Second Issue of AUR Library Newsletter

The second issue of the AUR Library Newsletter has just been issued. In it is announced some of the new initiatives: the Google Book Search, the Virtual Exhibition, the online documentaries and other information.

Link to Scans in Google Book Search from the AUR Library Catalog

AUR Library has added links from the catalog to scans in Google Book Search. This will allow you to view the scans made by Google of their 10,000,000 book library project. When you find a record for a book in our catalog, the catalog sends out a request to Google, where it will determine if the scan exists or not. If it does, then a link will appear in the AUR catalog, with the image to the right.

(The Google Book Search program is highly controversial. For an overview, see: Devichand, By Mukul Devichand Is Google really flouting copyright law? BBC News, 9 March 2007)

There are several caveats with this service, and they are discussed in the related page in the AUR Library Information Wiki. For example, most of the time you cannot see the entire book, but only selections. Still, this should be of help to people to get an idea of the book, to be able to read parts when the physical copy is checked out or otherwise unavailable. The text can be searched, too.

Here is an example from the catalog.

New Plugin Allows You to Search the AUR Catalog

The AUR Library has created a search bar plugin that allows you to search the AUR catalog from the search bars that are in your browser. Installation is very simple. All you have to do is go to the AUR Catalog Plugin Page and click on the link. It will automatically add the AUR catalog to your search bar.

What is this all about?

There normally are search bars in your browser where you can search, e.g. Google without having to type in the URL and to enter the search in the text box there. For example, the search bar in the following image will search Google for the word "open". Or, you can select "Yahoo" or "Ebay." (These are the default search engines) After you install the AUR plugin, you will see it added to the list.
















There is a separate plugin to add the AUR catalog to the "Google Search bar." You have to look farther down in the list, though.
























In both cases, enter your search terms, click "AUR Catalog" and you will be searching our catalog.

AUR Library Holds its First Virtual Exhibition!

A book from The Italian Futurist Book exhibition held at Colophon Page

Exhibitions of materials is an important task of a library. It lets the library's users know about all kinds of materials and resources they would never have known about.

AUR has a very small physical collection, but the number of materials on the World Wide Web is enormous and growing daily. These materials are very important and interesting for our users, but how are they to know about them? The AUR Library places many of these items into its catalog, but it has just finished an exhibition of many of these valuable materials on the web. Therefore, it can be thought of more like an "exhibition of exhibitions."

The purpose of our exhibition is to let our library users know of the existence of some of these wonderful sites dealing with various aspects of the topics of Rome and/or Italy. Many of them are "virtual exhibitions" of other libraries, but there are other ingenious projects undertaken by librarians, scholars, and scholarly organizations.

We plan to add other exhibitions in the future on other topics.

AUR and the Open Access Movement

AUR has created a genuine Open Archive, which means that we have joined the Open Access movement. Open Archives and Open Access are the most exciting developments in the field of scholarly publishing today. This makes it easier for both faculty and students to share their researches and other creative work in an efficient and controlled way. For much more information, see the announcement.

Go to: the main page for the AUR Open Archive.