Recently in New Electronic Resources Category

While some of the Libraries' online databases (e.g., LexisNexis) have long contained searchable content from the Chronicle of Higher Education, we are now pleased to offer free, campuswide access to the complete contents of the Chronicle. That includes every new weekly issue, the complete searchable archive back to 1989, and the full-text of the Almanac of Higher Education back to 1995.. Simply navigate to the Chronicle website and click on links to any article to gain access to the full text. When off campus, simply authenticate yourself using your Temple network account.

To get further value from the Libraries' subscription to the full-text of the online Chronicle, sign up for free subscriptions to any of the Chronicle's e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds. Daily reading of both Academe Today and Afternoon Update present an excellent strategy for keeping up with the latest developments in higher education. Just create your account and then sign up for your newsletters. For those who prefer to use a news aggregator, the Chronicle has plenty of RSS feeds from which to choose.

We hope that providing campuswide access to the complete text of the Chronicle of Higher Education will help every member of the Temple University Community to be better informed about the world of higher education.

Temple University Libraries offer nearly 400 different research databases, everything from the highly used and well known ones such as Academic Source Premier and LexisNexis to some niche products such as Mediamark Reporter or Women Writers Online. For many students and faculty a comprehensive research process often requires more than one database, and for some of our users just choosing the right database can be challenging. It can be time consuming to run a literature search in each selected database, and each search system may use a different search interface. MultiSearch, a new way to search library databases, changes everything.

MultiSearch is a collection of approximately 250 library databases, plus sources such as Google and Google Scholar. It allows library databases to be searched in any number of combinations, either those pre-determined by librarian subject specialists or those the searchers select themselves. The beauty of MultiSearch is that there is only one interface to use. You can now obtain results from multiple databases, all at once, with a single simple interface, and the search automatically deletes duplicate records.

Starting a MultiSearch is easy. Either choose one or more search subject categories or design your own combination of databases:

Record results are displayed by default in a most recent to oldest order, and records from the different databases are interfiled. The results are also categorized in a number of ways: by subject content, by author, by database, and by journal. You can easily rearrange the results to meet your specific needs:

Please give MultiSearch a try. We think you'll like it. But whatever your reaction is, we want to know. This is just our first version of MultiSearch - and we will use your feedback to guide our future customizations. Please share your reactions and suggestions by adding a comment to this post or use our library suggestion page.

For more information see our "Introducing MultiSearch" page.

And if you've got a better name for this thing than MultiSearch, we'd like to hear from you.

Temple University Libraries is pleased to announce the addition of new online streaming audio resources.

American Song contains over 50,000 songs in every style, period, and genre. Genres represented include Blues, Tin Pan Alley, Cajun, Cowboy, Ragtime, African-American songs, Bluegrass, sacred, and choral music. One can browse the database by historical events such as D-Day, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the first moon landing. Also included are presidential campaign songs from 1789-1996.

Contemporary World Music provides twentieth and twenty-first century music from everywhere in the world. Genres include reggae, world beat, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, and Arab swing as well as more traditional genres such as Indian Classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, gospel, and more. One can search or browse genre, people groups, instruments, geographic location, and performer.

Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) is a non-profit initiative funded by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other organizations. This database provides streaming audio of American music from New World Records, CRI, Albany, Innova, Cedilla, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening, and Mutable Music labels. A wide array of genres is represented: folk, Native American, jazz, 19th century classical, early rock, musical theater, contemporary, electronic, and more. Searching and browsing by composer, instrument, performer, record labels, and titles of compositions is available.

These databases provide depth and variety to the repertoire offered by Temple’s online audio resources.

For a list of streaming audio resources provided by Temple University Libraries see guides.temple.edu/music.

Please feel free to contact me for further information about these resources.

-Anne Harlow

TU Libraries has recently added Literature Criticism Online to its suite of electronic resources!

Literature Criticism Online is an outstanding reference literature database, offering biographical and bibliographical information on over 3,000 20th century and contemporary literary figures (novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and literary theorists), in addition to scholarly and popular commentary from books, journals, magazines, broadsheets, pamphlets, diaries, and newspapers.

This collection contains the scanned pages of every single volume from two of Gale's popular, print literary series: Contemporary Literary Criticism (245 volumes currently) and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (196 volumes currently). Just think how much shelf space that would be! Users can search by known author, text, critic, or source title, as well as by keyword.

Literature Criticism Online is a valuable literary resource and complements well with the Libraries' subscription to Literature Resource Center which contains select collections of critical material from Gale's other literary resources: Children's Literature Review, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and Short Story Criticism.

Be sure to check it out!

-Kristina De Voe, English & Communications Librarian

We are pleased to announce that Temple University Libraries has acquired Web of Science backfiles to the year 1900.

The breakdown by discipline is:

• Arts & Humanities back to 1975
• Social Sciences back to 1956
• Science back to 1900

Web of Science is a repository of historic, multi-disciplinary journal literature. The backfiles are critical to locating a wealth of useful historic source and citation information. Of the 50 most highly cited items in Web of Science, more than 60% were published over 20 years ago. Via the powerful linking capabilities of the Web, retrospective data becomes easily available and maximizes serendipitous discovery.

--Kathy Szigeti

...from The Teaching Professor.

Rare is the instructor who hasn't encountered a challenge in the classroom. Equally rare is the instructor who couldn't benefit from proven techniques shared by colleagues who've discovered ways to enhance the teaching and learning process. Within higher education, a respected and popular source that faculty use to share their ideas and best practices in teaching and learning is a publication called The Teaching Professor. Published 10 times a year, it incorporates into 6-8 pages of fast reading tips and techniques for everything from better tests and quizzes to improved classroom discussions to effective technology integration.

Temple University Libraries has just made it easy for all University instructors to be up-to-date with every new issue of The Teaching Professor. The Libraries now offer institutional access to the electronic version of the publication, both on and off campus. There is also an audio MP3 version of each issue. You can directly access The Teaching Professor here.

There you can examine the latest issue, any issue in the archive, or you can search for articles on a particular topic (e.g., lectures, quizzes). The November 2007 issue features articles on engaging large science classes, dealing with students who participate too much, and making the syllabus more than a contract.

In addition, interested faculty and administrators can sign up to receive e-mail alerts of the latest issues. To do so, register using this account information:

Voucher code: TEMPLE
PIN Number: 2310

-Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian

Google Scholar has become a useful search tool because it allows you to search across the content of many different databases, including JSTOR, Project MUSE, Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge Journals Online, SpringerLink, HighWire Press, Journals@Ovid Full Text, Sage Journals Online, ScienceDirect, and many more. That is not to say that the entire content of these databases is available through Google Scholar (which has never released a complete list of its sources or the extent of its coverage) but at least some of it is there. Google Scholar also includes books from Google Book Search in its search results.

Up till now, one of the problems with Google Scholar for Temple students, faculty, and staff has been the difficulty in retrieving the full-text of articles. You might find a juicy article in Google Scholar but after clicking on the link get a message that the article is blocked, even for many databases that you know Temple subscribes to. Well, this process has just gotten a whole lot easier.

Now Temple has registered its TUlink service with Google Scholar, which means that you can link directly from Google Scholar into the library's subscription databases. Look for Find Full-Text @ TU right after the article title and click on it. You will see the TUlink interface pop up with links for full-text if we have it online or in print, or a link to Temple's Interlibrary Loan Form if we don't.

From within any of Temple's campuses, links to Find Full-Text @ TU will appear automatically. From off-campus you need to do one of two things:

1. Just click HERE and it will automatically set your Google Scholar preferences for Find Full-Text @ TU, or
2. Go into the preferences of Google Scholar and select Temple University from LIbrary LInks.

You will find that Google Scholar is a nice addition to your research toolkit. Including it when researching a subject often brings some unusual and unexpected results. Set up your Find Full-Text @ TU preference and give it a whirl.

Find Full-Text @ TU will NOT appear for books. For books, click on the link to Library Search at the bottom of the citation. This will take you to the record of the book in WorldCat.org, where you can input a local zip code (Temple's is 19122) to find a local library with the book.

You can set your Google Scholar preferences to use Refworks as your citation manager. In Google Scholar Preferences, just select Refworks as the Bibliography Manager.

--Fred Rowland