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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
