History News

New Trial: Cambridge Histories Online

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:10:32 -0500

Temple Libraries currently have running, through 6/27/08, a trial to Cambridge Histories Online. This sub-collection of the larger Cambridge Collections Online, which also includes the already available Cambridge Companions titles, includes digital access to over 250 volumes of the vaunted "Cambridge Histories" series published since 1960. Find more information about Cambridge Histories Online here.

Open Access Journals

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:24:07 -0500

Beginning in the 1980s but accelerating over the last decade, libraries have been unable to keep pace with the skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals. For both private and publicly-supported research universities the publication "circle" looks something like this: 1) scholar obtains money to conduct research, perhaps through government grants or internal, tuition-supported funding; 2) scholar conducts and then publishes research in peer-reviewed journal; 3) university library "buys back" scholarly research from for-profit or societal journal publishers. The problem? Academic libraries, whose budgets sometimes do not even take inflation into account from year to year, can no longer afford to buy journal titles, especially in the sciences. Did you know, for example, that the annual $19,396 paid by Brown University Library for the journal Nuclear Physics A & B, matches the price of a "new midsize car" (Brown University's George Street Journal).

Libraries and others who care about open access to scholarly information are fighting back. "SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system... It's pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communications models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries" (About SPARC). The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is another such initiative. DOAJ defines open access journals as ones that "use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access" (About DOAJ). Explore DOAJ's list of 110 scholarly, open access journals in history.

Who benefits from these initiatives? In my view scholars, libraries, small and even large publishers benefit when research is made readily available to industry and the public at large. Think about it this way: It is reasonable to expect that the public will be more willing to support research that is readily available, and that the impact of this research will be greater and longer lasting.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the open access community is scholars' fear that publishing in open access journals will not advance careers or lead to tenure. After all, academic journals were created in the first place, in part, to promote the careers of authors. Scholars are also often concerned with a journal's impact factor. Despite these concerns, however, new information technologies and initiatives such as SPARC and DOAJ are here to stay. Consider the benefits of open access today!

Two New History Databases: Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974-1996 and AccessUN

Mon, 19 May 2008 17:37:37 -0500

Temple University Libraries recently acquired Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974-1996, an important new digital archive of full-text translations of foreign news sources from all areas of the world. FBIS will be of particular interest to anyone studying the Cold War and other major events of the last three decades of the 20th century. Currently Temple has complete online access to the parts of the database published by Readex to date, namely Parts 1 and 2, and which include material from the Middle East/Near East, South Asia, and Africa. Additional material from China (Part 3), Latin America (Part 5), and the former Soviet Union (Part 7) are scheduled to be released between summer 2008 and summer 2009.

Because FBIS contains historical content (1974-1996), it complements rather than competes with NewsBank’s Access World News / AWN (1996 to date), and Dialog’s World News Connection / WNC (1995 to date), two Temple databases that already provide access to foreign news sources in translation. FBIS dovetails nicely with DNSA and DDRS, two primary-source databases covering the same historical era. FBIS also complements AccessUN, yet another historical Readex database now available to Temple affiliates. AccessUN is a commercially published index to United Nations documents and publications. It includes resolutions, treaties, and UN periodicals and covers the years 1945 to date.

For more information and links to all of the above databases, please see the History Libguide. Contact me with questions or concerns.

Library Prize: History Department on a Roll

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:15:54 -0500

For the second year in a row the History Department has representatives in both the winner and honorable mention categories of the Library Prize competition. Congratulations to Maureen Whitsett (winner) and her faculty sponsors Liz Varon and Petra Goedde, and to Brian Chambers (honorable mention) and his faculty sponsors Liz Varon, Petra Goedde, and Art Schmidt. For more information, including (eventually) photos and downloadable PDFs of the students' projects, see the Winners page on the Library Prize website.

New Trial: SimplyMap Historical Package

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:29:03 -0500

If you've never checked out SimplyMap, by all means take a look. SimplyMap is a web-based mapping application with a user-friendly interface that permits users to quickly and easily create professional-quality thematic maps and reports using thousands of demographic, business, and marketing variables. Maps can be exported as high-resolution images to word processing or presentation software; data can be selected, sorted, and compared across multiple locations to build custom reports that can be exported to a spreadsheet. Demographic Variables: population, age, race, income, ancestry, marital status, housing, employment, transportation, families, and more. 2000 census data is available along with current year estimates and 5 year projections. Data is available by census block-groups, census tracts, ZIP codes, cities, counties, states, and the entire United States.

The Historical Package Trial incorporates the following: 1980 Census in year 2000 Geography, 1990 Census in year 2000 Geography, Additional year 2000 Census Variables, Additional Current Year Census Estimates, Additional 5 Year Estimates Census Estimates. Give it a try if your project deals with the period from 1980 forward. The Historical Package trial ends 4/30/08. Access to the 2000 census data will continue to be available after that date.

New Trial: Crossroads for Newsbank Databases

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:15:13 -0500

With Crossroads, Temple users of certain Newsbank history databases such as early American Imprints and Early American Newspapers can now create private or shared collections of primary documents, permanently bookmark documents, and easily tag, annotate and comment on a vast range of materials.

Students might use the service to organize their research, write a note at just the right spot within a primary document, and collaborate with their classmates. Instructors might use the service to create reading lists for students, highlight an important passage within a document, lead online discussions around specific documents, and create and organize custom collections of documents for their own research.

Crossroads is currently available on a trial basis to the entire Temple University community. Links to the service appear directly within Early American Imprints, Series I and II. Please contact me with questions or for a demo.

Gutenberg-e: History Monographs Online

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:52:52 -0500

Gutenberg-e, a digital book project jointly developed by the American Historical Association and Columbia University, is now open and available to anyone with an internet connection. Gutenberg-e currently provides full-text access to 22 scholarly history monographs with a 2000 or later copyright date. Eventually 36 award-winning titles will be made available through both the project's website and the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project.

The project hoped to find out whether or not "born digital" history monographs can compete with scholarly monographs published under a traditional print model. The good news is that the young scholars who authored the e-Books in Gutenberg-e all received tenure at their respective institutions. For more information about the project see the AHA Today announcement and this post on Library Journal's Academic NewsWire.

The Teaching Professor

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:49:07 -0500

The Libraries have recently acquired a site license to The Teaching Professor, an online newsletter designed to assist faculty with the practical side of teaching. The Teaching Professor helps instructors to:

Overcome obstacles to effective teaching
Stay abreast of the latest pedagogical research
Hear what’s working for colleagues “in the trenches”
Hone skills and stay on top of teaching innovations
Truly connect with students

Here's an excerpt from an article titled Faculty Self-Disclosures in the College Classroom from the April, 2007 issue: "While interviewing university faculty for a study about classroom communication, 'Jim,' a professor of history, made this comment about a colleague he had observed teaching: 'I was really amazed, when I saw him teach, how little of his personality you see.' This starkly contrasted with his perception of his own teaching style, about which he said, 'I try to use humor a lot. My dad says I just think funny, you know, and I do; it’s hard for me not to joke around.' This comment started me wondering about how much of ourselves we let our students see."

The articles in The Teaching Professor are brief and to the point. Worth a look.

--David C. Murray

New Platform for ABC-CLIO Databases

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:49:55 -0500

The two ABC-CLIO databases, America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts, are now available on the familiar EBSCOhost platform. Advantages of having these core history databases on Ebsco include multiple database searching; easy linking to full-text databases such as JSTOR; personalized folders, a part of My EBSCOhost, for those who choose to create personalized accounts; the Historical Period Limiter, a way to find articles that discuss an event or events that occurred within a specific time frame; and a new cited reference search encompassing both databases. This last feature can be used in conjunction with Web of Science to more accurately gauge the importance to the field of history of any refereed journal article.

--David C. Murray

Featured Database: Gale Virtual Reference Library

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:37:44 -0500

A Temple News reporter recently asked me about underutilized library resources. She wanted to know which resources, if more widely known, would have the greatest positive impact on students' research. At first I thought about JSTOR, Periodicals Archive Online, and other high-profile journal databases. After some additional thought I began to realize that another category of resources receives far too little attention in today's research environment. I'm talking about general reference material -- scholarly encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, statistical sources, and bibliographies. After all, finding reliable background information -- a primary purpose of reference works -- is absolutely critical to good research. Temple subscribes to several databases that provide digital versions of traditional encyclopedias and other reference sources. Among these databases are ABC-CLIO eBooks, Cambridge Companions, Credo Reference (formerly xreferplus), Gale Virtual Reference Library, netLibrary Reference Center, Oxford Reference Online, Reference Universe, and Sage eReference.

For history researchers, each of these databases has something to offer. Here I will highlight the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a database that provides full-text access to twenty history reference works, including these four noteworthy titles:

Encyclopaedia Judaica: Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to Americana and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition is important to scholars, general readers and students.

Encyclopedia of European Social History: This six-volume reference includes more than 230 articles, ranging from 5,000 to 10,000 words, on everything from serfdom and the economy, to witchcraft and public health.

Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa: The set covers the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, with major sections on Colonialism and Imperialism, the World Wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United Nations involvement in the region. Each country in the region is reviewed, detailing its population, economy and government.

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas: A six-volume survey of the history of Western thought and culture, presented through 700 alphabetically arranged entries. Each entry explores the origin, cultural interpretations, and historical themes of such subjects as beauty, love, feminism, diversity, and social capital, among many others.

--David C. Murray

New Database Trial - Making of Modern Law: Trials 1600-1926

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:05:08 -0500

This digital collection contains books and pamphlets, official and unofficial trial documents and materials, legal transcripts, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations. The collection covers trials from all countries and languages, although the great majority are English-language and published in the U.S. or Great Britain. Documents are in PDF format and are fully searchable.

This is a trial sponsored by the Law Library. I'd be interested to know if historians and other social scientists find it useful.

--David C. Murray

JSTOR vs. ABC-CLIO

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:32:18 -0500

JSTOR is the premier scholarly journal database. It is a full-text, interdisciplinary archive of only the most highly respected journal titles. By comparison, ABC-CLIO's two scholarly databases -- America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts -- seem to be less frequently used, even by historians. There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that JSTOR provides direct access to the full-text, full-page image of all articles in the database. Consider, however, the following advantages of the ABC-CLIO databases:

1) America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts between them index over a thousand scholarly journals, including 65 of the 72 history titles available in JSTOR. A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases will thus find nearly all citations to JSTOR articles and thousands of additional citations not available in JSTOR.

2) The Libraries' new TUlink service enables two- or three-click access to the full-text of thousands of articles indexed by America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts. This means that JSTOR's previous "full-text advantage," described above, no longer holds.

3) Citations to articles in America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts contain human-generated subject headings; JSTOR's article citations do not. Why does this make a difference? A researcher using the ABC-CLIO databases could perform a subject search for "Gates, Horatio," easily finding all 34 citations to articles about the Revolutionary War general. This type of search simply cannot be done in JSTOR.

4) JCR Online assesses the impact of scholarly journals on various academic disciplines. The higher a journal's "impact factor" the more important that journal is within its discipline. Between them, the two ABC-CLIO databases index all sixteen journals identified by JCR Online as having the highest impact factors in History. These journals are: Environmental History, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Modern History, Social Science History, Past & Present, Journal of African History, Comparative Studies in Society & History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, History Workshop Journal, International Review of Social History, Ethnohistory, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Zeitgeschichte, and Mouvement Social. JSTOR indexes only twelve of these same sixteen "high impact" history journals.

It certainly is not my objective to sour anyone on the use of JSTOR, which by any measure is a stellar scholarly resource. The point of this post is rather to say that both databases have much to recommend them. The choice of which to use ultimately depends upon the individual needs and preferences of the researcher. A comprehensive history article search will likely require the use of both.

Do you have a favorite history database?

--David C. Murray

The Greatest Invention

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:47:49 -0500

Has any human achievement topped the invention of writing? Without it History, defined as "all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing," couldn't exist. And neither could libraries. As Margaret Atwood states in the first episode of the Writing Code, a new 3-part series about the evolution of writing now airing on WHYY: "Writing is a code. It is the making of marks. You then have to understand that these marks can be retranslated into speech." Uniquely among the many different systems of visual signification, writing captures spoken language. Writing appears to have evolved independently in as many as five locations around the world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, and Mesoamerica. Early writing served several functions. Among the Sumerians writing developed as an accurate method of keeping accounts; for the Maya its primary purpose was to aggrandize the institution of kingship. No matter what its purpose, writing transformed every society that it touched. The following books tell the story of how three of the world's earliest writing systems -- Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics, as well as Sumerian cuneiform -- were deciphered by modern scholars.

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe, c1992
The Invention of Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer by Jean-Jacque Glassner, c2003
The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson, c1995

The next time you find yourself struggling through 200 pages of assigned reading for an Anthro, History, Poly Sci, Psych, or other college course, remember those long-ago geniuses who invented writing, without whom none of it would be possible!

--David C. Murray

Significant History Acquisitions, FY 2006-2007

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:12:23 -0500

The following recaps the more significant history-related acquisitions in the just-ended fiscal year of 2006-2007:

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (1801-1900) - HCPP is perhaps the most important electronic resource acquired for the History Department in FY 06-07. "The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers are vital to the historical record of Britain, its former Colonies and the wider world. They are among the richest and most detailed primary sources for the history of the past two centuries, and are fundamental to an understanding of current legislation, policy making and the political environment. HCPP online, with searchable full text, and detailed subject indexing, makes it possible to fully exploit the enormous potential of this resource for the first time" (HCPP About). HCPP does not include Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, which are available in printed form from the Library Depository. For more information about content and coverage see the Guide to Parliamentary Papers.

Periodicals Index Online (PIO) - Formerly known as Periodicals Contents Index / PCI, "Periodicals Index Online is an electronic index to millions of articles published in over 5,000 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. . . It is unique in combining a broad subject base with deep chronological coverage going back over 300 years" (ProQuest About - Periodicals Index Online). The database indexes many European foreign language journals. For full-text access to over 450 of the titles indexed in Periodicals Index Online, explore the complementary database Periodicals Archive Online (PAO). The over 130 full-text history titles in PAO can be accessed by clicking on "Find Journals" from the homepage, then on "Find Journals by Subject"; a right-hand column will display a list of subjects, including "History (General) [94 journals]" and "History (The Americas) [37 journals]"

British Periodicals Online (Collection I) - This database consists of full-text access to approximately 160 journal titles published between the late 17th and early 20th centuries. It covers topics as diverse as history, literature, philosophy, science, and the fine arts. British Periodicals can be searched in tandem with hundreds of additional journal backfiles via the aforementioned Periodicals Archive Online. Researchers can also use the online Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (part of C19) to link directly into full-text content in both British Periodicals and Periodicals Archive. "Crucially, the addition of attribution information from the Wellesley Index makes it possible to search for instances of a word or phrase in a given author's contributions to periodicals even where these originally appeared unsigned or over a pseudonym" (ProQuest About - British Periodicals).

Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) - This is the online version of the longstanding printed DDRS. The database currently contains over 78,000 post-WWII declassified documents that originated with the National Archives and U.S. executive branch agencies. The DDRS complements the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), a similar Temple database containing over 63,000 declassified federal government documents. Though similar in purpose, each of these databases is unique. DNSA is a thematic database that focuses on 29 important events in post-WWII U.S. history (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran-Contra Affair, the First Gulf War, etc.). DDRS, on the other hand, contains a much broader collection of materials. Important social and domestic issues are covered. DDRS also provides access to non-U.S. declassified documents from NATO. A minor difference between the two databases is the manner of release and provenance of the documents available. Many of the documents found in DDRS were originally requested by researchers via NARA's network of presidential libraries. Many DNSA documents, on the other hand, came to light as the result of executive branch compliance with the 1966 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century (Part XI) - Part XI of this popular and important database includes full-text coverage of The Christian Recorder from January 1894 to December 1898. A full-page image upgrade is promised soon.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae - This database contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century BCE) and CE 600, as well as the majority of surviving works up to the fall of Byzantium in CE 1453. Note: A polytonic Greek font must be installed on your computer in order to view some texts. With some browsers, you may also be able to input your search in Greek; with others, you may have to input Beta Code or Latin Transliteration. Extensive information about font requirements is available at the TLG website.

The Papers of W.E.B. DuBois - This set consists of 83 microfilm reels of the correspondence of W.E.B. DuBois, one of the most prominent early figures for African-American liberation. Coverage dates range from 1877 to 1965. For information about content see ProQuests's collection description.

--David C. Murray

LGBT History

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:54:39 -0500

The Libraries have acquired on microfilm The Lesbian Herstory Archives, part 7 of the Gay Rights Movement. This collection consists of a full 150 reels of primary-source material along with a 73-page printed collection guide. Media types represented include "clippings, flyers, brochures, conference materials, reports, correspondence, and other printed ephemera". The earliest documents date to the 1950s and the era of the Daughters of Bilitis organization. Additional information about the nature of the collection is available from the LHA website.

The Lesbian Herstory Archives complements existing primary-source printed and digital collections such as the Gerritsen Collection and Women and Social Movements. It also complements GenderWatch and the new-to-Temple LGBT Life, two databases that index journal articles and other secondary sources. LGBT Life in particular contains indexing and abstracts for more than 130 LGBT-specific core periodicals and over 290 LGBT-specific core books and reference works. It also includes comprehensive, full-text coverage of The Advocate (1996 to date) and other important LGBT publications.

--David C. Murray