Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program

This project by the National Library to scan the nation’s newspapers going back to the nineteenth century has been accessible for nearly a year now. This recent article by Gideon Haigh reminded me to mention it here. As they say on the website:

We are creating a free online service that will enable full-text searching of newspaper articles. This will include newspapers published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies. The first Australian newspaper, published in Sydney in 1803, is included in the Program.

JSTOR Arts and Sciences Collections V and VI

Two new groups of journals are now available through the Library.

JSTOR Arts and Sciences Collection V adds important literary reviews and state historical journals to the Library’s collection, broadening it in areas such as philosophy, history, classics, religion, art and art history, and language and literature. By the end of 2009 JSTOR Collection V will contain 120 titles.

JSTOR Arts and Sciences Collection VI extends JSTOR’s coverage in economics, education, linguistics, political science and area studies, with 120 titles expected by the end of 2010. View information.

[Source: Carmen Riordan, RMIT University Library]

Zotero — an alternative to Endnote

Zotero is a free open access bibliographic manager developed by some folks at the George Mason University. It is essentially a web-based bibliographic manager and uses the Firefox browser to take informaton directly from the web and works with sites like Amazon, NY Times, The Australian, Libraries Australia and publisher/database resources such as Informaworld.

They have just released version 2.0, and it’s time to look up and take notice. The new version now synchronizes with the Zotero website, allowing you to see your library online, and if you wish, share your library with others. This synchronizing function also allows you to link your home and work pcs with your library, eliminating the issue of different versions being used.

After registering, the website will also allow you to create a profile page with options to provide your details, library and CV. You can then also create groups for others to share and participate in around a particular area of interest.

The latest versions are at the testing stage so not everything will be working as intended. My experience is that it is pretty stable but the forums report on various problems and there seems to be a list of bugs that need to be fixed. I have registered but I won’t be abandoning Endnote just yet. It will also allow you to export endnote items into Zotero and vice versa.

There is a development roadmap with features such as a “recommendations service”, which will presumably generate recommendations based on your library. The potential of a resource like this is that it could allow the kind of powerful  resource sharing functions that we have seen in other web 2.0 applications.

I should also mention that Endnote also provides a web-based service called Endnote Web that RMIT University staff can access via our subscription to ISI Thompson products. But the free and open access that Zotero provides in allowing you to share libraries with others makes it a very promising alternative.

Also of interest here is the news of Endnote suing Zotero.

UPDATE: Judge Dismisses Software-Licensing Case Against George Mason U.

Search It updated

 Our Search It system, which allows you to find and search Library e-resources, has been updated. The software has been upgraded and the look of the interface has been refreshed. If you have used Search It before then you should find using the new interface is an easy switch. For new users we hope that it is easy to get started.

There are also some functional improvements such as better compliance with web accessibility, a new method of sorting results into clusters, and the ability to search more databases.

We are currently updating a number of resources listed in Search It.

Useful new Google features

Google has introduced some useful features to their search results page. After searching in Google you will notice a link to “Show options/Hide options” at the top of the page (seems to work on google.com but not yet google.com.au).

One of the options you will see on the left hand side includes the ability to  restrict your search results by date. For example, a search on early childhood education restricted to the last 24 hours brings up news items, conferences, events, jobs, recent postings to edna etc.

There are other options to restrict by types of material — forums and reviews. There is also the “wonderwheel” that gives you a visual representation of search results and related categories.

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education

We recently renewed OBHE. As they say on the website:

The Observatory’s primary purpose is to provide strategic information to enable institutional leaders and policy makers to make informed decisions relevant to their existing and/or future transnational higher education initiatives.

This mission is accomplished by a continuum of programmes, services and activities to provide access to state-of-the-art research, resources, best practices, emerging trends, policy frameworks, and assessment and quality assurance documents for the effective delivery of transnational higher education academic programmes and services.

This resource has password access — RMIT University staff and students can email me directly if they want to look at this product.

New reading list linking service for Blackboard courses

The Library invites staff using Blackboard in teaching to submit your reading lists to our new linking service.

We will prepare the links so that your students can easily access the articles, book chapters, TV recordings or other e-resources that are in our online collections directly from your online course. If we only hold the item in print then we will organise for it to be scanned (copyright compliant) and added to our e-reserve collection.

We will then send you a set of links that you can easily add to your course using Blackboard’s add external link function.

Our links will be formatted so that they don’t time out, and so that students on-campus and off-campus will be able to access them using their RMIT logins.

More information and a submission form is available from the Library News page.

“Once upon a time there was a block of wood.”

The New York Review of Books podcast page has an interview with author Tim Parks on a new translation of Pinnochio:

Novelist Tim Parks speaks with Andrew Palmer about Geoffrey Brock’s new English translation of Carlo Collodi’s children’s classic Pinocchio, and the book’s origins in the political and cultural tumult of 1880s Italy.

The editor of NYRB Classics observes that

Pinocchio, a book as mysteriously matter-of-fact as an early morning dream, is a brilliant evocation of the promise and precariousness of childhood, when the world is both new and immemorial and everything is possible and yet, because one is a child, nothing is.

I will place an order for Bundoora Library.

New online resources

New online resources are announced via our What’s new page. Some recent additions include:

McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology now online
Find authoritative and comprehensive content online. This highly regarded twenty volume reference work is now available electronically, enabling you to access it 24/7 from your own desktop.

 Search the catalogue and select the online access link: Available on Gale Virtual Reference Library

 Berg e-journals now available
You now have access to the Berg collection of e-journals focusing on culture and the visual arts. New journals are available on fashion, photography, textiles, design, craft and sociology. Berg content is peer reviewed and authoritative.

Access Berg through Search It.

 New journals on history, religion, classics and more …
You now have access to the BRILL e-journals package.

 Subject areas represented include:

•  ancient Middle East and Egypt
• Asian studies
• Islamic studies
• biblical studies
• religious studies
• medieval and early modern studies
• social sciences
• sciences, technology and medicine
• biology

Access BRILL via Search It.

 Jazz Music Library
Alexander Street Press are offering access for a very VERY short time to one of their music databases: Jazz Music Library. 

(RMIT staff and students can email me for password details)

 http://jazz.alexanderstreet.com

 Music Online
While some of you are familiar with the Alexander Street Press subscription Theatre in Video, you may or may not know that we also bought a few musical reference resources from this vendor as well. These resources have now been placed on one cross-searchable platform which only show the ones we bought:

• African American Music Reference
• Classical Music Reference Library
• Classical Scores Library
• The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

It’s now collectively known as Music Online.

Theatre in Video
This database contains more than 250 of the world’s most significant plays, and around 100 video documentaries.

Works include those of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Sean O’Casey, Sophocles, Heinrich von Kleist, Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekov, Jean Cocteau, Voltaire, and Henrik Ibsen.

The earliest productions are from the 1930s, it includes works by the Group Theater, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre. Contemporary productions include works by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Broadway.

Theatre in Video enables comparative analysis of different productions and cross searching. You can browse by genre, artist, time period and place, and select a scene or the whole play to be streamed to your desktop. You can create custom clips and class-specific playlists, and bookmark specific scenes at permanent, per second URLs and include them in papers or course resources.

Access Theatre in Video now via Search It.