Newsletter of the Tisch Library of Tufts University
Fall 2005 No. 44
Tisch Homepage
Tufts Catalog
Tufts Homepage
In This Issue:
Forever Free Exhibition
Women Working Website
Mini-Learning Commons
Print Version
Research Paper Navigator
Electronic Tufts Ph.D. Dissertations
New Databases
WebBridge Linking Arrives
One Librarian's Summer Experience
New Catalog Features
The Tufts Library Catalog has introduced some new features recently.
The New Acquisitions List debuted in May. The list is updated on the 15th of each month and includes all new holdings that have been cataloged during the previous month. You can use the list in several ways:
- Browse titles acquired by an individual Tufts library (or all Tufts libraries), sorted by author, title or call number.
- Browse titles by subject.
- Search new acquisitions by title, subject, call number or author and, if desired, limit your results to an individual Tufts library.
- Set up an RSS feed and have updates of your saved search or browse delivered to you through your favorite feed reader.
- Perform your search.
- Click on RSS Feed in the upper right-hand corner.
- Paste the address of the page into a feed reader such as Bloglines.
Preferred Search lets you create any number of searches and rerun them whenever you choose. If you are doing ongoing research on complex topics, you will want to take advantage of this feature. To activate it:
- Go to the My Account portion of the Catalog and log in with your name and the barcode on the back of your Tufts ID.
- Click the Search Catalog button.
- Perform your search and click Save as Preferred Search.
- Return to your patron record and click Preferred Search to review the searches saved.
The Reading History option provides access to a list of titles you’ve borrowed. Simply go to the My Account portion of the Catalog and log in with your name and the barcode on the back of your Tufts ID. Once you turn on Reading History, your list begins. If you wish, you can delete individual titles.
To turn off the feature, first delete all the titles on your list. Then click Turn OFF Reading History. The computer will no longer keep a record of what you borrowed. You may also delete specific items from your list. Simply mark the titles and click on the Delete Marked button.
If you are concerned about someone else seeing a list of what you are reading, the safest step is to not to turn on your reading history. However, once an item has been returned, the Tufts libraries maintain no record of what you borrowed. In addition, your list can only be accessed by someone with your barcode number. Library staff have no access to your reading history. Backup information remains for up to one month, but cannot be accessed by library staff.
The law allows law-enforcement officers to see any existing library records if they first obtain a subpoena from a judge.
Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation
Scheduled for display at Tufts University from October 12-December 2 is the exhibition entitled Forever Free. As one of only forty hosting sites in the country this year (and the only one in Massachusetts), Tisch Library is pleased to offer this highly acclaimed national traveling exhibition that focuses on Lincoln’s quest to restore a Union divided by war. From the beginning of the Civil War until his death, Lincoln evolved from a cautious moderate willing to see slavery continue to the “Great Emancipator” who ended slavery in the United States. Forever Free challenges us to re-examine Lincoln’s role in the abolition of slavery and to probe the reasons for his change of heart.
Tisch Library is hosting a diverse lineup of ancillary programs, scheduled throughout the exhibit’s six-week stay on the Tufts campus. All events are offered to the public free of charge, thanks to the generosity of the Diversity Fund, the Toupin Fund, the Offices of the President and Provost, numerous Arts & Sciences departments, and community sponsors.
Geared to a wide variety of ages and interests, the extensive lineup includes, but is not limited to, lectures, author talks, panel discussions by nationally renowned Lincoln experts, a twelve-week film series, period music and dramatic performances, re-enactments, teacher workshops, and a glimpse of the Medford Historical Society’s famed Civil War photographs. Presenting along with esteemed Tufts faculty members will be acclaimed scholars, historians, authors, and re-enactors and artists from near and far.
For more information, including names of participants and a full calendar of events, be sure to bookmark our website .
A publicly available website being developed at a neighboring institution is of noteworthy interest to scholars in various fields of the social sciences. Women Working, 1870 – 1930, makes widely available an extensive number of digitized textual and image resources chosen from books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and photographs in Harvard's museums and libraries. For a fuller description of this online collection, which documents women’s participation in the U.S. economy within the stated years, link to it at the image across.
Pictured: The Shelton Looms, from the Industrial
Life Photograph Collection at Baker Library
Tisch Library Introduces a Mini-Learning Commons
As student and faculty information and research needs change, the Tisch Library has evolved to accommodate them. Through the years Tisch has incorporated ever more technology and electronic resources and added important spaces such as The Tower café to foster collaborations. Now the library is moving to provide more collaborative research space in the form of a learning commons, beginning with a first-step mini-commons. This area is designed to create a new vision of the uses of library space while providing technologies and other support for Tufts undergraduate, graduate and faculty research initiatives.
Located in the reference and information area of Tisch, the mini-commons will consist of a collaborative workstation along with several already existing public computers equipped with Microsoft Software Suite. The collaborative workstation will have space for two to six users who will be able to utilize a Dell computer, wireless keyboard/mouse, and a large, flat panel LCD monitor. Software such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will be available, and the station will be connected to the printing stations and the Internet.
In providing this space, Tisch will also be seeking new partnership opportunities with campus organizations such as Academic Technology, Information Technology Services, the Academic Resource Center, and Communications and Media Studies for exploring the multimedia needs of Arts, Sciences & Engineering. It is hoped that these new partnerships and synergies will provide increased library-centered opportunities for the kind of socially interactive learning that transforms information, as shared, into knowledge.
- Interactive research timeline
- Reminder e-mails that help students with time management
- Helpful tips on how to do research, write a paper, and avoid plagiarism
- Subject guides that provide starting points for library research.
More information about this Berger-funded project, appears within the site.
Faculty are encouraged to provide a link to the Research Paper Navigator from their Blackboard class sites. Project director Anna Neatrour welcomes questions and suggestions about this resource and invites instructors wishing to have a particular subject guide created for a class to let her know.
Beginning with the 2006 academic year, Tufts Arts, Sciences & Engineering doctoral candidates will submit their dissertations electronically. Doctoral dissertations from 2006 on will no longer be available in print in Tisch nor in Digital Collections and Archives.
This change is in line with the joint endeavor of the Tufts Arts, Sciences & Engineering Graduate School Office and the Tufts libraries to better adapt new technology, teaching techniques, and audio-video capabilities to enhance intellectual content. Proquest (formerly known as University Microfilms) already provides electronic access to Tufts dissertations. The new procedure builds on past practice and streamlines submission, authentication, and approval processes, and provides ready access to current academic research.
To access the full-text of Tufts dissertations from 1996 to the present, go to the Tisch home page, select Databases and Articles, and then Dissertations and Theses at Tufts. You are able to search by title keyword, author, or adviser.
ARTstor is also a presentation tool that enables registered users to zoom and pan images, save groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and create and deliver both online and offline presentations. Faculty who want a higher level of access can obtain it through "Instructor Privileges Manager" from the "Tools" toolbar menu and by calling the reference desk (7-3460) for further information.
ARTstor is accessible from the Tufts Library catalog and from the A-Z list of library databases.
Another extensive database for images, although of a more diverse and general nature, is the NYPL Digital Gallery. Accessible here are over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of the New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, posters, photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more, on a huge variety of topics. You may link to this magnificent resource within our list of databases.
Another new database worth mentioning is Birds of North America Online from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Of interest to bird watchers and bird lovers generally, as well as to students of ornithology, it is a comprehensive resource for the 716 species of birds nesting in the USA and Canada. Included are bird songs & calls, maps of breeding & wintering ranges, routes of migration, video to illustrate key behaviors and an image gallery focusing on plumage, habitat, eggs & nests and behaviors. View it from its database listing.
With the fall implementation of WebBridge this capability will be coming to an increasing
number of the online indexes available at Tufts. This new access is part of a suite of products for electronic resource management that the libraries acquired from the vendor of their Millennium library system (Innovative Interfaces, Inc), which was installed in its initial phase last year.
Beginning this September with the databases in Ovid, Web of Knowledge, Engineering Village, and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, the Tufts libraries will offer links to articles found in the most comprehensive of our electronic journal collections: JSTOR, Project Muse, Oxford University Journals, Cambridge University Journals, Science Direct, and Blackwell Synergy. While some of our databases already offer links to articles, this coverage has been limited until now to a few selected journal collections. Implementation of WebBridge will open up citations to a greater number of journals. We will continue to add databases and journal collections throughout the coming months and will also use WebBridge to create links in the online catalog for related subject and author searching of journal literature.
In addition to adding WebBridge services to our databases, we will be expanding information about electronic resources in the online catalog, so that you will be better informed about our holdings and their availability. The kind of information currently available as a separate service in TDNet will begin to be integrated into the catalog so that you can more often rely on the catalog as a single source of information. This integration will take place over the coming months. TDNet will continue to be available during the transition.
Next to become available will be Metafind, a product that will make possible searching across a number of databases simultaneously. Look for Metafind offerings during the fall semester.
Laurie’s trip was not an all-work, no-play experience. She also traveled to the Baltic Sea to tour the former prison camp where her father had been held during World War II, sampled dozens of pierogies and other Polish delicacies, attended a Kosher-Gospel concert and had the good fortune to be in Warsaw during the Cow Parade exhibit.
For more information on Laurie’s trip, feel free to contact her.
Tufts library users now have access through Tisch Library, with support of its NEH collections endowment, to ARTstor, an expanding image database of architecture, painting, photography, sculpture, decorative arts and design, and archeological and anthropological objects -- with associated catalog data. It draws from such collections as The Museum of Modern Art Architecture and Design, The Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, The Huntington Archive of Asian Art, The Carnegie Arts of the United States, The Illustrated Bartsch, and The Image Gallery.
In addition to many full-text databases, the Tufts Libraries subscribe to hundreds of online indexing and abstracting services that point users to citations in the journal literature. Through the TDNet electronic journals interface, the libraries also provide access to thousands of journal titles available online. Imagine a link between these two services that would allow you to click on a button and be presented directly with the article from the citation. Instead of finding a citation, searching the lists of journals, and reviewing subscription coverage details, you are taken automatically to the article you want if it is available online through Tufts.
Laurie Sabol, Tisch Library’s instruction coordinator spent four weeks in Krakow, Poland, this summer. The purpose of the trip was to participate in the reclamation of a Jewish cemetery that was obliterated during World War II. The cemetery may be better known as the site of the Plaszow concentration camp, featured in Schindler’s List. When the Nazis built the camp, they disregarded the sacredness of the seventy-year-old cemetery, rampaging the land, blowing up its buildings and co-opting its headstones to use as road paving material. The land sat abandoned for almost sixty years after the war until a grassroots effort in Krakow began two years ago. With the help of volunteers from Poland, America, and other countries, the land is being cared for, the gravestones uncovered. Long-term plans call for walking paths, educational tours, a small museum and other commemorative spaces.
Entrance to the Site
BiblioTech Connections is published three times a year: in the fall, winter, and spring. It is made available in print form as well as via the Web.
- Contributors to this issue:
- Laurie Sabol
- Stephanie St.Laurence
- Regina Raboin
- Anna Neatrour
- Anthony Kodzis/
- Chao Chen
- Charlotte Keys
- Lincoln Image: permission of ALA Public Programs Office
- Computer image: © 2005 www.clipart.com
- Editor: Margaret Gooch
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