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.

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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!

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