Research Matters

Ask the Experts! Open Research Workshops

Students: The Yale University Library is hosting its annual series of open workshops on academic research.  Stop by the Bass Library (Room L06, on the lower level) any time during the following hours:

Monday, 11/09/09, 3-5pm

Tuesday, 11/10/09, 9:30-11am

Wednesday, 11/11/09, 3-5pm

Friday, 11/13/09, 9:30-11am

Learn how to find books, scholarly articles, and primary sources, how to make sense of the Library's databases, how to interpret citations in footnotes, and how to prepare a bibliography.  And meet your Personal Librarian!  No sign-up is necessary; just bring your paper topic or assignment.  See you next week!

17th- and 18th-Century Burney Collection Newspapers from the British Library

Yale University Library now has electronic access to Gale-Cengage's 17th- and 18th-Century Burney Collection Newspapers from the British Library.

You can get to it from the Databases & Article Searching page on the library front door:

http://www.library.yale.edu/

To learn more about the Burney collection please see this webpage:

http://gale.cengage.co.uk/britishlibrarynewspapers/

Another resource for biographical data

The Yale University Library has now purchased the full-text portion of the World Biographical Information System (WBIS).  WBIS includes almost 5.5 million biographical entries of men and women from all classes and professions, and from all countries and regions of the world, from the 8th century BCE to the present.  Use the Basic Search option to look up an individual by name, or the Biographical Search to identify individuals by date of birth or death, occupation, or "archive" (i.e. country, region or culture).  Many individuals are represented in more than one biographical archive; for example, Albert Einstein is included in the German Biographical Archive, the American Biographical Archive, and the Jewish Biographical Archive, among others.  To read the full text of an article, click on "View Digitized Article(s) from Archive".

The WBIS is one more addition to a growing list of online resources for biographical data available to the Yale community:

The African American National Biography

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie/Neue Deutsche Biographie

Biography and Genealogy Master Index

Biography Index Past and Present

Biography Resource Center

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

For more information about these and other databases, please contact smlref <at> yale <dot> edu.

Access to London Review of Books Online

I turned on our "personal" subscription to the London Review of Books online, which includes the archive--a free complement to our print subscription.

Login here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/login/

Contact todd.gilman@yale.edu for password.

British Periodicals II is live

Yale University Library now has access to ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey's British Periodicals II database.

This is a welcome addition to the earlier collection British Periodicals I.

You can get to both collections from the Databases and Article Searching link on the Library Front Door.

To read more about British Periodicals see http://britishperiodicals.chadwyck.com/info/about.do and http://britishperiodicals.chadwyck.com/info/whatsnew.do

Netcasts from the Yale Library

Distinguished historian and Yale alumnus David McCullough (Class of 1955) narrates an audio tour of Sterling Memorial Library.  Click here to listen. This is the second "netcast" produced by the Yale University Library; the first was "The Passover Haggadah" by Judaica Curator Nanette Stahl.

These and future netcasts from the Yale Library will be available on iTunes U.

For more information, contact Geoffrey Little, the Library's Development and Communications Associate, at geoffrey <dot> little <at> yale <dot> edu.

Reserves go digital

If you're teaching here in the '08-'09 academic year and using ClassesV2, consider using the Library's E-Reserves service.  The Library will scan book chapters and/or articles, or link to digital versions of these where they exist, to create a digital version of the familiar coursepack.  (Note that for copyright reasons the Library cannot scan entire books.)  Your students will be able to access reading materials easily through your course website.  They'll also save money, and trees.  How cool is that?  For more information, contact  Ken Raining, at kenneth <dot> raining <at> yale <dot> edu.

Institutional Access to Footnote.com

The Yale University Library now offers institutional access to Footnote.com. Earlier this year, Footnote.com entered into an agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration allowing them to scan and make digitally available parts of NARA's collections. As of today, Footnote.com already contains over twenty million scanned documents and it continues to grow at an impressive rate. It would be unwieldy to list all of of the collections available through Footnote.com - they range from papers from the Continental Congress to Confederate Amnesty Applications to FBI Case Files - but you can browse available collections here:

http://www.footnote.com/browse.php#All|172590

 

Additionally, here is a youtube video demonstrating the functionality of

Footnote.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCF0KRjWVAM

The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera now on trial

The Yale Library now has a trial  for about a month for this resource: The John Johnson Collection:  An Archive of Printed Ephemera.

"This collection provides access to thousands of items selected from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, offering unique insights into the changing nature of everyday life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

A longer description can be found at:

http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com/info/about.do

Highlights include:

*This first release of the John Johnson Collection provides access to facsimile images of more than 6,300 items, including more than 4,000 pieces of theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 1,000 items from the Booktrade category. Over 700 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 400 items from Advertising and over 100 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

* On completion the John Johnson Collection will offer access to more than 65,000 documents (in excess of 150,000 high-resolution colour images) in the above five categories.

 
You can  access via the campus network at:

URL: http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com/

 

Send comments to susanne.roberts@yale.edu

18th Century German Literature Online

The UK has EEBO, the US and the UK have ECCO, and now German speaking countries have DLO18!

Deutsche Literatur des 18. Jahnrhunderts Online or 18th Century German Literature Online offers full-text access (including full-text keyword searching) to first editions and first published complete editions by more than 600 German-speaking authors of the 18th century. The approximately 2,700 works wih almost 4,500 volumes reflect the broad spectrum of German literature and scholarship from the early stages of the age of Enlightenment to the later part of the period. You can access this collection through Orbis and through the Library's Databases & Articles list.