BC Libraries
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Communications
RefWorks
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Welcome to the latest issue of
the
English Dept. Library Newsletter. The following "news items" are
potentially useful for one studying, researching and teaching
literature in English and related areas. Of course, they refer to just
a few of the many resources and services 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. Also, feel
free to get in touch with me any time if I can assist you in any way
with
your research or teaching.
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 Poets
on Screen Multimedia Collection
Poets
on Screen is an important
component of the database Literature
Online (LION). It is a multimedia collection 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.
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. The clips
are
played 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.
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 Features
of Literature
Online (LION)
Literature
Online (LION) is a fully searchable library of more than
350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, about
180 full-text literature journals, almost 800 poetry video clips, over
5,000 selected web sites, and other key criticism and reference
resources. It is a very important complement to the MLA
Database. The following are some of the significant features of
LION:
- Durable URLs allow the reader to
bookmark articles or searches of interest for future reference.
Instructors may embed them in course web pages.
- Email content
alerts provide updates to content on authors in LION.
- The feature My Archive offers a personal
archive of the user's marked articles, previous searches, and
publications visited.
- Poets on
Screen features 900 film clips of contemporary poets reading
their own
and other poets' works.
- Citation
software support lets users mark articles online, then print a
bibliography in their choice of citation styles.
- Direct linking
allows users to access full-text JSTOR
articles from LION.
- LION provides
access to 3,000 biographies (many
revised) of leading authors.
- There is cross-searching capability with
the Early
English Books Online database.
- KnowledgeNotes™
text-based student guides provide critical study and in-depth
introductions to key novels, poems, and plays.
The following are some useful guides to
searching LION most effectively:
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Finding
Who Has Cited a Publication
 BC Libraries have a new guide: “How
Do I Find Who has Cited a Publication.” This guide provides details
about a number of multidisciplinary and disciplinary specific databases
that permit citation searching. Such databases assist users in
following a particular cited reference, or cited author, forward in
time to find other articles that have also cited that author or work.
Cited references may be useful for a number of reasons: locating
current research based on earlier research, patents, reports, etc.;
finding how many times and where a publication is being cited;
identifying who is referencing a particular paper; exploring how a
particular research topic is being used to support other research;
analyzing the impact of a publication on other research in the field;
tracking the history of a research idea; tracking the research of a
colleague, or keeping track of your own research.
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Full-text Access to Dissertations
 With more
than two million
entries, the ProQuest Digital Dissertations Database is the
single, authoritative source for information about
doctoral dissertations and master's theses. The database represents the
work of authors from over 1,000 graduate schools and universities. Over
47,000 new dissertations and 12,000 new theses are added to the
database
each year. The database includes bibliographic citations for materials
ranging
from the first U.S. dissertation, accepted in 1861, to those accepted
as recently as last semester. Citations for dissertations published
from 1980 forward also include 350-word abstracts written by the
author. Citations for master's theses from 1988 forward include
150-word abstracts. Information is also provided on well over 4,000
dissertations completed at Boston College. Particularly
significant is the access to the full text of dissertations published
since
1997, over 450,000 titles! Twenty-four
pages previews are also
available for the years 1997+.
Searching is powerful and flexible. It is possible to search by
keyword, author, title, school, and advisor and perform searches such
as a) keyword "Wordsworth" and
school "Boston College" or b)
advisor
"Wilt" and school "Boston College". The interface is simple to use and
makes viewing the preview pages and retrieving the full-text a simple
process.
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Historical
Archive of Two Major Newspapers
Particularly valuable to a researcher
of English and American literature and related subjects are the
full-text facsimile archives of the leading British newspaper over the
past two and a quarter centuries and the most prominent American
newspaper since the mid-19th century:
- Times Digital Archive: The Times Digital Archive
provides researchers with an
unparalleled opportunity to search and view online one of the world's
most
cited newspaper in its original published context.
Every complete page of every issue of The
Times
(London) from 1785 to 1985, every headline, article and image, every
front page, editorial, birth and death notice, advertisement and
classified ad that appeared within the pages of The Times is
easily accessible through this database.
- New York Times 1851-2001: Digitizing The New York Times
involved scanning, digitizing, zoning, and editing over 3,400,000 pages
from microfilm into digital files. The database covers The New York
Times from its first issue in 1851 through 2001. This full-text
database is searchable by keyword, article type, date range, and
author's name. Full-page images, including advertisements, can be
displayed by article or by page. The database is cross-searchable with American
Periodicals Series Online.
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 Agreement to Extend Author's Rights Adopted
For several
years Boston College Libraries have urged BC faculty, students and
staff to consider carefully before signing a publishing contract how
the contract might later affect their usage of the published work in
their teaching and research. In particular, the Library recommends that
BC authors retain the right to include the published work in a
course-pack, to place it on their personal web pages and to post and
update it in a scholarly e-print server. To effect this most easily,
the Library encourages authors to request that a scholarship dissemination-friendly addendum
be added to their contracts. Very recently the Board of Directors of the Boston Library Consortium (Boston College
is a member) approved unanimously the adoption of a similar amendment
to a contractual or publication agreement, namely Agreement to
Extend Author's Rights. This is a document that gives
authors and their employing institutions non-exclusive rights to use,
distribute, and reproduce material in electronic digital or print form
in activities connected with the author's academic and professional
activities. The amendment also supports placement of material in
institutional repositories. One may access the agreement in both PDF
and Word formats at the Boston Library Consortium website. The Boston Library Consortium
also has an Authors’ Rights website at: www.blc.org/authorsrights.html.
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 Three Databases
(Under-Utilized?) Useful for Research in Literature
The following three indexes/databases are
arguably not accessed by the Library's users as frequently as one might
suspect. Certainly they are potentially very valuable for researching
aspects of literature in English and related areas:
- British Humanities Index
(1962-present): BHI
indexes over 320 internationally respected humanities journals and
weekly magazines published in the UK and other English speaking
countries, as well as quality newspapers published in the UK.
- Essay & General Literature Index:
Access to nearly 65,000 essays contained in some 5,300 anthologies and
collections. Each year more than 300 single and multi-author
collections are indexed as well as more than 20 selected annuals and
serials. Coverage includes all of the humanities and social sciences,
including literary works, art history, drama, and film. Online coverage
is 1985 to present. [1900 - 1984 is
available in print in the O'Neill
Library Reference Index Area AI3 .E75 Range 2 : General.]
- Periodicals Archive Online
(1775-1995): Periodicals Archive
Online is an archive of hundreds of
digitized
journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences. It
provides researchers with access to more than 200 years of scholarship,
spread across a wide variety of subject areas. Currently, Periodicals
Archive Online contains over 350 journals, providing access to
over 7.8
million article pages - representing over 1.2 million articles.
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Searching
Across Archive of Americana
One is now able to search simultaneously the five databases that
compose our version of Archive of
Americana, a family
of historical collections containing books, pamphlets, broadsides,
newspapers, government documents and ephemera printed in America over
three centuries:
After accessing any one of these
databases (through the Online
Databases page) look near the top right
corner. Click on Archive of
Americana in “Use Archive
of Americana to search across multiple collections.” The searching
is fairly basic – keyword. However, the search hints are useful.
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Over 250
Newspapers From More Than 50 Countries: New Online Database!
 PressDisplay, the newest addition to
the BC Libraries' collection of online databases, lets you look at more
than
250 newspapers from around the world, exactly as they appear in print
and on
the same day they are published. PressDisplay
provides access to papers from
the U.S.
and more than 50 other countries. All papers are provided complete
(with a few
minor exceptions) and in color, displayed in their original format and
layout
(including images and advertisements).
Readers can browse the papers a page at a time,
zooming in for easy reading. A selected (and growing) subset of titles
is
available with advanced features, including clickable tables of
contents and
the ability to call up individual articles in text format for easy
printing or
cutting and pasting. Newspapers can be selected by country, by
language, or
from an alphabetical list. Each paper is available with a rolling
60-day
archive. (Older articles for many of these papers are available in
other
formats in the BC Libraries.) For more on PressDisplay, including how to
navigate through it, see the PressDisplay Tutorial.
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