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! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
– Changes to OCLC’s FirstSearch:
Though these databases may be available from other sources, beginning June 30th, 2011 FirstSearch from OCLC will no longer offer access to the following databases:
• ABI/INFORM
• Applied Science & Technology Abstracts and Index
• Art Abstracts and Art Index
• Biography Index
• Biological & Agricultural Index
• Biology Digest
• Book Review Digest
• Books in Print and nooks in Print with Reviews
• Business Dateline
• CA Student Edition
• Contemporary Women’s Issues
• Dissertation Abstracts Online
• Education Abstracts
• Education Index
• Essay and General Literature Index
• General Sciences Abstracts and General Sciences Index
• GEOBASE
• Humanities Abstracts and humanities Index
• Index to Legal Periodicals & Books
• Library Literature
• Newspaper Abstracts
• PAIS Archive
• PAIS International
• Periodical Abstracts
• PsycINFO
• Readers’ Guide Abstracts
• SIRS Researcher
• Social Sciences Abstracts
• Social Sciences Index
• Sociological Abstracts
• Wilson Business Abstracts and Wilson Select Plus
– Taylor & Francis Online
“Taylor & Francis’ new online platform, Taylor & Francis Online, www.tandfonline.com, will replace access to the 1,600 Journals and Reference Works currently on informaworld…We are currently in the advanced stages of testing and plan to migrate from informaworld to Taylor & Francis Online over the course of the weekend beginning 25th June 2011…The new site will then be live from 27th June.”
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
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! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Northern Ireland. A Divided Community 1921-1972
Contact person: Margaret Brill
” Northern Ireland: A Divided Community 1921-1972 presents a full record of every cabinet meeting for the duration of the Stormont administration, the devolved government of Northern Ireland, 1921-72. Separate files exist for each Cabinet meeting and include minutes and memoranda. The discussions and decisions reflect the wide range problems and activities involved in making the new administration work.
Topics debated and reported in just one sample year of the Troubles (1970) include: policing, arms and explosives, social need, Prevention of Incitement to Religious Hatred, Army occupation of factories, road spiking, routing of Orange Day parades, dock strikes, law and order, riots and the roles of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
With immediate access via browseable indexes of organisations, subjects, places and people (cabinet members, politicians, senior civil servants and police officers), in addition to full-text searching of the typed minutes themselves, this digital archive will be essential not only to teachers and researchers in Irish and British History, but will support students of politics, peace studies and conflict resolution. ” (Quote source.)
Oxford Bibliographies Online. Atlantic History
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Selected new articles (Spring 2011):
African American Religions by Stefania Capone; African Port Cities by Ty Reese, University of North Dakota; Coffee by Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton College; Visual Art and Representation by Susan Scott Parrish; and Sugar by Justin Roberts, Dalhousie University (New articles source)
Oxford Bibliographies Online. Hinduism
Contact person: Edward Proctor
“The study of Hinduism is diverse—it combines religion, philosophy, history, and textual studies, as well as informing a variety of comparative studies. Because the field comprises so many varied aspects, research and scholarship is wide-reaching in its response to different interpretations. Much of this work has moved online so that students and researchers have ready access to key primary source texts and a range of other electronic resources. ” (Quote source)
Forthcoming articles (Fall 2011): Marriageby Lindsey Harlan; Hinduism and Buddhism by Greg Bailey, La Trobe University; Sacrifice by Kathryn McClymond, Georgia State University; Hinduism and Psychoanalysis by Jason Fuller; Philosophical Approaches to Hinduism by Vishwa Adluri, The City University of New York.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive
Contact person: Karen Jean Hunt
Organized in 4 parts, Slavery and Anti-Slavery. A Transnational Archive now has available the first part:
“Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition – available now – contains 1.5 million pages, including more than 7,000 books and pamphlets, 80 newspaper and periodical titles, and a dozen major manuscript collections. For academic researchers, historians, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and others studying slavery, these varied sources shed light on the:
– Abolitionist movement and conflicts within it 
– Anti- and pro-slavery arguments of the period
– Debates on the subject of colonization” (Quote Source)
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
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 Zotero’s server API by grabbing library data dynamically and presenting it outside Zotero.
So why would you use it? Zotpress is great for scholars or job hunters who want to easily organize their CVs or resumes on their personal websites. Teachers can use it as well to present bibliographies to students. Or, if you just want to share some stuff you’ve been reading or studying, you can use Zotpress for that, too. In short, Zotpress is useful because it expands on Zotero’s mission by offering a new and easy interface to share your data freely with the world.”
This is great timing for Duke, because Duke WordPress was just updated to version 3.1.2 earlier this week. For members of the Duke community using WordPress for classes, group projects or multimedia presentations, you can now easily show your scholarly side, using Zotpress. For more information about Duke WordPress, contact the OIT Help Desk, and for more information about Zotpress, ask Ciara Healy, support librarian for Zotero.
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.”
From the Dance in Video website:
“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! – 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: 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 Thought and Culture
Contact person: 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: 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: 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 — others were large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked ‘Confidential Print’ were circulated to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad.
Dance in Video
Contact person: 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: Danette Pachtner
Subject Categories: Area Studies and Cultures – Film/Video; Arts and Humanities – Film/Video
“Filmakers Library Online provides documentaries with relevance across the curriculum—race 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! – 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
From the University of Pennsylvania press, “Change Over Time is a new, semiannual journal focused on publishing original, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles on the history, theory, and praxis of conservation and the built environment. Each issue is dedicated to a particular theme as a method to promote critical discourse on contemporary conservation issues from multiple perspectives both within the field and across disciplines. Themes will be examined at all scales, from the global and regional to the microscopic and material.”
This journal can be readily accessed through Duke’s ProjectMUSE database subscription. (Journal description provided from ProjectMUSE.) Here is a link to the journal’s web page, with information on the Spring & Fall 2012 calls for papers.
Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama and Fiction
“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 Library outage
On Saturday May 21st, access may be interrupted to Wiley Online Library due to essential site maintenance. The interruption will begin in the US at 5am eastern time and may continue for 2 hours.
New journal in Project MUSE – The Minnesota Review
Also indexed in MLA Bibliography, Minnesota Review is now available, from 2010, in full text through the Project MUSE database. “Publishing contemporary poetry and fiction as well as reviews, critical commentary, and interviews of leading intellectual figures, the Minnesota Review curates smart yet accessible collections of progressive new work. This eclectic survey provides lively and sophisticated signposts to navigating current critical discourse.”(Quoted from Project MUSE’s journal description.) This journal is also available through Duke Libraries in the following databases: Literature Online (from Spring 2004), ProQuest (from 04/2004), Humanities International Complete (from 03/2006), and Open J-Gate (from 2006). Check out The Minnesota Review’s Creative Writing Blog.
New database: The Foundation Directory Online
“To meet the needs of grantseekers at every level, all FDO subscribers can search by county, metro area, and ZIP code as well as by city and state; save searches and store them in a password-protected ‘My FDO’ e-folder; tag records with any reminder word or phrase; E-mail, print, and save records; export lists of up to 100 search results at a time into Excel with a single click; and exclude grantmakers that don’t accept unsolicited applications… Updated weekly, Foundation Directory Online includes details on nearly 100,000 funders and over 2 million recent grants.” (Quote from www.foundationcenter.org) Click to see a sample record from the Foundation Directory Online.
Electronic resources such as e-journals and databases are generally accessible only to Duke community members such as faculty, staff and students.
This post is brought to you by Alerts! – a special section of Library Hacks. Weekly, you can look forward to new database announcements, updates, and (rare) outage notices. Stay tuned!
Outages:
– UNC Libraries online services will be unavailable on Wednesday, May 18, from 2:30 a.m. until noon, because of a critical equipment upgrade. This outage will affect all electronic services, including: the online catalog; digital collections; access to electronic journals, databases, and e-books; request forms; interlibrary loan;
and the University Library website. Both on-campus and off-campus access will be affected.
– For those of you who use WiseSearch (WiseNews, the News archive, is updated every day with items from over 1,600 content providers, including all 18 Chinese and English newspapers of Hong Kong, and a large number of other top-tier newspapers, magazines, newswires, TV and radio broadcasts of Mainland, Taiwan and some Asia Pacific countries) please be informed that a system maintenance will be scheduled on Saturday, 21 May 2011 from 13:00 to 19:00. During this period, the information update on our platform will be temporarily unavailable. The services will be resumed to normal after the maintenance.
New databases –
Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991
“The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 features the complete 62-year run of The Listener, established by the BBC in 1929 as the medium for reproducing radio and later, television programmes in print.”
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Picture Post Historical Archive
“The Picture Post Historical Archive comprises the complete archive of the Picture Post from its first issue in 1938 to its last in 1957 – all digitized from originals in full colour.”
Contact person: Margaret Brill
Economy and War in the Third Reich, 1933-1944
“This source provides 30,506 digital page images reproducing… original documents from the London School of Economics and Political Science collection Statistics of the Third Reich analysed, 1933-1944”
Contact person: Heidi Madden, Ph.D.
Afghanistan and the U.S., 1945-1963: Records of the U.S. State Department Central Classified Files
“The U.S. State Department Central Classified Files are the definitive source of American diplomatic reporting on political, military, social, and economic developments throughout the world in the twentieth century.”
Contact person: Edward Proctor
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
Japan at War and Peace, 1930-1949: U.S. State Department Records on the Internal Affairs of Japan
“This collection of digital reproductions of State Department documents provides access to essential and unique documentation on a wide variety of topics relating to Japanese internal affairs”
Contact person: Kristina Troost, Ph.D.
Literature, Culture and Society in Depression Era America: Archives of the Federal Writers’ Project
“This collection presents the FWP publications of all 47 states involved in the project, which ran from 1933 to 1943.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
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
Amerasia Affair, China, and Postwar Anti-Communist Fervor
“This collection presents documents from 1945-1973. The Amerasia Affair was the first of the great spy cases of the postwar era.”
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
American Indian Correspondence: Presbyterian Historical Society Collection of Missionaries’ Letters, 1833-1893
“This is a collection of almost 14,000 letters written by those who served as Presbyterian missionaries to the American Indians during the years from 1833 to 1893.”
Contact person: Kelley Lawton
War Department and Indian Affairs, 1800-1824
“This collection consists of the letters received by and letters sent to the War Department, including correspondence from Indian superintendents and agents, factors of trading posts, Territorial and State governors, military commanders, Indians, missionaries, treaty and other commissioners, Treasury Department officials, and persons having commercial dealings with the War Department, and other public and private individuals.”
Contact person: Mark Thomas
America in Protest: Records of Anti-Vietnam War Organizations, The Vietnam Veterans Against the War
“This publication consists of FBI reports dealing with every aspect of antiwar work carried out by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). In an attempt to keep this group under close watch, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintained diligent surveillance of the VVAW almost from the inception of the group’s activities and running through 1975, when the United States ended its presence in Vietnam. The collection also includes surveillance on a variety of other antiwar groups and individuals, with an emphasis on student groups and Communist organizations.”
Contact person: Patrick Stawski
German Folklore and Popular Culture: Das Kloster. Scheible
“Das Kloster is a collection of magical and occult texts, chapbooks, folklore, popular superstition and fairy tales of the German Renaissance compiled by Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible, between 1845 and 1849.”
Contact person: Heidi Madden
Black Economic Empowerment: The National Negro Business League
“The records comprising this collection make clear that the National Negro Business League (NNBL) was an important social and economic organization among African Americans in the early years of the twentieth century… This collection documents the rise of the NNBL through 1923 and affords great insight into an important African American social movement and the black middle class after 1900.”
Contact person: Karen Jean Hunt
Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees: The West’s Response to Jewish Emigration
“The inside memoranda, records, government documents, and correspondence that helped shape the course of Jewish emigration in the Nazi era. The date range is 1938-1948, and the content is 30,100 pages.”
Contact person: Patrick Stawski
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!
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online Subject Categories
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
Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson: Digital Edition
“ 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.
Context –
The HathiTrust* partnership with Summon is about finding materials in new ways by taking advantage of technology. HathiTrust is a group formed by the 25 libraries participating in the Google Book Search and book digitization project. The HathiTrust/Summon partnership asks: How can we get more information to more people to enable conversations and solve information problems? The short answer is through digitization and full text searching. Getting more information to more people is rooted in two aspects of the the new norm: If it isn’t online it isn’t accessible and library content access expectations have changed from days to hours to right now. With Summon, currently used at Duke, library patrons will be able to easily search the HathiTrust collection.
HathiTrust –
“Preservation with access” is their tag line and with the Trust, they wish to create a collective space to meet a collective need. Its goal is to be, in essence, a comprehensive repository of published literature, plus access and preservation, primarily thru digitization. HathiTrust emphasizes long term preservation but not without access and sustainability. The scope of their holdings include 12 million digitized volumes in 2011 alone. Of all of the digitized volumes in the HathiTrust, only 26% are in copyright and the rest is in the public domain. Almost 50% of the copyrighted content is material published since 1960. According to the Trust, most major research libraries will be able to find 45% of their content in HathiTrust’s collection by December 2011.
Summon –
In partnership with HathiTrust, Summon increases user access to works in the public domain. Summon is what is called a “discovery layer” that is in front of many different kinds of databases. Summon indexes the contents of databases and other resources so it can quickly return results from multiple collections at once. Though you may not realize it, Summon is the Articles search tab found on the Duke Library front page. Summon is currently ingesting (yes, this is the technical term) HathiTrust’s index. Through Summon, a user’s query will be searched in databases, a local library’s catalog and HathiTrust content, all at the same time.
The partnership hopes to launch this summer coinciding with the American Library Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans, June 2011. However, not every library that has a Summon-powered discovery layer will necessarily search HathiTrust content. A library can choose the following options with regard to HathiTrust’s content: Opt to include all of the information HathiTrust offers, or opt to include just the public domain content on not include HathiTrust content in the results. When searching using the Articles tab, patrons will be able to click a “Search beyond your library” link to access HathiTrust and other content.
Duke libraries would like to know what you think of the increased access to HathiTrust’s content that will be offered this summer. Specifically, how much of Hathi’s content should appear in the Articles tab search results – all of it, just the public domain documents or just the ability to click through to the HathiTrust content?
*Hathi is pronounced either “hottie” or “hah-tee”. Also, Hathi or Haathi means Elephant in Hindi.
Click here for the Spring Reading & Exam Period Schedule
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:
| Sunday | Mon-Fri | Saturday |
| 10am-9pm | 8am-9pm | 9am-9pm |
Duke University Libraries is please to offer several new language learning tools. Find lots of resources for over 25 languages at http://guides.library.duke.edu/languagelearning.
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? Do you need to find a proctor for your exam? 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.
Also, Wake County Public Library branches provide free proctoring services. Each branch website has a link to information about proctoring.
List of branches in the Wake County Public Libraries System
Book early to make sure you can get a proctor for the date and time you want. Good luck on your exam!
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:
These options work both on and off campus. If you’re having difficulty with access, please contact the Perkins Reference desk at 660-5880, askref@duke.edu or through instant messaging.
Here is a link to a great video about how librarians are stereotyped in fashion and popular culture.
http://www.librarystuff.net/2011/03/22/librarian-stereotypes/
And don’t forget to take the Library Hacks Poll! Unlike the librarian stereotype, real librarians don’t want to shush you!
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. Jen’nan Read, Spring 2009, SOC 161
View Mapping Grocery Stores and Bus Routes -example in a larger map
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; it’s a learning process for us all. At the end of the day, it was superb.
Thank you again.
Jen’nan
Jen’nan G. Read
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
Written by Nathaniel King
We’re 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 you’d like to see when you visit Library Hacks.
In the sidebar you’ll see an orange button that links to our short survey – we hope you’ll 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!
We’ll be gathering responses through Friday, April 15th, and we’ll be sure to let you know what we’ve 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.
Thanks!
Everyone at Duke can now download and install the ChemBioDraw Ultra Suite from Duke OIT. 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.
To download the software, visit the OIT site here.
Thanks to the Chemistry Department and Duke OIT for the license.
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 – 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: 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.
New Articles Tab Tip
When you return from Spring Break, the articles search from the library homepage will look a little different. There will be no changes to the look of the homepage or the Articles tab, but your search results will reveal an improved system for finding articles.
The big improvements will be speed and a more comprehensive search. The new system creates a single index (like Google), which allows for much faster searching–results will display in around 2 seconds. The new system also includes much more content, searching over 90 percent of our journal subscriptions, giving users access to a much larger (if not complete) slice of Duke Libraries’ resources.
When searching from the Duke University Libraries’ homepage, you’ll be searching only for journal articles (the “Content Type” box on the left will be checked Journal Article.) Any subsequent search from the results page will search across all content types, adding books, newspaper articles, etc. You may search across all Duke Libraries collections simultaneously, but there may be times when you want to see only books, only journal articles, etc. You have complete control over this–-simply check the appropriate box under “Content Type.”
We are excited about this new search tool and welcome your feedback as you begin to use it.
Contact / For more information
Michael Peper
michael.peper@duke.edu
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 🙂
To honor the 50th anniversary, we would like to showcase four Returned Peace Corps Volunteers currently working in the Perkins Library:
Michael Peper, Librarian for Math and Physics
Benin
Education (TEFL)
2003-2005
Kimberley Burhop-Service, Manager, Library Human Resources
Gabon
Education
1993-1995
Jean Ferguson, Head, Research and Reference Services
Poland
Education
1991-1993
Karen Jean Hunt, Librarian for African Studies and African American Studies
Kenya
Education
1986-1988
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.
Written by Ciara M. Healy
Resources Currently Open for Testing by Duke University Affiliates
Go to: Database Trials
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 – 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 Office’s report on textbook price inflation.)
Tip: Have the textbook’s 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.
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 – 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: Compare prices at some of the popular rental sites found with a Google search for “textbook rental”. 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.
Written by Ciara Healy
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 People’s 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 web dossier can be found at:
http://www.ascleiden.nl/Library/Webdossiers/SouthernSudan.aspx
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 Agony and 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 People’s 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 Office’s reporting on politics, industry, trade and cultural affairs include:
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.
Written by Luo Zhou
Beginning January 1, 2011, JSTOR will provide access to the current issues of 174 journals from 19 different publishers.
Here are a few things that you need to know about the new Current Scholarship Program (CSP):
• Current issues will be seamlessly integrated with back issue content for institutional and individual subscribers to the titles.
• New formats are available for current issues, including full-text HTML for some titles and PDF for all.
• Multimedia is available, including zoomable images, videos, audio, and GIS for some titles.
A complete list of these journals is available at: http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/libraries/current-scholarship-program/2011-title-list.
If Santa doesn’t bring you the coffee table book of sumptuously illustrated Middle Eastern manuscripts that you were hoping for, you can now console yourself by browsing through some illuminated treasures of Islamic civilization in a post at Archivalia. There you can see, among other images, a mighty lion attacking its prey from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Kalila wa Dimna, a Qur’an from Persia in The Royal Library at Copenhagen, a Persian miniature from a Diwan by Hafiz at the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, a 19th century Christian Arabic manuscript at the University of Brimingham, or one of the earliest Mughal manuscripts at the Indiana University Art Museum. And now that all these pictures have made you curious, you can read up about their history in Arabic painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, available in Duke’s collection at Lilly Library. I hope you enjoy your holidays…
Perkins Reference Desk Hours – Fall Reading and Exam Period
December 13, 2010 – December 19, 2010
Monday – Thursday 9:00 am -2:00 am
Friday 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Saturday 1:00 pm -5:00 pm
Sunday 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
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!
What’s going on at the library or around campus? There are several events calendars to keep you posted.
You can get to the library’s Current & Upcoming Events page by clicking the News & Events link on the library’s homepage and then the Events >> heading (besides upcoming events, be sure to also check out the News, Exhibits, and Blogs). This page unifies listings from several of the library’s subunits (the Instruction & Outreach Department, the Data &GIS Services Department, and the Center for Instructional Technology) as well as from the Divinity School Library. Direct links to these calendars can be found at the right of the page. You can also receive an RSS feed to stay updated.
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: Friday, December 3 from 11:30 am-1 pm (moderated discussion will begin at noon)
Where: The Haiti Lab; Smith Warehouse, Bay 4
Bring your lunch – we’ll provide dessert!
Register online at: http://library.duke.edu/events/services/instruction/event.do?id=4641&occur=8691.
Learn more about the Haiti Lab at: http://fhi.duke.edu/haitilab.
For more info about the Humanities Labs, see: http://fhi.duke.edu/labs.
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.
Our heartfelt congratulations to the 2010 winners of the Middlesworth Award for their outstanding research using materials from the Rare Book, Special Collections and Manuscript Library:
Undergraduate Award: Adrienne R. Niederriter
“Speak Softly and Carry a Lipstick: Government Influence on Female Sexuality through Cosmetics During World War II”
Nominated by Sarah Hallenbeck
Undergraduate Award: Hannah C. Craddock
“‘New Self-Respect and a New Consciousness of Power:’ White Nurses, Black Soldiers, and the Danger of World War I”
Nominated by Malachi Hacohen and Adriane Lentz-Smith
Graduate Award: Bonnie E. Scott
“Demonstrations in the House of God: Methodist Preaching and the Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina, 1960-1969”
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 Nakasa”
Supported by Karin Shapiro
and
Eugenia Cho
“Architectural Acoustics of Symphony Hall”
Supported by Dewey Lawson
Honors Thesis Award: Andrew Simon
“Intertwining Narratives: The Copts and their Muslim Relations”
Supported by miriam cooke
I would also like to recognize this year’s 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.
Written by Cheryl Thomas
AllAfrica.com-Africa News Online is a comprehensive resource featuring stories from newspapers, magazines, and news agencies. 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: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/rbmscl/africa/inv/
For the latest updated news from Africa, Duke patrons can access the database at: AllAfrica.com-Africa News Online
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:” 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 note…don’t miss this interesting classroom experiment comparing textbooks on Kindle versus iPad: “The E-Textbook Experiment Turns A Page,” broadcast on NPR this evening. User satisfaction with the Kindle seems to be significantly lower than user satisfaction with the iPad: “The problem is that the Kindle is less interactive than a piece of paper…”
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
Bull City Rising: Musings, reflections, and general gossip
Durham Socialite: Durham’s source for social events
Please feel free to suggest other favorites.
If you deal with large amounts of data and especially if you use spreadsheets to work with it, there is a new tool for you. Freebase Gridworks allows you to upload data and then examine, filter and do data cleanup for ‘grid-shaped data.’ Visit the Gridworks project site for more information and videos that more fully explain and demonstrate some of the functionality of this tool.
Short List of Gridworks Functions
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 Africa’s participation in the “information society” and network economy. It is both a rigorous academic journal and a practical tool to inform the continent’s 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
patsnap, developed at MIT, provides free U.S. and international patent searching with analytic services.
http://www.patsnap.com/
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 GPO’s 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.
On Monday of this week, librarians from Duke, North Carolina Central, NC State and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill gathered for the Triangle Research Libraries Network’s (TRLN) annual meeting.
We librarians always look forward to the opportunity to catch up with colleagues from area libraries and learn more about the innovative things going on at their institutions, but the highlight for me this year was hearing from keynote speaker Diane Harley of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, lead author of “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.”
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:
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: “The 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. “
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:
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.
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, “[it is] very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”
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 available—it’s turning on a feature that lets you choose a date and “replay” the tweets from that point on. Google’s search combines Twitter updates with those from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz.
National index to Chinese newspapers and periodicals, 1833-1949 全国报刊索引 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.
Written by Luo Zhou
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.
Librarians Heidi Madden, Andy Armacost, Jill Katte, Lee Sorensen and Emily Daly will be offering sessions on topics ranging from using digitized primary sources in the classroom to building and storing online image collections at Duke, from Western European studies resources to EndNote citation management software.
These “Beyond the Stacks” sessions are part of the Center for Instructional Technology’s 21st 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.
Have an idea for a “Beyond the Stacks” session? Contact Emily Daly. Interested in learning more about the Teaching & Learning Workshops Series? Check out the full schedule of events.
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 “Good bye 3×5 cards, hello Zotero.” (Yes, we know that many of you don’t even remember taking notes and saving references on 3×5 cards…).
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 Zotero’s 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 Zotero’s 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 (here’s 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? It’s fairly easy to learn to use it, it works with a wide variety of materials, the collaborative features are great, and it’s 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.
Earlier, we told you about the many ways to get audiobooks through Duke and on the web.
There is now a new way to download audiobooks straight from the web. NC Live is now providing 750 downloadable audiobooks that are available in .mp3 format so you can burn them to a CD or transfer them to a portable device like an iPod. Just browse, select, and download the title of your choice to your computer, then transfer your selection to a portable listening device for on-the-go audio enjoyment.
Subjects focus subjects focusing primarily on language learning, classic literature, history, and biography. Available titles include The Shawshank Redemption, Slaughterhouse Five, Atlas Shrugged or learn to speak French, German, Greek or Thai.
Use this link to download books while you’re on campus…
And if you’re off campus, connect to NC Live and then browse to Audio Books.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22244945@N00/4394440698/
Courtesy of the CIT blog, here is an article from the Duke Chronicle on the future of the Apple iPad at Duke University and its libraries:
http://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-taps-ipad-fall-2010
Written by Zeke Graves
What else can we say this week except: DUKE RULES!
How does the library relate to (or compete with) that? Well, ummm…here are some facts to peruse as you transition from celebration to research focus:
Now that you’ve calmed down, don’t forget that the subject librarians have created research guides for you, and will meet with you to help you find sources for your papers. Here are some recent reviews of our services:
Thank you so much! This is extremely helpful!
Bravo!
my awesome Duke librarian
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 users’ 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 Harvey’s post on the new Instruction & Outreach blog.
What do you wish the library did that it doesn’t? 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!
Written by Alice Whiteside
Screencasting technology allows you to record what is happening on your computer screen with accompanying audio commentary and then share it with others. It enables remote collaboration and learning and provides an effective medium for educating users in the best use of databases and online resources.
It is a handy and useful tool for students, teachers and developers of software and web resources. Screencasting is especially useful in learning environments where it can be used to make live recordings of presentations or training sessions, to comment verbally on projects and assignments, to remotely show students how to use software or search a database, or for collaboration on projects. Developers can use screencasting to highlight features in new products or to give a tour of a website or resource.
These tools can also be used socially for things like sharing narrated slide shows with friends. More advanced tools with additional features, such as Camtasia and Adobe Captivate, are available for purchase. These tools allow you to edit your content and import still images, video, and PowerPoint slides and also let you create accessible tutorials and lessons through the use of closed captioning. Several basic tools such as Jing, Screenr and Screen Jelly are available for free. These online tools are designed for easy use so you can begin making screencasts immediately.
Have you tried any screencasting tools? What did you think?
Written by Julie Adamo
Need new research material? No matter what it is — book, DVD, CD, database, etc. — our library offers services to obtain it.
You May:
http://library.duke.edu/services/forms/suggestpurchase.html
Be sure to Search TRLN first in case the book is closer than you think.
Loans from libraries in the Triangle Research Library Network generally are quicker:
Otherwise use Interlibrary Loan:
http://library.duke.edu/libraries/ill.html
Also, keep in mind that not everything is available through ILL, though many things are.
For other requests see the forms at:
http://library.duke.edu/services/forms/index.html
Written by Cheryl Thomas
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!
Written by Anne Langley
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.
Written by Joline Ezzell
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.
http://www.cio.com/article/521064/Real_Time_Search_5_Alternatives_to_Google_Bing
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.
SocINDEX with Full Text is a great resource for your sociology research.
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?
Written by Debra Kurtz
Previous posts have focused mainly on text- and image-based resources. This installment will highlight audio, specifically free resources available on the Internet. Here are a few:
The British Library’s public collections include field recordings of natural and urban soundscapes, music from around the world, a survey of English dialects, early spoken word recordings, as well as historical information on sound reproduction technology.
Xeno-Canto hosts an archive of bird sounds from across the globe and makes good use of Google Maps in its search and information display interfaces.
London Sound Survey is a nice example of how audio can contribute to an overall picture of a geographical place and its culture and history over time.
The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds (focusing only on sounds, not songs).
Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal music downloads directed by New Jersey’s freeform radio station WFMU.
This is just a small sample of what’s out there. Now it’s up to you to decide how audio could enhance your research, project or presentation. Here’s some inspiration: http://tenement.org/folksongs/client/
Written by Zeke Graves
Even if you think you have no interest in printing, I urge you to listen to this very interesting podcast of To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio.
Interviewees include the designers of Gotham (the Obama campaign font) and Verdana (the Internet font) and Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. If you are interested in typefaces, you’ll swoon!
Written by Jean Ferguson
You may know that two major style manuals — APA and MLA — have released new editions in the last six or so months. And if you’re aware of that fact, you undoubtedly know that both editions contain inconsistencies in their examples and enough errors to require APA to post an 8-page list of corrections and then replace its first run copies with a second printing.
The new rules have driven confused and frustrated researchers to sources such as APA’s blog, which provides examples and attempts to explain the more complicated rules (check out the DOI/URL flowchart — yes, this rule requires a flowchart), or Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), which hosts APA and MLA resources that received 3.5 million and 2.5 million hits, respectively, during September and October alone, according to the coordinator of OWL.
It is evident from these stats alone that librarians and faculty have spent countless hours supporting the researchers and students who have spent even more time formatting manuscripts to meet the unbending rules of CSE, APA, MLA and enumerable others.
As Barbara Fister posits in her ACRLog post, is this time well spent? Is research somehow made more valid when its footnotes are perfectly formatted, its works cited page spaced just so? Have we spent so much time agonizing over comma placement and tracking down database names that we’ve lost sight of the whole point of citing sources in the first place? Do our budding scholars realize that citing sources is not merely an academic hazing ritual of sorts, causing them hours of extra labor after their papers are written?
It would seem that the newest editions of APA and MLA are only muddying the waters, making it harder for researchers — especially novice ones — to achieve the true goal of citing sources: to give credit to the scholars their research builds upon and to make it as easy as possible for their readers to learn more about that work.
And if we can agree on that primary goal, how do we get back to emphasizing it rather than the arcane rules?
Ready to start that term paper? Not sure how to start? The University of Minnesota Libraries have created an assignment calculator to help students organize their time to meet their research needs. Start with today’s date, enter the date assignment is due, a timeline is provided, with research milestones. Use Duke Library links for local, on-site research assistance. For example, How do I begin my research? or Find a Librarian in my subject area? or ask for help are just a few of the services available to you through the Duke Libraries.
The catalog says the location for the item you want is “Library Service Center.” Where’s that? and what is it? The Library Service Center, or LSC, is a high-density shelving facility in East Durham that holds the library’s books and other materials for which there is no room in the campus libraries. With 30 ft. high shelves, it can hold 4 million volumes. No searching for call numbers on the shelf here – it’s all tied to barcodes. Check it out for yourself:
If you want something from LSC, click on the 
next to the title. Then click the Request link in the “Get This Title” box. Deliveries are made to and from campus libraries twice a day during the week and once on weekends.
Written by Joline Ezzell
Do midterms and research papers have you crying out “Run away! Run away!?” Take a study break and just say “ni!” to them for awhile with Duke Libraries Monty Python resources. You’ll find videos, books, audio, and music in our catalog.
Why? Because, those zany blokes are celebrating their 40th anniversary in NY City this week. Besides, it’s a proven fact that laughing yourself silly is an effective antidote to stress. According to a literature review in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services 1
There are several beneficial efforts attributed to humor and laughter, including improved immune function, increased pain tolerance, and decreased stress response.
If you must rationalize it as schoolwork, you might hone your persuasive argument skills with The Argument Clinic
I don’t think there’s a punch-line scheduled, is there?
1 MacDonald, C. (2004). A chuckle a day keeps the doctor away: therapeutic humor & laughter. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services, 42(3), 18. http://search.ebscohost.com
Global Access and Local Action- Health Information and Open Access
Friday October 23rd , 1-3pm
217 Perkins Library.
In an era of globalization, issues of connectivity and access to information concerning health care and health related systems remain uneven across the world. Duke students and faculty from Trinity College and the Duke Global Health Institute will discuss their experiences with information access in health projects around the world, as well as their interactions with health consumers and professionals in other countries.
Sponsored as part of Open Access Week by Duke University Libraries and the Duke Medical Center Library
For people who are interested in colonial Taiwan(1895-1945), there’s some good news. Libraries inside and outside Taiwan are digitizing their special collections including photographs and art images and make them free available to interested researchers and general public. The following are four selected collections:
Three photpgraph collections from Lafayette college’s digital collection. All the photos have very detailed descriptive data (bilingual in many fields) and the images are of good quality themselves.
Taiwan Art Exhibition (1927-1943) Database 台灣美術展覽會資料庫 from Academia Sinica of Taiwan has Images of 2144 artworks from 16 art exhibits during Japanese colonial period. Information is in Chinese with Japanese titles.
Written by Luo Zhou
Help them win $5k and notoriety through the Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I Love My Librarian Award!.
The award invites library users to recognize the accomplishments of librarians for their efforts to improve the lives of people in their community. Nominations will run through October 9 and are being accepted online at www.ilovelibraries.org/ilovemylibrarian.
Up to 10 librarians will be selected. Each will receive a $5,000 cash award, a plaque and a $500 travel stipend to attend an awards ceremony and reception in New York, hosted by The New York Times in December. In addition, a plaque will be given to each award winner’s library.
Nominees will be judged by a selection committee based on quality of service to library users, demonstrated knowledge of the library and its resources and commitment shown in helping library users.
As they say in Chicago, vote early, vote often!
One of the most pressing issues in global policy development is migration. The 2005 report by The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) to the UN Secretary General Kofi Anan outlines the dimensions and dynamics of international migration. The report has focused the attention of a number of inter-governmental organizations (IGO) and agencies on a variety of aspects created by migration. While the 127 member-country International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the leading body to take on an advocacy role for the implementation of “safe and orderly migration” through research and policy development, agencies such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been monitoring monetary streams, called remittances, which are created by migrants who send part of their earnings back to their country of origin. These transfers have reached, according to a WB estimate, $397 billion in 2008, $305 billion of which were sent to developing countries by 190 million migrants or 3% of the world population. A recent IMF publication (Occasional Paper 259) traces the Macroeconomic Consequences of Remittances. The World Bank’s ‘Migration and Development Brief 10’ provides an Outlook for Remittance Flows 2009-2011: Remittances Expected to Fall by 7-10 Percent in 2009. The brief is accompanied by country-by-country data in Excel format. Figures on monthly remittance flows for selected countries are also available. These data update the Migration & Remittances Factbook 2008 (check availability @ Duke), a “snapshot of migration and remittances data for all countries, regions and income groups of the world, compiled from various sources.” The Migration & Remittances page on the World Bank site offers access to more papers and publications related to this topic. In addition, the World Bank blog People Move provides timely updates on emerging research findings and trends. It goes without saying that the services which send the money back to the migrants’ home countries are not free. The WB traces the cost of these transfers on its Remittance Prices Worldwide site.
It is to be hoped that the sheer magnitude of these transactions and their economic impact will help to focus attention on the humanitarian and ethical issues underlying the process of migration, issues which are often, despite the apparent beneficial financial results, less than benign.
We’ve been getting more and more questions in the library about how researchers can find information from other disciplines. For example, how can someone working on membranes in Psychiatry connect up with someone working on membranes in Materials Science? In a world where waiting for the published article is increasingly too late, we’ve been trying to find new avenues.
To answer the question above, I thought, ‘I wonder if there is a social networking site for scientists?’, did a Google search, and voila – Labmeeting!
The interesting part about Labmeeting is that it is only freely available to scientific researchers. You have to either get invited by a scientific researcher you know, or show online proof that you are doing scientific research. Or pay $99. Thus, not being a scientific researcher, nor willing to part with $99 for a look-see, I was unable to join.
A search on Duke presented 120 results and included the following:
Give it a shot and let us know what you think: http://www.labmeeting.com
Addendum: As William Gunn points out in the comments below, there are other similar tools which you may want to try. They include:
Duke’s ePrint distributed printing system now allows you to print a job again without running back to your computer.
With ePrint, you send a job to the system and then swipe your card at any print station and select the job from your print queue. With ePrint rePrint, the job goes back into the print queue for 15 minutes. If you need to reprint the job within that timeframe, just swipe your DukeCard at any ePrint station and choose the job out of the list of available jobs in your print queue. (sincere thanks to the Duke Divinity school blog)
Written by Anne Langley
The World Cup will be played in South Africa in the summer of 2010 and important soccer matches are being played around the globe this fall to determine the thirty-two countries that will qualify for the tournament. To prepare you for these games, several books are available in the Duke Libraries on the subject of soccer and its global importance.
In Franklin Foer’s book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, soccer is described as part of the economic, political, and cultural fabric of society. In a series of essays, Foer explores the cultural roots of fierce soccer rivalries around the world, rivalries that make battles between Duke and Carolina or the Red Sox and the Yankees look tepid. Matches between the Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow reflect the divide between the Protestant Rangers supporters and the Catholic Celtics and has roots in conflicts that date back to the Reformation. Matches between Barcelona and Madrid in Spain are recreations of the Spanish Civil War. Foer examines soccer as a liberalizing force in Iran and as a destructive force in Serbia, where soccer hooligans were used as death squads in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Although Foer does not, as his title suggests, provide a unifying theory of soccer and globalization, this book is a fascinating study of soccer in its cultural context and provides vivid examples of how national conflicts are reflected in the game of soccer.
The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, provides essays about each of the thirty two countries that qualified for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Each essay presents a short summary of the soccer history of the country and how each team qualified for the tournament, and places soccer in the context of that country’s culture and politics. Examples include the importance of qualification to war-ravaged Angola, the impact of globalization on the English economy, and the relationship between jihad and soccer in Saudi Arabia. Although the 2006 World Cup is in the past, the profiles of each country are fascinating and informative, and deepen one’s understanding of the world and its relationship to the world’s most popular sport.
Grant Farred, a Duke University faculty member, traces his passion for Liverpool football from his early years in apartheid South Africa in his book, Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football. He explores the cultural context of soccer around the world. Farred provides a shocking history of how Argentina’s military junta used the success of the Argentinean team to cover its ruthless oppression of dissent. Farred brings an obvious passion for world football and the Liverpool team as a lens to examine the global struggle for freedom. Although American readers will not be familiar with many of the events and players that are important in the history of Liverpool football, the reader is swept along by the force of Farred’s narrative and the deeply personal nature of his writing.
There are interesting films and discussions being held on campus this fall in conjunction with Professor Laurent Dubois’ course, “World Cup and World Politics.” A series of films about soccer are free and open to the general public. Lilian Thuram, Caribbean-born French soccer player, activist and writer, will share his thoughts on sport, racism, and immigration as well as discussing the work of his new foundation. The talk will take place at the Nasher Art Museum on Nov. 10 at 7:00 pm. More information at http://soccerpolitics.com/.
Photo Credit: Anthony Bidard/FEP
Now that classes are definitely back in full swing, we wanted to share some help with some of those consistently vexing issues for students. Refer to previous posts for some information on data backup, free video lectures, and electronic sticky notes.
Finding textbooks – Most know Amazon, but there are some other options out there for online textbook shopping. Bookfinder searches across many online book retailers, making it easy to compare prices. Chegg is a big textbook rental site, allowing for use of books for only a short time.
Lifehacker tips – This site helped inspire the name of this blog and is a great source for little ways to make life better, often with technology, but often without.
For a large list of all types of web apps that could be helpful for students, check out this list from readwriteweb. This list is a couple years old, any new apps on the scene since then?
**Photo Credit:
Student raising his hand in a classroom, 1970
William Gedney Photographs and Writings
Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/
The Digital Projects Department is pleased to announce that the enhanced homepage will go live before classes begin on Monday. Thanks to all the Libraries’ staff who helped collect and interpret user input. The focus of the Libraries’ homepage is first to facilitate research, teaching and learning and second to promote our services and resources.
Here is a brief summary of enhancements based on that focus statement:
You can preview these changes at the following URL while the DPD works to put them in production:
We will review these changes this fall and make adjustments as necessary. Please watch for invitations to participate in assessment activities for the Libraries’ web resources.
Have a great semester!
If you’re a Blackboard user, you may have noticed an addition to the left-side menu this past spring.
The new Library Guides button automatically directs you to a page of research tips and resources developed, in many cases, by a librarian who specializes in a subject area related to your course.
See a general research guide or a page that doesn’t reflect the goals of your course? Contact your subject specialist, who will replace the Library Guides link with a more appropriate page or work with you to design a guide specific to your objectives and assignments like the one below, which was created for a Writing 20 course:
Still have questions about this CIT/Libraries collaboration? Email Emily Daly, or check out CIT’s Blackboard support for more info.
If people are at all familiar with geographic information systems (GIS) software, they typically think of it as a tool for commercial cartographers or for government agencies needing to illustrate dry scientific reports. But GIS software offers students and researchers in any field (sciences, humanities, and social sciences) a powerful (and often, a remarkably simple) analysis and presentation tool whenever they’re dealing with information that has a locational element.
The Data & GIS Services Department at Perkins Library supports ArcGIS software as well as Google Earth Pro. The Brandaleone Family Center for Data and GIS Services on the second floor of Perkins Library has this software installed. ArcGIS software is also site licensed for faculty and staff at Duke, and is available in OIT labs on campus, while basic Google Earth is free to download. Duke affiliates who want the Pro version of Google Earth can contact Joel Herndon or Mark Thomas.
ArcGIS is great for analyzing any sort of data with a spatial element (for instance: data organized by county; associated with addresses; or containing latitude/longitude coordinates, such as GPS data).
You don’t even have to make a map … you might just want to answer questions about distance (example: what are the closest stores that sell tobacco to each school, and how far are they; or which such stores are within a certain distance from each school), location (example: for a set of crime data, identify the census tract that each crime is in, if you want to study socio-economic characteristics of the neighborhood); or network analysis (example: least-cost routes along roads and rivers to bring logs from tree plantations to mills). These are only a few of many possibilities (examples reflect real projects done here).
If you do want to build your own map for a paper or publication, ArcGIS is great for creating one that shows just the features you need, starting with a simple basemap and editing or adding more layers to created a customized presentation.
Google Earth has fewer analysis capabilities, but has a short learning curve and a large database of online geographic layers ready to go. Some sorts of data are easy to add (such as addresses or latitude/longitude coordinates). The map creation is less customizable than ArcGIS, but there are a lot of options for novel visualization. Some Duke users, for instance, have found it useful for creating attention-getting maps for poster sessions.
A few of the more focused interactive mapping databases (often dealing only with US Census data) that have GIS analysis or presentation features, or GIS layer download capabilities, include SimplyMap, Social Explorer, National Historic GIS, and Neighborhood Change Database.
…Or, how to browse full-text collections of books and more in foreign libraries without leaving your chair. Contrary to popular belief, there is no single starting point for browsing open access Digital Collections for Western European Studies –the Europeana is as yet more of a vision than a reality.
Today’s spotlight is on finding digital libraries of full-text materials in German Studies as one example of browsing what is available from libraries abroad. Your best first stop is this excellent list of digital production centers dealing with German language materials: Digitale Sammlungen [Dr. Klaus Graf]. Add to this a website on Digitalisierung und Digitalisierte Bestände that lets you browse digital libraries by subject or by geographic area: you will find materials for the study of witchcraft , travel literature , this includes travel in the Americas , and cook books for immigrants, to highlight just a few themes.
Digital Collections add international materials previously unavailable in US libraries. Take the debates of the Reichstag as an example: I remember well standing in the stacks at the Historisches Seminar Tübingen combing through the heavy volumes of the Reichstagsprotokolle to write a paper on the German politician Eugen Richter. These volumes are not held in US libraries, but today, I could search all of these volumes from my desktop through the free digital library of Reichstagsprotokolle.
A combination of free online content hosted abroad and Duke Holdings can add dimension to your syllabus. Contact me for help with Western European Studies: Heidi Madden
There are few things worse than working hard on a paper or a project, spending hours researching and writing only to lose that work and not be able to retrieve it. This can be just as frustrating when all your past work is lost because of a computer crash, lost flash drive, etc. Backing up your files is increasingly important, but often it’s something you don’t consider until it’s too late. Here are some strategies to make backing up easy. Take a look. Your future self will thank you.
Lifehacker did a feature on the various methods for recovering deleted files. This is for those moments when you’ve deleted a file and you realize it right away. Won’t work for every situtation, but when this happens, here are some helpful tips.
It’s now also possible to store your data and files “in the cloud.” This allows you to keep all your important items on a remote server that really helps if you delete something on your own machine or if your laptop is stolen or otherwise damaged. Some of these options allow you to schedule backups automatically, so your data is backed up without requiring you to remember to do so. Mozy and Carbonite are two of the leaders in this area, but there are many providers, all with their own storage limits, features, strengths, weaknesses and pricing models. Look to the comments about various providers in this blog post to get a sense of some of your options.
Lifehacker gives you step-by-step instructions for setting up automatic backups to an external hard drive.
Finally, Wired magazine provides a feature with several backup options for Windows PC users and Mac Users.
Have you found any backup strategies that are easy and effective?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
There are iPhone apps for just about anything. They’ve got you covered if you need to get Danish handball scores, calculate alimony, keep track of your pet’s vet records, or create and test palindromes. There is more than just fun in the world of apps, though. Here are some great research tools for mobile devices.
At Duke, there are a number of great ways to work in the library wherever you are. You can use the library’s mobile website to find library hours, available computers, directions, contact info and more. If you’re doing medical research, take a look at Duke’s Medical Center Library mobile site. It’s full of features enabling you to do PICO analysis, browse e-journals, and link to many helpful mobile resources.
On the Digital Collections blog, it was recently announced that you can search, browse and view our Digital Collections on your mobile device. Be sure to watch the short video demonstrating the ease of this feature in their post announcing this new tool. Just announced this week, you can now watch vintage ads from Duke Libraries Hartman Center from Duke iTunes U.
There are other nice mobile tools outside of Duke as well. This is just a partial list and some of these are third-party apps, but this will give you an idea of the possibilities out there. Some useful apps include those for WorldCat.org, the arXiv pre-print server for physics, math, computer science, etc, or the Papers PDF organizer software in mobile form.
I’m sure I’ve missed some helpful mobile resources. What others are out there?
Do you find yourself waiting longingly for the next post of Library Hacks? Is there just nothing that will satisfy your thirst for research, technology and library related news?? If so, LibWorm is the tool for you! LibWorm, a search engine that searches over 1500 library related or librarian maintained blogs, can help you find research tips, tools and strategies from librarians of all types from all over the world. Just type in a topic of interest and – PRESTO! – Hundreds of librarians are at your fingertips.
Sticky notes are great for jotting down quick thoughts to act on later. On the negative side, they have serious shortcomings when it comes to organizing all these ideas and sharing them with others. Here are a few web tools which expand the utility of sticky notes and bring them to your electronic environment.
Here is beefed-up, electronic version of your paper sticky note. Here you can create sticky boards and cover them notes, photos, to-do lists and documents and mark them up as you want. Then you can share them with group members and they can make and see edits and updates too.
This tool is a great way to organize your thoughts and is very easy to use. The interface is very appealing and is really fun to use. Plus, you can share your maps and collaborate with others with Twitter, Skype, iGoogle gadgets, Firefox add-ons and various export options. You can get a basic account (read: free) with up to six maps and premium accounts for a little more than free. Check out a completed map.
This is a similar tool to MindMeister. It’s not as feature-rich, but for what it does, it’s simple and easy. It has great keyboard shortcuts that allow for quick brainstorming and notetaking. Again, it keeps things organized and related in a way that you can make sense of all the notes you’re taking.
What you get here is basically a clean slate. It approximates a clean white board and you are free to doodle, add text, change colors, etc. It also has browser buttons that, when clicked, bring that web page into Twiddla where you can mark on them and share with others. This could be a helpful way to comment on the design or content of a web page and let others see your ideas.
What web tools do you like for keeping track of your thoughts and collaborating?
*Thanks to Lisa R. Johnston for her SciTech News column which inspired this post.
