New Electronic Resources: June 2006 Archives

Another round of new e-resources:

--Biography Resource Center: Integrates hundreds of thousands of biographies drawn from over 135 well-known Thomson Gale print sources including Contemporary Authors and over 300 full-text periodicals. Biographies of all kinds of people from history and government to the arts and sciences.

--Knovel Library: Knovel Library provides Temple with online access to over 450 titles included in the following subject collections:

-Aerospace & Radar Technology
-Chemistry & Chemical Engineering
-Civil Engineering & Construction Materials
-Electrical & Power Engineering
-Environmental Engineering
-General Engineering
-Mechanics & Mechanical Engineering
-Metals & Metallurgy
-Oil & Gas
-Semiconductors & Electronics

--(London) Times Digital Archive (1785-1985): Searchable, full-text and full-image archive of every page of the (London) Times from 1785 to 1985.

--(London) Times Literary Supplement Centennary Archive (1902-1990): "This database offers a complete facsimile edition of the Times Literary Supplement, from 1902 through 1990, contains new information on anonymous contributors that allows students and scholars to explore in greater depth the literary activity and critical opinion makers of the 20th century.

More than 250,000 reviews, letters, poems and articles in more than 5,000 issues of the Times Literary Supplement, searchable by author and/or contributor, are available here in the context in which they were originally published. Users can access any page via the online version of the published index when executing a title, author or subject search."

--International Financial Statistics of the International Monetary Fund: Provides approximately 32,000 financial time series covering most countries in the world. The data available for each country includes data on exchange rates, international liquidity, interest rates, prices, production, national accounts and population. In many cases the data extend back to 1948.

--Derik A Badman

The 5 volume Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. James Birx and available in the Paley Reference stacks (GN11 .E63 2006), is now also available online as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library.

The Encyclopedia features “over 1000 entries that focus on topics in physical/ biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural/social anthropology, linguistics, and applied anthropology. Also included are relevant articles on geology, paleontology, biology, evolution, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology.” All articles conclude with a short bibliography with suggestions for further reading; many articles also include a sidebar. Articles are available as PDF files, which provide an exact reproduction of pages from the print edition, or as e-books displayed on a webpage. An eTable of Contents, an eBook Index, and a List of Illustrations are available on the main search page of the Encyclopedia.

“The contributions are authored by 300 internationally renowned experts, professors, and scholars from some of the most distinguished universities, institutes and museums in the world. Special attention is given to: hominid evolution, primate behavior, genetics, ancient civilizations, cross-cultural studies, social theories, and the value of human language for symbolic communication.”

All databases are listed in the A-Z database listing linked from the Temple University Libraries website.

Please contact me if you have any questions. If you would like to have the Gale Virtual Reference Library / Encyclopedia of Anthropology and other social science databases demonstrated to a class, please call me at 215-204-4581 or email me to set a date for a Library User Education class.

Gregory McKinney

The Library is pleased to announce the addition of Literature Resource Center (LRC) to its collection of databases.

A superb resource for the undergraduate literary scholar, LRC is a complete reference literature database, providing access to not only biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information on over 127,000 literary figures from all time periods in every literary genre, but also a rich collection of full-text critical analyses spanning diverse literary movements.

Integrating Gale Group's three core literary databases -- Contemporary Authors Online, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism Select -- LRC also comprises critical material from known literary resources, such as Children's Literature Review, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism -- in addition to over 200 prominent literary journals.

Searching is seamless. The "Authors By Type" search mode permits the most creative searches, allowing users to search by author ethnicity or nationality, genre, literary movement, or time period. Themes may also be searched, ranging in topics from American identity and dystopia to rites of passage and tragic heroes.

Because of its comprehensive biographical and contextual information, LRC is a truly valuable literary resource and complements well with the Library's subscription to MLA International Bibliography, the premiere bibliographic database for researching literature and language.

Please feel free to contact me for further information about the resource.

--Kristina DeVoe

For those of you, like me, who remember libraries prior to the advent of digital resources, ECCO will serve as a revelation. In a world of hype and spin, this is the real deal. Even younger, Web-savvy researchers will be utterly amazed by ECCO. According to Thomson-Gale's "About" page, ECCO is the "most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken". It is based on the English Short Title Catalog, and contains the full-text of 150,000 book titles published in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. ECCO provides, "in essence, [easy access to] every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas" (ibid.).

ECCO complements Early English Books Online (EEBO), another Temple database that contains the full-text of nearly 110,000 English-language titles published between 1475 and 1700. It has never before been possible to quickly and comprehensively search the corpus of printed works spanning the entire history of Early Modern Britain. This opens up possibilities for research virtually unimaginable before the creation of ECCO, EEBO, and other primary source databases. Scholars from every conceivable field of inquiry can potentially benefit from access to ECCO. Obvious examples are history (including the history of science & technology), literature, political science, and even music.

Important Note: The undergraduate researcher, especially, should work closely with his or her professor and/or a librarian to identify reference works and other secondary titles that can provide some context for the primary sources discussed in this post. It is important to understand wider social, political, economic, and military contexts in order to make sense of primary documents preserved in the historical record.

--David C.Murray

The library has recently added the online version of Index Islamicus to our databases.

Index Islamicus Online is the premier database supporting the field of Islamic Studies. An international source for articles, books, and conference proceedings, Index Islamicus is a key resource for anyone studying Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world. Along with Arabic countries, it includes coverage of Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and other areas of the world with Muslim populations, like the United States, France, and Great Britain. Subject matter goes back to the ancient and medieval world and will be a useful interdisciplinary resource for historians, art historians, philosophers, theologians, and classicists. Over 3000 journals in multiple languages are monitored for inclusion and records go all the way back to 1906. Index Islamicus offers a basic and an advanced search. One of its most useful features is the ability to select subject descriptors from a bibliographic record and perform a new search with just those selected descriptors. Full text linking and links into Temple’s library catalog Diamond are provided, but the database itself has no full text content and no abstracts. Records can be easily exported to the bibliographic utility Refworks.

At long last, the library has access to L'Annee philologique, the most important database for the study of the ancient Greco-Roman world. L'Annee reflects the international and multidisciplinary nature of classical studies, indexing books, articles, and conference papers from around the world in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages. (You will often find that the abstract to an article is written in a different language than the article itself.) Whether you're searching for information on the Presocratics, the Homeric Hymns, the archaeological remains of Pompei, or ancient science and technology, you will find highly relevant and dependable sources here.

L'Annee philologique online is based on the print index of the same name that has been a standard for years among classics scholars. Current online coverage is from print volume 30 (1959) to volume 74 (2003). You can search by Modern Author, Ancient Author, Full Text, Subjects and disciplines, Date, and other criteria. In the case of "Full Text", this does not mean that you can search the entire contents of articles--this is NOT a full text database. Rather, it means that you can search the entire contents of the article records. This is unusual terminology for users in the United States and reflects L'annee's European origin.

There are some other important features that might be surprising to non-classicist American users. For the Ancient Author search, you need to input the latinized version of a name, so for instance "liuius", not "livy". To search for "livy", do the Full Text search. Complex searches are also handled differently. You have to build up your search step by step. To combine a Modern Author search with, say, a Subject search, you have to first do the author search, then the subject search, and finally combine the two searches using the boolean operator AND. Once you've done all the simple searches describing your topic (and you can have many), the combining and recombining of search sets--using AND, OR, and NOT--is made easy and efficient.

Unfortunately, the Help pages to this database are sparse. Below I've listed a bunch of academic library tutorials that I found useful:

• http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/useits/annee_phil/annee-philologique.html


• http://www.library.arizona.edu/help/tutorials/lannee/index.html


• http://www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/APhGuide.html.

--Fred Rowland