Top News: October 2007 Archives

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

We have just added a new service to TUlink. The Find Articles by Citation form allows you to enter an article citation (or part of a citation) and let TUlink find the full-text for you.

As long as you enter at least a Journal Title, ISSN, DOI, or PMID, TUlink will try to get you a link. In many cases you will get a direct link to the full-text labeled "Article". In some cases, the best TUlink can do is get you a "Journal" link that will take you to our electronic access to the journal where your citation is found. If Temple holds the journal in question in paper, you will get a link, and if TUlink cannot find any results it will direct you to an interlibrary loan form where you can request your article.

(More information on using the TUlink Find Articles by Citation form.)

In conjunction with this new addition we have slightly altered the "Find Articles" section of our library home page. We have added Find Articles "by Citation" to the list. Also, as part of this alteration, the list of "Only Full-Text" databases has been removed. The reasons for this are two fold: a) with the addition of TUlink, even if a database doesn't have full-text in it, full-text access is a few clicks away through the "Find Full-Text' icon; b) the full-text database list has gotten so long that it is no longer the small, useful subset of resources it once was.

-Derik A Badman,
Digital Services 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