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English Department Library
Newsletter
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15 Jan, 2004 |
Volume 1, Number 2 |
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BC Libraries
Online Databases E-Journals E-Books Other Libraries Scholarly Communications
Interlibrary Loan
Online Requests/ Forms Faculty Research Support Course Reserves MetaQuest Digital Library Initiatives Circulation Services Hours |
Welcome, This is the second issue of the English Department Library Newsletter. Below are brief details of a very small number of databases, guides, websites, tools, etc. that are potentially useful to one engaged in literary research. Obviously, this Newsletter could be many times larger. Even a brief account of all the American and English literature databases accessible through BC Libraries would result in a much more voluminous Newsletter! At any rate, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me if I can help in any way with either your research or teaching. Best wishes for a good Spring Semester, Brendan Rapple (rappleb@bc.edu ) x24482 Contents:
Challenges and Opportunities in Scholarly Publishing The 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place in Philadelphia, May 9-10, 2003. The presentations from the session, Crises and Opportunities: the Futures of Scholarly Publishing , are online. See the separate pages by Carlos Alonso , Cathy Davidson , John Unsworth , and Lynne Withey . These papers constitute an interesting complement to the earlier " The Future of Scholarly Publishing " a report from the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing. return to top Free Online Scholarship Newsletter Boston College Libraries are committed to the open-access scholarship movement – the worldwide effort to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. If you wish to learn more about this movement, an excellent source of news and analysis is the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN) written by Peter Suber. There is also an unmoderated discussion forum to accompany the newsletter, the SPARC Open Access Forum (SOAF). For daily news updates, see Suber’s Open Access News blog. For more information about the Newsletter and the Forum and for details about subscribing to them see http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html . return to top Using the 
Button in DatabasesIn many library databases, after you have done a search, you will see the “Find It” button next to your results. When you choose a record and click on Find It, you will see a menu of choices related to that citation. Find It links you from one database to many other BC databases, so that you can easily find out how to get full text either online or in print. If BC does not own the article or book you need, Find It will offer a link to Interlibrary Loan. For more information and a list of databases that include Find It links, see the Find It Frequently Asked Questions page. return to top Early English Books Online (EEBO) When complete the database Early English Books Online (EEBO) will contain in full digital facsimile over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661), and the Early English Tract Supplement . At present 99,287 titles are available with full page images. It is important to remember that when conducting a search one is searching the bibliographic citations of these almost 10,000 works, e.g. author, title, subject keywords. However, to accompany the citations and page images, a separate initiative, the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), is in the process of creating SGML coding for the full text of 25,000 EEBO works, so users can search the full ASCII text of the documents and view both the text and the corresponding original page images. Currently 3,385 titles are available as full text. When searching EEBO one may now search the full text as well as the bibliographic citations of these titles. New full text content will be added to EEBO on a regular basis until the project is completed. return to top Using MetaQuest to Cross-Search Databases MetaQuest is a research tool which contains links to hundreds of databases and library catalogs. MetaQuest allows you to cross-search multiple databases using one simple search, to create your own list of favorite databases, and save your search results within MetaQuest. MetaQuest also links you to thousands of e-journals and links the Libraries’ subject research guides, as well as a new alert feature which notifies you when new articles on your topic are added to a database. MetaQuest is available from the Libraries home page and at http://metaquest.bc.edu . A MetaQuest Quick Guide is available in pdf format. return to top Finding Images Online Bapst Library points to a very useful guide that provides help on locating images from a multitude of sources. It includes a specialized list for finding visual materials, for example Project AMICO (an online collection of 50,000 high quality digital images of works of art in American Museums), AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive (containing more than 700,000 photographs from the Associated Press' current year's photo reports and a selection of photos from their 50 million image print and negative library), and Hulton Getty Picture Collection (one of the largest collections of photography and illustrative material in the world containing over 40 million images, covering prints, engravings, cartoons, illustrations, maps, periodicals and other ephemera). These are just a few; to see more go to http://www.bc.edu/libraries/centers/bapst/resources/s-images/ return to top Searching Web Resources: A Research Guide BC Libraries have created a new guide that’s intended to facilitate searching web resources. The guide helps clarify the different kinds of search engines and directories on the web and how they may be most effectively used. Many of us now tend to rely amost solely on google.com. Google is a great search engine but it is not the only one. A particularly useful section of the guide is Selective Web Guides . This section points to web guides that are built by librarians, scholars, and other educators. The websites to which they link have been reviewed for accuracy and content. Use these guides when you are looking for high quality information. return to top 
200 Years Online of The London Times
BC Libraries have subscribed to The Times Digital Archive , a database containing full page reproductions of every issue of The Times (London) from 1785-1985. The entire newspaper is searchable with all articles, editorials, birth and death notices, cartoons, advertisements, illustrations/photos and other content divided into categories to facilitate searching. One can search full text or by headline, and there are several advanced search techniques. Individual issues of the newspaper may also be browsed for those interested in a particular date or time period. A particularly valuable searching feature is relevance searching, which displays those articles first which are most relevant to the search terms you enter. An interesting review of the database, " A database for old Times' sake " appeared in The Times itself (May 9, 2003). return to top 
Wright American Fiction 1851-1875 This is a collection, created by the Indiana University Digital Library, of American fiction that attempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875. It includes "works by well known writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, along with a great many forgotten authors, whose works may have been very popular in their own time." This collection currently has 2,887 volumes (1,987 unedited, 900 fully edited and encoded) by 1,448 authors. Viewers have the option of browsing this easily navigated site by author or word index, or by conducting simple and/or advanced searches using single words or phrases. return to top Studies in Bibliography – Online Each year Studies in Bibliography presents a wide range of scholarly articles on bibliography and textual criticism. Founded by Professor Fredson Bowers of the University of Virginia, Studies made its first appearance in 1948 as Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, a title that changed to its familiar form the following year. Now freely available on the Internet is the full text of the more than one thousand articles in the 52 annual volumes (1948/49-1999) of Studies in a searchable and browsable database. return to top North American Immigrant Letters The Boston College Libraries have added to the collection North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories , a full text digitized resource. Release I of the database has some 10,000 pages of recollections of the immigrant experience by 71 individuals in 123 sources from 1859 to 1993. Most of the sources are in books and journals. They include chapters in autobiographical works, letters and diaries contained in books and journals, emigrations guides, and digitized cartoons from Harpers Weekly and Puck . Also included are the first ten of over 800 Ellis Island oral histories projected to be in the collection. Most of the books digitized in the first release were not previously owned by the BC Libraries. When completed, the collection will contain some 100,000 digitized pages, representing the immigrant experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but also including the newer immigrant groups of the later twentieth century. The collection can be searched full text with simple and advanced key word searching, and with categories provided by the database. The second release will come by early 2004. 
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return to top ACLS History E-Book Project Now available from the Libraries’ Online Databases page is the ACLS History E-Book Project , a digital library of history books containing works of major importance to historical studies. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) publishes in electronic format a broad range of titles in the field of history. The books include hundreds of significant backfile titles chosen by a panel of noted historians and a smaller number of new titles where historians are encouraged to use new formats such as video and audio links, links to archives, and increased capability for including illustrations in their publications. Both backfile publications and new publications are added each year. The database contains much material useful to scholars in literature. 
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