Latest Education Videos/Public Lectures

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do we need people like him? You decide.

Keep Current with Academic Blogs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Subject Browse Implemented

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

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

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

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

New MLA Citation Decision

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

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

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

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

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!