New Featured Resource: I.F. Stone

Our new featured resource deals with the 20th anniversary of the death of the well-known investigative journalist, I.F. Stone. Our featured resource provides a link to a recent interview with his biographer, along with other links into a website dedicated both to him and to his journalistic work. There are audio files, movies, pictures, even entire books of his writings that you can download. In fact, it also includes every issue of his magazine, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971.

It's worth taking a look, especially in these days when so many people are talking about the end of journalism as we know it. Here's only one article, End Times by Michael Hirschorn (The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2009). Do we no longer need journalists such as I.F. Stone? He certainly was not popular with some people, such as when he wrote against Joseph McCarthy. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had him followed for years, and Stone single-handedly forced the U.S. government to back down on some issues.

Do we need people like him? You decide.

Keep Current with Academic Blogs!

A blog is like an online diary. Lots of scholars and societies keep blogs since this is becoming an important tool for scholarly communication. One person has described the academic blogosphere as an invisible college. See Brad Delong's The Invisible College (The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006).

Lots of people have their favorite blogs and regularly keep up with them. One way to find these academic blogs is to go to The Academic Blog Portal, but this can take time to click on each of these. The AUR Library has made a new attempt. Using the wonders of RSS feeds, Google Blog Search and php, we have made an Academic Blog page that allows you to just click and find the latest entries in different subject areas. The selection of the blogs has been based primarily on The Academic Blog Portal, and their arrangement is followed.

In several places, there were so many blogs entered, that we had to create separate links, so for example, look at how the tab "Economics" works:

There are so many that we needed to break them up, so you'll need to click on each part. The blogs under the "General" tab are taken from the list at Arts and Letters Daily (from The Chronicle of Higher Education). Some areas are busy, others are slow.

You can access it through the main catalog page using the drop-down menu.

If there are any blogs you would like added, or a new section added, just let us know.

New Subject Browse Implemented

Some library research has shown that many users would like to get an overall idea of the materials available from a library's catalog. Normally, libraries just allow you to search their catalogs, but it becomes difficult to get a general overview when you are only searching.

AUR Library has tried another method. We have extracted all of the main subjects from the catalog, gotten rid of the duplicates and placed them into a page you can scroll through. This may give you some ideas for searches that you hadn't thought of before. Give it a try and let us know what you think. This is not a "live" page, i.e. if we have resources with new subjects, it won't be there untili it is rebuilt, but it can still give you a good idea of what we have.

Also, don't forget the call number browsing that we have implemented: by Dewey Decimal number and by LC Number. There are also the pages that compare the LC and Dewey numbers so that you can browse everything. Everything is explained in the page you see when you select Browse ==> Catalog on the main page.

Let us know if this helps. We can improve on it.