The American University of Rome Library Blog

OECD Publications Added

2011-02-23T06:31:00.000-08:00

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, was established in 1961 on the basis of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), set up to run the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe after World War II. Today, there are 34 OECD member states. Its mission is to "... promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world".

Part of this mission is to create and share information. The AUR Library has added a new part to the Electronic Books Section of the Extend Search, which searches tens of thousands of books published by the OECD. (For more information on the Extend Search, see the Two-Minute Tutorial)

You will notice a new part: OECD Books.

When you click on it, you will be looking at the full-text books authored by the OECD that are in Google Books, which is the default search. You can also search the OECD Library site by clicking on the drop down box and selecting OECD Library.

When you click on this, you will be searching the electronic books hosted by the OECD Library.

Not all of the electronic books are available for free, but very many are. To find out, find if the the record has an option Look Inside which allows you to download a copy that you can read but not print.

Google Art Project

2011-02-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

Google has collaborated with some of the most famous art museums in the world to create an amazing site: the Google Art Project.

They have modified Google Street View to provide virtual "walking tours" of each museum, and when you see a work with a plus sign on it, you can see a very high resolution image. As only one example, here is Caravaggio's Medusa at the Uffizi in Florence. You can zoom in to reveal the rich details of Caravaggio's painting, but in the right hand column, you can click on additional notes, tags, and so on. If you click on "More works by this artist" you can go to the other works of Caravaggio in this project, at the Uffizi and in the other museums.

Sometimes, you can experience even more. At the National Gallery, you can see Holbein's "The Ambassadors" and in the right hand column, you will see "Media". When you click on that, you will see videos about the work of art.

To get started, please look at the Visitor Guide.

The AUR Library has included the Google Art Project in the Extend Search mechanism in the section "Art Images". Here is a search for Vermeer. For more information on AUR Library's Extend Search, see the Two-Minute Tutorial.

Updates to the AUR Library Catalog

2011-02-01T03:03:00.000-08:00

We have made three major additions to the materials available through the AUR Library.

We have added a tool to find the latest Book Reviews from the major book review sites from the US and UK The AUR Library has built similar pages: all you have to do is select the newspaper, magazine or website, and then click on anything of interest.

You can get to this page by going through the drop-down list available on any page of the Library Catalog, selecting Browsing → News → Book Reviews.

We have also added an extra database for searching through the Extend Search method, included in the Articles and Open Archives section. This is a British database and is called JURN.

Although we are still not sure what JURN stands for, it describes itself as:
...a search-engine dedicated to indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly publications offering free content.
Even though it uses a Google Custom Search Engine, you can often get better results using JURN rather than Google or Google Scholar, and the editors work very hard to make sure that you will get free materials. Included are book chapters, too!

We have created a page that searches the latest tables of contents of several thousand scholarly journals using the Journals TOCs service from the Institute for Computer Based Learning at Herriot-Watt University. You can activate it in two ways: in the drop-down menu from any page of the catalog under: Browsing → Magazine Rack → Journal TOCs, or through the Extend Search → Articles and Open Archives → Journal TOCs.

Please give all these tools a try and tell us what you think.

Welcome to the AUR Library!

2011-01-31T02:38:00.000-08:00

The new semester is starting. To get a quick understanding of what is available to you as a student at AUR, it is probably best to look at some of the Two-Minute Tutorials. These are very quick overviews (two minutes or less!) of some of the most important information you need to get started to use information materials as effectively as possible. It is probably best to start with the following:

Also, the AUR Library Catalog always has a Featured Resource. This one is on a series of interviews between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut.

Welcome!

How Google Works

2010-11-19T05:47:00.000-08:00

Here is a great "Infographic" that explains what goes on behind the scenes at Google. It's pretty self-explanatory.

New Featured Resource: Animal Farm (the Movie)

2010-11-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

We have a new featured resource, a video available in Youtube of the first movie version of George Orwell's Animal Farm. It turns out that this version involved a special office of the CIA, that even rewrote some of Orwell's story! The story is there, along with links to articles and lectures talking about it.

Also, there are links to propaganda films available in the Internet Archive, such as the famous "Duck and Cover" short for children, featuring Bert the Turtle, who teaches children how to save themselves from injury during a nuclear attack!

Bert the Turtle about to Duck and Cover

"Latest News for Archaeology" Search Tool

2010-11-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

We have just created another of our news feeds, this one for the area of Archaeology. It searches some of the major sites on the web that provide the latest news in Archaeology, returns an RSS feed, reformats it and provides it to you.

You can access this news feed from any page in the AUR Library Catalog, by going to Browsing, the selecting News and Archaeology. All you do then is simply select the sites you are interested in and then click on Latest News.You can select from a lot of other areas, too.

Tell us what you think, or if you have an idea for another site,

let us know.

More changes to Extend Search: Government Documents

2010-10-26T03:36:00.000-07:00

Based on feedback from some students and faculty, the AUR Library has added a couple of extra databases to search in the Extend Search function for Government Documents: the Congressional Record and TSO. The U.S. Congressional Record is the official record of the debates in Congress, and includes a section called Extension of Remarks, which can be anything: speeches and poems, and all kinds of other things.

The early issues of the Congressional Record (1774-1875) have also been digitized and can be found through the AUR Library Catalog.

The other database is TSO, or The Stationery Office of the British government. It includes Command Papers, House of Commons Papers and key Departmental papers. For more information, see their About page.

Here is an illustration of how it works, use the Extend Search to search for "elections in Iraq". From here you can select TSO and/or Congressional Record and the search will have been done. Of course, there are other options as well.

Please note that in the Congressional Record, the default search is for 2010, but there is a drop down box above it where you can select other years.

Changes in Extend Search: American Philosophical Society Publications

2010-09-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

We have added a new possibility in the Extend Search for the Electronic Book Projects. For some time, one option has been to select Full-Text University Press Books, which actually searches Google Books and automatically limits your search to freely accessible full-text books, published by a university press.

We have added an additional drop-down box after you select this option. The default is still to search "university press" publishers, but you can now select free books published by the well-respected American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin himself. The Society publishes in all fields, and not just "philosophy".

Here is an example search using the Extend Search for Michelangelo. When you click on Full-Text University Press Books, you will be viewing the full-text books published by various university presses in the world. Not all are in English. But in the drop down box, there is now the option for American Philosophical Society. Select it, wait a few seconds, and their publications will appear. You can sort and limit the results in the normal ways in Google Books.

For more information on using the Extend Search, see the Two-Minute Tutorial.

Let us know what you think!

Project Syndicate Added to Op-Ed Search

2010-09-28T01:01:00.000-07:00

We have added a new site to the page that allows you to find what is currently being discussed in the opinion and editorial pages of some of the major newspapers and magazines around the world. This site is called Project Syndicate and provides access to many opinions and articles by some of the leading thinkers.

AUR Library's Latest Opinion Pages provides a quick and easy way to find out what even more "movers and shakers" around the world are currently writing. Just select an area of the world in the menu on the left and select the site that interests you. There is also the possibility to get an instant translation through Google Translate by clicking on .

Be careful of bizarre translations, however! The idea of adding Google Translate is simply to provide an idea of what a web page in another language is saying, not an exact or even accurate translation.

If you have a suggestion for a new site to add, please let us know!

Google Translate Added to the AUR Library Catalog

2010-09-24T03:33:00.000-07:00

The AUR Library Catalog has added a new function: to get an almost immediate translation using Google Translate.

It is very simple to use. On the opening page, as well as on pages for individual resources, you will see a drop-down box that allows you to search the language you want. You can watch as the page is translated into the language you choose, as if by magic!

Since all of this comes from Google's servers, and lives "in the cloud", you may have to wait for a second or two for the box to load, or for the translate to work, but give it a try, and tell us how you like it.

Be aware that the AUR Library uses Google Translate in other ways as well, for example, in the Italian newspapers page, and in the Op-Ed pages. We've added it this this blog, as well.

Welcome and the Latest Enhancements

2010-09-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the AUR Library!

We have made some enhancements, two are available through the catalog:

You can now resort your search by publication date, by clicking on either Ascending or Descending. Of course, Ascending gives you the results by publication date with the earliest items first, and Descending with the newest items first. Remember you can also see the latest items added into the collection by going to the drop-down menu, choosing Browsing --> Latest additions and then selecting the format you are interested in.
We have made a change to the Extend Search for the Electronic Books Projects, which now searches Google Books in specific ways to find full-text copies of books published by University Presses. See an example search for Mussolini. Click on "Full Text Univ. Press Books." There will be other methods as well.

Available through the catalog, but separate from it, is the page to get the Latest News in International Relations. We have begun an experiment using a method to provide the latest 50 items added to Google Scholar using specific terms: International Relations, Political science, and Human Rights.

Let us know if it's useful or not.

Finally, remember the Two-Minute Tutorials that will give you a quick overview of what the library has. The most important to get that quick overview are:

These tutorials are all supposed to be Two-Minutes or less, so if something seems to be too long, let us know!

Enhancement to the Catalog: Most Checked Out Materials

2010-07-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

We have made a series of new lists that may be of interest to the AUR Library community: lists of the 100 most checked-out materials for each semester from 2007.

You can get to these lists by going to the AUR Library Catalog page, going to the drop-down menu, selecting Browsing and Catalog, and you will see the option Most Checked Out.

Let us know what you think.

Search Within Citing Articles in Google Scholar

2010-07-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

A very important improvement has just been announced by Google. One of the major advantages of using Google Scholar is to be able to find later articles that cite the article you are interested in. Many people have been asking for Google to allow you to search only within these specific articles, and now it does. This should make everyone's researching much easier.

How does it work? It's very simple. When you do a search in Google Scholar, either directly or using AUR Library's Extend Search tool, you will always see how many articles cited the article later.

In this example, the article Has feminism changed archaeology? by MW Conkey was published in 2003 and since then has been cited in 22 other articles. When you click on the Cited by link, it will show you the citations.

We see here that the previous article was cited in a book entitled Science and social inequality by S. Harding from 2006, among the 22 others. Google's improvement is to add a click box at the top so that you can limit your search to only within the articles that cited the original article, and not the entire Google Scholar database.

For more information on using Google Scholar, see the page in the AUR Library Information Wiki.

Featured Resource: The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire

2010-06-25T00:36:00.000-07:00

Our new Featured Resource is a website created by the J. Paul Getty Museum that "considers the Spanish conquest of Mexico, [and] European attempts to interpret Aztec civilization through the lens of classical culture, and comparative approaches to the monumental art of empire."

It's a beautiful website, highly interactive with lots of information. You can see it through the main page of the AUR Library Catalog.

You can also see the Archive of Previous Featured Resources.

New Public Lecture Site Added

2010-06-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

We have added a new public lecture site to the Online Public Lectures search tool. Now, you can see the latest lectures given at the world famous Institute for Advanced Study, next to Princeton University.

The Institute has always been one of the greatest research institutions in the world, boasting such faculty as Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Kurt Gödel, Irwin Panofsky, and George Kennan, to mention just a few.

You will find all sorts of topics covered in these lectures. For example, the latest one now is Exp eriments on Animals in Ancient Greece and R ome: Private and Public Science.

You can access AUR Library's Public Lectures search tool from any page in the library catalog, by clicking on Browsing on the menu, then Webcasts and Online Public Lectures (shown above) and then you can select Institute for Advanced Study, or one of the other options.

You can search by keyword, too!

Firefox Plugin for the Extend Search

2010-05-25T04:06:00.000-07:00

If you like the ease and utility of AUR Library's Extend Search tool, we have tried a new experiment to allow you to use it not only within the local catalog, but over the entire web!

The current version works only in Firefox and uses a special plugin. Once you install it, you will be able to select text from any webpage and it will be searched automatically in the Extend Search function.

To begin using it, see the installation instructions. It only takes a few seconds to install.

Let us know what you think and how it can be improved.

Sharing to Facebook and Other Social Accounts Enabled in the Catalog

2010-04-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

We have just implemented a method to share records in the AUR Library Catalog to your Facebook, Twitter, Blog etc. account, We did it using the AddThis button.

When you get to any record in the catalog, you will see

in the right hand-column, and you can use this to make a link into whatever account you may use. Take a look at this record and you will see it under the image of the book cover.

Let us know if you like it!

New Featured Resource: Who Protects Antiquity?

2010-04-19T05:12:00.000-07:00

We have added a new Featured Resource to the catalog: Who Protects Antiquity? was a forum held just a few days ago at the Graduate Center of CUNY, among four distinguished archaeologists who debated the contentious issue of cultural preservation today. Some of their topics are "How nationalism interferes with archaeology," "Current methods for discouraging looting," "The myriad causes of archaological destruction" and many others. There is also a lively Question & Answer sesssion after the main talk.

The Featured Resource also provides a few handy links into the AUR Library catalog and into some particularly useful sources on the web.

Don'f forget our Archive of Featured Resources, which has all of our previous Featured Resources.

Update to Browse the Catalog

2010-04-13T00:32:00.001-07:00

Do you like to browse the shelves of a bookstore or library? Almost everybody does. It's an interesting and highly personal way to get to know what is on particular bookshelves.

Unfortunately, it turns out that browsing the shelves has never been one of the better ways to find information. You wind up missing lots of materials because you cannot always be sure that everything on your topic is placed together on the shelves. There are many reasons why physical books that you might consider to be on a single topic may not be shelved together. (For more information, see the section on Browsing in the AUR Library Information Wiki)

This is the way it has always been, since the days of the ancient Egyptian Empire and the Library of Alexandria, but it is especially true today since there are all kinds of electronic resources that can never exist on any bookshelves at all. The AUR Library Catalog has attempted to fix this however. We have created a method to Browse the Catalog for related items, which we have just updated.

As you see, it's still not a really easy task, but if you read the instructions, it should be much easier. The AUR Library has two classification systems: the Dewey Decimal System (Dewey), and the Library of Congress Classification (LC) and you will need to click on Conversion to Dewey or Conversion to LC to browse everything. Let's see how this works.

Let's say that you are browsing and find that you are interested in Ethics. When browsing the LC numbers you discover that you can click on BJ - Ethics and browse the catalog for our reoords on ethics, either in book form or in electronic form. But you can also click on Conversion to Dewey and discover that in the Dewey Classification, ethics is 170. Now, you are browsing everything in the catalog on ethics. This is because the records in the catalog contain either the Dewey numbers or the LC numbers or both.

There are still other resources that are not available in this way, primarily the big databases of journal articles. Why aren't they included? Because they don't have the LC or Dewey Classification numbers at all, so there is nothing to search. For these materials, you must use other methods. To find out how to search these resources (and more) check out our section on How to Find Information in the AUR Library Information Wiki.

Bibliography of the History of Art

2010-04-07T00:26:00.000-07:00

Times are tough, even for the some of the most important institutes in the world. For several years, the J. Paul Getty Trust has published the famous Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), and many libraries have subscribed to it.

The problems in the economy were shared by BHA, and the Getty tried to find other partners to continue it. They ran into complications, and decided to make it available in an open manner so now everyone can use it. Currently, the database consists of BHA (covering 1990-2007) and the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), covering the years 2008 and part of 2009. Soon, there will also be the Répertoire de la litterature de l'art (RILA), one of the predecessors of BHA, with records that cover 1975–1989.

You can access this database through the AUR Databases page, which you can access from the main page of the catalog.

Please note that this database does not contain full-text sources!

This is an index, which provides summaries for the articles in different journals and books. If you want a specific article you find in BHA, you must still get it. If you need help with this

ASK A LIBRARIAN!

Stop by or send us a message.

Two-Minute Tutorials

2010-03-30T04:43:00.000-07:00

Keep in mind that the AUR Library has put up a lot of 2-Minute Tutorials for you to use if you get into trouble. This is a guarantee that each tutorial will be 2 minutes or less. If one is longer, please complain.

The idea is to give you some basic information at the point you need it. Each page in the catalog has special tutorials that can be turned off or on. A good place to begin is A Quick Overview of the AUR Library Catalog and Extending the Search: Overview. You may also want to take a quick virtual tour of the AUR Library, too!

You can take these tutorials from anywhere, at anytime. And nobody needs to know!

If you want something special or have a comment, send us an email or drop by!

New (old) Video on Google Videos

2010-03-26T04:02:00.000-07:00

One of the best war movies ever made is the 1930 film, "All Quiet on the Western Front," starring Lew Ayres and directed by Lewis Milestone, based on the famous book by Erich Maria Remarque. The book and movie tell the story of a young German soldier who is excited to sign up to fight in World War I but is slowly ground down in the realities of the war. The movie won awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Apparently, it was the first "talking picture" to win an Ocsar.

The Library of Congress restored the print, and put the video into Google Video where anyone can watch it for free. And the AUR Library cataloged it in the catalog, where you can find it in all kinds of different ways, to enjoy it wherever you have a computer and an Internet hookup.

But that's not all you can do. If you use the Extend Search function in the catalog, you can find articles about the movie and reviews and all kinds of related resources.

Oh yes! You can also read the book, located in the AUR Library. There are lots of other movies that you can watch free online. Stop by and ask us.

Latest Updates to the AUR Library

2010-03-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

This is another update from the AUR Library. There are some improvements and new tools in the library since the last message.

At the bottom of this message is a list of other relevant links.

Digital Books

We have just added over 550 new books through our subscription with the Humanities Ebook Project hosted by the American Council of Learned Societies. These are books selected by the Council as being especially important to the academic community. The total number of these books is now 2790 from 250 publishers. According to the Project's information:

"Fields currently covered include Area Studies in the following: Australasian/Oceanian, Byzantine, Canadian, Caribbean, Jewish Studies, Native Peoples of the Americas, Women’s Studies. Historical Studies include African, American, Asian, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian, Economic, European, Latin American, Law, Medicine, Methods/Theory, Middle East, and Science/Technology. HEB also encompasses the fields of Archaeology, Art and Architectural History, Dance and Performance History, Film and Media Studies, Folklore, Literature, Musicology, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology. Forthcoming fields include Bibliographic Studies."

We added over 300 additional books published by the University of Michigan Press and now being made available for free through the HathiTrust Digital Library, following the philosophy of the Open Access movement. Many of these books have been published only recently, and they comprise all topics. This brings to a total of over 650 books made available by the University of Michigan, and many more are expected.

We also added 69 new books from the University of Pittsburgh Digital Press, also made available through the Open Access movement, again, on various subjects. This brings the total number of U Pitt books made available in this way to over 590. These add onto the books made available through the University of California Press, Ohio University Press and others.

The Extend Search has some updates.

-In the Art Images section, we have added an automatic search of RIBA (the database of the Royal Institute of British Architects) which has may images on a wide aray of subjects

-In the Articles & Open Archives section, we have added OpenDOAR. This is a database that allows people to search the contents of over 1500 open access repositories.

-In the Videos section, we have added an automatic search for Movie Review Query Engine, which is a major database with links into movie reviews.

(We are still updating the related Two-Minute Tutorials)

We have also had several questions about statistical information. Since many statistics are government information, much of it is available openly online, but "statistics" is a huge field since there can be statistics for literally everything. As a result, statistics are anything but easy to find. In answer to this, we are experimenting with a page, based on our Do-It-Yourself Research Guide Finder, we have created the Do-It-Yourself Research Guide Finder for Statistics, which is focused on finding research guides for statistical information. Just as with the other Research Guide Finders, this tool does not lead directly to the actual statistics, but to specially designed research guides created by experts in the U.S. and

U.K.

to help lead you to the statistics you want. It functions similarly to the main Do-It-Yourself Research Guide Finder, i.e. enter the topic you are interested in and the finder will search Google in a highly specific way. For instance, if you search "Immigration" the first result is the excellent guide on International Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, while if you go down a few, you will find a pdf file that provides a nice overview of statistics from Teesside University.

Let us know how you like it and how it works for you. Naturally, we are anxious to hear any suggestions for improvements or new ideas.

The latest Featured Resource is the C-SPAN site, which has just made all of their videos available for free on the web. This has also been added to the Videos Extend Search section when you choose Educational Videos. C-SPAN has videos and transcripts on all topics, especially since it includes "Book TV" and "BookNotes." We provide specific examples: a video of Victor Davis Hanson discussing his book A war like no other : how the Athenians and Spartans fought the Peloponnesian War (which we have in the library), and the public intellectuals Christopher Hitchens and George Packer discussing the life and thought of George Orwell.

Some highlights of recently added materials:

Theoi Greek mythology

The Paris Review interview archive

David Rumsey map collection

Biblioteca digitale delle donne

The corporation (movie)

Do-It Yourself Research Guide Finder for Statistics

2010-03-03T01:25:00.000-08:00

Every student and every researcher will probably need statistics eventually on their subject. There are statistics for all kinds of subjects: business, politics, society, education, religion, and on and on. It is easier to work with statistics today, thanks to tools such as Excel and Access.

Getting the statistics is also easier today then ever before, but there is still a problem about finding them. This is an example of some of the limitations of Google searches since it often fails in the face of the needs people have for specific types of statistics.

To solve this, the AUR Library has made an attempt to create a tool that will help you find research guides for subjects of your choice. We have created the Do-It Yourself Research Guide Finder for Statistics. We still use Google, but we search it in a highly-specific manner that you may not have figured out on your own. What you will be retrieving will be research guides created by other organizations in the U.S. and U.K. which have links to statistics resources and all kinds of helpful advice.

Read the instructions there to see what is going on. Let us know how you like it and how it can be improved. While you're at it, you can see the other research guides we have made.

Author Interviews from the Paris Review

2009-12-15T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Paris Review magazine has been a great place to find much of the best in modern literature. Founded in 1953, it has published short stories, poems, photos, and other creative works. Unfortunately, we do not have a subscription to this magazine, but they do publish parts for free on the web, e.g. Benjamin Markovits' story, Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History or a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Interiors.

One highly important section of The Paris Review however, are their interviews with authors. Again, not all of them are available for free, but many of them have been. The AUR Library has created a page that has links into all of those that are available, and made a catalog record for them so that you can find them later.

Want to see their very first interview with E.M. Forster? or with Vladimir Nabokov? or Alberto Moravia? Dorothy Parker or Ezra Pound? Many of them are there.

Give it a try.

Movie Reviews

2009-12-03T04:31:00.000-08:00

We have upgraded our Extend Search function in the catalog to include a quick and easy way to find Movie Reviews.

Now, when you invoke the Extend Search, and then choose Videos, there is a possibility of searching for movie reviews using the Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE). This site has been on the World Wide Web for many years and comprises more than 25,000 movies in over 185,000 reviews culled from newspapers (local, national, and international), entertainment publications, and the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. It is fast, and is very reliable.

You can also find it through the AUR Library catalog.

Keep in mind that you must search the MRQE by the movie title, otherwise you will find zero. When you find zero, there is a link that goes into the Internet Movie Database, where you can search for the actor, find the title of the movie you are interested in, then go back to the MRQE to find the reviews.

Updates to the Library

2009-11-23T03:46:00.000-08:00

This is another update from the AUR Library. There are some improvements and new tools in the library since the last message.
At the bottom of this message is a list of other relevant links.

To begin, I have been working a lot with the the Extend Search function of the catalog. The first new option deals with searching Art Images. This new tool is designed to allow people to easily search many of the main art collections on the web for images, including the Metropolitan, the Hermitage, and the Louvre. For more information, see the blog post: http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-art-images.html
There is also a related Two Minute Tutorial http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/ArtImages/. For more information on the Extend Search, see http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/ExtSearch/

I have created a new page to search the publications of selected think tanks based on the “Think Tank Index” from the University of Pennsylvania and published in Foreign Policy. This project brought together researches from around the world to select the most important think tanks. The library created a tool to search the publications of each of these as easily as possible. This tool is also designed to work with the Extend Search option but can be used alone, too. For more information, see the blog post http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/10/think-tank-publications.html

The European Union made a website that includes all of the documents it has produced for the past 60 years. The library has made a tool to search these materials, also using the Extend Search function. (You begin to see a pattern here!) See the blog post for more information: http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/10/european-union-documents.html

The University of Michigan Press has made over 300 books available for free online (i.e. open access) and made them available through the database HathiTrust many of these are very recent publications (e.g. published since 2000). The relevant ones were cataloged by the library and you can find them by searching "HathiTrust Digital Library" in the library catalog. The University of Michigan Press (now under the management of the University of Michigan Library) will be putting out many more of their books using the open-access method. The University of Utah Press reportedly will be doing the same thing soon. See the blog post for more information: http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/10/university-of-michigan-press.html

The current featured resource: is the African Film Library, which contains full-length films of some of the best African directors, along with shorts and documentaries. In the featured resource description, special attention was given to the movie Lumumba, the exciting true drama (and prize-winning movie) about the former prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was caught up in the US-Soviet Cold War and executed in 1961. This movie can be watched online. All videos not in English contain English subtitles. For more information, see the catalog’s main page: http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl

Finally, our colleague at the Norwegian Institute has put up a site “In Rome” which puts out notices for various events in Rome. http://romenews.wordpress.com/ We have linked to her site from the associated AUR Library Wiki page. http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Around+Rome

A few highlights added to the catalog:
Life Magazine Archives (see the blog post http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/10/life-magazine-online.html)

Plakaty with some great Russian posters (site also in English) http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23987 One example poster, the famous “Did you volunteer?” (among thousands from all time periods) http://eng.plakaty.ru/posters?cid=4&part=D&id=9

A couple of works by Gregory Nagy made available through the web: Pindar's Homer http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23981, and The best of the Achaeans http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/nagy/BofA.html.

StoneWatch the world of petroglyphs http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23985 (StoneWatch is an IFRAO member association that promotes the study of ancient rock art. Its website publishes a CD-atlas, which is composed of several illustrated articles written by different experts and available as PDF files each presenting the rock art of a region.)

The generic radio workshop vintage radio script library http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=23980 (has scripts for over 150 radio plays).

The AUR Library Catalog http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl
The AUR Library Blog http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/
The AUR Library Information Wiki http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/

To see the new:
Books http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?value=STK&marclist=biblioitems.itemtype&and_or=and&excluding=&operator=%3D&op=do_search&type=opac&desc_or_asc=90&orderby=biblio.timestamp
DVDs http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?value=DVD&marclist=biblioitems.itemtype&and_or=and&excluding=&operator=%3D&op=do_search&type=opac&desc_or_asc=90&orderby=biblio.timestamp
Electronic Resources http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?value=ELEC&marclist=biblioitems.itemtype&and_or=and&excluding=&operator=%3D&op=do_search&type=opac&desc_or_asc=90&orderby=biblio.timestamp

(These can all be clicked through the Library Blog, or through the “Quick Links” in the Library Catalog)

See our AUR Library Virtual Exhibitions of Scholarly Resources on the Web. http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/exhibitions/exlist.html
The current one is on Illustration. http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/exhibitions/illustration/

The Featured Resources on the main page of the catalog http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl
Archive of Featured Resources http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/libweb/featuredres.html
The FAQ http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/faq.html
The Information Literacy Workshop http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Academic+Skills+for+Success+in+Scholarly+Research
The Citations/Plagiarism/Copyright Workshop: http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Citations%2C+Plagiarism+%26+Copyright
The Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rome-Italy/The-American-University-of-Rome-Library/99797815326

There’s lots more, too! Everything can be accessed through the main page of the catalog.

Finding Art Images

2009-11-12T04:18:00.000-08:00

The AUR Library has created a new option in the Extend Search function of the catalog. We have added an option to search Art Images. When you click on Art Images in the Extend Search, you will be searching the words you have input into the collections of the Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, National Gallery in Washington, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Corbis Images, the Hermitage, LunaCommons, ArtCyclopedia, and ArtStor. All with the click of a mouse!

Here is an example search for Caravaggio. It would be a good idea to go through the Two-Minute Tutorial also.

SEE ALSO:

The Two-Minute Tutorial for searching Art Images.

More information on the Extend Search function of the catalog.

Think Tank Publications

2009-10-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

What is a

Think Tank?

Earlier in the year, Foreign Policy published an article entitled "The Think Tank Index" by James McGann in (Jan-Feb 2009).

This was a project of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In this project, hundreds of experts from around the world ranked the best think tanks in various ways.

Many of these think tanks put their research materials on the web for free, so AUR Library has created a page that will search these materials as simply as possible. Follow the directions on the page. You can get to this page from the Wiki page on Think Tanks, or by using the Extended Search option, and selecting Government & Policy Documents --> Selected Think Tanks.

We will continue "tweaking" the query in Google to get better results. Give it a try and let us know how it works.

European Union Documents

2009-10-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago, the European Union announced that they had created a website that contains all of its documents dating back 60 years in 23 languages. For more information, see the article in CNN. Obviously, it is a very important resource that at one time, could only be used physically in (apparently) in Brussels, but now everyone can view these materials from anywhere in the world.

The AUR Library has added the EU Bookshop to its Extend Search function. To search it, all you need to do is select text, or click on Search Other Collections in the library catalog, select Government & Policy Documents, and you will see your search result under EU Bookshop. Here's an example for searching Italy. The Two-Minute Tutorial has been updated to reflect this as well.

For more information on the Extend Search of the AUR Library Catalog, you can take another Two-Minute Tutorial.

University of Michigan Press Publications

2009-10-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

There are huge changes taking place in the area of scholarly publishing, and perhaps there is no place where this is more evident than at the University of Michigan Press, one of the most important university presses in the country. It was recently placed under the management of the Univeristy of Michigan library and plans to go almost completely digital very soon. (See the story in Inside Higher Ed)

As a part of this change, they have made many of their books available for free over the web, and the AUR Library has cataloged them, which means that you can find them when you search the AUR catalog. So far, there are over 300, but they have said that there will be over 1,000 available over the next few months.

They are on all topics and include many recent publications. Almost all are highly relevant for AUR students. To see the list of the ones the library chose, you can look under HathiTrust Digital Library. But don't forget the other free university press books we have cataloged as well, and you can refer to the earlier blog post, where we discussed it in more detail.

REMEMBER that when you do the Extend Search and choose Electronic Book Projects, one of the choices is HathiTrust. For more information, see the Two-Minute Tutorial.

See also: the complete list of the Unveristy of Michigan Press

books that are available for free online.

Latest Updates to the AUR Library's Website

2009-10-15T00:26:00.000-07:00

The latest changes to the library websites are in the Academic blogs, which have been modified to function in two ways: to find the latest entries, and to be able to search them by keyword. As an example, go to http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/acadblogsocsciences.html, click on Political Science and you will see Part 1 and Part 2. When you click on either part, you will be getting the latest entries for the selected blogs. If you enter text in the box at the top and click on Keyword, you will be searching these same blogs for the keywords you want.

If you have any specific sites you would like included, please let us know.

We also changed the page for the Latest Education Videos/Public Lectures to work in the same way. These refinements should make these tools more useful to everyone.

Research Guides have become more embedded into the Extend Search through the section Synonyms/Other Tools. I have made this tool to allow people to find research guides based on their own keywords. When you use this tool, in the background is a highly-refined search of Google that I continue to “tweak.” To see this in action, here is an example of how it finds research guides for Charles Darwin.

Click on this link, which goes to the required page in the Extend Search function and then select Research Guides. and you can see the research guide on Darwin from Michigan State University, another one on evolution/creationism at the University of Wisconsin, several history of science guides, and so on. Naturally, you can use any words you want and you can normally find something somewhere. I am currently trying to include research guides from UK institutions since they have some excellent ones, but I have run into some technical problems. The associated Two-Minute Tutorial has also been updated. For a Two-Minute Tutorial on the Extend Search, which is unique to AUR, go to http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/ExtSearch/

The current Featured Resource is the sketchbooks of Charles Martens, artist for the H.M.S. Beagle during the voyage with Charles Darwin. The sketchbooks were digitized by Cambridge University, and it gave me a chance to point out some of the other works available to students online: more through Cambridge, and in the Internet Archive. The previous Featured Resource was the Edgar Allen Poe archive at the University of Texas at Austin. Featured Resources are available on the main page of the library catalog, and you can always see the archive.

Blog entries dealt with PDF Xchange Viewer, which is much superior to Adobe Acrobat Reader, since you can highlight and make notes on the pdf file itself, which is one of the basic reasons why students say they need printed sheets, but no longer if they use this viewer. Another entry discussed the free citation software programs Zotero and Connotea; other posts dealt with concerns over Wikipedia and updates to Google searching. The Library’s Blog is at http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/

Of course, we welcome all comments and suggestions. If you have link or sites you would like to see added somewhere, please let us know!

James Weinheimer
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy

Life Magazine Online

2009-10-08T04:36:00.000-07:00

Life Magazine was one of the most well-known U.S. publications. It was regarded especially highly for its photography, which managed to capture some famous moments.

Life magazine still has a site online but it has put its archive from 1936-1972 into Google Books where everyone can use it for free. The AUR Library has made a record for it in the catalog, adding links, and even adding a search box for you to search the contents by keyword.

There are all kinds of articles. Here are some of the pages from the Cuban Missle Crisis, which gripped the world at the time. You see students practicing their "duck and cover" while their teachers watch.

You can also see some of the earliest pictures of the Elvis Presley phenomenon, summed up in this title: Elvis: a different kind of idol, Presley's impact piles up fans, fads--and fears.

Or, an advertisement for Rayve hair cream shampoo featuring Marilyn Monroe.

Google Search Results Options

2009-10-06T03:26:00.001-07:00

Google has added several new options to rearrange the results of a search. Many people, including me, have felt very limited by being unable to re-sort the results of a Google search, and remaining constrained only to Google's secret algorithm that determines the page rank/relevancy ranking. (For a deeper discussion of how Google works, see Full-Text and Search Engines in the AUR Library Information Wiki)

There is now a Show Options selection.
When you click on it, a menu appears where you can arrange your search in different ways, by Videos, Images, only those in the past hour, and so on.
The newest one they just instituted is a potentially useful one: the Timeline. You can refine by the date merely by clicking on the graphs. It is important to keep in mind that when you click on the date, it is still unclear exactly what Google is searching and displaying.
There is also the strange Wonder Wheel, which may also prove itself to be useful:
In any case, Google seems to be admitting that the single arrangement of search results may not be thoroughly adequate, so they are adapting to what people want.

Latest Education Videos/Public Lectures

2009-10-02T02:41:00.000-07:00

The Library has updated the page that allows you to see the latest educational videos and public lectures in different websites. It functions in two ways: 1) to see the latest educational videos and public lectures using RSS feeds, and 2) to search the same sites using the keywords of your choice.

The idea of making these videos available is so that you can see the latest developments in the scholarly world. For example, anyone can now watch a public lecture given at Princeton University just a few days ago (September 21, 2009) How Small Emergencies Undermine Big Constitutional Principles by Kim Lane Scheppele, professor at Princeton and Yale, debating important issues of constitutional law with two other professors (University Channel). Or a discussion among cultural historians, critics, and composers about the music and influence of the folk singer Bob Dylan held at CUNY Graduate Center on September 17, 2009. See Bob Dylan: American Poet (fora.tv).

When you do keyword searches, a whole world opens up. As only one example, here is a lecture about Pompeii and the Roman Villa given by Carol Mattusch of George Mason University at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) on October 29, 2008. (youtube.edu).

Give it a try. Academia is not all in books, it's also in the relationships and debates among human beings.

PDF Xchange Viewer

2009-09-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

Lots of materials on the web are in pdf files. This is a format created by Adobe Systems primarily to guarantee how a document would print out. You may have noticed that when you look at a regular web page, it can appear quite different on different machines, depending on which fonts are installed, the display set-up, and so on. Printing out can be even more of a challenge. The pdf format solves this.

Eventually, it became a de facto standard. See more information in Wikipedia on Portable Document Format.

PDFs have become very popular for scanning, for example, Google Books uses it almost exclusively. Many people use it just to print however, and this can result in a huge waste of paper. One of the problems of pdfs is that you cannot add notes or mark them up like you can a piece of paper. Or, you can, but you must pay Adobe for the program that allows you to do it.

PDF Xchange Viewer changes all of that. It is a free viewer that is much faster than the viewer put out by Adobe, and it allows you to add your own notes and mark up your text in various ways. Best of all, it is free.

It is available from several sites on the web, but here is the one at CNet, always a good place to trust to download software. Be aware that the creator of a pdf file can disallow people the permission to mark up the text, but most of the time, there is no problem.

Give it a try. Here's an example file that I took from Google Books of a famous book of Edgar Allen Poe's and marked up the title page. While you can view all of the changes in the Adobe Acrobat Viewer, you can't make them or change them.

You may find PDF Xchange Viewer useful and, you might even save a tree or two.

Wikipedia Less Popular?

2009-09-25T01:26:00.000-07:00

In the Monday, Sep. 28, 2009 issue of Time Magazine (article available online), Farhad Manjoo writes about how the explosive growth of Wikipedia seems to be slowing down. Mr. Manjoo is a writer for Salon.com and has researched some of the reasons why there is this slowdown. Some of the reasons are that lots of topics already have been written, but Wikipedia has instituted several controls to make it more reliable, and while this is good development, it has also complicated matters somewhat.

You can also listen to an interview with Mr. Manjoo on NPR where he takes some interesting questions from callers.

For those who are really interested, you can watch a talk given at the conference Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires by Andrew Lih (professor of journalism at the University of Southern California and who wrote The Wikipedia Revolution), where he discusses some of these problems.

Citation Software

2009-09-23T23:44:00.000-07:00

Many scholars use special citation software that does at least some of the work of keeping and maintaining citations semi-automatically. Two of the best known are RefWorks and Reference Manager, which cost quite a bit of money.

There are other possibilities coming out now. While there is a wide choice of free software that can manage references, two of the most popular are Zotero and Connotea. One of the nice things about these tools is that if you don't care for one of them, you can export your citations, and then import them into another that you prefer.

Zotero can only be used with Firefox and is a plug-in. In the first version, you could only save citations to the computer you were on, then export/import them on a flashdrive for use on other computers. In its Beta version, your citations can be saved onto a shared server so that you can use them anywhere, including share them.
Go to the Zotero site.

Connotea is one of the "cloud computing" options that is becoming so popular today. All you have to do is create an account and set a bookmark on your browser, so it works with all browsers. It doesn't seem to have as much power as Zotero, but is simpler to use.
Go to the Connotea site.

There are many more free options available, too. For a list of them, with a few comparisons, see the Wikipedia page Comparison of reference management software. Before doing a lot of work with them, it is best to check the very handy tables on Export/Import formats, to make sure that you can export any work into another one. Look especially for the RIS format, which is the closest to a standard format for this type of information that exists.

Finally, you may want to check a couple of our Two-Minute Tutorials, one on Making Citations, the other on Automatic Citations, both with links into additional information in the AUR Library Information Wiki.

Electronic books

2009-09-18T07:51:00.001-07:00

This is a reminder about how to use the Ebook Library. Many times, you will come across a book such as this one:

When you click on the link, you will see this screen where you are asked for a user name and password.

Full instructions are available using the link into the AUR Library Information Wiki. Just click on that and it should give you the information to access the ebook, plus additional links as well.

Some other ebooks, such as those in the Humanities (formerly History) E-book Project, are currently available only on campus. But many others are available from everywhere.

Welcome to the AUR Library for the 2009 Fall Semester!

2009-09-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

The AUR Library wants to welcome everyone for the 2009 Fall Semester. To the returning students and faculty, this message will summarize the changes in the Library tools from the Spring. Much of this has been mentioned in previous blog posts but are repeated here. To everyone who is new, please read about these changes and at the bottom of this post are a number of links that should answer at least some of your questions.

The first change is designed to make the library catalog easier to navigate. http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl. Many people (including me!) found the main page rather confusing with too many links, so while we have not reduced the number of links, we have changed over to a drop-down menu. This menu has initial selections of "News & Contacts, General Information, Browsing, Research Help, Reserve Readings, Other sites." Moving the mouse over these selections provides links into different parts of the library's tools, e.g. the blog, the wiki, instant messaging, browsing the collection, latest news from around the world, and so on. Please feel free to explore all of these areas. Please note that the Reserve Readings by Professor and Course Number are still under construction.

We have also changed the page for the General News Feeds http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/generalnews.html so that they are more inclusive and easier to use. For this purpose, we have added many newspapers from around the world, plus a number of the most important general news aggregators and blog sites. Read the opening page for more information.

Working in a similar fashion are the Academic Blogs http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/acadbloghuman.html, which now are complete, based on the academic blogs selected by the Academic Blog Portal. The AUR page gives quick access to the newest entries in each field (the previous seven days). You can switch to each academic field by using the selection at the bottom Other Academic Blogs. See the opening page for more information. Please be aware that the keyword search currently does not search as many blogs as the general Academic Blog page, but this will be updated.

To see the latest websites selected by U.K. and U.S. librarians, you have always been able to click on Latest Websites under "Browsing" in the drop-down menu http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/latestwebsites.html. This is still available, but has been updated to work with the new Intute, and now works more like the News Feeds and Academic Blog Portal mentioned above.

A final change using this same method is the page for the Latest news in Business. This is more in the area of an experiment. See: http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/businessnews.html. I have done this based on the usefulness of my own Library Page, which allows me to keep up with the latest developments in the field very easily and that I have found very useful http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/news/librarynews.html.. See the opening page for more information. If you would like to do something similar with any other field, please let us know.

The Extend Search function now includes a Videos option, which allows people to search for videos on selected sites http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/extsearch/extsearchvideos.php. There are a huge number of videos available over the web, but of course not everything. Still, it is definitely s worth a try to find them. Especially, look at SurfTheChannel. For more information on the Extend Search function, see the related 2-Minute Tutorial at: http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/ExtSearch/

The University of Pittsburgh Press has made approximately 500 of their books available for free on the web. The AUR Library has cataloged them all and they are available through the search found on the blog entry at http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/07/university-of-pittsburgh-digital.html

Several 2-Minute Tutorials have been updated and/or created. The latest one created is a library orientation tour and can be viewed at http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/LibraryTour/. For a list of all of the 2-Minute Tutorials with the new and updated ones marked, see http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/tutorials/tutlist.html. If you have any ideas for a new one, please let us know.

The current Featured Resource available on the main page of the catalog is the book, The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson (professor at Harvard University), a link to a public lecture he delivered further extending the argument he makes in his book, plus a link into a related 4-part PBS documentary. Except for the book (available in the library), all are available for free over the web. For those who missed it, the previous Featured Resource was about the famous journalist, I.F. Stone, a video tribute to him, plus links into some of his journalism, much of it freely available. You can see this resource and all previous Featured Resources in the Archives at: http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/libweb/featuredres.html

Of course, we welcome all comments and suggestions. If you have link or sites you would like to see added somewhere, please let us know!

James Weinheimer
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome

Additional Links:
The AUR Library Catalog http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl
The AUR Library Blog http://aurlibrary.blogspot.com/
The AUR Library Information Wiki http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/

See the new:
Books
DVDs
Electronic Resources

These can all be clicked through the Library Blog, or through the Browsing --> Latest Additions option in the Library Catalog)

See our AUR Library Virtual Exhibitions of Scholarly Resources on the Web. http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/exhibitions/exlist.html

The current one is on Illustration. http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/exhibitions/illustration/

The Featured Resources on the main page of the catalog http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl

Archive of Featured Resources http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/libweb/featuredres.html

The FAQ http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/faq.html

The Information Literacy Workshop http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Academic+Skills+for+Success+in+Scholarly+Research

The Citations/Plagiarism/Copyright Workshop: http://aurlibrary.wetpaint.com/page/Citations%2C+Plagiarism+%26+Copyright

The Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rome-Italy/The-American-University-of-Rome-Library/99797815326

There’s lots more, too! Everything can be accessed through the main page of the catalog.

News Sites Added to General News Page

2009-07-24T07:55:00.000-07:00

When you go to the General News: Latest News Page, which searches the latest news in sites around the world, we have added three sites: The Independent (from the United Kingdom), Der Spiegel (from Germany), and Russia Today (from the Russian Federation). So, when you open this page, you will automatically see the latest news from these sites, as well as from the other sites.

Don't forget our other news feeds available through the AUR Library Information Wiki. All of this is available through the Library Catalog by choosing:
Browsing.
==> News.
==> News Feeds.

See also our Academic Blogs!

New Option in Extend Search: Videos

2009-07-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

There is now a new database group in the Extend Search function: Videos. When you select this group, you will be searching different online databases for online videos.

As with the other Extend Search groups, after you select the group, this will search different sites. In this case, Google Video, the Internet Archive, IMovies, Joost, Entertainment Magazine, and LikeTelevision. Hundreds, if not thousands, of movies can be watched in their entirety online, such as Frank Capra's moving Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, such monster movies as The Brain the Wouldn't Die, or film noir classics as D.O.A., or silent classics, such as Nosferatu.

And don't forget to read the 2-Minute Tutorial!

Good viewing!

New searching in the AUR Catalog

2009-07-24T03:35:00.001-07:00

We have made a small, but useful improvement to the AUR library catalog by allowing searchers to limit by format on any page. So, you can limit to only electronic resources, or books and so on.

Before this improvement, it was necessary to go to the Advanced Search page to select the format. You can still go there to make more specific searches, by subject, ordering the results, and so on.

Keyword Search for Academic Blogs

2009-07-20T01:16:00.001-07:00

We have improved our tool to search selected Academic Blogs by adding another page where you can search by keywords of your choice. When you search it, it will go into Google Blog Search to find the latest posts on your topic, and arrange it by date, but you can rearrange it by relevance or limit to different dates.

When you are in Google Blog Search, you can do other searches, but if you want to search the selected Academic Blogs for keywords, this is currently the only way to do it. Further instructions are on the page.

To get into both Academic Blogs, go to the AUR Library Catalog, select Browse on the Menu and run the cursor over Academic Blogs.

Try the Academic Blogs Keyword Search.

University of Pittsburgh Digital Editions

2009-07-10T00:21:00.000-07:00

Several university presses have made some of their books available for free over the Web. The University of Pittsburgh Press has recently done this for over 500 of their books! With this, they are taking a step along with the University of California Press and many university presses, who are making at least some of their books available.

The AUR Library has put records for all these books into the catalog and you can find them by searching for University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions.

To search other free university press books available in different ways, you can search for escholarship editions and you can use the Extend Search function to select Electronic Book Projects and then Free University Press Books.

Upgrade of Extend Search

2009-07-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

We have upgraded the Extend Search function so that you can revise your search over all of the databases. For example, if you search for Peter Jennings in the sections Articles and Open Archives, you will see a box where you can change your search over all of the databases listed there.

To find out more about the Extend Search function of the AUR Library Catalog, you can take a quick, Two-Minute Tutorial.

New Featured Resource: I.F. Stone

2009-06-19T04:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

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.

New MLA Citation Decision

2009-05-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

The Modern Languages Association (MLA) provides some of the most important guidelines for citing sources. According to Print Goes Out of Style from the Scholarly Kitchen blog (hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing), the latest, 7th edition of the MLA handbook for writers of research papers, states:

"the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry"

also:

"the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise.

Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs..."

This represents quite a change, and the blog entry talks about the importance of Google on this, where, if a site changes, Google will provide the new URL because it is constantly being updated.

Personally, I don't think this is a very good idea, especially for sites that disappear completely. There is the Internet Archive (which archives the web!) and in their page the Wayback Machine, you can look for specific pages, so long as you know the URL.
See Disappearing Websites in the AUR Library Information Wiki for guidelines on how to use the Wayback Machine.

So, my recommendation is to continue to put in the URLs for items on the web. It can't hurt, takes only a split-second with copy & paste, and it really might come in handy!

New Look for the Catalog

2009-05-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

We have been wanting to change the main page of the catalog for some time but we waited until the end of the Spring 2009 semester. Several found our main page to be too busy, and to be honest, we did too.

The links are still there as always, but we have placed them into a drop-down menu which should make for easier navigation, and people should have a better idea of what is available.

Now, even though there is still the same information available to you, it may all be easier to find. Explore what is there. There's a lot designed to help you succeed.

Adding the VIAF

2009-05-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

The Virtual International Authority File, or VIAF is slowly being built and is becoming very useful. The VIAF is a specialized tool being created by librarians around the world to share their controlled vocabulary. To find out about controlled vocabulary and its importance to research, see the Two-Minute Tutorial on controlled vocabulary.

The main advantage of the VIAF for students at AUR is that it can help you search Italian catalogs because Italians often use different forms of names than Americans. As only one example, if you are interested in the previous president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin, in the U.S., you must use:
Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich, 1931-2007
but in Italy, you must use:
Elʹcin, Boris Nikolaevič, 1931-2007

This means that you won't find anything in Italian catalogs if you search under the form of name used in the U.S., while the Italians won't find anything in American catalogs. How can you possibly know this?

The VIAF attempts to fix this, and at least you can find the correct forms of names to search Italian catalogs. Of course, this also can be used by Italians to search U.S. catalogs. There are other forms included as well.

We have added the VIAF to our Extend Search. To find out how to use the VIAF to help in your research, take the Two-Minute Tutorials on Finding & Using Synonyms and Related Tools and the other on Searching and Accessing Materials in Roman Libraries.

They will definitely be worth your while. This is another important step to making the World Wide Web much more useful to scholarship and society.

Italian Newspapers Online

2009-04-30T02:44:00.000-07:00

ITALIAN
LANGUAGE
NEWSPAPERS

The AUR Library has made a page that brings together the major Italian-language newspapers so that it is easy to keep up with the news. See the page.

An additional feature we have provided is the possibility of an immediate translation into English of each newspaper, using GoogleTranslate. Naturally, automatic translation is far from perfect, but this can still be useful to help you get the basic information out of a webpage quickly.

Also, when you are looking at the translated page, you can run your cursor over the text and see the original in a pop-up box. If the translation isn't correct, you can fix it, and help improve the machine.

If you look at the GoogleTranslate page, you will see a list of all of the languages they translate out of and into. There is also a button you can place on your toolbar, so that you can translate any page quickly and easily.

You can get to this page through the main page of the AUR Library Catalog looking under the QuickLinks and clicking on Italian Newspapers, or through the Wiki, from our page of Newspaper Feeds.

Spooky Radio Plays

2009-04-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Orson Welles performs a scene from
The Count of Monte Cristo

Before the days of television, people would sit together and listen to the radio, where all sorts of comedies, tragedies, music, and other entertainment took place.

One of the most famous of these radio groups was the Mercury Theatre on the Air, founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. They had some other great actors with them, performing radio plays as The Count of Monte Cristo, Dracula, A Christmas Carol, and their most famous, War of the Worlds.

Well, someone has been kind enough to place all of these radio plays on the web, and we can all enjoy them for free, especially now that the AUR Library has cataloged them.

So, if you have a free evening, turn off the lights at home and listen to Dracula. You might find out they did a pretty good job!

Latest Updates in the Library

2009-03-24T04:38:00.001-07:00

There have been several changes in the library since the last entry.

First, there are now lots of 2-Minute Tutorials being created to help you succeed in your studies. We are definitely keeping these two minutes or less because we figure that everybody has 2 minutes to devote to learning something new. There are currently two ways to get into these tutorials. First, there is a complete list of them, but secondly, in every page of the catalog, there are some that are relevant. You can always click on "Show Tutorials for this Page" and the relevant tutorials will appear. You can also hide them by clicking in the same spot "Hide Tutorials for this Page."

Try them. They are basic, but will probably answer many of your question, plus there are plenty of links into additional information in the AUR Library Information Wiki or other pages on the web if you want something more. If you would want some made specially, let us know.

Another update is the creation of the New Books Section, which is in the downstairs lounge. All new books will be shelved there temporarily before they go to their permanent place in the stacks.

You may be interested in our latest Featured Resource, displayed on the main page of the catalog. This one goes to an online exhibition by the Library of Congress in celebration of Women's History Month.

Welcome to the AUR Library! And the Latest Updates

2009-01-26T01:18:00.000-08:00

To all new and returning students and instructors, welcome to the AUR Library. There are several updates to discuss.

Firstly, and very nice indeed, is the new method of access to the CSI databases. It is now based on IP address and, when you are on campus, you can simply click into the database you want and no sign in is necessary. Again, you can access the databases through the AUR catalog and look for the logo:

Underneath, you can click on Databases or Electronic Journals List. For more information on the electronic resources, you can always click on How does this work?

Off-campus access has still not be determined by CSI. We will announce the method as soon as we receive it.

Secondly, the Extend Search function of the AUR catalog has been improved. The Extend Search function has been developed by the AUR Library to make searching in other selected databases easier (for more information see Extending the Search in the AUR Library Information Wiki). Now, all you have to do is select the text that you want and the following will appear:

Click on this and your search will be made in a variety of databases, organized by:

Other Roman Libraries
World Library Catalogs
AUR Digital Materials
Electronic Book Projects
Articles and Open Archives
Synonyms/Other Tools
General Search Engines

Click on any of these groups and the databases will appear below. For example, if you click on Other Roman Libraries, you will see the following databases:
SBN | URBS | Centro | Public Libraries | Senato | URBE

Click on any of these databases, and the database will appear below where the search has already been don. From here, you can browse and revise the search if you need to. Again, for full instructions, see Extending the Search.

You can also search directly in the Extend Search by clicking on Search Other Collections from any page in the catalog.

We are still revising some of the help screens. Also, this is complicated searching and may take some time, so you may have to wait a bit for the searches to complete.

Keeping Current in Your Field

2009-01-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

ARL (the Association of Research Libraries) recently came out with a report entitled Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication. Among other findings, there is a list of the most popular websites for scholars to stay current in their fields. In the Humanities, one of the most important of these sites is called Humanities and Social Sciences Online or H-Net.

H-Net is "an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web." It carries peer-reviewed essays, reviews, and announcements for upcoming events. The site is divided into many individual lists and, as with all such lists, some are more active than others.

Another section is H-Net Reviews. This section provides book reviews--including in-depth ones--of books found of interest to those in the list. There is also the possibility of others' comments to the book review, as well as to any post on the list.

One example of a book in the AUR collection is The Italian legacy in Washington, D.C. : architecture, design, art and culture / edited by Luca Molinari and Andrea Canepari -- Milano : Skira, 2007. with this online review.

Finally, if there is a list you would like but it is not there, you can start one yourself! The ARL report gives many other new and interesting ways that scholars can communicate. One of these is what they term the "academic hub" which is a portal for a scholarly society or professional membership organization. these attempt to be a "one-stop shop" for the most important information. One example is Poynter Online, created by the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and teachers of journalists.

AUR Library in Facebook

2008-12-17T01:34:00.000-08:00

The AUR Library in Evans Hall has created a Facebook page where you can keep up with the latest news, share information and so on. For example, this blog automatically feeds into the Facebook page.

We want to keep this current and you can help us. Please tell us any ideas you may have or would like to share.

New Extend Search Option

2008-12-03T07:49:00.001-08:00

The Extend Search function in the AUR Library Catalog has added an option: Scirus. The Scirus database has hundreds of millions of pages of "scientific" information on the web, but "scientific" should not be read too literally here. There are lots of resources on literature, art, archaeology, classics, and so on.

One part of Scirus is the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), which provides access to many dissertations and theses from around the world. Searching is still a little strange, but there are some excellent and important sources in this database, the vast majority for free.

Give it a try!

Google Books and Publishers

2008-11-19T01:49:00.000-08:00

Beginning in 2004, Google began scanning the books in several libraries including Stanford and the University of Michigan. Later, many other libraries joined the project. Currently, Google says that they have 7 million books searchable through the project. Many of these books can be viewed for free, and many others can be downloaded as well.

For more information on Google Books and how the AUR Library
and its catalog make these materials available to users,
see the AUR Library Information Wiki.

The problem with all this has been that the publishers believe Google has been violating their copyright and has taken Google to court. In a nutshell, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain and can be copied; orphan works are materials that were copyrighted and the copyright holder cannot be contacted, or perhaps it is unclear if a copyright was renewed; and today, copyright is based on the death date of the author and not on the date of publication. In other words, copyright is highly complicated.

Recently, the Google Books case was settled with an agreement that could have wide consequences. Essentially, the publishers have agreed to let Google display 20% of every book that is in copyright, and Google will begin to let people buy access rights to individual books they want, and libraries will be able to pay money to get full access to the books. (Printing and downloading are different issues)

So, it could all be a new world for making vast amounts of information available to the public , while making Google a lot of money and it will become the largest online book retailer in the world. (See Paul Courant's article (librarian at the University of Michigan): The Google Settlement - From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore for a good discussion). Lots of librarians are against the settlement; others are for it. For the other side, you can read Harvard's librarian Robert Darnton's reply in Harvard's newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

Anyway, the settlement still has to be approved by a court and then work can begin. Finally, what does this have to do with the AUR Library?

Unfortunately, very little because this settlement will work only from U.S. computers since the agreement deals with U.S. law, but as in so many things, there will be consequences for the rest of the world. The discussion is far from over, so let's wait and see.

See also: the summary of the agreement.

Copyright & Fair Use Guidelines

2008-11-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

A new and important online publication has just been released: The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. This document contains guidelines about fair use, and it is written not from the normal viewpoint of a publisher or lawyer, but from the viewpoint of an educator. The legal advisory board is very impressive, and was coordinated by the Media Education Lab, at Temple University, and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the Center for Social Media, both at American University. It is also not aimed only at media literacy, but is a general discussion of the concept of fair use, which has always been one of the more nebulous areas of intellectual property law.

It is written in a highly readable, and more importantly: a practical style, plus, there are three versions of the guidelines: as a pdf download, as a webpage, and even as a streaming video. The AUR Library has cataloged this important publication, and it can be accessed through the AUR Library Catalog.

AUR Library Virtual Exhibition - Illustration

2008-11-11T01:42:00.000-08:00

The AUR Library has created a second virtual exhibition of scholarly resources on the web. This exhibition has the topic of Illustration on the Web, and its purpose is to attempt to show just a few of the works on illustration, and examples of illustration, that are available on the web.

The areas are divided into: Books, Bindings, Children's Books, Humor, Landscape & Architecture, Advertising, Medicine, Natural History, Politics, and Activism. Some highlights of the materials available are the haunting graphic novel God's Man by Lind Ward (1929), Thomas Nast's political cartoons, Description de l'Egypte from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, to posters of the Spanish Civil War, plus many more.

Don't forget our previous exhibition dedicated to Rome and Italy.

Both exhibitions are available through the AUR Library Catalog by clicking in the Quick Links area.

New Trial Databases

2008-10-30T03:17:00.001-07:00

Please try our new Trial Databases that we have temporary access to through our arrangement with our consortiium AMICAL. Currently these work only on campus, but they are available for all students, staff, and faculty. These can be accessed from any page of the library catalog.

"ARTstor is a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes."
ARTstor is available to AUR users until the end of 2009.

eHRAF (Human Relations Area Files) is housed at Yale is provided in two parts: World Cultures and Archaeology. These are available until Dec. 31, 2008.

"eHRAF World Cultures is a cross-cultural database that contains information on all aspects of cultural and social life. The annually-growing eHRAF database is unique in that the information is organized into cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text sources are subject-indexed at the paragraph level."
"eHRAF Archaeology is a cross-cultural database containing information on the world's prehistory. This annually-growing eHRAF database is organized by archaeological traditions. The full-text sources are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. eHRAF Archaeology is a unique resource designed to facilitate comparative archaeological studies.?

Search Encyclopedias by Keyword

2008-10-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

The AUR Catalog has just instituted a new capability in the Extend Search function. When you select Gale Virtual Reference Library or Oxford Reference Online, you can search multiple reference works by keyword.

This ability should make it much easier to find the information within these reference books. Please note that records for all of these digital book are in the AUR Catalog.

Please note that you must be logged-in to the CSI materials for this to work, and the computer will ask for your CSI barcode.

You can access this by clicking on Search Other Collections from any page, or more specifically, by using the Extend this Search when looking at a specific record. You can always click on any of the links for additional information.

ITunes U

2008-10-08T02:39:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting developments in academia is the creation of ITunes U. (Connect to it most easily through the AUR Library Catalog, which takes you to a page with various options) ITunes U has a fabulous number of public lectures, entire courses, and other information created by colleges, universities, and other educational institutions from around the world. Several U.S. universities have been on ITunes U for some time, such as UC Berkeley, but Yale has also gotten involved recently, and now, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England are adding many of their own courses. See the article in the Guardian for more information. Apple also has a nice video discussing ITunes U.

All of these can be downloaded to your portable device and listened or watched when you want. Finally, they are all free. They are on all topics, from the highly technical to basic overviews of subjects.

Also included are many videos from institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and even some television stations, such as WGBH.

September 2008 issue of the AUR Library Newsletter

2008-09-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

Please read our AUR Library Newsletter, which discusses some of the developments in the library. There is also a featured database section, along with helpful hints about pages in the Library Information Wiki and the catalog.

See the latest issue (no. 3, Sept. 2008), and links to earlier issues, at the AUR Library Newsletter webpage.

New Fall Semester 2008

2008-09-18T02:07:00.000-07:00

We want to welcome everyone to the AUR Library for the Fall 2008 semester! There is a lot new going on:

the room downstairs has been refurnished and turned into a student lounge. It's a lot more comfortable and attractive than it was
there are lots more computers in the library now and they are located all over
the wireless network has been improved and works inside and outside the library
we have a nice widescreen television where you can watch videocassettes and DVDs
lots of changes to the catalog, which has improved functions. Remember, you can login to the catalog using your ID number and your student ID card, plus the default password: fall2008. Please change your password when you access your account.

Soon we will be issuing the new AUR Newsletter. In the meantime, you can read the earlier ones.

New Electronic Reference Books Added

2008-04-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

Through our relationship with the College of Staten Island, AUR has access to many electronic resources. Two of the most important of these resources are the Gale Virtual Reference Library and Oxford Reference Online. There are hundreds of reference books in these databases comprising thousands of volumes. The problem is, the only way to know about these wonderful reference sources is to get into the CSI database list and go to either "G" for Gale Virtual Reference Library or "O" for Oxford Reference Online. Of course, no one does this.

The AUR Library added records for these resources to the online catalog some time back, but major additions have taken place, especially in the Gale reference library. To see a list of the new materials cataloged, go to the main page of the AUR Library catalog, look for "Latest Additions to the Catalog" and click on Electronic Resources. You will see that we added almost 700 reference sources that comprise a total of over 1500 volumes. (There are other resources as well) You can also see complete lists of all of the Gale reference library or Oxford reference online by searching them in the Advanced search and searching Gale virtual reference library or Oxford reference online premium.

For the study-abroad students, these materials can be used only in the library, but if you find an interesting title, you can see if you have access to it through your home school. For example, students from Broome Community College can use the AUR study-abroad page to discover that they have access to the Gale Virtual Reference Library through their home school.

All topics are represented. As only one example, here is the record for the 17 volume reference work Women in world history.

New Additions to Selected Journals List

2008-04-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

AUR has added some new additions to its online journals. The first is The Globalist, which discusses various aspects of globalization.

The topics it covers are: Children, Companies, Culture, Development, Diplomacy, Economy, Environment, Finance, Health, History, Markets, Media, Music, People, Politics, Religion, Security, Sports, Technology, and Women in various parts of the world.

The second magazine we have added is Eurozine. This is from their webpage: Eurozine is a network of European cultural journals, linking up 70 partner journals and just as many associated magazines and institutions from nearly all European countries. Eurozine is also a netmagazine which publishes outstanding articles from its partner journals with additional translations into one of the major European languages.

This is a very handy magazine that can keep you up with the latest intellectual trends in Europe, with articles by some of its most famous scholars. Many of the articles are in their original languages, but there is always a summary in English available.

How to Find These Magazines
To find these--and other--selected magazines, you can either search the AUR Library catalog or browse our Selected Journals list. As always happens, the links from the Selected Journals list go into the Library catalog, where you can find additional information and links, including a link into the journal if it is available from the College of Staten Island.

The AUR Library Catalog Works with Answer Tips

2008-04-07T00:32:00.000-07:00

The AUR Library Catalog now works with Answer Tips from answers.com. This should make it easier for users to understand some of the terms found in the catalog records.

It is still not perfect, and more information can be found in the AUR Library Information Wiki page. Mainly, it currently does not work with any text that is linked. But it also does fairly well on some items. In this record, you can click on the names of some of the people work.

For example, did you know what prosopography means? Find the word in this record and double click on it. It will even pronounce it for you!

Second Issue of AUR Library Newsletter

2008-03-31T03:33:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-07T01:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-06T03:17:00.000-08:00

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.

Free e-books through Gutenberg-e!

2008-02-20T00:06:00.000-08:00

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, there is more and more ferment in the world of scholarly publishing. A person who has been especially busy is one of the great historians of the book, Robert Darnton, who has recently become the head of the library at Harvard University. Recently, it was announced that a number of books selected by the American Historical Association are now being made available through Open Access publishing.

For more information on the history of scholarly publishing and how it is changing, see The Scholarly Publication Process from the AUR Library Information Wiki.

The official announcement is on the homepage of the American Historical Society. Many people feel that open access publishing is unsustainable, but others feel that it is the unstoppable wave of the future. The announcement makes these problems clear.

Anyway, HOW DO I FIND THESE MATERIALS?
There is a list available from the AHA, but I have discovered that they are also findable through WorldCat, by searching "gutenberg-e.org" as a keyword. Currently, there are only 52 titles, but they are on all different topics, from art to culture to radium. Click on the link that says
Web Resources: gutenberg-e.org

There will probably be easier ways to find these materials in the future. They are supposed to be included in the Humanities E-Book project (AUR has a subscription), but they don't seem to be there yet.

AUR is making its own attempts at open access publishing and we hope to make an announcement soon.

First Issue of the AUR Library Newsletter

2008-02-13T00:52:00.000-08:00

The first issue of the AUR Library's newsletter has been issued. There is a lot of news about some of initiatives we are taking. It also points out some pages of interest in the Library Information Wiki.

Download a version at the AUR Library Newsletter homepage.

Search All Catalogs in Rome with One Search!

2008-02-11T01:25:00.000-08:00

We have added the last of the major catalogs in Rome to our Extend Search section of the catalog: the combined catalog of the Senate Library and the Chamber of Deputies. As with all of the other Extend Search options, select the search that you want to do, enter the text (or select it when possible), click Find, and a new window will open up with the search results.
Now, by selecting the options under Roman libraries, you can search all the books in all the major libraries in Rome that are available to you.

Don't forget to click on the name of the catalog to get more information about searching, access information, and links to the websites of the individual libraries.

To get more information on how the Extend Search option works, you can always click on the link that says "How does this work?"

New Resources from Intute

2008-02-05T07:16:00.000-08:00

We have added a search box to search Intute, a free online service that "provides access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources." The database currently has over 120,000 records. To search Intute (and lots of other databases) use the Extend Search function in the catalog.

New Semester, New Resources

2008-01-24T03:25:00.001-08:00

Welcome to all our new students and faculty. Please feel free to participate in this blog and to see some of the postings that discuss the new projects going on.

There are a couple of new resources we have built that may be of interest. One is an extension of our News Feeds, which is a selection of Online popular magazines. The selection is primarily from the list compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education's Art & Letters Daily. They have been organized very roughly by subject.

Another new development is to the Extend Search in the Library catalog, where an excellent resource was added: Intute. According to their site, it is "a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources." It has shown to be an excellent resource.

For more information about the Extend Search capability in the AUR library catalog, see the AUR Information Wiki.

Audio Books

2007-12-05T03:59:00.000-08:00

Getting tired of listening to loud music on your Ipod all day long? There is a choice. There are many free items that you can download to your Ipod and listen to. The AUR Library Catalog helps you to do this in several ways.

Audiobooks

These are books that you can listen to. Many of these can be bought from Amazon.com or other websites, but there are many free ones as well, where volunteers read their favorite books. If you want, you can participate as well. AUR has cataloged only a couple of these websites, but they have a good number of books.
These are all books that are in the public domain, so there is Arthur Conan Doyle, but not Stephen King.

Online classes

Want to take ANOTHER class? There are a lot of free ones on the web (for not credit, of course!)
You can "attend" the class when they take a video of it and put it on the web the next day. The best one is at UC Berkeley where you can watch the class as if you were there. Some of these are audio only.
Course materials
Another development is something called OpenSourceWare, where education institutions agree to share their education materials. The two major contributors at this moment are at Open CourseWare Consortium and The World Lecture Hall, both of which include course materials from around the world. If you want to take a course in economics as taught in Vietnam, the materials and lecture notes are all there.

Webcasts & Podcasts

2007-11-05T01:59:00.000-08:00

Some of the best parts of going to a university is that you can listen to lectures by some of the greatest experts in the world. Sometimes these are lectures by the local faculty, but they also may be lectures by visiting experts. To hear these lectures just a few years, you had to be at the university and sitting in the right place at the right time. Today, it's completely different.

Many universities and other organizations are recording their public lectures and putting them online for others to watch for free. The topics range everywhere: from architects discussing the latest matters, to politics, to philosophy, popular culture and so on.

How do I find these webcasts and podcasts?

AUR has added some of these sites to its catalog. The easiest way to find these records is just to go to the main page of the catalog and click Webcasts & Podcasts. From these records, you can go to the sites selected by the AUR library. Many of them are from universities around the world (e.g. Harvard, the New School, MIT, etc.) but others are from scholarly institutions, such as The Royal Society in London, or the Library of Congress. Still others are from news organizations, such as Frontline, or from think tanks.

Unfortunately, AUR can only make these materials available at an institutional level, that is, it answers questions such as "What are the latest webcasts from Princeton University?" but if you want to search specific webcasts by subject or author, you should try University Channel and/or LearnOutLoud.com where they attempt to allow you to search for individual webcasts by subject or author. LearnOutLoud.com includes many materials that you have to pay for, but you can click on Freestuff at the top. These sites do not add all that AUR has added, however.

Finally, most of these lectures can be downloaded to an Ipod.

Think tank publications

2007-10-18T05:02:00.000-07:00

When you are doing your research, don't forget to check the Think Tank publications.

What is a think tank? It is an institution that publishes information on a whole variety of topics, mostly trying to influence policy decisions. Normally, a think tank has a specific viewpoint: liberal or conservative. Their publications are normally biased toward one side or another, but they are reliable works and collected by every library.

Luckily, many of these think tanks are putting their resources on line for free! AUR is cataloging them and you can see the discussion on the Wiki here. And don't forget about the reports from the Congressional Research Service from the Library of Congress! They are on many topics and are made to be concise and easy to read.

New Place, New Catalog, New Everything!

2007-08-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

This semester is going to be one of changes. First, we have a beautiful, new library very close to the main campus. There are gorgeous grounds, and lots of space for more books. We have ideas for how to use this space to the best benefit of the students, but please, give us some ideas!

We also have upgraded the look of our catalog, so it looks completely different. It is designed to work with the catalogs of other libraries in Rome and in the world, as well as to help you surf the materials in the World Wide Web more effectively. It also works with the Library Information Wiki, which has lots of information designed to help you.

There are now online workshops on Information Literacy and Citations.

Finding Images

2007-04-30T01:01:00.000-07:00

We have made a new research guide about finding images on the web. You can find it at http://www.galileo.aur.it/opac-tmpl/npl/en/pages/images.html.

It has some of the best research guides on finding images that we have found, plus an excellent article from Information Today entitled "Looking for Good Art." There are a lot of images on the web. Of course, what you can download is often lower-quality, and you would still need to get permission if you formally published them.

And don't forget to give the proper citations!

Citations and Their Power

2007-03-14T05:19:00.001-07:00

Citations and Their Power
It is important to cite your sources for a couple of important reasons: to avoid plagiarism, and to let others know where you found the source of your information. But in addition to this, well done citations are an important tool in the hands of a researcher. To see how they can work, let's take a hypothetical situation. Say you are interested in researching the topic "fascist ideology in Italy" and you find an article that is exactly what you want. The problem is, it's from 1978.

From your article, you can look at the author's list of citations and find books and articles, but of course, those will all be from before 1978. You can guess that there are probably other materials that have been written in the meantime. How can you find those? Wouldn't it be great if citations worked not only in the past, but in the future as well? That is, wouldn't it be great to know the papers and books that cited your article after 1978?

There is such a tool, and it's called a citation index. They are relative latecomers to bibliography and the first scholarly one (The Science citation index) was not published until 1963. Since that time, there have been many other citation indexes created. Unfortunately, AUR does not have access to any citation indexes. But, there are new tools that index citations: the search engines such as Google, and its spinoff: Google Scholar. It's important to realize that Google's power comes from citations. How does this work?

Google works by weighing those websites with many links/citations to them more heavily (that is, it places the sites cited by others toward the top). The idea seems reasonable: an item that is cited more heavily would be better and more important, but this is often not the case. People work together and agree to place reciprocal links on their own pages. Companies will pay owners of websites to place links to the companies' sites. They will do almost anything to get to be number 1 in Google! It's life or death for a business: whoever is number 50,000 in Google may as well not even be in there. For more information, you can read How Google Works at Braintique.com

Google Scholar works similarly to Google, but it is aimed at scholarly literature. You can search Google Scholar to get a list of articles and books, e.g. Lega Nord. If you scroll down, you will see a book cited: The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies.
You can click on this link and see part of the book, but you can also see where this book has been cited later, in this case: 2002 in the article Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration? in Comparative Political Studies.
You can click on this link, but many times it will say that they want you to spend money for the article. This is where you can search something else.

Journal List
To see if you can get the article, copy the name of the journal (Comparative Political Studies) go back to the AUR catalog and click on Journals on the left side under the College of Staten Island logo.
This will open a list of all of the journals that we have access to. When it opens, paste in the name of the journal and you will find out if we have access to this journal and what the coverage is.
In this case, we have it going from 1968 to the present and therefore, you can see this article.

This is the main way to work with citations: find a book or article, then find who else cited those articles later. Do the same with the citations you find in these books and articles, find where they have been cited and so on and so on. Most of the time, you'll find plenty of material.

Why is This So Difficult?
Can this be made easier? Yes, but it already is easier than it used to be when everything was in paper. Just this little search that we demonstrated would probably have taken a few hours 20 years ago.

But we are trying to make it even easier.

Working With Citations

2006-11-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

Everybody loves to hate citations. They are a lot of work to create and organize. But when they are done correctly, they are actually a very powerful tool for research. How do they work? But first, let's discuss how to get some answers to those questions: how do I cite this book/journal article/website ....?

One way of getting these citation guides is to get into the catalog and click Help. This will get you into the AUR Library Wiki and you can either scroll through the pages or search for citation guides and you will find this page: Citation Guides . Here you will find a list of links to citation guides created at some other schools. These are the guides that we feel are the best. There are normally lots of examples to help you create your citation. There is also a separate guide for electronic resources--something that is still rather new. If you are having trouble, or there is a format that you can't find, e.g. a map, don't hesitate to ask us.

You can also search in the AUR catalog for Style manuals.

"Automatic" Citations
A real advantage today is that often, you can get citations automatically. Citations for most books can be gotten from WorldCat, while most journal databases offer a way to get citations easily. See the AUR Help Wiki for more information.
It's important to realize that these citations are often incomplete, and you need to add extra information such as page numbers, translators, or change information for different versions of the text, e.g. electronic. You are still responsible for any citations you give.

Still, this can come in very handy and give you 75% or more of a citation. If you're lucky, you might get 100%!

In the next post, we'll discuss how citations are not only a pain, but how they can help you do your research. That is, if they are done well.

Research Guides

2006-10-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

Every library has guides to help their students do their research. These can be anything from highly in-depth guides to more general ones. Now that the internet is easily available, it is possible to simply link to guides on the web created by other libraries. Very simple.

The problem is that every library does not have access to the same materials. This is especially true today of the electronic databases, which contain thousands of journals. If two libraries subscribe to two different electronic databases, often they have access to completely different journals. This is why AUR's research guides are a little different. These research guides help you to find materials suggested by other libraries and then discover if those materials are available here.

When you click on a research guide, you will see a page with three frames. The top frame gives access to the different guides at selected universities. When you select one, e.g. Johns Hopkins, it will load into the lower left frame. From here, you can read their recommendations, tips, etc. and if they suggest a database, you can compare it with our list, which is in the lower-right hand side. From here, you can go directly into the database.

Here is an example of how it works. Johns Hopkins has suggested ABI/Inform, Academic Search Premier, and Applied Science & Technology Abstracts. You can check with our resources and discover that we have the last two, but not ABI/Inform.

If you want individual journals, you can search Electronic Journals through CSI, and there are links to our catalogs.

Finally, clicking on Help in the top frame reloads the first page back into the lower left frame, and you can also click on Search Google for Other Guides, which will do an automatic search for library guides on the topic you have selected.

The guides are always available when you click on Help in the Current catalog. Click here to work with them now.

Changes in the Library

2006-10-04T04:38:00.000-07:00

What is a blog?

There are several changes in the AUR Library from the previous semesters, including adding a blog. Here, we will try to inform our users on new services in the AUR library, new books or websites, or perhaps simply some interesting news.

The first important development is that the library has changed! There is a different classification for the new books: the Library of Congress Classification. The old books still have their previous numbers, but we will be reclassifying them. To find the books, now you need a Library Map, which shows where everything is.

There is also a new catalog, which contains all books received after July 2006, and lots of electronic books. To see some of the differences, search Mark Twain in the old catalog, and you will find one book: The Innocents Abroad. Search for Mark Twain in the new catalog, and you will find five works, all electronic (you can tell by the little laptop computer), but in this case, look especially at the one named [Selected works].

When you look at the record, you will see a link called: Link to Resource. When you click that link, you will go to another site, which has links to almost all of Twain's works, and almost all of them are available for free. Twain's books are not the only things that are available in this way--literally thousands of authors and tens of thousands of books are available if you search for Digital Book Index.

All we can ask is to please, please, please, be careful of printing these types of resources. Ask us in the library. We can all save a lot of trees if we work together.

There are a lot more changes. These are only the most visible ones. Many more posts will follow.