Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Current faculty, staff, and students have trial access to all 588 of the Cambridge Companions through mid-March.

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

Following up on successful trials, the library has subscribed to three new resources:

• Ancestry, Library Edition – we got very positive feedback on this trial and we are pleased to enable faculty, students, and staff to use this fascinating resource for classes and scholarly and personal research.
• Human Rights Studies Online – both the Monterey and Middlebury campuses now have access to this archive of documents, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010.

• BrowZine – Students, faculty, and staff at both Middlebury College and the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey can get easy browsability and convenient access to most of our subscribed journals on mobile devices or through a web browser. Since our trial, the web version now has the capability to provide your own personal “bookshelf” of your favorite journals.

For the next 30 days, students, faculty, and staff of Middlebury College have free access to the Foreign Office Files for China, 1919-1980. These are archival documents from the British Foreign Office that deal with China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan from between 1919 through 1980. Our trial includes these parts of the archive:

• 1919-1929: Kuomintang, CCP and the Third International
• 1930-1937: The Long March, civil war in China and the Manchurian Crisis
• 1938-1948: Open Door, Japanese war and the seeds of communist victory
• 1949-1956: The Communist revolution
• 1957-1966: The Great Leap Forward
• 1967-1980: The Cultural Revolution

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

We trialed BrowZine in mid-summer and got some good response, but since then they’ve enabled a Web-based version which we think will be useful to more of our community, so we’re trialing it again.

BrowZine is a unique product that “knows” Middlebury’s journal subscriptions and allows you to browse or search our journals in a visually interesting and convenient interface.

On mobile devices (and soon in the web version),  you can create your own shelf of journals, on which new issues will appear as soon as they are published.

It’s modeled after the experience of browsing the periodical shelves in the library, but it’s on your mobile device. There are many more features, too.

We would really like to get some feedback from all parts of our user community this time – staff, faculty, and students! Try out BrowZine – the web version, or download the app – and let us know what you think: email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or contact your liaison.

For the next thirty days, the Middlebury College community has free access to Ancestry Library Edition – the library’s version of ancestry.com. Search census records; birth, marriage, and death records; city directories, and much more.

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

From ProQuest:

On February 28, 2015, ProQuest will be upgrading its systems infrastructure to improve performance, security, and overall reliability of your products. The window is scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and will last for five (5) hours

Affected resources that Middlebury subscribes to:

• ProQuest platform (search.proquest.com), which includes (a partial list):
  • ProQuest Central (over 16,000 full-text journal titles)
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers
  • PsycINFO and PsycTESTS
  • Safari Technical Books
• ProQuest Congressional (congressional.proquest.com)
• Chadwyck-Healey databases (full list available here); includes Periodicals Archive Online
• ProQuest Digital Microfilm
• RefWorks

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• London Review of Books – by popular demand, we now have full access to current and past online content of the 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