September 2008 issue of the AUR Library Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is an example from the catalog.

New Plugin Allows You to Search the AUR Catalog

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

What is this all about?

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
















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
























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

AUR Library Holds its First Virtual Exhibition!

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

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

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

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

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

AUR and the Open Access Movement

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

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

Free e-books through Gutenberg-e!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!