OECD Publications Added

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

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

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

1. 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.



2. 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!


3. 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!

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:

• A Tour of the AUR Library
• A Quick Overview of the AUR Library Catalog
• Records in the AUR Catalog and How to Use Them
• Extending the Search: Overview 

 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

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)

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

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.