May 2005 Archives

As another academic year ends it's time to appreciate and praise the work of the hundreds of student assistants who work for us in all of our libraries and make it possible to do everything we need to do to serve our Temple community.

There are students working in our libraries every hour we're open. In the case of many of the branch libraries student assistants keep the libraries open on evenings and weekends. In Paley Library students work in every department. They performs tasks as varied as answering phones during staff lunch hours; delivering important documents to the Provost's Office; delivering mail; helping ship items going to the bindery; staffing the help desk and installing software and hardware in the Systems and Technology department; working in the current periodicals,government documents, and micromaterials unit, including staffing the ground floor desk, processing government documents, and refiling micromaterials. With our special collections, including rare books and Urban Archives, students help with many projects to make these collections accessible to our users. In the Access Services areas of Paley - circulation/reserve, interlibrary loans, and the stacks - student assistants make it possible for us to offer such critical services as e-reserves, and PALCI E-ZBorrow, activities where we rely heavily on students to do processing and scanning. In the stacks, students shelve thousands of books a week and are involved in year-round shifting projects. In interlibrary loans, students are processing and filling requests and wrapping hundreds of books a day to be shipped to libraries all over the country.

Thank you to all our student assistants. We couldn't do it without you.

--Penelope Myers

Staff Recognition Awards were presented to three library staff members on May 24th during a special Temple Libraries luncheon hosted by Larry Alford, Vice Provost for Libraries.

Award recipients (from left to right) were Royce Sargeant, Assistant Director of the Health Sciences Center Libraries; William H. Stout, supervisor of the lending side of Paley Library's Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan unit; and Ethel Fiderer, Assistant Cataloger in the Law Library.

Temple Libraries recently acquired access to JSTOR's Arts & Sciences IV Collection. When complete, this multidisciplinary collection will provide access to over 100 new, full-text journal titles. Many titles are already available. JSTOR is the premier scholarly journal database. To access JSTOR's main search interface, click here.

--David Murray

The entire Library Staff congratulates all 2005 graduates, especially our own Library Student Assistants. We all wish them well in finding jobs and even more for a full and happy life! The list is long; and I hope complete. These Student Assistants have helped to a great degree the successful and smooth operation of the entire library system.
We thank them again! And we will miss them!

From Access Services:

Interlibrary Loan: Levi Obonyo, PhD -- Mass Communication

All these are getting their Bachelor's degrees:

Circulation/Reserve:
Mabana Bamba--Journalism/PR/Advertising
Jessica Joh--Art History
Lindsay Keating--English

Interlibrary Loan:
Robert Baker--American Studies
Patrick McDonald--French/Spanish

Stacks:
Jeff Cafaro--Film and Media Arts
Kristin Kelly--Film and Media Arts
Katherine Westbrook--Broadcasting Telecommunications Mass Media
Stefanie Martoccio--Accounting

Ambler Library:
Rebecca Weide--CLA

Biology Library:
Wazha Mathanjane

Chemistry Library:
Cori O'Brien

Library Systems & Technology:
Emmanuel Dierisseau--Fox School of Business and Management/MIS

Mathematical Sciences Library:
Abbas Haji

Physics Library:
YiFan Huang

Reference and Instructional Services:
Lisa Hayes--School of Communications and Theater
Shirley Pegues--CLA
Autumn Raniere--School of Communications and Theater

Tyler Library:
Courtney Zeigler
Jason R. Miller
Chiayu Mao

Urban Archives:
Allistair Alves--CLA/Sociology
Kyanna Barlow--School of Social Work/Social Administration
John Pettit--SCAT/Film and Media Arts

--Al Vara

A number of user specific functions are available in our library's catalog, Diamond. These include seeing your currently checked-out items, renewing books, and, what I will write about today, saved searches.

If you are doing ongoing research in an area or just want to stay up on whatever new books come into the library in your field, the saved searches allow you get email notifications every few weeks of new additions to the library that fall in whatever parameters you specify.

I'll run through a brief example (where necessary I use bright green to highlight in the images; images 2-4 are clickable for a larger view):

Go to Diamond and click on the "My Library Account" button. You will need to click through the login screen and then login with your name and ID number.

This will then take you to your Library Account screen, which includes your name and contact information, the number of books you have out, any holds you might have, as well as links to search the catalog and to see your saved searches.

Click on "Search the Catalog". This will take you to the catalog search screen. Do a search on your topic. In this example I did a keyword search for "film noir" (I want to see any new books or dvds that come in). When you get a result screen there will be a "Save this Search" button underneath the text fields (this button does not appear if you are not logged in when you do a search). Click on this to save your search.

Follow the "Patron Record" button at the top back to the Library Account screen. Now when you click on "Saved Searches" you will see the saved search. Through this screen you can see the search again (link to the right), delete it, or "mark for email". If you click off "mark for email" and then "update list" you will be set-up for email notifications.

Periodically you will be sent an email with any new additions to your saved search(es), including author, title, call number, and subject(s), as well as a link into the library catalog record for the item.

If you have any questions or need assistance contact Derik Badman.

--Derik A. Badman

Since 1994, scholars at a number of universities have been working on an electronic variorum of Shakespeare's Hamlet. What is a variorum? It collects both the play itself (including textual variants) and its attendant criticism, interpretations, and annotations as written by various authors through history. Usually variorums are in the form of books and thus limited in scope; this project is in the form of a web accessible database and theoretically unlimited in scope.

After 11 years the project still isn't complete (and how could it be with people still writing on Hamlet to this day), but what is there shows the promise of what will come. Already one can see extensive commentaries on the play, often at the level of the single word. These comments are not yet linked to full bibliographic citations, though that is the eventual outcome. The site also includes electronic images of editions of the play and four searchable concordances.

This project is an excellent example of how technology can be used to assist literary study. This kind of narrowly focused but highly detailed project (narrow in its focus on one work, not narrow in its potential size) is made more easily possible and widely available thanks to computerized databases and electronic communication.

See a longer article at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

--Derik A. Badman

A bookmarklet is similar to any other "Favorite" or a "Bookmark" that you save in your internet browser. Similar, but also different. It is a very small program that takes input from the user and loads up a page based on that input.

Below are two bookmarklets that can search Diamond, our library catalog. Instead of having to navigate into the catalog and click on the search you want to do, the bookmarklet will search the catalog by keyword in one of two ways:

1) Highlight some text on your screen with your cursor. Then click on the bookmarklet. It will search the catalog for the words you highlighted and bring up a page of results.

2) Click on the bookmarklet. A box will pop-up prompting you to enter keywords. Type what you what to search for in the box and hit "OK". You will then get a page of results in the catalog.

To use the bookmarklet you need to add it to your list of Favorites/Bookmarks. You can drag the link into your browser toolbar or right click and select "Add to Favorites/Bookmark this Link." It works best if it is the group of bookmarks that appear in your toolbar.

For Internet Explorer Users:

Diamond Keyword Search

For Firefox users:

Diamond Keyword Search

--Derik A. Badman