Top News: September 2007 Archives

CBS 3 DONATES VAST VIDEO ARCHIVES TO TEMPLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Philadelphia, September 26, 2007 - CBS 3 (KYW-TV) will donate its vast Video archives, a virtual diary of the history of the region during the last thirty years, to Temple University's Paley Library, CBS 3 President and General Manager Michael Colleran and Temple University President Dr. Ann Weaver Hart announced today.

The station's collection of more than 20,000 videotapes, which includes daily local newscasts and video clips from the last thirty years of Eyewitness News as well as 15 years of the local lifestyle show, Evening Magazine, will be housed in Temple University Libraries Urban Archives and, once catalogued, will be available to students and local residents alike.

Colleran officially presented the videotapes to Dr. Hart in a ceremony held today at Paley Library.

The station's archival tape contain many of the most memorable moments in Philadelphia history - from the Pope John Paul II's visit to Philadelphia in 1979 and the Phillies World Series victory in 1980 to the MOVE bombing in 1985 and the Blizzards of 1983 and 1996. Many national and international stories are also included from the Reagan years in the While House to the fall of Communism in Europe.

"The University is honored to be chosen as guardian of what amounts to a historical record of the last three decades of the 20th century in Philadelphia," Hart says. "We hope that this collection will encourage others to preserve this type of material, so that future generations will have a first-hand account of the times in which we lived."

"Anyone interested in the history and culture of 20th century Philadelphia must use the incredible resources held in the Urban Archives," Dean of University Libraries Larry Alford adds. "Those resources are deepest for the first 80 years of the 20th century because of the archives of The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which ceased publication in 1982. The KYW footage will fill in the gap of that last 20 years.''

Colleran says that, in addition to chronicling local history, the tapes are also a dynamic example of the evolution of local television since the 1970s. "Not only do we see the evolution of news coverage from the anchor desk to live coverage in the field, but we can witness the birth of a whole new genre in television through Evening Magazine, a program that was imitated across the country and became a precursor to such shows as Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and the celebrity journalism of today."

The station's contribution of the tapes to Temple University Libraries corresponds with its relocation earlier this year from its 35 year-home on Independence Mall to its new state-of-the-art High Definition studios in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia. Coincidentally, this is not the first time astation relocation has benefited the University. When KYW moved from its Walnut Street studios to Independence Mall in 1972, the company donated its building there to the University which used it as a Center City campus for many years.

CBS 3 is part of CBS Television Stations, a division of CBS Corporation.

Watch the CBS 3 (KYW-TV) coverage of this momentous event in Philadelphia history online.

The library now has The Index of Christian Art, the result of a project begun by Professor Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University in 1917. He believed that the development of Early Christian art could be more deeply understood through the study of themes rather than artistic styles, which during the Greco-Roman period were too "uniform" (more information on the ICA). From a humble beginning of a few shoe boxes of index cards he crafted an indexing system which today falls under five broad thematic groups, Figures, Scenes, Nature, Objects, and Miscellany.

The current online database covers all additions to the collection since 1991 when digitization began and thirty percent of the items indexed before 1991. It grows yearly and the retrospective digitization will eventually bring all pre-1991 content into the database. In addition to indexing Christian art, the database contains over 60,000 images both in color and black and white. For those who need to examine content that has not been digitized, they can still go to Princeton, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Utrecht, or the Vatican to view the entire collection. The Index of Christian Art includes works of art from the early years of Christianity up through 1400 AD and recently the decision was made to expand the coverage up through the sixteenth century.

The Index of Christian Art contains three different record types, which are called "databases" or simply "bases": Work of Art records (over 57,000), Subject records (over 28,000), and Bibliographic records (over 57,000). The Work of Art records provide detailed descriptions and links to the images. Although there are multiple ways to search and browse, I found it confusing for the novice user (myself) since it's often hard to distinguish between the actual record types and the individual fields in the records, especially when constructing a search and interpreting the results. I trust that greater knowledge of Early Christian art and more familiarity with the database would ease this burden a little (if not, feel free to let me know). The new user should start with the Multi-Base search because it lets you search across all fields and you can select which record type you'd like to search. Your results are unambiguous: if you search Work of Art records (or Subject or Bibliography records) you'll get just that type of record in the results set.

Index of Christian Art is a nice addition to our other art bibliographic and image databases, which can be found on the Arts & Humanities database list. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

---Fred Rowland

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

Have you encountered frustration in fetching the full text of an article when using the library's research databases? We have some good news for you. We are pleased to announce the arrival of TUlink, a new service of the Temple University Libraries.

With TUlink, the research process is greatly streamlined. TUlink acts as a bridge between a citation in a database and the full-text of the article in a different database--removing a number of formerly necessary steps.

When the citation you find in a database doesn't have the full-text immediately attached to it, look for the TUlink icon:

Clicking on this icon will perform a search of our full-text resources and when possible give you an "Article" link directly to the full-text of the article. In other cases you will see a "Journal" link to the electronic copy of the journal in which your citation was published. TUlink can also get you to information on journals held in the library on paper.

If no full-text is available you will be offered an interlibrary loan link to request the article from another library.

TUlink is a work in progress. Currently enabled databases include all the EBSCO databases (Academic Search Premier, ERIC, MLA, PsycInfo, etc) and CSA databases (Criminal Justice Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, etc) and numerous others. Other databases will be enabled on an ongoing basis.

See more details on using TUlink.

--Derik A Badman, Digital Services Librarian

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

RefWorks, the online citation manager, is a valuable and easy-to-use tool for all kinds of researchers from students to faculty. A brand new feature makes it even more useful.

Every RefWorks user now has 100MB of storage space to attach files to their citations. This means that not only can you store citations but also the full-text of articles, songs, images, or short videos. Files are limited to 5MB each, which should be sufficient for most uses.

With files stored in RefWorks you'll never misplace that article you need for quoting in a paper or have to deal with a usb drive filled with unorganized files. RefWorks can keep them sorted in folders and searchable.

In case you missed it, we also added the RefShare module to RefWorks over the summer. For more information see this post on our blog. Also: see shared bibliographies from Temple on RefShare.

Questions? Contact Fred Rowland or Derik Badman.

--Derik A Badman

Paley Library's entire collection of 2,300 current print scholarly journals, newspapers, and popular magazines has moved from Paley's ground floor to new shelving on the first floor.

Overall, the University Libraries subscribe to more than 20,000 journals and magazines with the latest in cutting edge research, scholarship and opinion. A large number of these subscriptions are now exclusively online with no print equivalent received.

However, there are many fine journals and magazines available only in print. Bringing these 2,300 periodicals to the well-lit and comfortable first floor of Paley Library will not only convenience readers, but will help to build awareness that print resources continue to be invaluable even in the age of online information.

An additional 200 current print journals in scientific fields, architecture and engineering are held in SEAL, the Science, Engineering & Architecture Library on main campus.

During Fall 2007 we will partially renovate and re-equip the ground floor space formerly occupied by the current periodicals collection to form a new Media Services Department offering audio and video collections as well as playback equipment configured for individual and group listening and viewing.

Look for progress reports on Media Services during the fall semester!

Jonathan LeBreton
Senior Associate University Librarian

Today Dr. Diane D. Turner joins the Temple University Libraries as curator of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. Please see an announcement from the university's Office of Communications for more details about her appointment.

I welcome Dr. Turner to our staff, and I greatly look forward to working with her.

Larry P. Alford
Dean of University Libraries

Temple University Libraries is pleased to announce the addition of Theatre in Video to its online resources. Theatre in Video is an entirely different kind of database, offering streaming video of entire plays. Included in the repertoire are the BBC’s productions of the entire works of Shakespeare, as well as plays from antiquity to modernity, unlimited by geographic origin. In addition to plays, Theatre in Video contains documentaries about notable playwrights and directors such as August Wilson, Bertolt Brecht, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Tennessee Williams, and many more. Productions range in date from 1936 to 2005.

Theatre in Video is easy to access and to use. Viewers can do a general search for a particular play, performer, playwright, or director, or browse lists of productions, documentaries, people, genres, companies, theatres, and dates. Students and professors can make personal playlists of clips which can be shared.

Theatre in Video is an exciting new kind of database, opening a new dimension in online offerings from Temple University Libraries, useful for instruction in many disciplines, as well as for enjoyment.

If you have any questions concerning Theatre in Video, feel free to contact me, Anne Harlow, aharlow@temple.edu.

If you think that libraries are no-fun zones, think again.

On the afternoon of Friday August 24 business was anything but usual at Paley Library. As part of the University's Welcome Week event, the Temple University Libraries hosted ceLIBration. Offering food, music, and fun, ceLIBration was an opportunity to encourage new students and their parents to visit Paley Library, enjoy the facility, and meet staff members. Several hundred students and their families joined in the festivities.

One of the highlights of ceLIBration was a "Guitar Hero" video game competition. Seven students competed against each other for the title of Paley Guitar Hero Champion and a $100 gift certificate. The winner of the competition was Chris Sekula who amassed a huge score in dominating the competition. Later, a grand finale raffle offered more gift certificates for local restaurants and the Pearl movie theater.

Here are a few pictures of the event, starting with the Guitar Hero competitors:

Guitar Heroes in action.

Even some of the library staff got in on the action.

The DJ and guests at the entrance to Paley Library.

People and food in the reference stacks of Paley.

-Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian

I am pleased to welcome Adam Shambaugh, who joins Temple Libraries on September 4, 2007 as our new Business Librarian.

Prior to coming to Temple, Adam served as the assistant department head of the Springs Business Library at the University of South Carolina. Before starting a career as a librarian, he served for several years as the assistant director of the university’s Center for Business Communication. Adam holds a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of South Carolina as well as a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics from the same institution.

Larry P. Alford
Dean of the University Libraries