Author Archives: Arabella Holzapfel

New online library resources for 2015

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Over November and December of last year, the library purchased access to a number of fascinating library resources:

  • Gale Virtual Reference Library – we now have access to everything in the Gale Virtual Reference Library that was published prior to August 2014.GVRL
  • Alexander Street Drama – loaded with information about theatrical productions and with full-text scripts for many (but not all) plays by a wide breadth of playwrights, Alexander Street Drama includes Black Drama, Asian-American Drama, Latino Drama, and more.asd
  • Kanopy Streaming – members of the Middlebury College Community can now watch films from Kanopy (“Netflix for colleges”). Our access to this uses a “Patron-Driven Acquisitions” model. A film in the collection can be watched by any authorized user (student, faculty, staff member) anywhere, anytime – just click this link. The fourth time a given film is viewed, a purchase will be “triggered” and we will have licensed access to that film for a year. Kanopy
  • American History in Video – a student requested that we trial this collection of newsreels, documentaries and other historical film works. Browse by event, person, place, and more. ASP_AHV
  • National Anti-Slavery Standard – still in pre-publication, this is a database of images and some full-text from the National Anti-Slavery Standard – the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in 1833 by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan, the society sought to extend the rights of slaves across the country and implied not only suffrage rights for colored males, but also advocated suffrage for women.NASS
  • London Review of Books – by popular demand, we now have full access to current and past online content of the LRB! LRB
  • CQ Researcher Archive – we now have access to the full archive of CQ Researcher, going back to 1923. We’ve also filled in some gaps in our access to CQ Almanac, and added CQ’s Guides to U.S. Economic Policy, U.S. Environmental Policy, and U.S. Health & Healthcare Policy.
  • Coming Soon – Celebrity Studies, a new journal subscription

Friday links – January 9, 2015

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Libraries are in the technology industry, says Rick Anderson. “… When we talk publicly about technological change in libraries, it seems to me that it’s too often in one of two ways: either we’re patting ourselves on the back for being so ready to embrace it, or we’re talking about how a particular change is just a fad and really doesn’t really apply to us. But the information world has become, decisively and whether we like it or not, a technology industry. … Confusing the sacredness of ends with the sacredness of means is one symptom of a disease that could easily kill us. …”

Friday Links – December 5, 2014

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Gates Foundation announces “world’s strongest policy on Open Access“. ‘from January 2015, researchers it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data-sets immediately upon publication — and must make that research available for commercial re-use. “We believe that published research resulting from our funding should be promptly and broadly disseminated,” the foundation states.’

Librarians as publishers. As an example – one of our own: Portulano (while the library may not be “a publisher” of this journal, certain library staff members provided instrumental support in making it accessible)

All About Those Books. The Mount Desert Island High School version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About The Bass.” (MDIHS has just 571 students!)

FSU Shooting Highlights the Need for Library Security.  Library Journal article – “Early in the morning of November 20 a lone gunman opened fire in Florida State University’s (FSU) Strozier Library.”  The library staff will be receiving training this month for how to handle such situations.

Friday Links for Halloween, October 31, 2014

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10 reasons scholars should start writing BuzzFeed articles

Infographics in 3 Steps

NEW! Moodle Users Listserv – This group is for Moodle teachers who would like to use an email forum to ask, answer, and share Moodle questions and tips. To join the list you can either visit http://sites.middlebury.edu/ct and use the sign up form in the right hand column, or send an email message to listmanager@lists.middlebury.edu and include:

  • subscribe in the subject field
  • subscribe moodle-users in the text of the email

 

 

Alexander Street Drama (trial ends December 3, 2014)

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Alexander Street Drama brings together thousands of plays from Alexander Street’s individual full-text drama collections and makes them accessible and cross-searchable in a single package. It includes the complete content of:.

Everything is cross-searchable through the unified North American Theatre Online interface, with the results seamlessly integrated into one search result.

Let us know what you think – email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or your Library liaison.

Friday Links – October 10, 2014

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How tech is changing the way we think and what we think about – There are a myriad of arguments for and against the increased use of technology in everyday life. Futurists and technophiles encourage its use, sure that technology will welcome a new utopia, while luddites rail against the “destructive” nature of technology use.

The Next Wave of Tech Change | Self-Publishing & Libraries (from Library Journal)

Trust, Privacy, Big Data, and E-book readers “… the Amazon Kindle platform is as much a data ingest tool for providing end-user behavior data to Amazon as it is a sales platform for digital media content,…” … “It seems that counter to this trend, libraries and scholarly publishers are the exception to the rule. Whether our community will remain outliers and whether this status is a good thing or not over the long run, remains to be seen.”

IEEE’s Computer Science Digital Library (trial ends October 22, 2014)

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Members of the Middlebury community have free access to the Computer Science Digital Library from the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for two weeks, ending October 22, 2014.

Included in the CSDL are over a dozen journals, many “Transactions of the IEEE” and hundreds of conference proceedings.

Let us know what you think – email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or contact your liaison.

Friday links – October 3, 2014

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JSTOR Daily – an online journal offering “insight, commentary, and analysis of ideas, research, and current events, tapping into the rich scholarship on JSTOR … In addition to weekly feature articles, the magazine publishes daily blog posts that provide the backstory to complex issues of the day in a variety of subject areas, interviews with and profiles of scholars and their work, and much more.”
Clever video, but I (AH) wonder how they’re able to trademark a “bookbook”