Ace of Diamonds, 1971, by Salvador Dali, Lithograph

Tisch Library Director, Jo-Ann Michalak, and Tufts Director of Galleries and Collections, Amy Schlegel, have been cooperating to select works of art from the university’s permanent collection for display in the library building. Over one hundred pieces have been added in 2005, along with identifying labels. Along corridors and on wall spaces near tables and carrels throughout the library are various large and small prints, paintings, posters, and photographs offering studious patrons an aesthetic break from their labors. In addition to the pieces intended for permanent or long-term display, a changing selection of student art will be found in The Tower Gallery along the corridor to The Tower café.

If you have never thought of touring Tisch from an artistic perspective (in contrast to investigating its literary, scholarly, and informational resources), why not consider, and then take, such a tour? A viewing aid listing all artwork, with a floor plan, may be consulted at the reference desk.

Times have changed.

The card catalog has long given way to its online counterpart, indexes and abstracts have found a natural home in on-line databases, and journals are as likely to exist in electronic form as in paper. Books, too, are increasingly available on-line.

Tisch Library has added a number of e-book collections over the past year, ranging from the early literature of England and America to history texts to extensive collections of dictionaries, encyclopedias and handbooks.

Early English Books Online contains over 100,000 books, from the first book published in English through the works of the Renaissance up until 1700. Works ranging from the Venerable Bede through Chaucer, Shakespeare and up through the works of Sir Isaac Newton can be searched and read from your own home computer.

Early American Imprints does much the same for the literature of the United States from 1639 through 1819. It contains books, pamphlets, broadsides and sermons and lays out the writings of a new and rapidly developing nation. Both Early American Imprints and Early English Books Online allow you to read the image of the original text and so give you the sense conveyed by early printing and orthography.

The ACLS History E-Book Project brings together secondary literature in the various fields of history, some currently in print and some out of print. Altogether, it contains over 1000 titles of highly respected historical works, with about 250 sources being added each year. In addition to being found within the database, these books can be accessed by individual title through the Tufts online catalog.

Tisch Library also subscribes to collections of reference books. Oxford Reference Online contains electronic versions of commonly used Oxford dictionaries, encyclopedias and subject reference works such as the Concise Guide to African American Literature, a Dictionary of Buddhism, and the Handbook of International Financial Terms. Xreferplus offers reference works for law, business, medicine, geography, and other fields as well as collections of art images. Both collections include an impressive number of bilingual dictionaries.

These collections are all accessible from the A-Z database list.

The electronic collections of texts at Tisch are a supplement to the print collections that continue to grow as needed. We are interested in how e-books are being used by our patrons and would especially like to hear from faculty about ways these materials can further facilitate course reserves and primary source research.

President Bacow Offers a Toast

The list of honorees and the books they selected is as follows:

ARTS & SCIENCES


• R. Bruce Hitchner, Professor of Classics and International Relations
  Caesarea de Mauretanie. Une ville romaine et ses campagnes by Philippe Leveau
• Enrico Spolaore, Professor of Economics
  Before the Industrial Revolution : European Society and Economy, 1000-1700 by Carlo M. Cipolla
• Nancy Bauer, Associate Professor of Philosophy
  The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Consuelo Cruz, Associate Professor of Political Science
  Negara by Clifford Geertz
• Misha Kilmer, Associate Professor of Mathematics
  Rank-Deficient and Discrete III-Posed Problems: Numerical Aspects of Linear Inversion by Per Christian Hansen
• Edward Kutsoati, Associate Professor of Economics
  False Start in Africa by Rene Dumont
• Mohamed Mahmoud, Associate Professor of Comparative Religion
  Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs by Ninian Smart
• Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English
  Corregidora by Gayl Jones
• Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Associate Professor of Political Science
  System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life by Robert L. Jervis
• Montserrat Teixidor, Associate Professor of Mathematics
  Introduction to Moduli Problems and Orbit Spaces by P.E.Newstead
• Barry Trimmer, Associate Professor of Biology
  The Principles of Insect Physiology by V. B. Wigglesworth

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING


• Carla Brodley, Professor of Computer Science
  Pattern Classification by Richard Duda, Peter Hart and David Stork
• Shafiqul Islam, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  How People Learn edited by John Bransford, Ann Brown and Rodney Cocking

The Music Librarian, Michael Rogan, is working with library and university personnel to insure that this temporary inconvenience is handled as smoothly as possible. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact him at 617-627-2846 or michael.rogan@tufts.edu.

Electronic Federal Publications Now in the Online Catalog

Government publications can be a valuable resource for anyone in any field. Besides the obvious field of Political Science, researchers in UEP, Engineering (especially those studying water resources), Education, Child Development, International Relations, Economics, and History will often find materials of interest. Publications include Congressional materials such as House and Senate Reports and Documents, hearings, and public laws, as well as publications from various agencies. We hope the electronic documents now appearing in catalog searches will alert students to the research value of government publications and cause them to search for additional documents shelved in the Tisch depository collection.

As a selective government depository library, we still receive government publications in print. Finding aids for identifying and locating these documents, along with those online, can be found at our posted research guide for government information. These aids are worth consulting for both recent and early documents. It may still take searching by more than one means to find any particular item or a good selection of those on any set topic. For assistance in retrieving government publications, please go to the reference desk during our service hours, call us at 617-627-3460, or e-mail a brief reference question. For aid with in-depth research needs, contact Connie Reik, Coordinator of Government Publications at 617-627-2073 or connie.reik@tufts.edu.

Forthcoming Authors Talks

On Thursday, February 9, from 3:30-5:30 p.m. in the Hirsh Reading Room of Tisch Library, Tony Massarotti, A89, currently a reporter for the Boston Herald, will be speaking about his recently published book: A Tale of Two Cities: The 2004 Yankees and Red Sox Rivalry and the War for the Pennant. An accompanying exhibit will run in the Tisch Library lobby from January 16 to February 15.

On Wednesday, April 5, from 4:00-5:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Room of Ballou Hall, Richard Wilbur, author of Collected Poems, 1943-2004 and second U.S. Poet Laureate, will give the second John Holmes Memorial Poetry Reading. An exhibit on the author will be on display in the Tisch Library lobby from March 16 to April 15.

Google Print Developments

The media has been filled with the news that Google has undertaken a long-term project to digitize the print collections of Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. According to Google, 80% of the books will be pre-1923 out-of-copyright titles that will be available in their entirety. The other 20% will be in-copyright books for which only a small snippet will be available online. As might be expected, lawsuits have already been brought by publishers and authors against the digitization of in-copyright works, and it could be years before this issue is resolved.

How will this project affect Tisch Library and its mission of supporting research and teaching at Tufts University? Instead of seeing Google Print as a competitor, we view it, and all scholarly web resources, as complementary to Tisch Library’s print collections. Indeed, the libraries that are giving their materials to Google also see the digitization project as a complement to their print collections. None of the libraries will be withdrawing their print holdings. They view the Google project as their best means of long-term preservation of their intellectual capital.

The availability of pre-1923 hard-to-find material that Tisch does not own could offer a research opportunity for certain scholars. In addition, Google Print will provide a link to libraries that own the books in print. Since Tisch will have some of these books, we expect that this will increase access to our print collections.

These are the possible positive ramifications of the Google project, but we do have some concerns about retrieval and functionality. The Google search engine provides keyword searching of the full-text of digitized books. The lack of precision in subject-specific searching could result in thousands of non-relevant citations that will be tedious to sort through with few positive results. Studies show that students and faculty dislike reading sustained text on the computer. Even with electronic journal articles, library users almost always print them out so that they can reread them, annotate them and consult them multiple times. In addition, we believe that scholarly monographs are not meant to be read in bytes and bits, but instead require sustained and contextual reading so that readers can see how the author constructs a thesis and builds an argument to support it.

For these reasons, Tisch Library will continue to purchase print books to support the research and teaching needs of the Tufts community, while at the same time supplementing our print holdings with appropriate electronic material. In these times of so many options and limited monetary resources, the librarian/faculty partnership is more important than ever. We need to be involved in frequent discussions so that bibliographers know what to buy for on-site use, what to license, what to take for free, and what to build locally. We look forward to these conversations with our faculty colleagues.

A significant number of people expressed particular interest in the pamphlets displayed in the cases near the panels and in the library lobby. Fortunately, most of these reside at Tufts and can be viewed, by arrangement, at any time. A description of the Ryder Collection of Civil War documents, located in the Digital Collections and Archives, may be accessed from their listing of manuscript (subject) collections. For help in locating additional ante-bellum pamphlets housed in Special Collections and Archives, please contact Christopher Barbour, Humanities Bibliographer, at 617-627-2398 or christopher.barbour@tufts.edu.

Contributors to this issue:

Edward Oberholtzer

Michael Rogan

Connie Reik

Laura Walters

Stephanie St. Laurence: photographs (3)

Graphic images (2): © 2005 www.clipart.com

Editor: Margaret Gooch