that disability doesn’t define a person.

The problem with fiction that it often follows negative stereotypes and tropes about people with disabilities. These include but are not limited to: using disabled characters purely as inspiration for the growth of a non-disabled character, villainizing disabled and mentally ill characters, and implying the only two possible ends for the story arc of a disabled character are death or cure. While there is no perfect fictional representation, avoiding the aforementioned tropes can help readers to identify the better ones. Here are a few of the standout fictional novels featuring characters with disabilities:

  • Dregs Duology by Leigh Bardugo*: Consisting of the novels Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, this young-adult fantasy series has been described as Game of Thrones meets Oceans 11. The diverse casts of this series is lead by a morally-grey crime boss with a cane, characters with PTSD, and one who is implied to have dyslexia. This is not a story is not about disability or mental illness, but author Leigh Bardugo weaves it into aspects of the stories so that it is never erased or ignored.
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident follows Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old with autism spectrum disorder, as he embarks on a mission to solve the mystery of the death of his neighbor’s dog. Despite adhering to some stereotypes of autism, this book presents an interesting first-person portrayal of autism. This book has also been adapted into a widely acclaimed stage production.
  • Carry the Ocean by Heidi Cullinan, Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell, El Deafo by Cece Bell*, and Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling by Lucy Frank. Additional recommendations and reviews in the young adult genre can be found at Disability in Kidlit.

Disability Studies Scholarship/History

The field of disability studies has made important strides in understanding the societal constructs surrounding disability over the past several years. If you are interested in learning more about the scholarly field of disability studies, check out some of these books on the history of disability and theory surrounding disability.

  • The Disabilities Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis: A collection of the most important articles from the field of disability studies. For anyone looking to get started in the field, this collection serves as an excellent introduction.
  • Claiming Disability by Simi Linton: Linton examines the field of disability studies and critiques the stance that academic fields tend to take on disability: that it is a tragedy that must be avoided or fixed. Linton points out how the perspectives of people with disabilities often go ignored, and the only voices heard on the topic of disability are non disabled people. Through her analysis of the field, Linton sends a strong message of taking pride in disability.
  • For other titles like these, check out What Have We Done by Fred Pelka and Defining Deviance by Michael Rembis.

Poetry and Anthologies

The books in this category are all personal narratives, but they take the forms of poetry, short essays, and short fiction. Each of the works listed below also represent intersectional accounts of disability. It is extremely important to remember that a disability doesn’t define a person or their identity. Other aspects of identity, including race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion, can also affect a person’s experience in society.

  • All the Weight of Our Dreams by multiple authors (Autism Women’s Network)*: This collection features stories by people of color with autism. In a world where most disabled characters in the media are white males, the works in this anthology send important messages about what it is like to live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities.
  • QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology by Raymond Luczak and others*: Much like All the Weight of Our Dreams, QDA features stories focused around identifying as both queer and disabled. These stories are all the more important given that a study from 2015 found that none of the top 100 movies featured disabled LGBT characters.
  • When the Chant Comes by Kay Ulanday Barrett*: In this collection, Barrett uses poetry to explore political and social constructs surrounding disability, race, and gender.

By choosing to read literature that positively represents disability, one can learn about the perspectives of people with different experiences and about social and political constructs that exist in the world that one might not otherwise know about. Additionally, choosing to support books featuring disabled characters and/or books written by disabled authors works to show the disabled community that their voices are heard and their voices matter. The next time you are looking for a read, consider choosing one from this list and support disability pride.

 






A Sneak Peek at Downtown Durham’s New Main Library


Last week, the staff of the Duke University Libraries were treated to a fascinating presentation by Durham County Library Director Tammy Baggett-Best, who offered an update on the renovation of Durham’s Main Library on N. Roxboro Street.

With our own major library renovation here at Duke just a few years behind us, it was exciting to see what our colleagues down the street have planned. As downtown Durham continues to grow more vibrant, the renovated Main Library promises to be yet another point of pride for those who live and work in the area.

The Main Library renovation started in early 2017 and is scheduled to be complete in late 2019. With over $44.3 million in funding and a planned addition of 19,804 square feet to the existing 65,000 square feet of library space, Baggett-Best explained that Main Library is undergoing some serious transformations.

“Pretty much the only thing that will be left is the foundation and the frames,” she said—joking that the library outreach program “Downtown Library Without Walls” was being taken rather literally by the renovation crew.

Simplified cross-section of Main Library before (left) and after renovations (right), showing the greater vertical openness, connectivity, and natural light in the new building.

And it’s true: with the goals of creating greater openness and visibility throughout the building site, Main Library may be almost unrecognizable to many Durham residents by the time renovations are complete. New roof terraces, glass walls, and horizontally integrated staircases are all designed to create a heightened sense of freedom and connectivity, while new meeting spaces, public spaces, and a comprehensive literacy and technology center are intended to improve community outreach.

A rendering of how the library will look once complete when viewed from the side facing Liberty Street.

Some areas of particular interest include a career development workspace, a MakerLab / S.T.E.A.M. space, a cultural/arts exhibition gallery space, and an expanded and more accessible space for the popular North Carolina Collection. The newly renovated library will also provide more social space for children, teenagers, and adults, along with multiple event venues.

Outside the building, meanwhile, the library grounds will feature numerous open areas for library and community use, including an art garden, an amphitheater, a public plaza, covered seating, an urban agriculture section, and an interactive play and gathering space. Baggett-Best hopes these and other programs will contribute to a sense of community and connectivity across social groups.

Indeed, the renovations are just one part of the Durham County Library’s mission to help Durham grow and thrive. Improved access and technological services feature heavily in their plans. Baggett-Best said they are currently working on a program that will allow all Durham County public school students’ ID cards to do double-duty as their library cards. They’re also working on a way to clear all outstanding overdue fees by public school students at the end of each school year.

Rendering of a community event at Main Library, post-renovation.

It was heartening to learn that Durhamites are big library users, even before the renovation got started. Approximately 71% of all Durham County residents have a library card, compared with 44% statewide. In a recent city/county survey, the only local government agency or service that gets higher satisfaction marks from residents is EMS. In 2017, Durham libraries circulated nearly three million physical items—a number that has been decreasing slightly in recent years in tandem with increased use of online resources.

This seems like a good time for a public service announcement to our Duke students:  All Duke students are eligible to get a free library card at any Durham County Library location. Even if you’re not a North Carolina resident, you can still use the public library, and you don’t even have to leave your dorm room. If you love the hundreds of popular e-books and audiobooks you can get online through the Duke Libraries’ OverDrive app, consider the thousands and thousands more you have access to through the Durham County Library!

Overall, it’s clear that the renovations at Main Library represent one more sign of the ongoing revitalization of downtown Durham. The “library without walls” will have some pretty spectacular walls once again before long, and we can’t wait to help them celebrate its re-opening in 2019!

Learn more

Visit the Durham County Library’s website to find out more about the renovation and see photos from the construction site.

 






Collection Spotlight: Contemporary African Literature

Contributed by Heather Martin,  Librarian for African and African American Studies

What is African literature? Is it literature created by Africans or about Africans? These are some of the questions students in the Duke Africa Conversations Club hope to spark in their selection of books for Duke University Libraries’ current Collection Spotlight on Contemporary African Literature.

The Africa Conversations Club encourages discourse at Duke about issues relating to the African continent and the African diaspora. Their selections (chosen in consultation with Heather Martin, African and African American Studies Librarian) highlight contemporary African fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Join Africa Conversations for a discussion of “African Literature and Its Place in Academia” with Dr. Tsitsi Jaji, Associate Professor of English at Duke, on Wednesday, January 31, 4:00-5:00 p.m. in Rubenstein Library 153 (Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room).

The Contemporary African Literature display will end in February, but books chosen for the display are available in the Duke Libraries any time.


Poetry

Beating the Graves – Tsitsi Jaji (Zimbabwe)

The January Children – Safia Elhillo (Sudan)

Madman at Kilifi – Clifton Gachagua (Kenya)

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth – Warsan Shire (Somalia)

When the Wanderers Come Home – Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Liberia)


Fiction

Aya: Life in Yop City – Marguerite Abouet (Cote d’Ivoire)

Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara

And After Many Days – Jowhor Ile (Nigeria)

Binti: Home – Nnedi Okorafor (Nigeria)

The Automobile Club of Egypt – Aswany Al Alaa (Egypt)

Behold the Dreamers – Imbolo Mbue (Cameroon)

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze: A Novel – Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia)

Black Moses – Alain Mabanckou (Congo)

Blackass – A. Igoni Barrett (Nigeria)

The Book of Memory – Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)

Born on a Tuesday – Elnathan John (Nigeria)

Chaos of the Senses – Ahlem Mosteghanemi (Algeria)

Confessions of the Lioness – Mia Coutu (Mozambique)

Every Day Is for the Thief – Teju Cole (Nigeria)

The Fishermen – Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)

A General Theory of Oblivion – José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola)

Graceland – Chris Abani (Nigeria)

The Hairdresser of Harare – Tendai Huchu (Zimbabwe)

The Happy Marriage: A Novel – Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco)

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi (Ghana)

The Kindness of Enemies – Leila Aboulela (Sudan)

The Moor’s Account: A Novel – Laila Lalami (Morocco)

Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)

Period Pain – Kopano Matlwa (South Africa)

The Queue: A Novel – Abdel Aziz (Egypt)

We Need New Names – NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe)

The Woman Next Door – Yewande Omotoso (South African)


Nonfiction

The Lights of Pointe-Noire – Alain Mabanckou (Congo-Brazzaville)

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah (Sierra Leone)

Never Look an American in the Eye: A Memoir: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American – Okey Ndibe (Nigeria)

Nomad: From Islam to America – A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations – Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somalia)

Queer African Reader

Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider – Zakes Mda (South Africa)






Textbooks on Reserve in Perkins and Lilly

Left your textbook in your dorm room? Borrow our copy!

As the spring 2018 semester gets underway, we want to remind students that you can check out copies of textbooks for the largest courses on campus from the library.

The books include required texts for some of Duke’s most popular courses in Economics, Chemistry, Math, Computer Science, Biology, Psychology, and other subjects. They can be checked out for three hours at a time and are available at the Perkins Library Service Desk. Some textbooks are also available at Lilly Library on East Campus.

Here’s a complete listing of courses that have textbooks on reserve in the library. (This list is also available on our website. More courses may be added as orders come in.) Courses listed in red also have copies available at Lilly Library.

COURSE NUMBER

COURSE TITLE

AAAS 335 HISTORY OF HIP-HOP
BIOCHEM 301 INTRO BIOCHEMISTRY I
BIOLOGY 223 CELL AND MOLEC NEUROBIO
BIOLOGY 201L MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
BIOLOGY 202L GENETICS AND EVOLUTION
CHEM 201DL ORGANIC CHEMISTRY I
CHEM 202L ORGANIC CHEMISTRY II
CHEM 210DL MOD APPS CHEM PRINCIPLES
CLST 262 ANCIENT ATHLETES
COMPSCI 330 DESIGN/ANALY ALGORITHMS
COMPSCI 250D COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
ECE 110L FUND OF ELEC AND COMP ENGR
ECON 208D INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMETRICS
EGR 244L DYNAMICS
EVANTH 260 HUMAN COGNITIVE EVOLUTION
GLHLTH 101 FUNDAMENTALS OF GLOBAL HEALTH
MATH 230 PROBABILITY
MATH 202D MULTIVAR CALCULUS FOR ECON
MATH 216 LINEAR ALGEBRA & DIFF EQUATION
MATH 353 ORD AND PRTL DIFF EQUATIONS
MATH 112L LABORATORY CALCULUS II
MATH 212 MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS
NEUROSCI 101 BIO BASES OF BEHAVIOR
PHYSICS 142L GENERAL PHYSICS II
PSY 104 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
PSY 105 ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
PSY 101 INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY
SPANISH 203 INTERMEDIATE SPANISH
STA 101 DATA ANALY/STAT INFER

Please note: Textbooks on reserve are not intended to take the place of students purchasing textbooks for their courses. Due to budget limitations, the Libraries are unable to purchase textbooks for every course at Duke.

For questions related to textbook reserves at Perkins Library, please contact: perkins-reserves@duke.edu.

For questions related to textbook reserves at Lilly Library, please contact: lilly-requests@duke.edu






Lilly Spotlight-Cuban-Americans, the Duke Common Experience and Beyond

Cuban-Americans, the Duke Common Experience and Beyond

Need some new reading material or just interested in seeing what’s in Lilly Library’s collection that you might not know about? Check out Lilly’s Collection Spotlight!

Lilly Spotlight on Duke Common Experience

In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month and the Duke Common Experience Reading Program selection of Richard Blanco’s The Prince of Los Cocuyos, our spotlight shines on books and films relevant to his and the Cuban-American experience.  Blanco, the inaugural poet for Barack Obama in 2012, writes in his memoir of his childhood growing up in Miami as a son of Cuban immigrants. The memoir finds Blanco grappling with both his place in America and his sexuality, striving to discover his identity.

Our collections include books on Cuban Art, the Cuban-American immigrant experience in the United States, LGBTQ communities in Hispanic culture, and several books of Blanco’s poetry. Here are a few highlights from our Lilly Collection Spotlight:

Books:

Adios Utopia — Art in Cuba Since 1950
This exhibition catalog covers Cuban art from 1950 to the present viewed through the particular lenses of the Cuban Revolution, utopian ideals, and subsequent Cuban history. The collection covered in this book will be on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in November.

Latinx Comic Book Storytelling:Latinx
An Odyssey by Interview by Frederick Luis Aldama

In this book, scholar Frederick Luis Aldama interviews 29 Latinx comic book creators, ranging from the legendary Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame to lesser known up and coming writers/illustrators.

Matters of the Sea / Cosas del mar by Richard Blanco

This bilingual chapbook contains a poem Blanco wrote and read for the reopening of the US Embassy in Havana in 2015. Blanco writes in the opening lines, “The sea doesn’t matter, what matters is this: we all belong to the sea between us, all of us.”

Films:


CubAmerican (2012)  DVD 28418
Exploring the causes leading to the exile of millions of Cubans from communist Cuba by depicting the journey of illustrious Cuban-Americans to their new life in the United States

 

Finally the sea (2007) DVD 12185
“The wreckage of an empty Cuban raft is the catalyst for Tony, a successful Cuban-American businessman, who files from Wall Street to Cuba to discover his roots. His journey develops into a striking love story where politics and romance collide

Mambo Kings (1992) DVD 27116
Musician brothers, Cesar and Nestor, leave Cuba for America (NYC) in the 1950s, with the hopes of making it to the top of the Latin music scene. Cesar is the older brother who serves as the business manager and is a consummate ladies’ man. Nestor is the brooding songwriter, who cannot forget the woman in Cuba who broke his heart. This is an unrated version of the film, with one restored scene.


Visit our Collection Spotlight shelf, in the lobby to the left of the Lilly desk. 
There are many more titles available to you, and if you want more suggestions – just ask us. Stay tuned – We will highlight our diverse and varied holdings at Lilly with a different theme each month.

Submitted by Ira King
Evening Reference Librarian & Supervisor
Lilly Library

 

 

 






In-Depth Look at SNCC’s Past Offers Lessons for Activists Today

Man and woman looking over a brochure for a political candidate before election day in Lowndes County, Alabama, November, 1966, Photograph by Jim Peppler, Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.


What can the immediate past teach us about voting rights, self-determination, and democracy today? A new website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University explores how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—the only youth-led national civil rights group—organized a grassroots movement in the 1960s that empowered Black communities and transformed the nation.  Told from the perspectives of the activists themselves, the SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (snccdigital.org) highlights SNCC’s thinking and work building democracy from the ground up, making those experiences and strategies accessible to activists, educators, and engaged citizens today.

Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the site uses documentary footage, audio recordings, photographs, and documents to chronicle how SNCC organizers, alongside thousands of local Black residents in the Deep South, worked to enable Black people to take control of their lives. The gateway unveils and examines the inner workings of SNCC over the course of its 12-year existence—its structure, how it coordinated sit-ins and other direct action protests, and how it organized voter registration efforts and economic cooperatives to effect social change. SNCC had more field staff than any civil rights organization and was considered the cutting edge of the civil rights movement.

The SNCC Digital Gateway also presents the voices of today’s young activists in the Movement for Black Lives, sharing their views on the impact of SNCC and the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s on their activities today. “Reading through the SNCC Digital Gateway website is like taking a masters class in community organizing,” explains Jennifer Bryant, a community organizer based in Washington, D.C. “The primary source documents provide a deeper understanding of how SNCC was structured, the day-to-day work of field organizers and how campaigns were shaped. The site serves as a reminder that the civil rights movement was fought by everyday people. It provides hope that in these perilous times, we too can fight and win.” Courtland Cox, chairman of the SNCC Legacy Project, who served as an organizer in Mississippi and Alabama in the 1960s, explains, “Our experiences have created a level of ‘informational wealth’ that we need to pass on to young people. This unprecedented collaboration with Duke University hopefully will pilot a way for other academic institutions to re-engage history and those who make it.”

The website is a product of a groundbreaking partnership among veteran civil rights activists of the SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, Duke University Libraries, and civil rights scholars. Wesley Hogan, director of the Center for Documentary Studies, who has written extensively about SNCC’s work and legacy explains, “The way we are working together—activists, archivists, and scholars—is a powerful new model. This project gives us a unique opportunity to understand the work of the local people who broke apart Jim Crow that would otherwise be lost to future generations.”


For more information, contact:

Wesley Hogan, Director, Center for Documentary Studies
(919) 660-3610
wesley.hogan@duke.edu

Courtland Cox, Chairman, SNCC Legacy Project
(220) 550-8455
courtlandc@starpower.net

John Gartrell, John Hope Franklin Research Center, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
(919) 660-5922
john.gartrell@duke.edu






New U.S. Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2017- 
Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd Poet Laureate, was appointed on June 14th.  If you are interested in reading her work, fortunately we have several collections of her poetry that you can read.

You might also want to explore some articles about her.  This great NPR profile discusses her appointment, her process as a poet, and a recording of her reading ‘When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me.’  Here’s another profile from the NYT.  This PBS article lists four poets that Tracy K. Smith recommends you read: Solmaz Sharif, Erika L. Sanchez (coming soon to our collection) James Richardson, and Claudia Rankine.

Finally here’s a video where she reads from Life on Mars:






For the 20th time: It’s that time of year again!

 20th Annual Full Frame
Documentary Film Festival

Lilly Library offers a selection of Full Frame titles

Each spring since 1998, Durham has hosted international filmmakers and film lovers who flock to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Festival goers revel in the latest in documentary, or non-fiction, films which are presented in venues throughout historic downtown Durham.

Because it is the 20th anniversary, this year’s festival’s thematic program is a cinematic retrospective of the twenty years of Full Frame. Curated by Artistic Director Sadie Tillery,  notable films, filmmakers, and special moments that have distinguished Full Frame since it was founded in 1998 are to be highlighted this year.

Do you know that Duke University is a major supporter of Full Frame?
Of special note, because of his support and commitment to the arts, Duke University President Richard Brodhead will be honored with the Full Frame 2017 Advocate Award.  In addition, the Duke University Libraries support and highlight films from past festivals.   If you don’t attend the festival, consider the Libraries’ collections.  A major resource is the Rubenstein Library’s Full Frame Archive Film Collection, that includes festival winners from 1998 through 2012.  In addition, the film and video collection at Lilly Library on East Campus contains a selection of Full Frame titles available to the Duke community.

 

 






Duke Faculty: $250 to Consider Open Educational Resources

oer-logo-600x360

The Duke University Libraries are offering $250 to faculty who are interested in learning about open educational resources for the courses they teach. Details below.


What are open educational resources (OERs)?

Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials that are free. Unlike traditional textbooks or course packets that students must purchase every semester, OERs are released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can include textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports free access to knowledge.

What is the Duke University Libraries OER Review Project?

The OER Review Project is a collaborative effort of the Duke Endowment Libraries, which includes all libraries at institutions supported by the Duke Endowment—Duke, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University. Faculty at all four schools are being offered $250 stipends to review OERs for potential use in their courses. (Limit 10 stipends per university.)

How does the program work?

  • Meet with a library staff member to learn more about OERs and select OERs to review.
  • Review each of your OERs by a determined date. We supply the review form.
  • Fill out a short survey about participating in the program.
  • 10 lucky faculty members will get $250!

Who can participate?

All Duke faculty members. We’re interested in working with faculty from a variety of schools and academic programs. To learn more, please contact:

Haley Walton
Outreach Coordinator for Open Access
haley.walton@duke.edu

Kim Duckett
Head of Research and Instructional Services
kim.duckett@duke.edu

 






2016 Banned Books Week

diversity-banner-website-780x300-v1

Banned Books Week runs this year from September 25th through October 1st.  This year’s theme is about celebrating diversity!  If you’re interested in reading why diversity was picked this year, you might appreciate reading “Why Diverse Books are Commonly Banned,” which mentions that ” ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, has determined that 52% of the books challenged, or banned, over the past decade are from titles that are considered diverse content.”  I also appreciated this point of view from an article in Time.

If you’re interested in reading challenged books with diverse content, here is a list of titles. We of course own many of these books, including these selected titles:

You might also want to check out the 2015 list of the “most challenged” books.

 






Drama Online

dramaonline3

We now have access to the Core Collection of Drama Online, a resource for finding full texts of plays.  It Includes full texts of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day.  It also includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides.

You can browse by plays, playwrights, genres, periods, context and criticism, and by theatre craft.  Advanced search options also allow you to search by type, playwrights, genre, period, theme, and setting.

Each play in the collection includes a production enquiry, which gives helpful information on who to contact to get performance rights for the play.  Many plays also include useful tools, like a Character Grid that can be used to see only the lines of a given character.

dramaonline1

Another great tool is the Words and Speeches tool that shows how many words and speeches are spoken in different acts of the play.

dramaonline2

Currently we don’t have access to all the Nick Hern plays or the videos, but it’s quite likely that our access will expand in the next year!






New Program: Textbooks on Reserve in Perkins and Lilly

textbooks_on_reserve_600x360

Starting this semester (Fall 2016), the Duke University Libraries will be piloting a program to provide selected textbooks on 3-hour reserve in Perkins Library on West Campus. Some textbooks will also be available at Lilly Library on East Campus.

Included among the 300 items are textbooks for courses in Economics, Chemistry, Math, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. The books have been selected based on orders placed with the Duke Textbook Store by departments and faculty.

Visit our website to see a complete listing of the textbooks on reserve, organized by course.

Please note: Textbooks on reserve are not intended to take the place of students purchasing textbooks for their courses. Due to budget limitations, the Libraries are unable to purchase textbooks for every course at Duke.

Circulation numbers will be reviewed to determine if this pilot program is valued and should be extended.

For questions related to textbook reserves at Perkins Library, please contact: perkins-reserves@duke.edu.

For questions related to textbook reserves at Lilly Library, please contact: lilly-requests@duke.edu






African-American Filmmakers Before Spike Lee

In the mid 1980s Spike Lee opened the door for many African-spook who satAmerican filmmakers. It is sometimes easy to forget those who laid the groundwork for his success. Ivan Dixon’s 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by bush mamathe Door takes a look at discrimination within the CIA. Haile Gerima, the first important African-American female director, gave us Bush Mama (1975), which details the difficult life of a killer of sheepsingle mother.

Charles Burnett’s classic Killer of Sheep (1977) provides a glimpse of life in the Los Angeles Watts district. Melvin Van Peeples’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1971) exploded out of the Blaxploitation era of the late sixties and early seventies. Continue reading African-American Filmmakers Before Spike Lee






Video Spotlight on Women Filmmakers

It’s Women’s History Month! Spend this March 2016 watching wonderful films created by talented women from around the world.

The Video Spotlight on Women Filmmakers, created by Lilly Library’s own audio-visual specialist and film aficionado, Ken Wetherington, can give you great ideas of where to start.

In recent years women in film have begun to be slightly better recognized, like Katheryn Bigelow’s oscar-winning direction (the only time for a woman!) of The Hurt Locker.  hurt locker

But did you know that in the early days of cinema, many women were powerful creative forces? Movies like Lois Weber’s SuspenseThe Ocean Waif by Alice Guy Blaché and Cleo Madison’s Eleanor’s Catch,  and other women pioneers of early cinema, can be viewed in Duke Libraries’ new subscription database, Kanopy Streaming Video.

WomenFilmmakers2

Check out Lilly’s foyer display exhibiting films by women in the history of cinema. Some of the titles just may surprise you…

Browse Ken’s Video Spotlight Archives for more topical viewing inspiration.

 






History Hackathon – a collaborative happening

Students in Rubenstein Reading Room

What is a History Hackathon?

The term “Hackathon” traditionally refers to an event in which computer programmers collaborate intensively on software projects. But Duke University Libraries and the History Department are putting a historical twist on their approach to the Hackathon phenomenon. In this case, the History Hackathon is a contest for undergraduate student teams to research, collaborate, and create projects inspired by the resources available in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library collections. Projects may include performances, essays, websites, infographics, lectures, podcasts, and more. A panel of experts will serve as judges and rank the top three teams. Cash Prizes will be awarded to the winning teams.

The History Hackathon will take place over a 72-hour period from October 23-25, in the Rubenstein Library and The Edge.  All the  guidelines, rules, and details may be found at the History Hackathon: a Collaborative Happening  site.Students in the Edge

  • When:  Friday, October 23rd to
    Sunday, October 25th

http://sites.duke.edu/historyhackathon/register/

Contact : HistoryHackathon@duke.edu


Sponsored by the Duke History Department,  the Duke University Libraries, the David M. Rubenstein Library, and the Duke University Undergraduate Research Support Office.

Contributor: Susannah Roberson

 

 






Step into the Spotlight: Dance Films

Dance on film: movies to get your groove on
Step into the Spotlight: Dance Films

The 2015 season of the American Dance Festival has now kicked off with fabulous performances through July 25th.

To help you get your  groove on, check out dance-themed highlights from Lilly Library’s film/video collection in the Lilly Video Spotlight: Dance on Film.

If our spotlight whets your appetite, explore Lilly Library’s large selection of dance DVDs to keep you tripping the light fantastic all summer long.  Don’t feel like tripping the light fantastic with Lilly?  The ADF Archives serve as an excellent resource for dance historians, and  this summer the International Screendance Festival hosts screenings at the Nasher Museum of Art.

Updated from a June 2014 post authored by Danette Pachtner,  Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Women’s Studies






Access Expanded Through New Library Agreement

Books
Starting Oct. 1, Duke students, faculty, and staff will be able to check out books in-person from nearly a dozen other major research libraries.

 

Duke University students, faculty, and staff will soon enjoy on-site library borrowing privileges at several other major research universities, courtesy of a new program known as BorrowDirect Plus.

Under a new pilot agreement beginning October 1, 2014, students, faculty, and staff from the following institutions will have reciprocal on-site borrowing privileges: Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.

Guest users who have been verified and have home library accounts in good standing will have in-person access to materials at any of the participating libraries. When visiting one of these libraries, members of the BorrowDirect Plus community will need to show their campus ID card and log into their home library account to show their current status. Once verified, they will be issued a library card from the institution they are visiting.

Items, collections, and participating libraries available will vary by institution. The lending library’s policies and loan periods apply to guest borrowers, and it is recommended that users considering a visit to another library view their policies ahead of time. Borrowed items may be returned at either the lending library or the user’s home library. (For example, a book checked out at Yale could be returned here at Duke, and vice versa.)

For the most part, these same materials are already available through BorrowDirect, a rapid book request and delivery system used by all of the participating institutions (with the exception of Duke). The new agreement expands the system to include this in-person component.






Badges to Buttons: Students Write About “Images That Shock”

Guest post by Professor Ann Marie Rasmussen and students in her Spring 2014 Writing 101 course, “Images that Shock: Obscenity from the Middle Ages to the Present,” which was co-taught with Heidi Madden, Librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies. Writing 101 courses are offered during a student’s first year at Duke and are designed to offer students a foundation for and  introduction to university-level writing. See more at the Thompson Writing Program’s Writing 101 website, or see a list of all Spring 2014 Writing 101 courses and course descriptions.

As part of their research into the meaning and historical significance of late medieval badges, students in Professor Rasmussen's Writing 101 course turned medieval badges into buttons.
As part of their research into the historical significance of late medieval badges, students in Professor Rasmussen’s Writing 101 course made their badges live again as buttons.

When I teach Writing 101, I focus not on content, but on process. The goal is to give first-year students what my co-teacher, Heidi Madden, and I like to call a tool chest of skills in academic communication, broadly understood, that will help them make the most of studying at Duke. The skills we emphasize include writing skills such as revision; giving and accepting rigorous yet fair feedback; and communicating clearly and effectively for different audiences, media, and formats. We also emphasize turning students into effective, knowledgeable, and critical researchers by teaching them  how to master the complex modern research engine that goes by the name of a research library.

Still, to learn process you have to apply it. For their final paper, students write a research paper in an area of my scholarly expertise, late medieval badges. These are small objects found in Great Britain and northwestern Europe, usually about the size of a quarter and featuring a vivid image. They were made to be worn, usually sewn or pinned to clothing, but sometimes suspended as a pendant. Made of lead-tin alloy, badges were cheap to make and to buy. Some 15,000 survive; millions were probably made in the three hundred years they were in circulation. Although they are little known today, badges were once ubiquitous, ordinary artifacts. What makes badges rewarding for student research are their images, which draw on and disseminate iconographies that, however shocking, mysterious, or inscrutable they now seem to us, were once widely and immediately understood. A badge image presents itself to a modern viewer as a puzzle that repays diligent, focused, expert research by delivering new findings and a deeper understanding of the past.

What a great topic for Writing 101! For their final paper, each student selects and researches a single badge and its image. As a way of getting to know their badge better, we asked students to carefully draw it. Then, we used the library’s button-maker to affix each drawing to an aluminum, pinned back. Viola! The medieval badges live again in a modern form, as buttons. Students were also asked to write a blog post about their badge, which they have identified using categories and data from an important, web-based reference and  research tool for badges, the Kunera database housed at  the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This assignment allowed them to practice making academic research accessible and compelling to non-specialists. We, teachers and students, hope that the buttons and blogs pique your interest in medieval badges and in Writing 101 at Duke.

 

A Selection of Student Research on Medieval Badges


Tiffany Chen:
What a week this has been! To be honest, when first faced with the task of researching the badge—well, actually, mine is an ampulla—I was sure it would not be so difficult. But when I realized that the ampulla for my paper is… undocumented in a conspicuous way… I found out how challenging researching the unknown can really be.

 

I have felt like a detective lately, sleuthing for clues and trying to piece them together in a way that not only makes sense, but also is likely to be correct. Luckily, I have found clues pointing me in promising directions. For instance, the location of my ampulla was listed as Jerusalem, but I had to look at the ampulla itself and its depiction to discover that it represented Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is held by tradition to be the location where Christ was resurrected.

I am on a good path towards uncovering more clues. So far, I have delved into the ampulla’s rich history, circa 1149-1199 (around the time of the Third Crusade to the Muslim world). I have researched its image and as well ampullae in general to better understand how they were used. But I have yet to uncover information on the ampulla’s inscription of capital letters, HMPO, and on other key features. More to come in the future! Until then, this detective needs to pick up her magnifying glass and see what else she can find.

Kay Hasegawa: Yes, that badge is showing exactly what you think it is, a woman standing next to a penis with little arms and legs, wearing a crown, and carrying a pilgrim staff and a shoulder bag. Very, very eccentric, and not exactly the first thing we would imagine when we think about medieval accessories in Western Europe! But the image embodies a very common desire for the agriculture-intensive peasants of the day, the wish for fertility of the land and of the mother. All hail the medieval phallic figure!

 

Alyse Whitaker: Do me a favor. Imagine a world in which it is acceptable for you and your peers to wear clothing or badges adorned with explicit images of female and male genitalia… In our world, it would be unusual to walk down the street and see a man wearing a shirt with a phallus on it because exposing genitals is not tolerated or legal in American culture. Thinking back to the Middle Ages, which supposedly is a time when people were more modest, it was shocking to discover that this assumption was not accurate. Here is a badge that caught my eye. It shows a phallus on a spit, something used to roast chicken over a fire, with a vulva functioning like a  “grease trap” to catch the drippings. There are so many impressions that could be taken from this image. My first impression was that the artist was trying to express the efficiency of the men when it came to fertility,. Or perhaps the image was supposed to shock and ward off evil spirits? Badges such as this one may have been worn for many different purposes.

 

Special thanks to Elena Feinstein and Aaron Welborn for bringing the button-maker to the library, and to Mark Zupan for photographing the buttons.

 






Now Available: Check Out E-Books and Audiobooks on Your Phone or Tablet

Just a sampling of the hundreds of popular titles you can now download as eBooks or audiobooks and enjoy on your own device. Click on the image to get started.
Just a sampling of the hundreds of popular titles you can now download as eBooks or audiobooks and enjoy on your own device. Click on the image to get started.

Duke University Libraries and Ford Library at the Fuqua School of Business are excited to offer a new service that allows library users to download and enjoy popular eBooks and audiobooks on their own devices, including iPhones, iPads, NOOKs, Android phones and tablets, and Kindles.

The new service, called OverDrive, has hundreds of popular fiction and non-fiction titles to choose from, including best-selling novels, well-known classics, self-improvement guides, and much more. We are adding new titles to Duke’s collection all the time.

Here’s how it works:

  • To get started, visit the Duke OverDrive website. (You can easily get there through the eBooks portal on our library website.)
  • Browse through the available titles, and check them out using your Duke NetID.
  • You can check out up to five (5) eBooks or audiobooks at one time.
  • Titles will automatically expire at the end of the lending period (21 days). There are no late fees!
  • eBooks can be read immediately on any device with an internet browser. Audiobooks can be streamed using the OverDrive Media Console app, which you can download for free on all major desktop and mobile platforms.
  • If a title is already checked out, you can place it on hold and request to be notified when it becomes available. You can place up to ten (10) titles on hold at a time.
  • If you don’t see a title you’re looking for, submit a request from any search page using the recommendoption. We’ll add requested titles to our wishlist and purchase them as funds become available.
  • Once you download a title, you can transfer it to your iPhone, iPad, NOOK, Android phone or tablet, or Kindle.

That’s it! Pretty simple.

In addition to hundreds of new and recently published books, you can also download tens of thousands of public domain classics as eBooks through OverDrive. Look for the “Project Gutenberg” link under Featured Collections.

We are in the process of adding to our initial selections in OverDrive, so we encourage you to submit recommendations through the site if there are eBooks or audiobooks you’d like to see available.

To get started, visit the Duke OverDrive website. And let us know what you think!

Screenshot of the OverDrive interface. Just a click "Borrow" to check out a title with your Duke NetID, or place it hold and get notified when it becomes available.
Screenshot of the OverDrive interface. Just a click “Borrow” to check out a title with your Duke NetID, or place it on hold and get notified when it becomes available.






Good Questions: Is It the Shoes?

The questions we get in Perkins Research Services range from the fatuous to the far-fetched to the fascinating. This is the second of a series on our most interesting research questions, and how we go about answering them. (Some details have been changed to protect our users’ privacy.)

Sometimes the questions we get are terse yet timely, like this one: “Articles about engineering and manufacturing of basketball shoes.” This has obvious and immediate import in the month running up to March Madness, so Perkins librarian Brittany, ever on her toes, got right to work on it one Sunday evening.

the sneaker book Did you know there’s a “Sneaker Book?”

In fact, there are at least two, the newer one subtitled “50 years of sport shoe design” and available to Duke users upon request from the library at NC State. (The Triangle Research Libraries are team players, even during basketball season.) Brittany started by recommending these books for “Steve” to get some background before delving into the technical questions.

The full-court press followed, with more specific questions that were not answered in the books:

  • How is a basketball shoe made? What science goes into the design?
  • How do factories make basketball shoes? What machines are used? What is the process in detail?

For these answers Brittany turned to our databases, first constructing a search strategy in ProQuest: ‘athletic shoe’ in Subject AND (manufacture OR design) in Subject

She also recommended the Engineering Village database, which turned up a promising article, “A structural mechanics model for sports shoes: the heel strike” from the Sports Engineering journal. Who knew there was such a specifically targeted journal? Not this Social Sciences generalist.

We aim for both the slam dunk and the buzzer-beater when we answer research questions—zeroing in on exactly the information you need, and just in time. Brittany turned in a good performance in this round.

Moving forward, I wonder if March Madness led to this other question we received about the same time: “I want to find articles about how would drunk people walk. Like would they stumble to their dominant side?” Our answer, in part, is to be careful around those bonfires, folks. LET’S GO, DUKE!

Post by Catherine Shreve, Librarian for Public Policy & Political Science






Good Questions: How to Track Down a Top-Secret Letter

A declassified "top secret" letter sent by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to U.S. President Richard Nixon (via several intermediaries) in October 1973.
The declassified “top secret” letter sent by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to U.S. President Richard Nixon (via several intermediaries) in October 1973. Click on the image to see the full document on the National Security Archive website.

The questions we get in Perkins Research Services range from the fatuous to the far-fetched to the fascinating. This is the first of a series on our most interesting research questions, and how we go about answering them.

In this age of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, a lot of current U.S. classified information is in the news and floating around on the web, should you choose to seek it out. But how do you find top-secret communications between world leaders from the past? This was the question I received via IM recently.

According to several articles, in October 1973 Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sent an urgent letter to President Richard Nixon via Henry Kissinger. The researcher (let’s call her Mary) had already checked many primary sources, databases, and yes, even Google. But she could not locate the original letter. Only quoted fragments of the declassified document could be found.

Rule #1 of library detective work: Go with your gut (especially if it’s an experienced gut). If you think it should be found in the National Security Archive database and Mary didn’t find it there—look again, trying other search strategies. So I did.

No luck there. This question obviously would take more persistence as well as intestinal fortitude. I checked the print Foreign Relations of the U.S. and other sources in the Reference area then redoubled my efforts. (For those with less research experience in this area, there are clues in the library’s guide to International & Transnational Relations.)

In true government document fashion, my search results often had obscure titles that made it difficult to know if I had hit pay dirt. With a combination of persistence, collaboration, educated guessing, and serendipity….

BINGO! Document 7 in a search of the National Security Archive website through GWU was described thus: “Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Brent Scowcroft to Kissinger, 5 October 1973, enclosing message from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (passed through Israeli chargé Shalev).” The murky type on the cover page said “Top Secret/Exclusively Eyes Only.” Coo-oo-uhl. Once I deciphered the trail of all the people through whom it was transmitted, it became clear that the next page was Meir’s own message. I IM’d Mary, who excitedly confirmed this by matching some of the quotes she had found.

Although we found our answer on the free web after all, it took a library to index and share the document and librarian intervention to track it down. You might call us everyone’s favorite “intelligence agency,” mining and exposing information for the common good.

Post by Catherine Shreve, Librarian for Public Policy & Political Science






ALERTS!

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 journal cover
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 StudiesJournal Cover International 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.






Alerts!

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.

US State Capital locations
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.
  •     Access state newspapers of record.”

Quote source

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

Leiden Armenian Lexical Textbase

Armenian Lexicon
from LALT

“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

Naver news archive

Naver news Archive
Naver news Archive

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

Selden Society Publications  & History of Early English Law (available in HeinOnline) – “Access to English and American legal history dating back to A.D. 1066 in an online digital format. ” Quote source

Spinelli’s Law Librarian’s Reference Shelf   (available in HeinOnline)

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.






Alerts!

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.

DRAM online logo from website
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:

Naxos Video Library image
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.) Small EBSCO logo

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)Graphic of opera singer
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.






Downloadable e-Books

Wondering how to access all that lovely, lovely e-Book content in EBSCO eBooks? Here are a few easy (but not obvious) steps to get what you need:

1.   Create an Account on EBSCO eBooks and Sign In:

  • ­Click on Sign in button in the upper right corner.
  • Click on  create new accoutn button in the upper right corner.
  • You can choose any username and password.  We recommend choosing your NetID and NetID password so you will remember it.

2. Download your e-Book

  • After searching NetLibrary, click on the title of an e-book that you’d like to download.
  • Click on this button Download ebook button to download your e-book.

3.  Install Adobe Digital Editions

  • If you haven’t already, you’ll need to download Adobe Digital Editions to check the book out.
  • You can click on this link  Adobe Download link from within the download window
  • Or you can download Adobe Digital Editions directly from Adobe’s website.






Alerts!

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.






Learning to love the “QuickSearch” tab

Here is a great way to use the QuickSearch tab found on the front page of Duke Libraries webpage. Because searches in that tab search a lot – journal databases, the catalog (books), and more, it is a great place to start. In particular, it is a great way to follow up on an article or post of general interest because QuickSearch tab allows you to find most everything on a particular topic. You can get a comprehensive view in one spot.

In this example, we can follow up on an NPR story that was posted and re-posted on Facebook.  In the NPR story, psychologists performed a series of experiments on inattentional blindness arising from a police brutality case from the mid-1990’s. This is a great example for Quick Search because it covers academic research, a formal psychological theory, a book about the police trial and a current event found in newspapers.

Dick Lehr's book The fence
Image source: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-Fence-Dick-Lehr/?isbn=9780061894022

In our first search – a search for officer “Kenneth Conley” – Quick Search returns over 200 hits, mostly newspaper articles.  A search for “inattentional blindness” returns almost one thousand hits, most of which come from scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Vision or Consciousness and Cognition.  (The psychologist’s study, published in the journal iPerception is also available through the QuickSearch tab.)  You can also use the Quick Search tab to search for Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr’s book on the Conley case.  A search for “Dick Lehr” also returns over a thousand hits, but the very first one is Lehr’s book The Fence, which is about the Conley case.  You can also immediately see that The Fence is in the collection at Perkins/Bostock!

The QuickSearch tab makes it easy to find more about various aspects of the original story with a few searches, zeroing in on what aspects interest you.






Alerts!

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!

Northern Ireland. A Divided Community 1921-1972
Contact person:  Margaret Brill
” Northern Ireland: A Divided Community 1921-1972 presents a full record of every cabinet meeting for the duration of the Stormont administration, the devolved government of Northern Ireland, 1921-72. Separate files exist for each Cabinet meeting and include minutes and memoranda. The discussions and decisions reflect the wide range problems and activities involved in making the new administration work.
Boys in fornt of grafitti, N. Ireland
Topics debated and reported in just one sample year of the Troubles (1970) include: policing, arms and explosives, social need, Prevention of Incitement to Religious Hatred, Army occupation of factories, road spiking, routing of Orange Day parades, dock strikes, law and order, riots and the roles of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

With immediate access via browseable indexes of organisations, subjects, places and people (cabinet members, politicians, senior civil servants and police officers), in addition to full-text searching of the typed minutes themselves, this digital archive will be essential not only to teachers and researchers in Irish and British History, but will support students of politics, peace studies and conflict resolution. ” (Quote source.)

Oxford Bibliographies Online. Atlantic History
Contact person:  Margaret Brill

Selected new articles (Spring 2011):

African American Religions by Stefania Capone;  African Port Cities by Ty Reese, University of North Dakota;  Coffee by  Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College; Visual Art and Representation by Susan Scott Parrish; and  Sugar by Justin Roberts,  Dalhousie University (New articles source)

Oxford Bibliographies Online. Hinduism
Contact person:  Edward Proctor

“The study of Hinduism is diverse—it combines religion, philosophy, history, and textual studies, as well as informing a variety of comparative studies. Because the field comprises so many varied aspects, research and scholarship is wide-reaching in its response to different interpretations. Much of this work has moved online so that students and researchers have ready access to key primary source texts and a range of other electronic resources. ” (Quote source)

Forthcoming articles (Fall 2011):  Marriageby Lindsey Harlan; Hinduism and Buddhism by Greg Bailey, La Trobe University; Sacrifice by Kathryn McClymond, Georgia State University;  Hinduism and Psychoanalysis by Jason Fuller; Philosophical Approaches to Hinduism by Vishwa Adluri, The City University of New York.

Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive
Contact person:  Karen Jean Hunt

Organized in 4 parts, Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive now has available the first part:
“Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition – available now – contains 1.5 million pages, including more than 7,000 books and pamphlets, 80 newspaper and periodical titles, and a dozen major manuscript collections. For academic researchers, historians, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and others studying slavery, these varied sources shed light on the:

– Abolitionist movement and conflicts within it slavery_antislavery Gale

– Anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period

– Debates on the subject of colonization”      (Quote Source)

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.






Zotero + WordPress = Zotpress

This in just yesterday from Zotero’s blog:Small Zotero image “A new third-party plugin called Zotpress is now available. It runs on WordPress, the open source platform widely used for personal, professional and course websites and blogs. Zotpress was created by community member Katie Seaborn, and it allows you to pull and organize items from your or another Zotero library into your WordPress site. The plugin harnesses the power of Zotero’s server API by grabbing library data dynamically and presenting it outside Zotero.

So why would you use it? Zotpress is great for scholars or job hunters who want to easily organize their CVs or resumes on their personal websites. Teachers can use it as well to present bibliographies to students. Or, if you just want to share some stuff you’ve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zotero’s mission by offering a new and easy interface to share your data freely with the world.”

This is great timing for Duke, because Duke WordPress was just updated to version 3.1.2  earlier this week.  For members of the Duke community using WordPress for classes, group projects or multimedia presentations, you can now easily show your scholarly side, using Zotpress. For more information about Duke WordPress, contact the OIT Help Desk, and for more information about Zotpress, ask Ciara Healy, support librarian for Zotero.






Alerts!

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.)

Change Over Time

Journal cover for Change Over Time

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.

Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama and Fiction

Journal cover of Latino Literature “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.






Alerts!

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!

Wiley Online Library outage

On Saturday May 21st,  access may be interrupted to Wiley Online Library due to essential site maintenance.  The interruption will begin in the US at 5am eastern time and may continue for 2 hours.

New journal in Project MUSE – The Minnesota Review

Minesota review "Feral" cover
Minesota review "Feral" cover

Also indexed in MLA Bibliography, Minnesota Review is now available, from 2010, in full text through the Project MUSE database. “Publishing contemporary poetry and fiction as well as reviews, critical commentary, and interviews of leading intellectual figures, the Minnesota Review curates smart yet accessible collections of progressive new work.  This eclectic survey provides lively and sophisticated signposts to navigating current critical discourse.”(Quoted from Project MUSE’s journal description.)  This journal is also available through Duke Libraries in the following databases:  Literature Online (from Spring 2004),  ProQuest (from 04/2004), Humanities International Complete (from 03/2006), and Open J-Gate (from 2006). Check out The Minnesota Review’s Creative Writing Blog.

New database:  The Foundation Directory Online

“To meet the needs of grantseekers at every level, all FDO subscribers can search by county, metro area, and ZIP code as well as by city and state; save searches and store them in a password-protected ‘My FDO’ e-folder; tag records with any reminder word or phrase; E-mail, print, and save records; export lists of up to 100 search results at a time into Excel with a single click; and exclude grantmakers that don’t accept unsolicited applications… Updated weekly, Foundation Directory Online includes details on nearly 100,000 funders and over 2 million recent grants.” (Quote from www.foundationcenter.org)  Click to see a sample record from the Foundation Directory Online.

Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members  such as faculty, staff and students.






The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art

Tile, Safavid period, IranARTstor, one of Duke University Libraries’ image databases, recently announced the addition of about 400 pictures from the collection of Islamic and South Asian art from the Shangri La, Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. The images feature some of the exquisite objects in the collection: Indian jewelry and enamels; Syrian, Indian, Spanish, and Persian furniture, doors, and ceilings; Persian and Turkish tile panels and portable ceramics; and Central Asian, Persian, Turkish, and Indian textiles.

Shangri La, A Center for Islamic Arts and Cultures, the online exhibit of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, is fully searchable by keyword, medium region, and period. Containing about 3500 objects, the artifacts cover a time period from 1500BCE to the 20th century.

I heard about Doris Duke’s interest in Middle Eastern and Islamic art for the first time when Mary Samouelian, Doris Duke Collection Archivist at Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL), asked me to help her identify locations on photographs Ms. Duke took during her trip to the Middle East in 1938. These pictures, linked to an interactive map, are part of an online exhibit of materials from the Doris Duke Archives. The records from Doris Duke’s Shangri La residence are housed in RBMSCL.






Is more better?

Context

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.






Practice GRE, MCAT, LSAT, and GMAT tests from the library!

Are you thinking about going on in school? Do you want to get some practice in before taking your GRE, MCAT, GMAT, or LSAT? Well the library can help! We have a database called Learning Express Library that can help. Once you get into the database, create a free account so that you can keep track of your results. Then click on College Students in the menu on the left. Then choose Graduate School Entrance Exams Preparation. Choose the test you want and get started!

Get started here!






Illuminations

If Santa doesn’t bring you the coffee table book of sumptuously illustrated Middle Eastern manuscripts that you were hoping for, you can now console yourself by browsing through some illuminated treasures of Islamic civilization in a post at  Archivalia. There you can see, among other images, a mighty lion attacking its prey from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Kalila wa Dimna, a Qur’an from Persia in The Royal Library at Copenhagen, a Persian miniature from a Diwan by Hafiz at the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, a 19th century Christian Arabic manuscript at the University of Brimingham, or one of the earliest Mughal manuscripts at the Indiana University Art Museum. And now that all these pictures have made you curious, you can read up about their history in Arabic painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, available in Duke’s collection at Lilly Library. I hope you enjoy your holidays…






Power tool for working with data

If you deal with large amounts of data and especially if you use spreadsheets to work with it, there is a new tool for you. Freebase Gridworks allows you to upload data and then examine, filter and do data cleanup for ‘grid-shaped data.’  Visit the Gridworks project site for more information and videos that more fully explain and demonstrate some of the functionality of this tool.

Short List of Gridworks Functions

  • Bring similar data together for normalization (CIT and C.I.T. or just plain old data entry errors)
  • Create facets based on any column of data
  • Make graphs of any two columns to quickly visualize relationships
  • Pull data from the Freebase database to add to your own data
  • Make external data sets more useful by creating linking

This is just a brief list, but visit the site for more detail and see how Gridworks could save you time in data cleanup or help to create visualizations you couldn’t before.






New & Free: Three Recent Islamic Studies Sites

Three recently created and published online collections of images, manuscripts, and theses in the field of Islamic Studies are indicative of a growing number of rich and diverse free online resources in this field.

  • Images: The Casselman Archive of Islamic and Mudejar Architecture in Spain provides access to over four thousand color slides and black and white photographs of medieval Spain taken by the late Eugene Casselman (1912-1996) during his thirty years of travel throughout the Iberian peninsula. The images span over one thousand years of architectural history, from the seventh to the seventeenth century.
  • Manuscripts: The Manumed project database consists of a body of 255,635 digital files and 13,373 descrip tive summaries of manuscripts, prints, videos, radio broadcasts, etc. Besides a wide variety of French resources, it houses significant numbers of Arabic materials, among them manuscripts form the Library of Alexandria, Arabic medical manuscripts, Arabic and Berber manuscripts owned by a French repository, and the manuscripts of Lmuhub Ulahbib.
  • Theses: Researchers and librarians working in Islamic Studies now have online access to nearly 1000 Ph.D theses in the subject, spanning over ten years. JISC, The Academy and The British Library have combined their resources to bring together Islamic Studies theses from universities across the UK and Ireland.






Duke Campus GIS Data

Members of the Duke community who are engaged in research relating to the campus infrastructure can now download GIS Layers of the Duke campus and surrounding areas.  These are in formats compatible with ArcGIS software, and some (the shapefiles) are importable into Google Earth Pro.

The layers were created by Duke’s Facility Management and are being provided for download by Perkins Library’s Data & GIS Services Department.  Categories of data include general campus features (e.g., building footprints, parking lots, crosswalks, Duke Garden trails), campus vegetation (e.g., coniferous trees, hedges), topography (contour lines), and color aerial photography in geo-referenced MrSID compressed format.  The area of coverage includes not only West, Central, and East campuses, but many of the surrounding Durham neighborhoods.  But no, undergrads, we have nothing showing the tunnels!

We hope to improve the documentation over time with improved metadata, as well as periodically update the layers.  Users should contact Mark Thomas or other staff in the Data & GIS Services Department for help in using this data.






The World Bank Frees Data

On April 20, 2010, the World Bank announced that it would offer free access to its global development and financial indicators. This puts the widely used and well-liked World Development Indicators (WDI), the Global Development Finance (GDF), the African Development Indicators, and the Global Economic Monitor (GEM) at the fingertips of anybody who wants to use them for analysis, policy development, decision-making, etc. (http://data.worldbank.org/). The data have become freely available to anybody who wants to re-distribute them, use them in mash-ups or apps. The World Bank has created a how-to guide and by mid-2010 will make the Web API available to developers. The data catalog offers an extensive listing of all databases and pre-formatted tables. The terms of use of the data are very liberal and impose very few restrictions.






Books To-Go

Flying-Books1

Earlier, we told you about the many ways to get audiobooks through Duke and on the web.

There is now a new way to download audiobooks straight from the web.  NC Live is now providing 750 downloadable audiobooks that are available in .mp3 format so you can burn them to a CD or transfer them to a portable device like an iPod.   Just browse, select, and download the title of your choice to your computer, then transfer your selection to a portable listening device for on-the-go audio enjoyment.

Subjects focus subjects focusing primarily on language learning, classic literature, history, and biography.  Available titles include The Shawshank Redemption, Slaughterhouse Five, Atlas Shrugged or learn to speak French, German, Greek or Thai.

Use this link to download books while you’re on campus

And if you’re off campus, connect to NC Live and then browse to Audio Books.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22244945@N00/4394440698/






Of champions & libraries

What else can we say this week except: DUKE RULES!duke-university-ncaa-champions--d-10nc-x-00195sm

How does the library relate to (or compete with) that? Well, ummm…here are some facts to peruse as you transition from celebration to research focus:

  • The University Archives has a collection of coaches’ films–men’s basketball films date from 1947 to 1996.
  • And here’s a pictorial history of our own Blue Devil.
  • Duke Libraries hold 112,186 unique titles that no other library in the world reports having.
  • We are 5th in the nation for our Film & Video holdings with 81,517 Film and Video titles collected.

Now that you’ve calmed down, don’t forget that the subject librarians have created research guides for you, and will meet with you to help you find sources for your papers. Here are some recent reviews of our services:

Thank you so much! This is extremely helpful!

Bravo!

my awesome Duke librarian






What screencasting can do for you

Screencasting technology allows you to record what is happening on your computer screen with accompanying audio commentary and then share it with others. It enables remote collaboration and learning and provides an effective medium for educating users in the best use of databases and online resources.

It is a handy and useful tool for students, teachers and developers of software and web resources. Screencasting is especially useful in learning environments where it can be used to make live recordings of presentations or training sessions, to comment verbally on projects and assignments, to remotely show students how to use software or search a database, or for collaboration on projects. Developers can use screencasting to highlight features in new products or to give a tour of a website or resource.

These tools can also be used socially for things like sharing narrated slide shows with friends. More advanced tools with additional features, such as Camtasia and Adobe Captivate, are available for purchase. These tools allow you to edit your content and import still images, video, and PowerPoint slides and also let you create accessible tutorials and lessons through the use of closed captioning. Several basic tools such as Jing, Screenr and Screen Jelly are available for free. These online tools are designed for easy use so you can begin making screencasts immediately.

Have you tried any screencasting tools? What did you think?

Written by Julie Adamo






Just say “Ni!”

Do midterms and research papers have you crying out “Run away! Run away!?” Take a study break and just say “ni!” to them for awhile with Duke Libraries Monty Python resources. You’ll find videos, books, audio, and music in our catalog.

Knights who say ni
Knights who say ni

Why? Because, those zany blokes are celebrating their 40th anniversary in NY City this week. Besides, it’s a proven fact that laughing yourself silly is an effective antidote to stress.  According to a literature review in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services 1

There are several beneficial efforts attributed to humor and laughter, including improved immune function, increased pain tolerance, and decreased stress response.

If you must rationalize it as schoolwork, you might hone your persuasive argument skills with The Argument Clinic

I don’t think there’s a punch-line scheduled, is there?

1 MacDonald, C. (2004). A chuckle a day keeps the doctor away: therapeutic humor & laughter. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services, 42(3), 18. http://search.ebscohost.com






Economic Effects of Migration

One of the most pressing issues in global policy development is migration. The 2005 report by The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) to the UN Secretary General Kofi Anan outlines the dimensions and dynamics of international migration. The report has focused the attention of a number of inter-governmental organizations (IGO) and agencies on a variety of aspects created by migration. While the 127 member-country International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the leading body to take on an advocacy role for the implementation of “safe and orderly migration” through research and policy development, agencies such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been monitoring monetary streams, called remittances, which are created by migrants who send part of their earnings back to their country of origin. These transfers have reached, according to a WB estimate, $397 billion in 2008, $305 billion of which were sent to developing countries by 190 million migrants or 3% of the world population. A recent IMF publication (Occasional Paper 259) traces the Macroeconomic Consequences of Remittances. The World Bank’s ‘Migration and Development Brief 10’ provides an Outlook for Remittance Flows 2009-2011: Remittances Expected to Fall by 7-10 Percent in 2009. The brief is accompanied by country-by-country data in Excel format. Figures on monthly remittance flows for selected countries are also available. These data update the Migration & Remittances Factbook 2008 (check availability @ Duke), a “snapshot of migration and remittances data for all countries, regions and income groups of the world, compiled from various sources.” The Migration & Remittances page on the World Bank site offers access to more papers and publications related to this topic. In addition, the World Bank blog People Move provides timely updates on emerging research findings and trends. It goes without saying that the services which send the money back to the migrants’ home countries are not free. The WB traces the cost of these transfers on its Remittance Prices Worldwide site.

It is to be hoped that the sheer magnitude of these transactions and their economic impact will help to focus attention on the humanitarian and ethical issues underlying the process of migration, issues which are often, despite the apparent beneficial financial results, less than benign.