Happy Sunshine Week! Sunshine week occurs annually and is “a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.” (sunshineweek.org)
To raise awareness, Public Policy Librarian Catherine has written this excellent post in honor of Freedom of Information Day this Friday, March 16th. If you want to give it a go, hop on the DIY wagon at the Department of State’s information page on the Freedom of Information act.
Top off the week by thanking a Government Documents librarian đ
Duke students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other members of the Duke community are invited to a night of seriously graphic fun, sponsored by the the Duke Marketing Club and Duke University Libraries.
Bringing together the entire Duke community, Heroes & Villains will be an adventure of its own, drawing inspiration from the Duke University Libraries’ vast collection of comic books from all periods and genres.
When: Friday, February 24 What Time: 9 PM to Midnight Where: Perkins Library Admission: Free Dress:Â Cocktail Attire, or Your Best Heroic/Villainous Costume
Students: Midterms got you feeling like a mere mortal? Throw on your cape and utility belt. Things are about to get supernaturally weird in Perkins.
Need more inspiration? Check out the Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection in Duke’s Rubenstein Library, one of the largest institutional collections of comics in the world!
Many thanks to our superhero sponsors: the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, the Deans of Trinity College, the Annual Fund, SOFC, Duke University Union, and the Sociology Department.
Charles Dickens at his last public reading in London, 1870
Join us for a special celebration of Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday!
When: Wednesday, February 8, 7:00 p.m. Where: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library (Map)
Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Charles Dickens performed in a series of dramatic public readings adapted from his own works, impersonating characters from famous scenes in Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, and other beloved novels. In celebration of Dickensâs 200th birthday in February, please join award-winning Duke author, Professor of the Practice of Theater Studies, and consummate Dickensian Michael Malone as he re-enacts these entertaining performances.
The event is held in conjunction with the exhibition Charles Dickens: 200 Years of Commerce and Controversy, on display outside of the Biddle Rare Book Room beginning January 30, featuring rare first editions of Dickens’s works and other materials from the holdings of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
A reception with refreshments will be held after the performance. This event is free and open to the public.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â 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!
BIOSIS Citation Index
“Covers all major areas in the life sciences, with broad coverage in molecular and cell biology, pharmacology, endocrinology, genetics, neurosciences, infectious diseases, ecology and organismal biology… Seamless access, research, and discovery in the life sciences with coverage of nearly 6,000 journal titles 18 million records with coverage to 1926…Â Identify potential collaborators with significant publication records… Find the first mention of plants, organisms, chemicals, or lab techniques in various life sciences fields… Access high quality journal content as well as content from reports, reviews, and meetings.” (Quote source)
For more info, check out the BIOSIS Citation Index help page.
Subject categories:Â Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Health and Medical Science
Moutons Interaktive EinfĂźhrung in die Historische Linguistik des Deutschen /Â The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Historical Linguistics of German
“The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Historical Linguistics of German offers an extensive overview of the language-historical development of the German language from its origins to the German spoken today and describes how the phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of German have changed.” (Quote source)
Papers of Alexander Hamilton:Â digital edition
“All the writings by and to Hamilton know to exist.” That pretty much sums up this comprehensive database, which in print form exceeded 27 volumes. Use this database to get the historical perspective on U.S. government spending, from the source.
Now with cross-search and cross-navigation features as part of the digital enhancement! Look forward to, “An integrated subject index [that] will convert page references to document references, creating a digital version of the cumulative index originally published in volume 27.” (Quote source)
Subject category:Â U.S. History
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
     Feel free to request these titles for addition to a Kindle or nook for checkout from Perkins/Bostock library. Check out our e-reader’s page for directions on how to request titles for and check out eReaders form Perkins/Bostock Library. For all available titles loaded onto our Kindles, check out this title list. Recently added titles include Jeffery Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman.
A $1 million pledge to endow the directorship of the Sallie Bingham Center for Womenâs History and Culture at Duke University has been made by journalist, activist and womenâs health care pioneer Merle Hoffman, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Thursday.
âThe Bingham Center is one of the leading womenâs history research centers in the U.S., documenting centuries of womenâs public and private lives, including education, literature, art and activism,â Brodhead said. âWe at Duke are grateful for this generous gift by Merle Hoffman, which will help further the Bingham Centerâs mission to preserve and promote the intellectual and cultural legacy of women from all walks of American life.âmenâs History and Culture at Duke University has been made by journalist, activist and womenâs health care pioneer Merle Hoffman, President Richard H. Brodhead announced Thursday.
After abortion laws were liberalized in New York state in 1970, Hoffman founded Choices Womenâs Medical Center, one of the first ambulatory surgical centers for women, which has become one of the largest and most comprehensive womenâs medical facilities in the U.S.
In 2000, the Bingham Center acquired both Hoffmanâs papers and the records of Choices Womenâs Medical Center. Since then, the center has collected the papers of numerous other providers, clinics and reproductive rights organizations that document the work of activists, health care workers, attorneys and others involved in reproductive health.
The center also has a large body of works that documents four centuries of political activity surrounding womenâs reproductive rights, thanks in part to several generous gifts from Hoffman, said Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs.
âAssociating Merle Hoffmanâs name with the directorship creates an enduring connection between the Bingham Centerâs leadership and Hoffmanâs outstanding contributions to the health, safety and empowerment of women everywhere,â Jakubs said.
Hoffman is also the publisher and editor-in-chief of On the Issues Magazine, and her autobiography, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Board Room, is set to be published in January 2012.
Hoffman said she decided to endow the centerâs directorship as a way âto continue to support the visionary efforts by Duke University to honor and document the many courageous women who have fought their own âintimate warsâ in the long struggle for reproductive justice. I hope that the Bingham Center will become the bridge between theory and practice that will catalyze future generations to joyfully go further and deeper in the continual battles for women’s equality.â
Center director Laura Micham said Hoffmanâs latest gift âwill enable us to expand our activities and impact, bringing us closer to our goal of building one of the premier research centers for womenâs history and culture in the world.â
The Sallie Bingham Center for Womenâs History and Culture was established in 1988 to acquire, preserve and provide access to published and unpublished materials that reflect the public and private lives of women, past and present. It is named in honor of author, playwright, teacher and feminist activist Sallie Bingham.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â 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 statesâall from a single, comprehensive Web source. Bills and laws, constitutions, proposed and enacted regulations, legislature membership, newspapers of recordâtheyâre all hereâmost updated dailyâin LexisNexis State Capital.
State capitals
   Compare law and public policy developments.
   Monitor proposed and enacted state laws.
   Analyze national and regional trends.
   Get facts about state legislators and their staffs.
Academic Video Online
“Academic Video Online brings you content from the BBC, PBS, Arthaus, CBS, Kino International, Documentary Educational Resources, California Newsreel, Opus Arte, The Cinema Guild, Pennabaker Hegedus Films, Psychotherapy.net, and hundreds of other partners. Newsreels, award-winning documentaries, field recording, interviews, lectures, training videos, and exclusive primary footage come together in a vast and powerful collection – 22,000 full-length videos by 2013…Make custom clips at per-second start-point and stop-point accuracy. Create custom playlists with your clips, whole videos, or content selected from anywhere on the Webâanything that has a URL can be put into your playlist. Each of your clips and playlists lives at a permanent URLâso you can cite them all in papers, blogs, and courseware, email them, share them.” Quote source
Subject Categories:Â Â Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video; Arts and Humanities – Film/Video
“This textbase is designed to provide basic tools, in the form of texts and lexica, for the study of Armenian from the classical period, with a focus on the oldest states of the language. For texts: the textbase contains Biblical and theological translations and native texts up to the time of Movses Xorenats’i in the late eighth century. Every word in these texts has been lexically analyzed, for its dictionary form and part of speech, and is searchable on each of these. For lexica: four major Armenian dictionaries have been included, complete or in substantial excerpts. Together, these cover the complete range of the classical language down to the latest periods. The four lexica are supplemented by Greek and Armenian wordlists. Uniquely, all words of all texts and all entries in every dictionary have been linked together through a ‘base lexicon’ which allows readers to find every occurrence of every word throughout. ” Quote source
Subject Categories:Â Â Arts and Humanities –Â 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:Â Â Area Studies and Cultures – Chinese Studies, Taiwan
Also known as the Naver digital news archive and the Naver news library, Naver News Library provides a Korean digital newspaper archive for articles published between 1920 and 1999 from four major Korean newspapers: Dong-A Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Maeil Business Newspaper and Hankyoreh. For more information about what this resource offers, check out their You Tube video!
American Bench: Judges of the nation
“This is the only directory which contains biographical information on current state court judges. It contains entries for federal judges as well. It also provides information on each court, including location, jurisdiction, method of selecting judges, and maps of judicial divisions. It is arranged alphabetically by state, with a separate section for the Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals. Information on federal district court judges is provided in the state section in which the judge presides.” Quote source
Includes:Â 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. SDSCâs 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.
Unidentified family photo, donated by Larry Henderson, Alabama.
One hundred oral histories of life in the Jim Crow South, complete with transcripts, have been digitized and made available on the Duke University Libraries website and iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store.
From 1993 to 1995, dozens of graduate students at Duke and other schools fanned out across the South to capture stories of segregation as part of âBehind the Veil,â an oral history project at Dukeâs Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). The students sought to preserve the stories before the men and women who survived Jim Crow passed away. The interviews — some 1,260 in all — were recorded on regular cassette tapes, transcribed and archived in Dukeâs special collections library.
But many of the interviews were omitted from the book and documentary.
For example, in 1957, a group of African-American businessmen in Memphis launched a boycott of the cityâs largest daily paper to protest the paperâs policy of not using courtesy titles, like Mr. or Mrs., when referring to blacks. The businessmen bought every copy they could find of The Commercial Appeal and threw them into the Mississippi River.
âI donât care how prominent you were, you were just Willie Brown,â said Imogene Watkins Wilson, a schoolteacher whose husband edited the Memphis Tri-State Defender, the cityâs leading African-American newspaper. âYou werenât Rev. Willie Brown, you werenât Dr. Willie Brown, you werenât Professor Willie Brown. And then, if [they] referred to your wife, she was Suzie. Not Mrs. Suzie, just Suzie.â
Wilson recollected the start of the seven-week boycott in a July 1995 interview with a Duke student, but her story never made the original projectâs final cut. Now her memories — along with the personal accounts of scores of other Americans who lived through the Jim Crow era — are among the hundred stories that have been digitized and made available for free for researchers, genealogists, educators and others.
Another newly digitized story is told by Ernest A. Grant of Tuskegee, Ala., who recounts how his mother was forced to flee town for burning a white insurance agent with a hot iron after he made unwelcome advances toward her. And Jesse Johnson of Norfolk, Va., a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, describes officer training in the 1940s at Fort Lee, Va. as âthe most segregated, the most prejudiced camp in the United States.â
This just in from Bowker’s:
A severe storm on the US East Coast has left over 2 million homes and businesses without power. This is affecting a number of Bowker services including:
⢠Books in Print
⢠Bowkerlink
⢠Data Services
⢠Syndetic Solutions
⢠LibraryThing for Libraries (Syndetics content)
⢠RCL
⢠BBAS
Bowker staff are currently working to restore services using generator power and hope to have some power restored by close of business Monday, 31 October EST. However, they predict access may be initially patchy. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you or your customers and appreciate your patience. We will keep you informed of progress.
– So stay tuned!
The Duke University Libraries recognize that the format of the book, along with the content, plays an important role in the research process. The Libraries are committed to advocating for optimal e-book functionality in every phase of the research process. The guiding principle behind our E-Book Advocacy Statement is that e-books should have the described functionalities as an essential part of research support.
The Libraries are
exploring the complexity of the research process and how e-books fit within this process
learning from readers about their preferences
advocating to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs
We want to know about your experiences with e-books. Â Please leave your comments below on when you use an e-book, when you prefer print, your desired functionalities, or other thoughts about how e-books fit, or don’t, into your research process.
“I read an article about that a while ago. No – wait. I cited it in a paper… What was the title again? The author’s name started with a J, I think.”
Perkins-Bostock Library offers a series of workshops for Zotero, RefWorks and EndNote.  If you’d like to sign up, please do so here. Some of the benefits of these citation managers include storage of .pdfs or links to .pdfs, organization of citations and exporting bibliographies according to a variety of styles. Each of these programs also allows you to cite your references while you compose your research papers.
If you are trying to decide which workshop to take, ask your favorite professor what she or he uses to manage their citations. (In general, Zotero is used by researchers in the humanities, and EndNote is preferred by scientists and social scientists.) Keeping your research organized is smart and will be beneficial to you when it comes time to write your senior thesis, study abroad or write your graduate school applications.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
– Audiobooks from Recorded Books Incorporated via NC Live
Duke Libraries will be offering a great selection of downloadable audiobooks later this month, according to NC Live:
“On Monday, September 19th, NC LIVE will disable the MyiLibrary Audio Books platform from use. Beginning September 19th, you will no longer be able to access or download audio books via the MyiLibrary service.” Instead, a new audio book provider and platform – Recorded Books One Click service – will be available later this fall. The new Recorded Books platform will be an improvement with regard to download and searching capabilities.
– Information set free!
JSTOR announced today it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This Early Journal Content includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. To learn more and to watch a video tutorial on how to access Early Journal Content, click here.
NEW databases:
– DRAM – Database of Recorded American Music
From the DRAM website : “DRAM is a not-for-profit resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. Continuing in the tradition of DRAM’s sister company New World Records, one of DRAM’s primary focuses is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings that have been neglected by the commercial marketplace, recordings that may otherwise become lost or forgotten.
Currently DRAM’s collection contains more than 3,000 albums worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 26 independent labels, and we are continually working to add more content. The basis for the current collection is the diverse catalogue of American music recordings by New World Records. From folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th century classical to early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic and beyond, New World has served composers, artists, students and the general public since its inception in 1975 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.” (Quote source and more information from DRAM.)
Contact librarian:Â Laura Williams
Subject Categories:Â 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, Hâ°nssler Classic, Medici Arts, Naxos, Opus Arte and TDK. Featuring performances from legendary artists including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Martha Argerich, Gerald Finley, and celebrated conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Valery Gergiev and many more, videos are available to stream at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps(high quality) and the service is compatible with both PC and Mac computers.”
Functions and features:
Conductor Simon Rattle
Ability to stream videos at 700 Kbps (standard quality) and 2 Mbps (high quality) resolutions
Create custom clips, which can be edited and added to individual playlists
Access to pre-defined video chapters, as well as individual arias and scene breaks of operas
Subtitles in up to 5 languages
The ability to follow along with scrolling libretto text
View video as Full Screen, 2/3 Screen or 1/4 Screen
Advanced search functionality, including the ability to search by category, role, composer, artist, production, personnel, work venue or festival (Quote source and more information)
Contact librarian:Â Laura Williams
Subject Categories:Â Arts and Humanities, Music, Film/Video; Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video
– Political Science Complete (PSC)
From EBSCO: “PSC contains full text for more than 530 journals, and indexing and abstracts for over 2,900 titles, (including top-ranked scholarly journals), many of which are unique to the product. PSC has a worldwide focus, reflecting the globalization of contemporary political discourse.” Topical coverage includes : Comparative politics,Humanitarian issues, International relations, Law and legislation, Non-governmental organizations, Political theory” ( Quote source, title list and more.)
What do librarians think? This database received a “Highly Recommended” rating in a 2010 issue of Choice, the American Library Association’s review magazine.
Contact librarian:Â Catherine Shreve
Subject Categories:Â Â Social Sciences – Political Science
– IPA Source (Transcriptions and Literal Translations of Songs and Arias)
From the IPA site: “Online since 2003, IPA Source is the web’s largest library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. Now with over 5598 texts including 955 aria texts! Using the dropdown menus, search for titles by composer, poet, title, opera aria, or Latin text.” Tip: This resource requires the Aodbe Acrobat reader. (Quote source)
Subject Categories:Â 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.
In January, we posted some handy information about how to get through, around or over expensive textbook purchases. It was so good, we decided to re-post it for fall semester.
Now that you have your licensed e-content – a.k.a your e-Book – on your computer, you can also transfer it to a portable e-reader device, such as the Nook or a Sony e-reader. (Here is a list of e-readers that are compatible with Adobe Digital Editions.)
The transfer takes place with the Adobe Digital Editions.
Connect your portable device to your computer.
When Adobe automatically recognizes your device for the first time, it will ask you to authorize it using your Adobe ID. Use the same username and password you created when you authorized your computer.
Drag and drop the title into your reader.
Two apps are available to make EBSCO eBooks compatible with iPhones,and iPads : Bluefire Reader and Txtr. Txtr is also available for Android phones.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Outage:
ProQuestŽ will be performing infrastructure maintenance on July 30, 2011. A twelve (12) hour maintenance window will be required for this maintenance. The window will take place from Saturday, July 30, 2011, at 22:00 EDT to Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 10:00 EDT.
NetLibrary has transitioned to EBSCOhost! The look and functionality is different. To get the full functionality, create a myEBSCO folder and acquire the license you need to download books to your computer or other compatible device. The interface for searching and looking at the books and tables of content in NetLibrary have also been revamped.
EBSCO support offers a variety of user guides and tutorials to help you navigate the new interface and make the most of the increased functionality. Supported reader devices include the Nook (as well as the color and gossamer models) and the Sony reader (several models) and any e-reader that is compatible with Adobe Digital Editions . One of the most attractive features of the new version of NetLibrary is that library patrons may select the length of time they can borrow the e-book. If you just want to read a chapter or two, check it out for a day or if you want to read it from the front over image to the back cover image then you can opt to have it for longer. Let us know how it is working out for you!
– Project MUSE, expanded coverage and full runs from now available
The 10 titles, their new coverage periods, and the collections to which they belong are:
Asian Bioethics Review, Dec. 2008 inaugural issue tot he current issue (complete run.) Found in Project MUSE’s Premium Collection.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Outages:
image courtsy of nilsvic & Flickr creative commons
ReferenceUSA will be performing required system maintenance from Friday 7/15 10:00 PM – Saturday 7/16 5:00 PM. During this time period the website will be unavailable.
Also,
ProQuestÂŽ will be performing infrastructure maintenance on July 30, 2011. A twelve (12) hour maintenance window will be required for this maintenance. The window will take place from Saturday, July 30, 2011, at 22:00 EDT to Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 10:00 EDT.
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
From the Library of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. This database, comprised mainly of first-person accounts, “supports research in religious studies, African studies, womenâs studies, international affairs and anthropology. Letters that served as reports from the field describe the indigenous peoples and cultures, tribal factionalism, cultural differences and mores, and the many problems and achievements of the work.” (Quote source and more information.)
Contact person:Â Danette Pachtner
Available in streaming audio! This database of over 300 plays “…will be used for research and instruction well beyond literature, as the works are chosen not only for their literary significance, but also for their ability to challenge presumptions and examine complicated moral and ethical questions. Critical essays written by known figures in medicine, academia, politics, and other fields will draw connections from the plays to issues and hot topics in the humanities, social sciences, theatre, hard sciences, law, medicine, and virtually every other field of study.” Important titles in the collection include “Julius Caesar, William Shakespeareâs classic tale of duplicity, betrayal and murder,  performed by Stacy Keach, Jobeth Williams, and Kelsey Grammer and The Cherry Orchard , Anton Chekhovâs timeless story of an aristocratic Russian familyâs fading fortunes and struggle to maintain their status in a changing world, starring Marsha Mason, Charles Durning and Jennifer Tilly.” (Quote source and more information.)
“The collection offers more than 22,000 records in nearly 1,000 files selected by Dr Michael Stenton, University of Cambridge. There are also newly commissioned thematic essays by leading scholars in the field with links directly to relevant documents, a World War II Chronology, a picture gallery of SOE plans and equipment and clips from the SOE film, Now it can be told (1946).”
image courtesy of Gale
In addition to those primary source documents, this collection also offers “fully text-searchable images of the British Foreign Office information files gathered from across German-occupied territories following the collapse of the peacetime diplomacy.” Here is a link to the introductory essay for this Database.   (Quote source and more information.)Â
“For the first time, students, instructors, and researchers can bookmark specific scenes, monologues, and staging examples and then include those online links in their papers and course reserves. Â Class assignments and published papers will take on a whole new dimension… Both Broadway and off-Broadway productions are represented in each decade…Â The writers and actors will also span a wide range of periods and nationalities. .. Some of the authors represented include Sean OâCasey, Jean Cocteau, Ntozake Shange, Tennessee Williams, Wendy Wasserstein.. The performers include Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Faye Dunaway, William Hurt, Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins… Ben Kingsley, Juliet Stevenson, Zoe Wanamaker, and Prunella Scales, to name just a few.” (Quote source and more information.)Â
“Wellesley then, is an index to the authorship of articles, and a bibliography of articles written by each contributor, and using each pseudonym. Citations of evidence are provided to support attributions of authorship, along with brief biographical and vocational details. 45 important monthly and quarterly titles are included, covering the period from the beginning of the Westminster Review in 1824 to the end of the century. ”
Among the titles indexed are: British and Foreign Review, British Quarterly Review, Dark Blue, Dublin Review, Dublin University Magazine, Foreign Quarterly Review, Foreign Review, Modern Review, Monthly Chronicle, Nineteenth Century, North British Review and Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.  (Quote source and complete list of titles indexed.)
Primary and secondary materials – plus video! “Covering Latin America culture and society from the 15th century to the present day…The first release of Gale World Scholar delves into one of the most studied areas in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean. Curated by an advisory board of experts in Latin American studies, the collection is designed to enrich research and student assignments. .. populated by interactive tools and rich multimedia including BBC News and the New York Times video collection.” (Quote source and more information.)
E-Journals available at Duke through Project MUSE & now online:
Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different and personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. This journal is available, from 1990 to the most current issue, across a variety of databases accessible to Duke community members.
American Catholic Studies is a double-blind refereed journal that publishes high quality studies and book reviews for academics, opinion leaders, and informed general readers in the fields of U.S. Roman Catholic history, sociology, theology, architecture, art, cinema, music, popular movements, and related areas. Available from Spring 2011 issue.
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.
Labour/Le Travail is the official, semi-annual publication of the Canadian Committee on Labour History. Since it began publishing in 1976, it has carried many important articles in the field of working-class history, industrial sociology, labour economics, and labour relations. Although primarily interested in a historical perspective on Canadian workers, the journal is interdisciplinary in scope.
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (EASTS) aims to bring together East Asian and Western scholars from the fields of science, technology, and society (STS). Examining issues such as human embryonic stem-cell research, family and reproductive technologies, and the globalization of Chinese medicine, the journal publishes research on how society and culture in East Asia interact with science, technology, and medicine.
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
A few weeks ago Hacks posted an update about WordPress plug-in called Zotpress that allowed Zotero information to be easily posted on a WordPress site. Not to be outdone, Mendeley also has a WordPress plug in found here.
Mendeley
From WordPress: “Mendeley Plugin for WordPress is a plugin for displaying information from the Mendeley “shared bibliography system”(www.mendeley.com) in WordPress blogs. Using the public API from Mendeley, meta-information on documents in personal, public or shared collections is loaded and formatted as bibliographic entries.”
If you are a Mendeley user (hence more science-y than humanities-y) you’ll appreciate this plug in. Post a link to your WordPress blog and let us know how this plug-in is working for you!
Though vandalism is vehemently discouraged, there are two marks left that are worth sharing.
The first one:
It reads:
“Studying here makes me feel like the protagonist in Checkov’s The Bet. I love it. Surrounded by all this knowledge – isolated between books – I become so much more motivated.”
The second one:
It reads:Â Â “I love the smell of old books, and the words left behind by students past.”
Things a librarian might appreciate:
The Chekov reference.
The correct underlining of Chekov’s short story title.
The smell of old books
Nice use of the comma.
What we can all appreciate – loving the library! If you’d like to express your love of the library, books, the smell of books, short stories, Russian literature, alumni or other delights, feel free to respond to this post instead of inking your devotion in a drawer đ
A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Here is a quick introduction to data visualization, in pictures. And best of all, the data set is not so.. well.. data-y. The data set is what one person ate – everything – across one year. See the various ways that data can be displayed at the creator Laura Manning’s Flickr site.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â 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:
â˘Â   ABI/INFORM
â˘Â   Applied Science & Technology Abstracts and Index
â˘Â   Art Abstracts and Art Index
â˘Â   Biography Index
â˘Â   Biological & Agricultural Index
â˘Â   Biology Digest
â˘Â   Book Review Digest
â˘Â   Books in Print and nooks in Print with Reviews
â˘Â   Business Dateline
â˘Â   CA Student Edition
â˘Â   Contemporary Womenâs Issues
â˘Â   Dissertation Abstracts Online
â˘Â   Education Abstracts
â˘Â   Education Index
â˘Â   Essay and General Literature Index
â˘Â   General Sciences Abstracts and General Sciences Index
â˘Â   GEOBASE
â˘Â   Humanities Abstracts and humanities Index
â˘Â   Index to Legal Periodicals & Books
â˘Â   Library Literature
â˘Â   Newspaper Abstracts
â˘Â   PAIS Archive
â˘Â   PAIS International
â˘Â   Periodical Abstracts
â˘Â   PsycINFO
â˘Â   Readersâ Guide Abstracts
â˘Â   SIRS Researcher
â˘Â   Social Sciences Abstracts
â˘Â   Social Sciences Index
â˘Â   Sociological Abstracts
â˘Â   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.
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.
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.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â 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:Â 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.
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.)
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)
“The study of Hinduism is diverseâit 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):Â Marriageby Lindsey Harlan; Hinduism and Buddhism by Greg Bailey, La Trobe University; Sacrifice by Kathryn McClymond, Georgia State University;Â Hinduism and Psychoanalysis by Jason Fuller; Philosophical Approaches to Hinduism by Vishwa Adluri, The City University of New York.
Organized in 4 parts, Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive now has available the first part:
“Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition â available now â 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
– Anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period
– Debates on the subject of colonization” Â Â Â Â (Quote Source)
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This in just yesterday from Zotero’s blog: “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 Zoteroâs 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 youâve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zoteroâs 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.
Our new database Dance in Video offers the option to view content on your phone. Just in time for the American Dance Festival! Here are the details from Alexander Street Press: ” Stream video to your mobile device! All video can now be viewed on iPhone & Android smartphones operating on 3G network or better.”
“Many performances currently targeted for Dance in Video include Points in Space (Merce Cunningham Dance Company); highlights from Dance Theatre of Harlem; an Evening with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Strange Fish (DV8 Physical Theatre); Silence is the End of our Song (Royal Danish Ballet); Intimate Pages (Rambert Dance Company); Swansong (English National Ballet); Peter and the Wolf (The Royal Ballet School); Rainbow Round My Shoulder (Donald McKayle); and hundreds more choreographed or performed by dancers and groups including Agnes de Mille, Mark Morris, Lestor Horton, Anna Sokolow, Norman Walker Dance Company, Anthony Tudor, Jose Limon, Paul Draper, Chuck Green, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, The Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Nederlands Dans Theater, and others.”
To access this database on your phone, open your phone’s internet browser and navigate to the front page of the Duke Libraries website by clicking on the databases tab in the upper left of the page and typing in Dance in Video into the search field below. Once in the database, search for the dance performance you’d like to see.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Alternative Press Index
Contact person:Â Margaret Brill
“The Alternative Press Center (APC) is a non-profit collective dedicated to providing access to and increasing public awareness of the alternative press. Founded in 1969, it remains one of the oldest self-sustaining alternative media institutions in the United States. For more than a quarter of a century, the Alternative Press Index has been recognized as a leading guide to the alternative press in the United States and around the world.” (Quote source.)
Alt press blog url: http://www.altpress.org/blog/index.php
Black Music by LeRoi Jones/Baraka
Black Thought and Culture
Contact person:Â Karen Jean Hunt
“Black Thought and Culture contains 1,297 sources with 1,098 authors, covering the non-fictionpublished works of leading African Americans. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.” Also: “Most recently, the database has begun adding 13,000 pages (the only existing full run) of The Black Panther, the party’s newspaper, with full-color images of every page. ” (Quote source.)
RSC ebook Collection (Royal Society of Chemistry)
Contact person:Â Meghan Gamsby
“The RSC eBook Collection is a definitive point of reference for chemical science, providing a comprehensiveoverview of research and opinion in many areas – from food and medical science, to energy and environmental issues. Content is continually updated, with new titles added as they are published during each year… NB: all e-book chapters have individual DOI’s making it easy to create stable direct links to them,for use in teaching, reading lists, etc.” (Quote source.)
Confidential Print: Middle East
Contact person:Â Christof Galli
“From the Egyptian reforms of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the nineteenth century, the Middle East Conference of 1921, the Mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia and the Suez Crisis in 1956, to the partition of Palestine, post-Suez Western foreign policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict, Confidential Print: Middle East is a fundamental resource for academics, students and researchers studying the modern Middle East. These historical documents inform the volatile situation in the region today.” (Quote source.) This resource covers Middle Eastern history from 1812-1958; countries included are: Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, Persia, Suez Canal, Turkey, Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. The series originated out of a need for the British Government to preserve all of the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Some of these were one page letters or telegrams â others were large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked âConfidential Printâ were circulated to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad.
Dance in Video
Contact person:Â Danette Pachtner
“Dance in Video contains dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Included are classic performances from top ballet companies; experimental works from up-and-coming dance troupes; documentaries by and about leading choreographers; videos on dance training; and other items covering a wide range of 20th century dance styles.”
Filmakers Library Online
Contact person:Â Danette Pachtner
Subject Categories:Â Area Studies and Cultures â Film/Video;Â Arts and Humanities â Film/Video
“Filmakers Library Online provides documentaries with relevance across the curriculumârace and gender studies, human rights, globalization and global studies, multiculturalism, international relations, criminal justice, the environment, bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more. It presents points of view and historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.”
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! â 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) –Â integrates VDE’s conference proceedings into IEEE Xplore. This includes 3,100 VDE conference papers from 20+ annual conference titles, with 1,000 new articles being added every year.
Sort search results by “Most Cited”: This upgrade includes a new feature to IEEE Xplore that will allow you to sort your search results by “Most Cited”. Also, you will also see the article’s citation count in the article metadata. Find articles of high impact quickly with this new feature.
Quickly and easily perform your search in IEEE Xplore and also see further relevant results from scitopia.org based on your search terms. Sciptopia.org provides a federated search of content from 15 leading scholarly society publishers in science and technology.
eBooks – a dedicated web page has been created for eBooks OPAC that includes both the HTML persistent link list as well as the Excel versions and Customers with OpenURL activated on their account will now find OpenURL links next to eBook chapters. (IEEE information for this post provided by IEEE.)
From the University of Pennsylvania press, “Change Over Time is a new, semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Themes will be examined at all scales, from the global and regional to the microscopic and material.”
This journal can be readily accessed through Duke’s ProjectMUSE database subscription. (Journal description provided from ProjectMUSE.)Â Â Here is a link to the journal’s web page, with information on the Spring & Fall 2012 calls for papers.
“The majority of Latino Literature is in English, with selected works of particular importance (approximately 25% of the collection) presented in Spanish. The three major components deliver approximately 200 novels and many hundreds of short stories; 20,000 pages of poetry; and more than 450 plays… Social historians will find much of value in Latino Literature…Authors are indexed for national heritage, gender, birth and death dates, literary movement, occupation, and more.”  (Description excerpted from longer description provided by Alexander Street Press.) Free, browse-only access provided here, by Alexander Street Press.
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Wiley Online Libraryoutage
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.
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.
“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 âMy FDOâ 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 donât 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)Â 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.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Outages:
– UNC Libraries online services will be unavailable on Wednesday, May 18, from 2:30 a.m. until noon, because of a critical equipment upgrade. This outage will affect all electronic services, including: the online catalog; digital collections; access to electronic journals, databases, and e-books; request forms;interlibrary loan;
and the University Library website. Both on-campus and off-campus access will be affected.
– For those of you who use WiseSearch (WiseNews, the News archive, is updated every day with items from over 1,600 content providers, including all 18 Chinese and English newspapers of Hong Kong, and a large number of other top-tier newspapers, magazines, newswires, TV and radio broadcasts of Mainland, Taiwan and some Asia Pacific countries) please be informed that a system maintenance will be scheduled on Saturday, 21 May 2011 from 13:00 to 19:00. During this period, the information update on our platform will be temporarily unavailable. The services will be resumed to normal after the maintenance.
New databases –
Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991
“The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 features the complete 62-year run of The Listener, established by the BBC in 1929 as the medium for reproducing radio and later, television programmes in print.”
Contact person:Â Margaret Brill
Picture Post Historical Archive “The Picture Post Historical Archive comprises the complete archive of the Picture Post from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 – all digitized from originals in full colour.”
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Economy and War in the Third Reich, 1933-1944
“This source provides 30,506 digital page images reproducing… original documents from the London School of Economics and Political Science collection Statistics of the Third Reich analysed, 1933-1944”
Contact person: Heidi Madden, Ph.D.
Federal Response to Radicalism in the 1960s
“This collection provides digital page images reproducing FBI documentation on a wide range of viewpoints on political, social, cultural, and economic issues.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Democracy in Turkey, 1950-1959: Records of the U.S. State Department Classified Files
“This collection of digital reproductions of State Department documents provides access to unique primary source materials on the political, economic and social development of Turkey during a period of democratization in the 1950s.”
Contact person: Christof Galli
Mountain People: Life and Culture in Appalachia
“This collection consists of the diaries, journals, and narratives of explorers, emigrants, military men, Native Americans, and travelers. In addition, there are accounts on the development of farming and mining communities, family histories, and folklore. ”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Bush Presidency and Development and Debate Over Civil Rights Policy and Legislation
“This collection contains materials on civil rights, the development of civil rights policy, and the debate over civil rights legislation during the administration of President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and during his tenure as vice president (1981-1989).”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
Civil War in Words and Deeds
“These first-person accounts, compiled in the postwar period and early 20th century period, chronicle the highs and lows of army life from 1861 through 1865.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800-1824
“This collection consists of the letters received by and letters sent to the War Department, including correspondence from Indian superintendents and agents, factors of trading posts, Territorial and State governors, military commanders, Indians, missionaries, treaty and other commissioners, Treasury Department officials, and persons having commercial dealings with the War Department, and other public and private individuals.”
Contact person: Mark Thomas
America in Protest: Records of Anti-Vietnam War Organizations, The Vietnam Veterans Against the War
“This publication consists of FBI reports dealing with every aspect of antiwar work carried out by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In an attempt to keep this group under close watch, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintained diligent surveillance of the VVAW almost from the inception of the groupâs activities and running through 1975, when the United States ended its presence in Vietnam. The collection also includes surveillance on a variety of other antiwar groups and individuals, with an emphasis on student groups and Communist organizations.”
Contact person: Patrick Stawski
German Folklore and Popular Culture: Das Kloster. Scheible
“Das Kloster is a collection of magical and occult texts, chapbooks, folklore, popular superstition and fairy tales of the German Renaissance compiled by Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible, between 1845 and 1849.”
Contact person: Heidi Madden
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
“The records comprising this collection make clear that the National Negro Business League (NNBL) was an important social and economic organization among African Americans in the early years of the twentieth century… This collection documents the rise of the NNBL through 1923 and affords great insight into an important African American social movement and the black middle class after 1900.”
Contact person: Karen Jean Hunt
ARTstor, 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.
“The Latin American Theatre Review (LATR) is published twice per year by The University of Kansas’ Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center of Latin American Studies. Founded in 1967, LATR covers all aspects of Latina/o and Latin American theatre and performance and is one of the premiere scholarly journals in its field.” – from the Latin American Theatre Review’s web page.
Some interesting background on the review itself and the field of Latin American theatre studies, from an article entitled On the Visibility of Latin American Theatre by Kirsten F. Nigro
Databases and electronic journals are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students, unless accessed from on campus.
Welcome to the first post of the Alerts special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
The Garland encyclopedia of world music online is a comprehensive online resource devoted to music research of all the world’s peoples. Each volume contains an overview of a geographic region, a survey of its musical heritage, and a description of specific musical genres, practices, and performances. Articles include detailed photographs that show musicians, musical instruments, and the cultural context of dances, rituals, and ceremonies. Other images include drawings, maps, and musical examples for further study. Contains the full text of the 10 volume print encyclopedia (originally published in 1997), which is searchable all together for the first time.
OntheBoards.TV is a way to view theater performances. According to KUOW radio station news, “A recent study released by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that millions of people watch performing arts online. Seattle’s On The Boards hopes to capture some of that audience through a new project called On The Boards TV.” Here is a link that describes the history and mission of On the Boards: http://www.ontheboards.org/history-mission
“ As a historical resource, these tapes transcend scandalous utterances to provide a compelling, unique window into the American presidency during some of the most pivotal and contentious years of recent American history.”  – David Coleman, Associate Professor and Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program. Quoted from the website http://presidentialrecordings.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/essays
Databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
The HathiTrust* partnership with Summon is about finding materials in new ways by taking advantage of technology. HathiTrust is a group formed by the 25 libraries participating in the Google Book Search and book digitization project. The HathiTrust/Summon partnership asks: How can we get more information to more people to enable conversations and solve information problems? The short answer is through digitization and full text searching. Getting more information to more people is rooted in two aspects of the the new norm: If it isn’t online it isn’t accessible and library content access expectations have changed from days to hours to right now. With Summon, currently used at Duke, library patrons will be able to easily search the HathiTrust collection.
HathiTrust –
“Preservation with access” is their tag line and with the Trust, they wish to create a collective space to meet a collective need. Its goal is to be, in essence, a comprehensive repository of published literature, plus access and preservation, primarily thru digitization. HathiTrust emphasizes long term preservation but not without access and sustainability. The scope of their holdings include 12 million digitized volumes in 2011 alone. Of all of the digitized volumes in the HathiTrust, only 26% are in copyright and the rest is in the public domain.  Almost 50% of the copyrighted content is material published since 1960. According to the Trust, most major research libraries will be able to find 45% of their content in HathiTrustâs 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 âdiscovery layerâ 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) HathiTrustâs 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 Associationâs 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 HathiTrustâs 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 âSearch beyond your libraryâ 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 âhottieâ or âhah-teeâ. Also, Hathi or Haathi means Elephant in Hindi.
The Duke University Libraries are open during all posted hours to anyone who presents a current Duke University ID card. Use of the Libraries during all posted hours is also permitted by anyone who presents a current Duke Alumni card, a current Friends of the Libraries borrowing card, a current ID card from a TRLN university, or a current ID card from another college or university. Entry into the building after posted general public hours; however, requires a current Duke University ID card. All other users are welcome in the Libraries during posted general public hours. The Libraries reserve the right to deny access to any person whose conduct is disturbing to others or detracts from the research, scholarship, and study environment of the Libraries.
General Public Hours
The Duke University Libraries welcome members of the general public to use this facility during the following hours:
Duke faculty, students, and staff can now access Byki Online, an online language instruction resource. This new subscription to Byki Online gives users free access to flash cards, blogs, and other tools to help you learn or revisit more than 70 languages.
Sign up for your own Byki Online account to prepare for your research, study, and travel plans this summer.
Are you taking a distance ed course this semester? Â Do you need to find a proctor for your exam? Â Check out these resources that may help.
There is a great interactive map of proctoring sites approved by the UNC system. Check it out. Included on the map is the location, what is provided, and the cost at each site.
Beginning March 28, the New York Times will start charging online readers who want to view more than 20 articles per month. Upon clicking the 21st article, users will be given an option of purchasing an online package.
As a print subscriber, the Libraries are investigating options in how we might offer access to Duke affiliates. Unfortunately, this option is not yet available.
Never fear, although we cannot offer access to current content through nytimes.com, we can offer access via several of our databases:
Factiva – The Newsstand feature of this database allows you to browse today’s edition by sections. Â Searching older issues is also available using the Search Tab and then choosing Search Builder.
LexisNexis Academic – Gives you a variety of search features for today’s and past editions.
ProQuest – Searchable version of today’s and past editions. Â Scroll down and click on the year, the month, and then the day to get a list of all of today’s articles.
These options work both on and off campus. Â If you’re having difficulty with access, please contact the Perkins Reference desk at 660-5880, askref@duke.edu or through instant messaging.
We’ve started a new category on Library Hacks where we’ll highlight the innovative and creative ways Duke faculty are using library resources and librarian expertise in the classroom. We will continue to add new case studies to this section on a regular basis to highlight each project.
Case Study:
Assignment #1: Obesity and Health. Dr. Jenânan Read, Spring 2009, SOC 161
The goal of this assignment was to demonstrate how individuals’ everyday social environment influences important health outcomes, such as obesity. Students broke into teams and conducted comparative research at local grocery stores in the area, focusing on cost, content, and placement of food at the different locales. Students were given a fixed budget to feed a family of four and compared the quantity and quality of foods within that budget. Students evaluated the accessibility of the various grocery stores (and exercise facilities) in relation to different socio-economic and ethnic neighborhoods in the Durham area using mapping tools that were demonstrated in class by Librarians and CIT staff.
Library Session:
Two librarians, Linda Daniel and Joel Herndon, and Shawn Miller, a consultant with CIT, prepared a highly interactive introduction to library resources and online mapping tools. The class enabled the students to make compelling visual connections about the complex relationship between diet, socioeconomic status and access to grocery stores.
The result:
Thank you all so very much for your efforts and preparation. The students were duly impressed, as was I (many commented on how happy they were to get the training and hand-outs, etc). Sorry if it seemed rushed; itâs a learning process for us all. At the end of the day, it was superb.
Thank you again.
Jenânan
Jen’nan G. Read
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Weâre librarians: we like information. For the next month, Library Hacks will be gathering information from you, our reader, in our first-ever feedback poll!
This is your chance to tell us a little bit about your blog-reading habits and what youâd like to see when you visit Library Hacks.
In the sidebar youâll see an orange button that links to our short survey â we hope youâll take a few minutes to help us learn how to create a better, more informative blog. Of course, your responses and comments will be submitted anonymously, so click away!
Weâll be gathering responses through Friday, April 15th, and weâll be sure to let you know what weâve learned once the results are tabulated.
All of the other Duke University Libraries blogs will be running the exact same poll, so head over to the other blogs that you read and leave some feedback for them, too.
Everyone at Duke can now download and install the ChemBioDraw Ultra Suite from Duke OIT. Â ChemBioDraw is a powerful drawing and analysis tool that will be useful for many scientists, not just chemists. Features include proton NMR with peak splitting and highlighting, amino acid and DNA sequence tools, TLC plate drawing tool, Struct=Name, ISIS/Draw mode and stoichiometric analysis.
How technology is being used to provide information
This is a guest post by Kristina Troost, the Japanese Studies librarian and Head of International and Area Studies at Duke. She selects books on Japan and works with faculty and students to find information on Japan.
As I see the images of the destruction caused by the tsunami in northern Japan on Friday March 11, 2011, I find myself wanting to know more. As I search, I am overwhelmed by the amount of information that is available.  The first information I found was Al Jazeera doing some on-the-spot reporting, but soon I learned that most Japanese TV stations are available through ustream. Videos of the earthquake and the tsunami have been posted on YouTube (as of the afternoon of March 11, more than 9,000 earthquake-related videos and 7,000 tsunami-related videos had been uploaded to YouTube).
Satellite photographs, too, have increased our understanding of the scale of the disaster. The New York Times links to a series of photos from before and after the quake and tsunami: you can move the slider to compare satellite images, taken by GeoEye: http://www.nytimes.com /interactive/2011/03/13/world/asia/satellite-photos-japan-before-and-after-tsunami.html. A series of KML files are available for download to view Google Earth (remember to take time differences into account; if night in Japan, there will be no image available).
Facebook, Twitter, Mixi and email have been used to let friends and family know of individual statuses, and technologies such as Google Docs have been used to share information â see, for instance, a spreadsheet on the status of faculty and graduate students at Tohoku University and Miyagi University: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=ja&key=th1OKZ0vIq74DQI-tF-w_tg&hl=ja#gid=0.  The major cell phone companies have set up message boards to help people contact their friends, and Google has set up a person finder web app (see Google Crisis Response for more information as well as information about making donations, links to organizations, maps, and latest news). Google Maps has been used to plot the damage to libraries in northern Japan with links to photos and their current situation, http://bit.ly/h8QAIj.  Even NHK and US cable networks have been cooperating to provide free access to NHK in many cities.
Right now, look out for phishing scams masquerading as contribution links or organizations to help Japanese victims of the recent earthquake and tsunami. Feel free to support the relief effort through legitimate NGOs that you trust. In addition, beware of links online that are malicious. While not the same as a “phishing” scam for your personal information, clicking these links can trigger a download – a tsunami of bad code flooding your computer. Currently the disaster in Japan is being searched a lot and some of the links returned will install malware if you click on them.
The upshot:Â in addition to sticking with trustworthy relief organizations, stick with known, trustworthy news sources for your news, commentary, analysis and especially video. This is also true when you click through on a post via a social network.
When you return from Spring Break, the articles search from the library homepage will look a little different. There will be no changes to the look of the homepage or the Articles tab, but your search results will reveal an improved system for finding articles.
The big improvements will be speed and a more comprehensive search. The new system creates a single index (like Google), which allows for much faster searching–results will display in around 2 seconds. The new system also includes much more content, searching over 90 percent of our journal subscriptions, giving users access to a much larger (if not complete) slice of Duke Librariesâ resources.
When searching from the Duke University Libraries’ homepage, youâll be searching only for journal articles (the “Content Type” box on the left will be checked Journal Article.) Any subsequent search from the results page will search across all content types, adding books, newspaper articles, etc. You may search across all Duke Libraries collections simultaneously, but there may be times when you want to see only books, only journal articles, etc. You have complete control over thisâ-simply check the appropriate box under “Content Type.”
We are excited about this new search tool and welcome your feedback as you begin to use it.
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!
A few weeks ago, some of the science librarians took a trip to Beaufort, NC to visit Duke’s Marine Lab campus and library. We toured the library there and the labs and facilities with librarian Janil Miller and had lunch before leaving town. Well worth the three hour trip!  One of the many highlights included seeing dolphins in the water near where we lunched. Check out the video link above – it is quick, but you can see two dolphins breach the surface, one after the other. We guess that they were having lunch, too.
In addition to seeing dolphins we saw a wild horse on Carrot island, visible from the Marine lab dock. Lucky scientists đ
Are you an EndNote or RefWorks user? Many people on Duke’s campus are. There is an open source alternative, however that you might want to check out. Starting out as a Firefox browser plug-in, Zotero let users capture any bibliographic information they came across while on the internet. With a click, you could capture and store bibliographic references from Amazon, Google Book or anywhere else. You could also organize your references in folders, search your folders and generate works cited pages.
Now Zotero has a stand alone option (in beta) that works with Google Chrome AND Safari. Granted, this makes Zotero have pretty much the same features as EndNote and RefWorks in that all three now have web based and desktop solutions for citation management.
What makes Zotero competitive? Try it and find out. Duke Libraries now offers some support for Zotero users, similar to the help you can get with RefWorks and EndNote, as well as upcoming instruction opportunities.
For more information on Zotero’s latest standalone option, click here. To find out more about Zotero support within the Duke community, contact librarian Ciara Healy at Perkins Library.
20th Century African American Poetry:
A database of modern and contemporary African American poetry, featuring almost 9,000 poems by 62 of the most important African American poets of the last century, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Rita Dove 2011-02-28
African American Biographical Database:
The African American Biographical Database (AABD) brings together in one resource the biographies of thousands of African Americans, many not to be found in any other reference source. These biographical sketches have been carefully assembled from biographical dictionaries and other sources. This extraordinary collection contains extended narratives of African American … 2011-02-27
Black Abolitionist Papers:
This collection documents the efforts of African American activists in their international effort to abolish slavery in the United States. Covering the period 1830-1865, the 15,000-item collection records the full impact of African American efforts to oppose slavery by displaying the writings and publications of the activists themselves. 2011-02-28
There exist several complimentary routes to getting your textbooks. Obviously, purchasing them at the bookstore is the easiest way â if you have more money than time. For those who have more time than money, there are other places to check first, so get started early. (For a little background on why textbooks are so expensive, check out the Government Accounting Officeâs report on textbook price inflation.)
Tip: Have the textbookâs ISBN handy. Having this number will help you to know that you have found the exact book (and edition) you need for class. Textbook information – including the ISBNs, exact title, edition number etc.- can be found at the Duke book store and on their website.
This image courtesy of McGraw-Hill
PDQ
Google Book:  Google Book is a specialized Google search for, well, books. Only books. Is your textbook available? Search by title. Almost no book in Google Book is available in full text, however, so pages are always missing to conform to US copyright laws. BUT there are often whole chapters to be found. Google Book also offers links to finding the book in a nearby library (WorldCat) and online sale outlets (Books-A-Million, Half.com and others).
Perkins Library : Might your professor have put a copy of the book on reserve? Though your access to the reserve copy is limited â it may be currently checked out by a classmate or restricted to in-library use only – a book on reserve is f-r-e-e! The book may also be sitting right on the shelf. Check the catalogue as well.
Blackboard: Perhaps your professor put the first chapter or two in your Blackboard course site. Professors are not obliged to do this, but some do and it will buy you more time, so double check.
Electrify: The electronic version of the textbook may be available at Perkins/Bostock to read on the computer or though an online store, especially if you have a Nook, iPad or Kindle. There is a special ebook search in our library catalogue, just under the main search field on the front page.
Pretty soon
Editions: Consider earlier or other editions of the textbook you need. Sometimes a new edition is created to include significant new material and findings. Sometimes a new edition is the same information rearranged and has added features like a CD-ROM or access to online materials. So, an older edition might suffice. So might a soft cover edition, instead of the hard back.
InterLibrary Loan : Using this service, you can request to borrow from another library. ILL is a popular option, however. Also, the lending period for these books is determined by the library that holds the title, not Duke. You may have quite a short loan period and if there is high demand, it is likely that the book has already been requested or will not be lent so that patrons at that library may have a chance to use it first.
International: Often the UK or Canadian publication or a printing meant to be sold in another country is the same as the US edition you need. These may be significantly cheaper to purchase, but consider shipping costs and timing when pursuing this option. Think Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.ca and remember to calculate the cost in US dollars to make sure it is a bargain.
Rental options:Â Compare prices at some of the popular rental sites found with a Google search for âtextbook rentalâ. This is a great time to have your ISBN handy to make sure you have the exact book that you need. Keep in mind that there may be delays with this method and there are few guarantees if there is a problem, such as the wrong edition or pages missing.
Power to the people!
DIY: Consider organizing a book swap or a student-to-student sales site. Often you can sell for more and buy more cheaply when you make a deal person-to-person, compared to a bookstore. This is another good time to check that ISBN to make certain that the edition you purchase is the same one used next semester. With this option, as well, there may be little recourse if you receive a damaged book or find out too late that there is a newer edition in use. Caveat emptor.
The Library of the African Studies Centre Leiden has compiled a web dossier on Southern Sudan to coincide with the 9 January 2011 referendum.
In the referendum, southern Sudanese throughout the country will vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or secede and become a separate country. The referendum marks the end of the six-year interim period under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), also known as the Naivasha Agreement, which was signed by the National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan Peopleâs Liberation Movement (SPLM) in Nairobi in January 2005 to end the decades-long second Sudanese civil war.
The dossier contains titles of books, articles and online publications on civil war in Southern Sudan, the peace process, and the events leading up to the referendum.
The annual Commemorative Service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will take place Sunday, January 16th at 3:00 pm in the Duke University Chapel. This year’s theme, Connect to the Dream, reflects a desire for today’s youth to stay connected with, or reconnect to, Dr. King’s values and vision for a world together.
Randall Robinson is the author of An Unbroken Agonyand the national bestsellers The Debt, The Reckoning, and Defending the Spirit. He is founder and past president of TransAfrica and is known for his impassioned opposition to apartheid and for his advocacy on behalf of Haitian immigrants and Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Frequently featured in major print media, Robinson has also appeared on Charlie Rose, Today, Good Morning America, and the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.
Duke’s MLK Program
Time: 3:00 p.m. Duke Chapel
Free and open to the public
Free Parking — Bryan Center Parking Garage
Looking for resource materials on Dr. King? Begin your research here.
Sourced from The National Archives, Kew – the UK government’s official archive, Foreign Office Files for China, 1949-1980 provides primary source materials in English language for researchers at all levels.
Published in three sections covering the periods 1949-1956; 1957-1966; and 1967-1980; this database addresses a crucial period in Chinese history, from the foundation of the Peopleâs Republic, in 1949, to the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao, the arrest of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. This complete British Foreign Office Files deals with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in this period. These files are particularly important because Britain was one of the first countries to recognize Communist China and to maintain diplomatic relations with China and from 1950 onward. From their vantage point in Beijing British diplomats reported on the turbulent and confusing political, social, and economic developments.
The Foreign Officeâs reporting on politics, industry, trade and cultural affairs include:
Eye-witness accounts and detailed reports on life in China, 1949-1976.
In depth analysis of the Communist Revolution and all the major figures.
Material on the Korean War, the Cold War, US relations and the Cultural Revolution.
Please note that files for 1980 have not been released under the 30 year rule in time to be included at this stage but will be added by the publisher as soon as possible.
Library Hacks has blogged about Zotero before, and it continues to develop into an interesting and useful citation management tool. Unlike EndNote or RefWorks (both of which are freely available to Duke users under a campus site license), Zotero is an open source application, freely available to all. Currently it works only as a Firefox plugin, but plans are in the works for Zotero Everywhere which will be browser-independent.
The Libraries are beginning to offer workshops (such as this one for English and Literature graduate students) and will continue to explore ways to support Zotero users. How can we best help you to explore research tools like this one? Give it a try and leave a comment to let you know your thoughts!
Some library users can find interesting lectures, useful software training sessions, and workshops on the use of statistical data from the events calendar page for the Social Science Research Institute or SSRI (some of these, in fact, are cross-listed on the library calendars or taught by library staff).
Many events at Duke can be found from the main Events@Duke calendar. Use the See all groups link in the left-hand column to get a listing of the many departments and groups at Duke that may sponsor workshops, lectures, and training sessions.  At the top, you can select Day, Week, Month, or Year listings, and the RSS feed might be handy.  Although it might be fruitful to spend time exploring the various Calendar Views and other options, please be aware that although the goal of this calendar is to be comprehensive not all campus events are submitted.  You still may want to check individual calendars that interest you like the ones mentioned above or (for example) from Student Affairs, the Sanford School of Public Policy, the Nicholas School of the Environment, or the Fuqua School of Business.
Google Scholar is a search engine that allows users to search for scholarly materials on a topic. Instead of searching the entire web (like Google), Google Scholar searches the scholarly literature provided by numerous academic publishers, professional societies, universities and scholarly organizations.
Search results include citations from peer-reviewed journals, theses, papers, books and technical reports.
For the most part, Google Scholar provides citation-only results. The full-text of an article or book can be accessed by using the Get it @ Duke link.
If you are using Google Scholar off campus, you will need to set your ‘Scholar Preferences’ to Duke University Libraries.
Want to learn more about Google Scholar?
Go to: http://library.duke.edu/research/help/googlescholar/index.html
The Professional Affairs Committee of Librarians Assembly invites you to join Haiti Lab Co-directors Laurent Dubois and Deborah Jenson, Franklin Humanities Institute Director Ian Baucom and Librarians Holly Ackerman and Heidi Madden for a brownbag discussion of the Haiti Lab and the potential for involvement of Duke Libraries staff in future humanities labs.
When:Â Friday, December 3 from 11:30 am-1 pm (moderated discussion will begin at noon)
Parents’ and Family Weekend brings with it special events and festivities held across campus, and Duke University Libraries are not excluded from the excitement. As part of our roster of activities, we will honor the recipients of the Middlesworth Award and Durden Prize for their exceptional use of the Libraries’ special and general collections.
Undergraduate Award: Adrienne R. Niederriter
âSpeak Softly and Carry a Lipstick: Government Influence on Female Sexuality through Cosmetics During World War IIâ
Nominated by Sarah Hallenbeck
Undergraduate Award: Hannah C. Craddock
ââNew Self-Respect and a New Consciousness of Power:â White Nurses, Black Soldiers, and the Danger of World War Iâ
Nominated by Malachi Hacohen and Adriane Lentz-Smith
Graduate Award: Bonnie E. Scott
âDemonstrations in the House of God: Methodist Preaching and the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina, 1960-1969â
Nominated by Laceye Warner and Kenneth Carder
And our congrats to the 2010 recipients of the Durden Prize for their use of resources from and services related to the Duke University Libraries’ general collections:
First/Second Year Award: Julia Sun
“The Myth of the Addict: Opium Suppression in Late Imperial China”
Supported by Vasant Kaiwar
Third/Fourth Year Award: Ryan Brown
“The Native of Nowhere: Nat Nakasaâ
Supported by Karin Shapiro
and Eugenia Cho
“Architectural Acoustics of Symphony Hall”
Supported by Dewey Lawson
Honors Thesis Award: Andrew Simon
âIntertwining Narratives: The Copts and their Muslim Relationsâ
Supported by miriam cooke
I would also like to recognize this yearâs finalists for the Durden Prize: Lindsay Emery, Rose Filler, Caroline Griswold, Brad Lightcap, Brianna Nofil and Eugene Wang.
We will be celebrating the achievements of our winners at an awards reception on Friday, October 22 from 3:30-4:30 in the Rare Book Room. All are invited to join us for refreshments and the opportunity to honor the recipients of and applicants for the 2010 Middlesworth Award and Durden Prize.
Reduce connection charges while flying..most major carriers charge between $5.00 to $13.00 for internet service. Gogo Inflight (gogoinflight.com) offers six-packs and 24 our flight passes that may cut your charges by as much as 30%. An alternative to online charges is to check out our E-readers, go to library.duke.edu/ereaders for more details.
To highlight the generosity of donors, the Collection Development Gifts Unit is now adding electronic gift plates to records for new gifts in kind.
Searchable in the catalog, the text can be found on the details tab.
The default text on the book plates is” Gift of [Professor Kindheart]” but other text options are available.
Since nearly 100% of donors during a pilot offering have already agreed to have this note added, we expect this option to be well received. It will soon become the default, though donors will still have the choice of anonymity.
If you have further questions about donating books to Perkins Library, please contact staff in the Collection Development Gifts Unit, Cheryl Thomas or Ian Holljes.
AllAfrica.com-Africa News Online is a comprehensive resource featuring stories from newspapers, magazines, and news agencies. Â The news service posts more than 1000 stories daily in English and French and also provides access to the Africa News Service Archives, a resource of more than 900,000 articles on Africa dating back to 1997.
For pre-1997 materials, look no further than the Duke University Libraries. The Africa News Service was founded in 1973 by a trio of Duke graduates, Bertie Howard (’69), Tamela Hultman (’68), and Reed Kramer (’69). The Africa News Service resource files for 1960-1996 were donated to the library in 1997.
The finding aid for the archives is available at:Â http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rbmscl/africa/inv/
Jakob Nielsen , a renowned Danish researcher in the field of web design for user satisfaction, compared the speed of reading (Lesegeschwindigkeit) in print, on the Kindle and on the iPad in his latest research
His conclusion is:â The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print.” The article links to more information on what we can expect from e-readers and tablet computers in the future; the future is bright indeed (no pun intended).
On a related noteâŚdonât miss this interesting classroom experiment comparing textbooks on Kindle versus iPad: âThe E-Textbook Experiment Turns A Page,â broadcast on NPR this evening. User satisfaction with the Kindle seems to be significantly lower than user satisfaction with the iPad: âThe problem is that the Kindle is less interactive than a piece of paperâŚâ
Use the comment section to share your experience with various devices.
As a Durham native, I know there are lots of interesting places where you can eat or relax after a busy week at work. Here are just a few blogs worth checking out, if you are looking for ideas:
Carpe Durham: Ramblings about food by people whose only qualification is eating a lot
Endangered Durham: Land use, architecture, history, and sustainable development
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.’Â 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.
Open Access to Knowledge: The African Journal of Information and Communication
The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC) is an academic journal, accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training. Formerly the South(ern) African Journal of Information and Communication, the AJIC is an annual interdisciplinary journal concerned with Africaâs participation in the âinformation societyâ and network economy. It is both a rigorous academic journal and a practical tool to inform the continentâs ICT actors and decision-makers in government, industry and civil society. In the spirit of open access to knowledge and scholarship, AJIC is now published online. For additional information: http://link.wits.ac.za/journal/journal.html#iss
Computer users often have ways to backup their computer files but, if you use a number of cloud-based services, you should also think about developing a strategy for backing up your cloud data.
Hopefully, you won’t need the backup but we all know that problems with data storage can cause headaches: servers and internet access can go down and internet companies can have policies that change your access to your files.
Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs, recently wrote, “I woke up this morning in Montreal to find that my access to my Google accounts has been temporarily disabled due to a ‘perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.'” So, if you rely on such services as Gmail, Google Docs, and Flickr, you should think about a backup plan.
PC Magazine has a good article, “Back Up or Else” that discusses different methods and strategies you can use to back up your cloud. They also give “best practices” to get you started. Here are a few suggestions taken from Natalie Houston, “How to Back Up Your Cloud“:
Backup Your Photos
If you use Flickr to archive or display your photos, you may already have your photos backed up on your hard drive. But, if you upload photos directly from your computer or camera to Flickr, you may want to check out FlickrEdit, an open source program that allows you to download, backup, or upload your photos to and from Flickr.
Backup Your Gmail
The mail program Thunderbird is a simple and free way to backup your Gmail. Thunderbird is a mail program that collects and stores copies of your Gmail messages. Messages are stored in a simple text file so they are easy to access.
Backup Your Google Docs GDocBackup, a free and open source utility, can be used to backup all your Google Documents to a local disk. It backs up those documents not found on your hard drive or with a different date.
Other Ways to Backup Your Cloud?
If you know other tools to use to backup cloud data, please post them as comments. I’m sure others would like to hear your suggestions. Thanks!
It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find information from the US federal government. Most of this information is now online, but this hasn’t made the task any easier. Here are just a few of the ways of searching for government information (documents or data) when you don’t know where to go.
The Government Printing Office (GPO) has for many years provided access to authoritative versions of major government publications through their GPO Access web site. The information on GPO Access is in the process of being migrated to GPOâs Federal Digital System (FDsys). The migration is occurring on a collection-by-collection basis. The information on GPO Access will remain current and continue to be available until migration is complete. Using the “browse” feature to scan though available collections can
be most fruitful. This site is especially good for legislative and regulatory materials, and for regularly published reports such as the US federal budget, but also provides a link to GPO’s online bookstore
for more general government publications.
The FedStats website provides links to statistical pages of US federal government agencies. You can look up the statistic by topic without knowing in advance which agency produces it. The “About” page provides more information about what’s included in FedStats. Although this may lead to a lot of extractable and downloadable raw data in addition to statistics that are presented online, if you specifically need to locate machine-readable empirical or geospatial datasets generated by the US federal government you can try the Data.gov website. Datasets here may be in one of more the following formats: XML, CSV/Text, KML/KMZ, Shapefile, RDF, Other.
General search engines to search across websites of federal government agencies and Congress include USA.gov (the “official” such search engine) and Google U.S. Government (formerly Google Uncle Sam). Always feel free to consult with the library’s public documents subject librarian, Mark Thomas, and visit the paper collection of federal government publications (many older ones aren’t digitized or even in the library catalog) on the second floor of Perkins Library.
The study conducted by Harley and four others was comprehensive: It involved over 160 scholars from 45 elite research universities and includes 12 case studies representing as many disciplines (anthropology, English language literature, law economics and biostats, to name a few), in addition to an extensive literature review and daily environmental scans of issues in higher education.
As you might imagine, Harley and her colleagues gleaned an amazing amount of extremely rich data from their interviews of faculty, administrators, publishers and librarians. One surprise to Harley was the amount of time she and her colleagues spent discussing tenure and promotion (T&P) with their interviewees. Let’s consider just a few of Harley’s findings related to T&P and the role that scholarly publication plays in it:
– The most important aspect of T&P is a stellar publication record — service, teaching and public engagement are important but secondary to publication
– New journals and genres are acceptable — so long as they’re peer reviewed
– Peer review is the “coin of the realm” — it is the sole value system in academia, but…
– Peer review has problems: lack of speed, conservatism, bias, low quality reviews, non-scholar editors, cost to the institution to subsidize peer review via faculty salaries, lack of fraud and plagiarism detection
– T&P should be supportive of non-traditional forms of publication (e.g. Open Access journals)
– Publishers may say that they “do” peer review, but that’s not the case — faculty “do” peer review, at a cost to their institutions, NOT at a cost to the publisher
Do these ring true for you? Are these issues that you face in your work as a librarian, faculty member or aspiring scholar? How does the culture at Duke fit into this picture of T&P and scholarly communication? What can or should Duke Libraries do to support non-traditional forms of publication?
From the website: âThe annual Horizon Report is a collaborative effort between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). Each year, the report identifies and describes six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression in higher education within three adoption horizons: a year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. â
The areas of emerging technology cited for 2010 are: Mobile Computing ; Open Content; Electronic Books; Simple Augmented Reality; Gesture-based Computing; Visual Data Analysis. The full report is available at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD5810.pdf The July 12 Webinar presentations are also online at http://www.educause.edu/Resources/HorizonReport2010ProjectsinEBo/207847
This news item came to my attention via Resource Shelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/
Black Short Fiction and Folklore is the most comprehensive collection yet created of stories from African and the African Diaspora. When complete, it will feature 8,000 stories and folk tales published in more than 15 countries from the mid-1900s to the present. In addition to these published works, the database features previously uncollected works and unpublished manuscripts by many authors. We have an impressive collection of fables and folktales, which arise from oral traditions that date back hundreds of years.
The relevance of the collection extends well beyond literature:
Fables and folktales provide unique insights into a cultureâs history and memories. Social anthropologists and psychologists will find this collection to be rich in myth and societal customs. The extensive indexing even makes it possible to see how certain parables evolve over time and to compare New World fables with those told in Africa today.
Ideas expressed here often are not found in mainstream publications; getting novels published through traditional publishing channels was often impossible for blacks. But through short stories, these writers could express themselves quickly and distribute their works effectively through literary journals and other alternative forms.
Historians will find the collection to be rich in political discourse, social commentary, and polemic.
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 descriptive 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.
The Library of Congress announced that it has acquired and will archive every public tweet since Twitter’s service started in 2006. That’s more than 50 million tweets per day. Twitter declared, â[it is] very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.â
Notable tweets include:
Obama’s tweet when he won the 2008 election: http://tiny.cc/srs68 and the first tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey: http://tiny.cc/aa2nt.
The Twitter archive joins the Library’s Web capture project that already has stored 167 terabytes of digital material.
There are some limitations. Personal tweets will not be collected and the Twitter archive will be available only for scholarly and research purposes.
Google doesn’t think you should have to wait for the Library of Congress to make archival tweets availableâitâs turning on a feature that lets you choose a date and âreplayâ the tweets from that point on. Googleâs search combines Twitter updates with those from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz.
National index to Chinese newspapers and periodicals, 1833-1949 ĺ ¨ĺ˝ćĽĺç´˘ĺź is an index database is from Shanghai library and covers about 18,000 Chinese newspapers and periodicals published 1833-1949. There are approximately 400,000 entries in NICNP (1833-1910) and more than 4,000,000 entries in NICNP (1911-1949). From 1833 to 1949, China experienced great changes from the dynastic reign to the establishment of Republic of China(1912) then to the founding of the People’s Republic of China(1949). These journals and newspapers record the major and minor events at that time, including two Opium wars in mid-19th century and the Japanese invasion of China(1937-1945). They are important primary source materials to the study of China’s politics, economics, ideas and culture in this period.
Now that the semester is over and you’re ready to begin your summer research or plan your courses for the fall, consider learning more about ways that the librarians at Duke Libraries can help.
These “Beyond the Stacks” sessions are part of the Center for Instructional Technology’s21st Century Teaching & Learning Workshop Series and are designed for faculty and graduate students interested in integrating library resources and services into their teaching. Participants will also, however, leave with valuable tips for using library resources in their research.
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.
A while ago, Library Hacks blogged about Zotero, an open source research organizer/citation management system developed at George Mason University. One of their tag lines is âGood bye 3×5 cards, hello Zotero.â (Yes, we know that many of you donât even remember taking notes and saving references on 3×5 cardsâŚ).
A lot has happened since those blog posts, including the release of Zotero 2.0. The new version has features that enhance collaboration and information sharing, one of Zoteroâs four key functions (collecting, organizing, citing and collaborating). Your Zotero collection can now be synced between multiple computers, and you can backup your files on Zoteroâs web server. If you want to collaborate with others to compile material in Zotero, you can now create a group, access material in real time, and move materials among group members. Groups can be public (hereâs a list of public Zotero groups that you can join or view) or private (for a course assignment, research or work-related project).
What are some advantages of using Zotero? Itâs fairly easy to learn to use it, it works with a wide variety of materials, the collaborative features are great, and itâs free.
NYU Libraries created a great site that compares Zotero, RefWorks and EndNote. Interested in migrating from EndNote to Zotero? Check out the useful migration instructions prepared by George Mason University.
More information about Zotero 2.0 can be found here. The Libraries are looking at how we can support Zotero at Duke. Stay tuned.
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.
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.
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:
We hope you know that librarians are here for you – we are in the business of supporting research at all levels, assisting students, faculty, and everyone in the Duke community. In an effort to improve the services we provide, we are trying to better understand the research habits and needs of different groups at Duke. This is where the User Studies Initiative comes in. We are trying to get past our own preconceived notions about what our users need and base decisions about library services on empirical evidence. The User Studies Initiative is a staff development effort, providing librarians at Duke with the tools and know-how to conduct effective user studies.
On Monday, March 8th, a group of Duke librarians presented this work-in-progress to colleagues from across North Carolina at the annual LAUNC-CH Conference. Their talk, Know Thy User: Duke Libraries User Studies Initiative, demonstrated to other librarians the feasibility of conducting effective, targeted studies to better understand usersâ needs and wants. Diane Harvey and Yvonne Belanger provided the big picture view of the initiative, and Emily Daly, Linda Daniel, and Shawn Miller discussed studies they are currently working on. To read more about the presentation, see Diane Harveyâs post on the new Instruction & Outreach blog.
What do you wish the library did that it doesnât? The User Studies Initiative is an ongoing project intended to generate a culture of continual assessment and improvement of library services. Let us know what you think!
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?
During the month of January, Reference librarians at Perkins Library answered a total of 1,795 questions, excluding questions sent in by chat.
Here is a sampling of the questions asked last month –
* Need help tracking down the volume in which a 1883 botanical illustration appeared?
* game theoretic applications to executive compensation?
* US and global railcar manufacturing?
* Seeking 1968 Soviet physics journal?
* I spilled some coffee–do you have any paper towels?
* I am trying to locate a book of collected drawings of the Great Kanto Earthquake by children. I have found an oblique reference to it in a caption to an illustration without any bibliographic info?
* Stem cell biology in traumatic brain injury: effects of injury and strategies for repair?
* what citation management tool do you recommend?
* GIS : how to get started; availability of data for India?
* trouble accessing journal article?
* help finding articles for class?
* speech by Booker T. Washington in Atlanta, 1895?
* can you eat in the library?
* How to find Russian books?
* 2001 Indian Census volumes for Gujarat
* I can’t find this shelf at all, where are these books?
You can ask reference questions in person (Perkins Reference Desk), im/chat (click on the askusNOW icon), email (askref@duke.edu) or by phone (660-5880). Save some time and get the information you need quickly!
Quiet study spots
Looking for a quiet place to study in Perkins/Bostock? No need to limit yourself to the designated quiet rooms in Bostock – the International and Area Studies Reading Room on the 2nd floor and the Carpenter Reading Room on the 3rd floor. Check out some of the lesser known places.
Group spaces
For those who want large spaces in which to study, the Gothic Reading Room on the 2nd floor of the oldest wing of Perkins (closest to the bus stop) could be perfect.
Individual spaces
On the 3rd and 4th floors of Perkins individual open carrels are available on the side facing CIEMAS. On lower level 2 of Perkins, you might find an individual table/chair tucked away at the ends of aisles. Individual carrels are available around the edges of the 5 upper stack levels in the oldest part of the building, accessed by making a u-turn around the circulation desk, entering level A, and taking the interior stairs to levels B-F. Additional open carrels are available at the back of the 3rd and 4th floors of Bostock.
Real-time search tools let you search not only the Web but also Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and similar services — which can prove especially helpful when events such as the Haiti earthquake happen. >>> Here’s a look at five tools for effective real-time search.
Duke users now have access to the sociology research database SocINDEX with Full Text. This new subscription provides comprehensive coverage of sociology resources, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study.
SocINDEX with Full Text features more than 2,066,400 records; extensive indexing for books/monographs, conference papers, and other non-periodical sources; abstracts for more than 1,200 “core” coverage journals dating as far back as 1895; and provides cited references that can also be searched.
SocINDEX with Full Text offers coverage for topics including: abortion, anthropology, criminology, criminal justice, cultural sociology, demography, economic development, ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage and family, politics, religion, rural sociology, social psychology, social structure, social work, sociological theory, sociology of education, substance abuse, urban studies, violence, welfare, and many others.
In addition, SocINDEX with Full Text features over 25,000 author profiles. Each profile includes contact information, journals of publication, and author’s areas of expertise and professional focus.
We previously discussed the growing number of sources for getting lecture videos in the post Free Video Lectures. These are great ways to provide an alternative for the classroom experience. But what about using video as an alternative to traditional scholarly communication or publishing through journals, books, etc? Here are a few sites promoting open scholarship by allowing researchers to display their research methods and results through video.
This site is focused in terms of content, focusing on the sciences, but could be helpful for a wide range of audiences. There are videos here for children through postgraduates. They build in nice browsing features as well, so users can select the proper language, audience, subject and sort by recency or popularity. Contributors also include figures, supplemental materials and links to the original article or presentation. The theme here is openess as anyone can view or contribute anything.
While not as slick and easy-to-use as YouTube, Research Channel focuses on high quality submissions from research universities, like Duke, and large organizations such as the National Institutes of Health. You can browse by institution, program title or subject and the quality is good and from respected sources.
An interesting and well-designed site. It focuses on videos about politics and economics, but also includes categories such as the environment, science, technology and culture. This is a great place to come to see mental celebrities (General Richard Meyers, Dr. David Kessler for example) talk about the subjects for which they are famous. FORA.TV can’t compete for YouTube in terms of volume, but it more than makes up for that with its quality and interesting discussions.
Another example of lower volume, but higher quality. These videos have big thinkers (if not always big names) discussing the big ideas. Instead of talks about individual research projects, these videos focus more on big-picture synthesis of research on important topics of the day. While it’s not the open model of SciVee or YouTube, Big Think provides a platform for discussion of important issues by those who speak knowledgeably and engagingly about them.
What are other good sites for publishing or viewing research-oriented videos?
*Thanks to Lisa R. Johnston for her SciTech News column which inspired this post.
Before finals Information Technology Services (ITS) polled patrons at the Perkins Reference desk to see which netbook they preferred the Lenovo s12 or the slightly smaller Lenovo s10e.  9 of 10 surveyed said they preferred the slightly larger s12 over the s10e because the larger keyboard was easier to use and the 10 inch screen display was clearer. Some also felt the wireless on the s12 was faster. Overall the larger model was easier to use while not compromising portability. Based on these findings, we will likely purchase the s12 to replace the current pool of loaner laptops next fall.
Patrons were also asked what software they would like on these laptops. Most said they would need Office and a Web browser but there were also requests for Adobe products and EndNote. What software would you would like us to include on the build?
The Duke University Libraries recognize that the format of the book, along with the content, plays an important role in the research process. The Libraries are committed to advocating for optimal e-book functionality in every phase of the research process. The guiding principle behind our 
“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 
Before finals Information Technology Services (ITS) polled patrons at the Perkins Reference desk to see which netbook they preferred the Lenovo s12 or the slightly smaller Lenovo s10e.  9 of 10 surveyed said they preferred the slightly larger s12 over the s10e because the larger keyboard was easier to use and the 10 inch screen display was clearer. Some also felt the wireless on the s12 was faster. Overall the larger model was easier to use while not compromising portability. Based on these findings, we will likely purchase the s12 to replace the current pool of loaner laptops next fall.