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13 Jan, 2005 |
Volume 2, Number 1 |
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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 to the third issue of the English Department Library Newsletter.
The following "news items" are potentially useful for one researching and
teaching literature(s) in English. They constitute just a few of the many
resources provided by and/or pointed to by BC Libraries. To keep up to date
with the Libraries' myriad new databases, guides, web sites, tutorials etc.
it's a good idea to browse frequently through the Libraries web site <
http://www.bc.edu/libraries/
>. Also, feel free to get in touch with me any time if I can assist
you in any way with your research or teaching. Best wishes for a good Spring Semester, Brendan Rapple ( rappleb@bc.edu ) x24482 Contents:
New Interface for MLAWe have a new interface for the MLA International Bibliography database. Our contract with the vendor Ovid/SilverPlatter, through whom we formerly had access to the database, ended in December, 2004 and we now subscribe to the CSA Illumina version of MLA International Bibliography (new interface) . I believe that this is a welcome development. Not only is the new format more user-friendl, its variety of search options is more powerful than the former version’s. Some useful tutorials may be found at http://beta.csa.com/preview/ . MLA provides more than 1.6 million records with backfiles to 1963. There is also a new interface for the MLA Directory of Periodicals . return to top 
Arts & Humanities Citation Index Now Goes Back to 1982 Boston College Libraries now provide access to an added ten years of Arts and Humanities Citation Index (part of the Web of Science database), with coverage spanning 1982 to the present. Web of Science, made up of Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index, provides access to nearly 9,000 major journals across the disciplines. Web of Science is most famous for its “Cited Reference” search feature that enables one to search for recent works which cite earlier research literature of interest. One may also search the database by author, topic, journal title and address. return to top 
Full-text Access to Dissertations The Library continues to expand its repertoire and back-file of electronic resources. A recent acquisition is the ProQuest Digital Dissertations Database , which includes indexing of citations and abstracts to more than 2 million dissertations and masters theses in all fields produced in North American colleges and universities from 1861 to the present, and from around the world since 1988, including more than 3900 from Boston College. The more significant news, however, is the access to the full text of dissertations published since 1997, over 450,000 titles! Twenty-four pages previews are also available 1997+. Searching is powerful and flexible. It is possible to search by keyword, author, title, school, and advisor and perform searches such as: keyword "Wordsworth" and school "Boston College" and adviser "Richardson"return to top 
http://escholarship.bc.edu/ -- eScholarship@BC pilot web siteThe web site http://escholarship.bc.edu has recently been created. This is a pilot project of the eScholarship@BC initiative of the Boston College Libraries. Research and scholarly output included has been selected and deposited on behalf of individual university departments and centers. The repository supports open access to scholarship by encouraging Boston College authors to archive and distribute online both unpublished work and peer-reviewed publications. Perhaps the primary benefit of such institutional repositories is the widest diffusion possible of scholarship. They promote what the Budapest Open Access Initiative terms "open access", namely the free availability of the literature deposited "on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself". Another major benefit will be the inevitable improvement in the research process. Research will be disseminated far more speedily. It will be cited more. The feature of being able to search across subjects will open new avenues in scholarship. Digital repositories facilitate e-mail notification alerts of new papers. Usage reports that show traffic for papers are easy to produce. Institutional repositories have the ability to disseminate highly specialized material that might otherwise find it extremely difficult to attract a traditional publisher. In like manner, an institutional repository is an excellent vehicle for storing and disseminating a scholar's data resources which he or she has used to create a scholarly product. Moreover, institutional repositories can easily hold and make available videos, images, audio files, slide shows, and so on. In addition, as more institutional repositories are established and more fully populated with scholarly material, the 'interoperability' feature of metadata harvesting protocols searching across institutional archives will become more prominent. In short, users will be enabled to search across a multitude of university digital repositories simultaneously. If you have any questions about our pilot project http://escholarship.bc.edu/ please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me [ rappleb@bc.edu ] return to top 
Poets on ScreenPoets on Screen, a fascinating multimedia collection, is an important component of the database Literature Online (LION) . It is produced in collaboration with some of the foremost poets living and working in the English-speaking world today and provides a unique opportunity to hear major authors interpreting their own works and those of their contemporaries and predecessors. For example, the clips feature contemporary poets reading a selection of works by authors such as Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath as well as poets reading their own work including Patience Agbabi, Margaret Atwood, Sujata Bhatt, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Andrew Motion, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nikki Giovanni and Benjamin Zephaniah. Users can access the whole library of clips from the Poets on Screen link on the home page of Literature Online (LION) or under the Multimedia heading of the Complete Contents page. Links to Poets on Screen clips also appear on the relevant Author Pages. Poets on Screen clips can be viewed using either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. For more information on downloading media players or to see what media players are already installed on your machine go to the Technical Support page in Literature Online. return to top 
Eighteenth Century Collections Online Boston College Libraries have purchased the database Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) . When complete, this database will deliver every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. It will comprise nearly 150,000 titles and editions and will allow full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material. Titles included in ECCO are based on the English Short Title Catalogue bibliography and are sourced from the holdings of the British Library, as well as other national, university, research, and public and private libraries. The database includes a variety of materials - from books and directories, Bibles, sheet music and sermons to advertisements - and works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century. A centerpiece of the collection is the complete works of such major eighteenth-century authors as: Edmund Burke, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, John Wesley. Additionally, significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth-century, collections on the French Revolution, and the eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare can be found within this database. Variant editions of each individual work are frequently offered to enable scholars to make textual comparisons of the works. The database is divided into seven subject areas: History and Geography; Fine Arts and Social Sciences; Medicine, Science and Technology; Literature and Language; Religion and Philosophy; Law; General Reference. Users can search Eighteenth Century Collections Online by specific keywords or phrases, full text, author, title, date, general subject area and more. Advanced page navigation options allow users to search by entering a sequential page number, a printed page number or by using a list to navigate between pages that contain a match for the search term entered. From the results list and page view, the user then has the ability to link directly to different portions of the work, such as the title page, back-of-book index, list of illustrations, an e-Table of Contents and more. Eighteenth Century Collections Online is reputedly the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken. It is also an excellent complement to two other BC Libraries' databases: Early English Books Online (EEBO) , which provides full-text access to nearly every English language book published from the invention of printing to 1700, and Evans Digital Edition , the full-text digital collection of books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in America from 1639-1800. return to top 
Jesuit Library Passport ProgramThe libraries of the Jesuit institutions represented in the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) have joined together to provide a nationwide reciprocal borrowing program for the faculty of each institution. Faculty members have on-site access to the collective holdings of 28 Jesuit institutions listed below. In addition, if a Boston College faculty member visits one of these institutions, the library will grant the visitor borrowing privileges. Before visiting, the faculty member must complete an AJCU Direct Reciprocal Library Borrower Form, available in the O'Neill Library at the main Circulation Desk. Then take the completed, signed form with you to the participating library, together with your Boston College photo ID. Please remember that borrowing privileges are determined by the host lending library and may or may not be similar to your borrowing privileges at Boston College. Member Institutions
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Book Review Digest PlusBC Libraries have recently subscribed to the database Book Review Digest Plus . Book Review Digest, a library classic for nearly 100 years, has dramatically expanded its scope (from its former base of 109 periodicals) and now draws entries from over 8,000 periodicals. With coverage back to 1983, Book Review Digest Plus indexes reviews of current fiction and non-fiction, and provides review excerpts and over 100,000 full text reviews. Entries currently encompass some 1,300,000 reviews covering over 550,000 books and growing with daily updates. return to top 
Essay and General Literature Index: A Digital Guide to Some 65,000 Essays in Anthologies and Collections The database Essay and General Literature Index offers access to nearly 65,000 essays contained in some 5,300 anthologies and collections published in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. This constitutes a wealth of information that might otherwise be difficult to access. Each year more than 300 single and multi-author collections are indexed as well as more than 20 selected annuals and serials. The database facilitates locating related articles at a click: each citation links to a list of other works in the collection, others by the author, and others on the subject, as well as to an entry for the source collection. Coverage spans the entire range of the humanities and social sciences, including literary works, art history, drama, and film. Online coverage is 1985 to present. The years 1900 - 1984 are available in print in the O'Neill Library Reference Index Area AI3 .E75 Range 2: General. return to top 
Open Access and the Humanities Saul Fisher (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) presented the paper "The Open Source Movement and Higher Education: Consequences for the Humanities " at the Modern Languages Association Convention, December 30, 2004. I think that some of his points are certainly interesting, particularly from page 7 onwards. Those who would like to learn more about the notion of Open Access could do worse than peruse the t wo documents, one very short and one a little longer, that explain very clearly and cogently, the major concepts of Open Access: A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm and Open Access Overview <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm >] Re cently , SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) published a brochure introducing open access to scientific and scholarly research. The Open Access brochure [pdf] describes the benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists. Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on internet connectivity to increase a research article's use and impact. The brochure also suggests steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work. For example, retaining rights to post their pre- or post-prints in institutional repositories can help ensure broad exposure for a scholar's research (see Boston College Libraries' Suggested Addendum to Publishing Contracts ). Broader scale faculty actions include working towards their academic society's adoption of open access or helping to publish an open-access journal themselves. return to top |
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