New Databases
a) House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 18th, 19th, and 20th century provides full text of the sessional papers presented to the British Parliament. Papers include reports of committees, royal commissions, public bills, and accounts and papers. Coverage is from 1688 to 2005.

b) The database Colonial State Papers provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. | more »

c) BC Libraries recently added the new database: Book Review Index. This comprehensive online index to book reviews has over 5.5 million review citations (dating from 1965) from thousands of publications. Arguably this index has a better selection of scholarly journals than Book Review Digest Plus.

Two Publisher Databases

Global Books in Print (Bowkers)
In addition to offering bibliographic information on over 6 million in-print, out-of-print, and forthcoming book, e-book, audio, and video titles, Global Books in Print features over 220,000 tables of contents, 2.5 million annotations, and over 1 million reviews of titles by more than 370,000 publishers, as well as extensive cover images and author biographiess

Ulrich's Periodicals Directory
Ulrich's is an authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types — academic and scholarly journals, Open Access publications, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more from around the world. It covers all subjects, and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and that are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription. Ulrich's also indicates where journals are indexed and/or abstracted.

Reduced Membership Fees for the Boston Athenaeum
The University Libraries owns a share in Boston Athenaeum which enables members of the Boston College community to purchase annual individual memberships at the reduced fee of $85.  BC Libraries will continue to pay the annual fee required to hold this share and is planning to publicize this benefit more widely.  More information on the Athenaeum is here: http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/

Chicago Manual of Style
BC Libraries provide access to the online version of The Chicago Manual of Style (the 15th edition, revised and updated with current style and writing in the electronic age). The Manual incorporates the Chicago Style Q&A, the contents of which are fully searchable along with the content of the Manual. Your queries will return results—clearly distinguishable—from both the Manual and the Chicago Style Q&A.

Faculty Publication Highlights
Over the past couple of years four English faculty have been interviewed about their recently published books as part of the Library's Faculty Publications Highlights series. If you have a new publication  and would like to be interviewed/videotaped,please contact me (Brendan Rapple).

Waiting for America A recent Library interview with author and professor Maxim D. Shrayer regarding his story of emigration.	Ireland's Magdalen Laundries And the Nation's Architecture of Containment By James Smith
Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History By Marjorie Howes	An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry By Maxim D. Shrayer
Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict by Paul Lewis

New Link to Google Books from Quest
A new feature was recently added to the Quest catalogue.   When you do a search you'll notice a new field (the last one in the cataloguing record) that reads: Google Books: More on this title via Google Book Search.

Say that you are looking up in Quest Carlo Rotella's 2002 work Good with their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt. When you've accessed the full record in Quest click on the More on this title via Google Book Search link at the end. A lot of added information and details about Carlo's book are available (much full-text too).

Not every book in Quest has as much added detail as the work above. Also, there are certainly errors and other "infelicities" in these Google links -- perhaps many. It's still a work in progress by Google. Nevertheless,  it's a fascinating and potentially very useful development for Quest.

Posting One's Articles on Personal and Departmental Websites
Many authors wish to provide full-text access to their journal publications on their own personal websites. However, there are often challenges to doing so, notably when the author has signed over their copyright to the publisher in the publication contract. The following website is very useful: SHERPA/RoMEO: Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving. Essentially this site may be used to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement. Though it certainly does not include every publisher, the number of publishers listed is fairly large.  Each publisher is assigned a color (green, blue, yellow, or white). “Green” is the best: an author can provide access to the full-text of the pre-print and the post-print of her/his journal article. Some green publishers, e.g. Cambridge U. Press, Duke U. Press, U. of California Press (and many others) allow an author to place the actual publisher’s version/PDF on the author’s personal or departmental web page or in their university's digital repository (admittedly, sometimes there's an embargo period). The SHERPA/RoMEO url is: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php