Children’s Literature Database

The Patricia Standish Curriculum Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Lally Building, houses hundred of children’s books — picture books, children’s fiction and non-fiction. It also subscribes to an online database, Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database, which provides many useful ways of searching for children’s books and reviews. Among the tools available to searchers are genre searches, limits to age groups or grades, date ranges, illustrators and lexile range (a measure of reading difficulty).

A monthly newsletter from the vendor is available, providing search tips, database-related news, and monthly feature books.

Steinbeck Review Now Available Online

The Steinbeck Review is now available online through Project Muse. Note that The Steinbeck Review absorbed (isn’t that a nice periodicals term?) Steinbeck Studies with volume 3, 2006. Grapes nuts should be pleased.

Publisher description of The Steinbeck Review

The Steinbeck Review is an authorized publication on the life and works of John Steinbeck. It publishes scholarly articles; notes; essays; book and performance reviews; creative writing; original artwork; short intercalary pieces offering new perspectives on Steinbeck; poems dealing with his themes or settings; and notes on contemporary references to him. Appearing twice a year in Spring and Fall issues, SR has a three-fold mission of broadening the scope of Steinbeck criticism, promoting the work of new and established scholars, and serving as a resource for Steinbeck teachers at all levels.

Books in Print Online Now Available

As part of its subscription to Resources for College Libraries, the Library now has access to Books in Print (BIP) online. BIP has a very comprehensive database of books, audio books, and videos. It also is one of the best sources for forthcoming books, often including information on books set to be published years into the future.

A natural competitor of Amazon, BIP distinguishes itself through its sophisticated (yet easy-to-use) search interface. In addition to the expected search keys, BIP includes limits by status, audience, format, price, binding, “media mention,” review source, and inclusion of first chapters.

Users can also set up a My Favorites account, which allows users to create lists of items to email or print, and save searches to run periodically.

Lexis Nexis To Introduce a New Look

Lexis Nexis Academic Universe has developed a new user interface, one that looks quite different from the one it has used for several years. The new system is now in beta testing, and you can check it out by following the link on the top of the main Lexis Nexis Academic Universe page.

I know of very few people who liked the old interface (including me). I have not experimented with the new interface enough to have developed a firm opinion; however, my initial exploration makes me wish they had tried to produce something with more of the feel of Ebscohost.

Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture Now Online

Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture will now be available online through Project Muse. Online coverage will begin with volume 36, 2007.

Publisher’s Description of the Periodical: Published by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture is an annual volume that features significantly revised versions of outstanding papers read at national and regional conferences of ASECS and its affiliates. Committed to representing ASECS’s wide range of disciplinary interests, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture particularly selects essays that reflect new and highly promising directions of research in the field.

Library Joke of the Day

“I get no respect. I was crossing the street. I got hit by a mobile library. I was lying there in pain, screaming. The guy looked at me. He went, Shhhh‘”

- Rodney Dangerfield 

Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Other Primary Sources

The Library subscribes to a number of databases published by Alexander Street Press which appear to be underutilized. This is a shame because these ASP databases contain thousands of primary documents that would be hard to find elsewhere. One such database is The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries.

Having recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, I am knocked out by the volume of letter writing during this period. Not only was the letter the main form of personal communication (text messaging would have to wait 135 years), but families were often separated by the circumstances of the Civil War. This body of writing, then, provides a unique and insightful look into this period of American history.

The ASP database provides access to the writing of over 2,000 individual and 100,000 pages of letters and diaries from the period. It also includes over 4,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. While the database provides expected search functions, it also has some unique and useful tools for finding content. One that I particularly like is the ability to click into a specific date, starting by year, then month, and finally day. You will see a list of all letters and diaries that contain entries from that date.

Here is the complete list of Alexander Street Press databases, all with links to the resource:

• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• American Film Scripts Online
• Asian American Drama
• Black Thought and Culture
• British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries
• Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures and the Environment
• In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories and Personal Narratives
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: Colonial Period to 1950
• Oral History Online
• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600 – 2000

Moving Walls

The phrase moving wall has an oxymoronic sound to it. Walls usually do not move — unless you are talking about the conceptual barrier that some publishers place on access to their online journal content.

Known also as embargo periods, moving walls disallow access to online journal literature for a specified period of its recent publication. Over time, this wall allows additional access and can be thought of as moving. While this can be very frustrating for researchers, it provides publishers with a strategy for encouraging libraries to continue to purchase access (print or individual online subscription) to current content.

This can be illustrated by looking at the journal Renaissance Quarterly. While the full text of back issues is available through JSTOR, the publisher has placed a three year moving wall on its content. Thus the most current issue available through JSTOR is the Winter 2003 issue. We would expect that shortly the Spring 2004 issue would become available to us.

It is important to note, however, that there is more than one way to scale a wall. In our example above, a search of Renaissance Quarterly using the library’s Full-Text Finder tool (available here), we find that the library also has a print subscription to Renaissance Quarterly that fills in the gap from 2003 to the present. (In addition, Project Muse has announced it will be adding Renaissance Quarterly to its database with full text available from 2007 onward.)

As with all things concerning periodicals, the issue of moving walls can be frustrating and confusing. But as a sage of old has said, Nothing in this world that’s worth having comes easy.

Library Circulation Continues Downward Trend

Circulation statistics measure how often printed materials are checked out of the library. For the eighth consecutive year the number of books checked out of the Neil Hellman Library has declined — down 14% in 2006-07.

Of those subject categories with over 500 circulations, the following experienced the largest declines:

• Music: -44%
• Special Education: -30%
• Education: -27%
• British Literature: -22%
• American Literature: -21%

There was, however, a few positive trends in the 500+ subject categories:

• North American History: +24%
• Political Science: +16%
• Sociology: +5%

While the general downward trend is disappointing, it parallels national trends; and given the broad range of resources available to students online, the declining use of books is not surprising. However, books continue to be valuable sources for student research, and in some instances, books are the best source for this research. While accepting the important role of online resources in academic research, we are not ready to simply accept this trend as inevitable. Through a combined effort of collection development and educational initiatives, library staff hope to positively impact this trend.

A table of complete circulation data from 2002 – 2007 is available on the library’s web site.

Resources for College Libraries

For more than a decade, academic librarians have waited for an update to Books for College Libraries (BCL).  BCL was a major collection development tool, providing lists of core titles in support of undergraduate programs.

Finally, the Association of College & Research Libraries and Bowker have published an update titled Resources for College Libraries (RCL).  RCL has the same goal as its predecessor, but it has been developed for a web environment.  Not only does RCL have a familiar print edition, it also has a web version.  Even better, Bowker — for a price — provides access to an analysis tool that compares RCL’s core lists to your library’s collection.  In addition RCL, unlike BCL, will include web-based resources that it considers core subject resources.

The Neil Hellman Library has subscribed to the web version of RCL, along with access to the analysis tool.  We anticipate that this will allow us to develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of our collection and develop title lists that can address major gaps.  While the process of strengthening the collection based on this analysis will stretch over a number of years, we anticipate that we will be able to make significant progress in filling gaps during the 2007-08 academic year.

I plan on sharing the information we collection from our analyses with faculty.  More information will follow, both here on the blog and through other channels.