Middlebury College now has full access to The Illustrated London News digital archive, 1842-2003. The archive incudes over 260,000 color pages and full-text searching. Find it on our Journals & Databases page (go/journals) or our Databases A-Z page (go/databases).
Play On! Put On a Show Within A Show
This play is hilarious! And it features our very own System Administrator, Mike Lynch! Nice write-up in the Campus, just in time for this weekend’s performances.
Terry Deary’s attack on libraries branded ‘ignorant twaddle’
Popular children’s author Terry Deary says public libraries should cease to exist. Other authors disagree.
The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid Is Your Liberal Arts Degree, from McSweeney’s.
Safari Books Online, our digital library with over 22,886 ebooks on technology, digital media, and design, announced some recent changes.
Find more ebooks and scholarly essays in Oxford Handbooks Online.
We’ve expanded access to include the following collections: Philosophy, Religion, Economics & Finance, Music, Literature, History, and Political Science.
Find OHO and other new library acquisitions & current trials here.
Helen Hartness Flanders
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.
Wax cylinders, Middlebury’s Special Collections & College Archives
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
Until February 15 the Middlebury College Libraries has trial access to Proquest’s House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP), a full-text searchable database with the working documents of government for all areas of social, political, economic, and foreign policy from the 18th century to the 21st.
House of Commons at Westminster 1808 (Wikimedia Commons)
Visit our New & Trial Resources page or search the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) here.
Please share your comments with Rebekah Irwin or your subject liaison.
Until December 26 we have access to all of Oxford’s fourteen handbooks in the Oxford Handbooks Online (OHO) collection. Middlebury currently has access to only three OHO collections: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Science.
Get started with a video tutorial or browse and search OHO.
Find OHO and other New & Trial Resources here (go/trials).
Email Rebekah Irwin or your library liaison with comments.
The Library took note in May 2011 when Amazon.com announced that its customers were purchasing “more Kindle books than all print books – hardcover and paperback – combined.” Though we’re certainly not yet debating the idea of a bookless library at Middlebury, some number crunching over a 14 month time period seems to show that Middlebury faculty, students, and librarians are beginning to favor ebooks over print too:
++
A 14 Month Snapshot of Library Requests (Sept. 1, 2011-Nov. 1, 2012)
1,339 faculty, students, & librarians requested books
Overall 35% preferred a print book
Overall 65% preferred an ebook
++
Of the 211 students requests 45% preferred a print book and 55% preferred ebooks
Of the 432 librarian requests 33% preferred a print book and 67% preferred ebooks
Out of 696 faculty requests 34% preferred a print book and 66% preferred ebooks
LIS Staff Middlebury Community MiddPoints