Aluka Preview

Aluka, from the Zulu word for “to weave, ” is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. The website includes a wide variety of scholarly materials, ranging from archival documents, periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts, and reference works, to three-dimensional models, maps, oral histories, plant specimens, photographs, and slides. To demonstrate Aluka’s potential, three content areas are being developed: African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes; African Plants; and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. New materials are added to the collections on an ongoing basis. Aluka’s creators intend for it to serve as a model for future efforts to document other regions of the developing world.

As subscribers to the JSTOR Collections, UNH will receive free access to Aluka through June 2008.

The Easy Button: Playing in the JSTOR Sandbox

If you look at the top of the JSTOR search page, there is a question: “What’s new in the JSTOR Sandbox?” The sandbox is literally a place where you can explore new resources and play with planned changes to the JSTOR technology platform. As they continue to work on changes, it includes some screenshots of what the site will look like in the not-so-distant future.

Their sandbox permits you to test drive their faceted search, which lets you deepen or expand searches by organizing search results into different categories, or “facets.” Using this feature you can narrow results by: discipline; journal; article type; publication date; language; the number of times the article is cited in JSTOR; number of pages; and those articles containing images. Just recently, they added three additional features:

• You may now click on a “More Like This” link to bring up similar articles;
• You may use article-level keywords to identify important concepts within the article and to search for other articles with the same keywords; and
• You can use a “slider” to help fine-tune your search by increasing or decreasing the importance that the search gives to your selected facets and search terms without the need for complex Boolean equations.

Take some time to experiment with these new features. JSTOR includes a warning that this is a protoype and that it cannot guarantee that results are up-to-date; however, I have run a number of searches side-by-side and results have been the same. But, don’t sue me!

Scholarships and Fellowships for UNH Grad Students

From Ellen Fitzpatrick:

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR PART TIME STUDENTS
The Graduate School has several tuition scholarships available for part-time students for the spring semester. The deadline is December 8. I have attached the announcement which explains eligibility and how to apply: announcement.pdf

DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIPS
Likewise, the Graduate School has now posted its announcement inviting applications for 2008 Dissertation Fellowships: 08_dissertation_announcement.pdf

PhD students who expect to FINISH their theses in 2008-2009 are eligible. If you are planning to apply for a dissertation fellowship, please let me know by return email. The deadline for applications is January 11. Every student applying for a dissertation fellowship will need a letter from me, as well as from their adviser. I will need at least a rough draft of your proposal, a short c.v. and the recommendation form by noon on DECEMBER 12. Please submit these materials to Susan so that we can ensure nothing is misplaced. I will be happy to meet individually with any student applying for a dissertation fellowship to discuss strategies in writing your proposal.

Online Resource of the Week: Women Working, 1800-1930

Women Working, 1800-1930

This site, part of Harvard’s Open Collections Program, focuses on women’s role in the United States economy. It provides online access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University’s library and museum collections. The collection currently contains approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including: 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets, and over 1,200 photographs.

It features the diaries of women who were engaged in often disparate occupations, turned to the current date, but readily browsable to the reader. In addition, it documents occupations ranging from mill workers, secretaries and teachers to women working in the entertainment industry or with the Department of the Interior on the American frontier (above). One can easily browse by subject, genre, or keyword. Moreover, the online viewer is quite intuitive and functional.

Harvard’s other digital collections feature primary source material related to Islamic and Latin American studies, early photography, immigration, labor history, and Harvard history, just to name just a few.

The Easy Button: New Tools for Project MUSE

Project MUSE has developed a search plugin that you can add to your web browser. When added, it will be part of the list of search engines that are available in the search box in the upper right corner on your browser. This will enable you to search MUSE any time your browser is open, regardless of the web page you are viewing. The plugin can be added to any browser that supports Sherlock and OpenSearch Search Engine Plugins. The installation takes just a couple of seconds. To read about and install the Project MUSE search plugin, please go to http://muse.jhu.edu/content/ml/about/librarians/search_plugin.html.

In addition, Project MUSE has added a new RSS feed: Upcoming Journals for 2008. This feed provides a list of all titles confirmed to join MUSE in 2008 with subsequent notification when each of the new titles first becomes available online. This is in addition to feeds for Upcoming Journals for 2007 and journal feeds, i.e. automatic notification for the most recent issues of MUSE titles that you select according to your interests. Read about and subscribe to MUSE RSS feeds at the MUSE RSS Syndication page: http://feeds.muse.jhu.edu.

Online Resource of the Week: The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

From the University of Texas-Austin Libraries, this collection contains more than 250,000 maps covering all areas of the world. Descriptions for many of the maps are included in in their Library Catalog. You can limit your search to maps only by clicking on “PCL (Perry-Castañeda Library)” under the location tab. In addition, this website includes more than 11,000 map images from their collections, as well as links to related sites containing even more maps.

You’ll be able to find the boundaries of 13th-century Spanish kingdoms (above), early plans for the city of New Orleans, and battlefield maps created by the U. S. National Park Service. For modern topics, you can access maps outlining the Kurdish lands of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Armenia or link to maps showing the areas of Bangladesh affected by the recent cyclone.

If you haven’t visited their site before, take a look. The breadth, in respect to chronology, geography, and topic, is remarkable. Enjoy thinking of ways to put these resources to good use.

The Easy Button: Digitized Documents and PDF

Portable Document Format or PDF is a widely accepted file format for exchanging, displaying, and printing documents. Most of the collections of digital documents that we have purchased in recent years feature a PDF function to permit researchers to print or save items. In addition, I have found that it is often faster to save and work with documents as PDFs, rather than to use them online. This is especially true when navigating large files, accessing databases of such documents from home, or using a wireless internet connection. So, the next time you are using Early English Books, America’s Historical Newspapers, or similar products, and response time seems a bit slow, hit the PDF button and see if you can’t make your work go a little faster.

Online Resource of the Week: Beyond Brown Paper

Beyond Brown Paper

This week’s resource is from New Hampshire, but I think it is one of the most innovative digital library sites out there. Casey Bisson and the folks at Plymouth State University are compiling an online photo archive of the the Brown Paper Company, the now defunct paper company in Berlin, NH.

What makes this site interesting? In addition to making archival scans from a collection of over 11,000 photos, they are being fed through a blog. As a result, members of the Berlin community, former Brown employees, etc. can comment on images, identify the people or places in them, and explain often arcane paper manufacturing processes. Moreover, interested researchers can tag photographs using their own terms for future use. In this way, collections are not just fed to researchers: they become interactive and a community of interested users can develop around them.

We are exploring ways to do the same with some of our collections here at UNH. In the meantime, explore and enjoy the good work of our colleagues at Plymouth.

The Easy Button: The U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980

U.S. Congressional Serial Set [restricted to UNH users]

About a year ago, the UNH Library added the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 from Readex to its digital holdings. Unfortunately, its bland title suggests page after page of dry legalese. On the contrary, this product is a rich and largely untapped collection of primary source material detailing all aspects of American history and culture. When completed, the U.S. Congressional Serial Set will replicate nearly 14,000 volumes and more than 12 million pages from the original 350,000 publications, along with 52,000 maps and thousands of illustrations and statistical tables. It currently has been scanned and indexed through the 70^th Congress (1928), but more is being added all the time.

Digitization not only makes it possible to access over a third of a million publications from your desk-top, it allows full-text searching. Moreover, Readex has added thousands of access points, so that researchers can locate materials by subject, publication type, Congress, and even personal name. And once you have accessed an individual document, the table of contents enables you to identify any tables, maps or illustrations within a document. Some examples of searches:

• Looking under the subject area “Health” can lead you to the sub-heading “Influenza Epidemic (1918-1919)”, where you locate 15 related documents. You can break it down further to track-down legislation regarding “Undertakers and undertakers” or reports on the link between the outbreak and the First World War.

• A search under “Science and Technology” can take you to the 36 documents published as the result of the “Pacific railroad surveys (1853-1856).” Within these you can see maps and illustrations from the survey.

• Within “Safety, Accidents and Disasters” you can identify 89 documents related to hurricanes. You can use sub-headings to narrow it to the 13 documents on the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Within those documents you may locate maps which document the destruction to the city and local shipping.

The point is: don’t be intimidated by the amount of information contained in the Serials Set. There are thousands of access points that can lead you to information specific to your research. And then there is the full-text searching capability.

So, if you haven’t already, take it for a test drive. If you do have any questions or run into any problems, don’t hesitate to post any questions or comments.

Online Resource of the Week: American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936

American Environmental Photographs

Milne Special Collections has a number of significant collections related to environmental history. For that reason, I am always scouting for related collections on the web. This site, produced by the University of Chicago from its collections, is featured as part of the American Memory Project from the Library of Congress.

This collection consists of approximately 4,500 photographs documenting natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Century. These photographs were created between 1891 and 1936 by University of Chicago faculty who helped influence the development of modern ecological studies. These images provide an overview of important representative natural landscapes across the nation. They demonstrate the character of a wide range of American topography, its forestation, aridity, shifting coastal dune complexes, and watercourses.

I am partial to the landscapes of Yellowstone National Park and this collection does not disappoint in this regard. You can use the search box to locate images of interest within the collection. In additional to photographs of iconic American landscapes, the collection contains images of University of Chicago faculty and students in the field (above). Thus, it provides visual documentation of the evolution of the modern American academy as well as the emergence of the American environmental studies.

Take the opportunity to explore the images that make up this free, online resource.