The Middlebury College community now has access to the full archives of  Harper’s (starting in 1850-current), The New Yorker (1925-current), and The New York Review of Books (1963-current). 

Until now, we’ve had a patchwork of years through databases, microfilm, and print. Starting today, access all issues, with full illustrations, on any device, through the magazine’s own websites.

(A caveat! Our subscription does not include access to The New Yorker iPad/iPhone app. That’s available only through individual subscriptions.)

If you’re off-campus use one of the go/links listed here too access through the College’s network.

http://go.middlebury.edu/newyorker (go/newyorker)

http://go.middlebury.edu/nyreview (go/nyreview)

http://go.middlebury.edu/harpers (go/harpers)

*Tip: add icons to your iPad/iPhone home screen by following these directions.

Middlebury College’s Library & Information Services (LIS) will participate in a federal grant rewarded to the Northeast Document Conservation Center to digitize wax cylinder recordings in the Flanders Ballad Collection, one of the nation’s great archival collections of New England folksong, folklore, and balladry.

Working in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the grant will use IRENE/3-D, a system that uses digital imaging to retrieve sound from historical recordings made on discs and wax cylinders that might otherwise be unplayable. IRENE/3-D was used at the Library of Congress in 2012 to extract sound from discs produced by Alexander Graham Bell whose contents hadn’t been heard since they were made about 125 years ago.

Middlebury College will make available over 200 wax cylinders and more than 1,000 records from the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection. This new technology will make it possible to capture sound even from broken and cracked cylinders and records, making it possible to play ballads not heard for over 80 years.

Along with Middlebury College, The Woody Guthrie Archives and The Carnegie Hall Archives will make historical records available to the project.

Learn more

The Library of Congress Blog post on IRENE/3D

Playback: 130-Year-Old Sounds Revealed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Press Release for the NEDCC Grant Project

About Middlebury College – Helen Hartness Flanders Collection

About Carnegie Hall Archives Collections

About the Woody Guthrie Archives

Selected new books and DVDs for 2012-2013

New journals subscriptions for 2012

New audiobooks for iPod/mp3 players and new ebooks for Kindles, Nooks, etc.

New Library collections in Environmental Studies

New library acquisitions for the study of China

New Library acquisitions for Latin America, the Caribbean, South and East Asia, & African history

New library collections for American history

New library collections: women’s history

JSTOR is on steroids

National Geographic online archive (1888-1994)

New Library acquisitions for the Sciences

New to the library: statistics and GIS data

New to the library: technology and computer science resources

Consumer Reports online

Middlebury students, faculty, and staff can “check-out” from the Library eBooks for Kindles (or the Kindle app), Nooks, or other eReaders and audiobooks for your iPod (or any other mp3 player). Visit our eBook & AudioBook Home, or visit go/bookstogo (go.middlebury.edu/bookstogo). (Very soon, all of these books with be in our library catalog too.) You can also download a special app for your mobile device (Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPad, etc.) and check-out eBooks and audiobooks directly. Download the right mobile app here. From the app, search for “Middlebury College” when you’re asked to Add a Library. These eBook and audiobooks are available with support from an ACE/Alfred E. Sloan Faculty Career Flexibility Award to promote Work/Life Balance at the College. So download a book, and then relax, or take a walk, go for a run, cook a meal, or take a very long drive, all with a book playing in the background.

In addition to the iPad, iPhone, Android devices, and Nook, tens of thousands of our ebooks can be downloaded directly to the Kindle Fire with the free Bluefire app.

Here are the steps:

1. With the Bluefire app on your Kindle Fire, access our ebooks at go/ebooks.
2. If you don’t have the Blurefire app installed, our ebook site automatically links to Bluefire instructions for download.
3. Once the Bluefire app is installed and authorized, click ‘download’ and your ebook will download and open.
4. You can also transfer downloaded content from your PC or Mac to your Kindle with Adobe Digital Editions.
5. We’ve got step-by-step directions on downloading ebooks to your desktop here. Or, if you’d rather not download, you can read ebooks online through the Kindle browser.

Enjoy, and look out for LIS’s very own Kindle Fires, available at a library circulation desk near you. (Sometime this summer we hope.)

Though we love to see you in the library, we’ve added a new website where you can view a changing sampling of new books, DVDs, and other materials as we acquire them for the College’s Libraries. Check out our new feature and then check those books out and start reading. You’ll have to come to the library for that.

The Middlebury Libraries pulled back the curtain today to reveal a new face for our Digital Collections archive. Please visit and search through thousands of historic books, postcards, photographs, maps, illustrations, manuscripts, and recorded campus lecture videos from the holdings of our College Archives, Special Collections, and Vermont Collection. Here are a few to whet your apetite for our rich and varied digital archive. Enjoy!  

On March 8, the Middlebury College Library celebrated 102 years of International Women’s Day. (And March is also Women’s History Month, so what the heck, let’s celebrate all month long.) The U.N. has a helpful timeline detailing the history of this day and the theme of International Women’s Day 2012: Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty. The Library has endless ways to celebrate women, so today, we’ll name but a few. Please add your own comments below and add to the festivities. Visit our Women’s and Gender Studies (WAGS) Research Guide Search Women and Social Movements a research archive organized around the history of women in social movements in the US between 1600 and 2000. Listen to Biophilia, by Björk, the Icelandic pop star, or anything by Björk, for that matter. Request her CDs at the Davis Library’s circulation desk. Watch the first season of Xena, Warrior Princess, the French film Séraphine, about a self-taught, middle-age painter, or How to Be a Woman, a compilation of school classroom films of the 1940s-1980s including Let’s make a sandwich (1950) and Why study home economics (1955). Stream an audio recording by Sofia Gubaidulina, the ground-breaking Russian/Tatar composer known for combining bongos, cymbals, tam-tams, among other percussion instruments. Or simply browse Midcat for books, DVDs, and more, all about: Women.

Starting February 1st, the College Library is providing access to Consumer Reports Online.

Our print copy of Consumer Reports, available in the Harman Periodical Reading Room on the first floor of Davis Library is a popular title, and we’ve been asked by staff and students to consider full online access. So, whether you’re looking for cell phone plans, laptops, cars, or water filters, your research can start online, through March 1st.

Access Consumer Reports online here or via our New & Trial Resources page.

Every year, thousands of books come into the library from all corners of the world. (It takes a lot of fossil fuel to fill a library of over 750,000 books.) So, if you care about how far your food travels, now you can care how far your books travel too. By sourcing new books for our Browsing Collection from a local Middlebury bookstore, we’re supporting Middlebury’s local economy and reducing the miles that these particular books travel.* Now that’s reading local.  You can find our newest books on the New Books shelves and on the Browsing books shelves, located behind the DVDs on the main floor of the Davis Library. And by the way, our Browsing collection is made up of recently published and bestselling fiction and nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, memoirs, and biographies. Now that’s reading to feel good about, for lots of reasons. * An environmental footnote: typically, we would have bought our books from a sort of “library middleman” based in New England, a subsidiary of a global corporation with offices all over the world. We still rely on this company to supply many, many of our harder-to-find academic books. But for our Browsing collection, we turned to Middlebury’s Main Street instead. A much shorter trip and an investment in our community, to boot.