AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource

The latest AustLit newsletter came out recently and I thought it a good opportunity to promote this resource. AustLit contains information on writing by and about Australian authors and includes a subset specifically on children’s literature. We have links from our Children’s literature guide to this resource, and I have just added it to the VCE guide. Students can use AustLit to identify works, reviews, biographical information and so on.

The latest newsletter includes information on the launching of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, recent awards and shortlists, coverage of the parallel importation report.

Scopus expands arts and humanities coverage

Scopus is one of the key citation databases used to analyse citation information. It has been selected as a citation data supplier for the ERA.

Scopus now announces the launch of expanded Arts & Humanities (A&H) coverage as per mid-June. A&H coverage in Scopus has added nearly 1,450 new titles. Scopus users will now benefit from broader access to close to 3,500 international A&H journals dating back to 2002 in a variety of subject areas including-

• Education
• History
• Developmental & Educational and Social Psychology
• Literature and Literary Theory
• Architecture, Design

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]

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 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.

Updates to Informit

Informit is one of the providers/platforms for quite a few of our Australian databases, including the premier database for Australian education, A+Education. Their latest bulletin includes some updates and enhancements.

It is now possible to set up alerts based on search criteria for databases like A+Education.  As new records are added to the database, Informit will automatically email records that match your saved search query.

Informit e-Library have just added access to the following journals:

• Educating Young Children: Learning and Teaching in the Early Childhood Years
• Journal of Distance Learning 
• Journal of Educational Leadership, Policy & Practice 
• The Monthly 
• New Zealand Research in Early Childhood Education 
• Teaching History 

Informit e-Library have just added access to the following monographs:

• Better Schools Better Teachers Better Results: A Handbook for Improved Performance Management in Your School
• Cultural Diversity in Music Education: Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century 
• Education, Science and Public Policy: Ideas for an Education Revolution 
• No Time to Lose: The Wellbeing of Australia’s Children 
• Reading and Learning Difficulties: Approaches to Teaching and Assessment 
• Seven Steps to ICT Integration 
• Spelling: Approaches to Teaching and Assessment 
• Stepping Stones: A Guide for Mature-aged Students at University 
• Supervising Doctorates Downunder: Keys to Effective Supervision in Australia and New Zealand

A+Education now includes selective or comprehensive coverage of and access to:

• Parent & Citizen Journal  (selective)
• Quest  (selective)
• Australian Educational Leader   (selective)
•  Christian teachers Journal   (selective)
• Australasian Journal of Educational Technology  (comprehensive)
• Australian Journal of Teacher Education  (comprehensive)
• Social Educator   (selective)
• Learning Difficulties Australia Bulletin   (selective)
• Eingana   (selective)
• Australian Journal of TAFE  (comprehensive)
• Victorian Journal of Music Education  (comprehensive)
• Dissent   (selective)
• Education in Rural Australia  (comprehensive)
• ACHPER Healthy Lifestyles Journal  (comprehensive)
• Queensland Teachers Journal   (selective)
• Australian Journal of Reading  (comprehensive)
• Connect   (selective)
• Nurture   (selective)
• Psychological Test Bulletin   (selective)

We will create catalogue entries for many of these listed items but for the moment they can be accessed directly via Informit e-library and A+Education (Informit).

Newspapers via ProQuest ANZ Newsstand

We’ve had a subscription to Factiva for some time for searching and accessing newspapers throughout the world. I often teach the TAFE groups, such a the ESL or the Further Education students, how to use this resource. Since there is a limit to the number of people who can access Factiva simultaneously we now have access to ProQuest ANZ Newsstand, which will give us extra access to newspapers in Australia and New Zealand. Browse the newspaper list to see what is available.

New subscription to Scopus

I mentioned last year our trial of Scopus. As announced in the latest RMIT Update we now have this resource:

Our acquisition of Scopus is a win for researchers. Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools for tracking, analysing and visualising research. It’s easy to use and has global coverage.

Scopus gives you:

• 15,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers;
• 1000 open access journals;
• 500 conference proceedings;
• patent information; and
• 17 million records from before 1996.

Scopus lets you:

• refine search results;
• track citations;
• find the most highly cited articles and authors in your area;
• see research trends from a particular year or group of years;
• distinguish between authors with similar names;
• set up search and citation alerts and RSS feeds;
• display your work on your personal homepage using profiling options to create HTML feeds or cited by counts;
• measure research performance by identifying papers of an individual, tracking the citations and analysing their influence using the Scopus h-index; and
• go straight to the full text of an article or learn more about a particular author.

Scopus is available from Search It.

Enhancements to the ERIC website

ERIC have just announced some updates and new features to their website, including

• RSS feeds, which will alert you when new items are indexed that meet your search criteria.
• an update to their downloadable journal list, which now includes 825 titles.
• an update to their thesaurus, with the addition of 40 new subject terms.
• seven new tutorials for first-time users.

This is the free online version of ERIC. The Library also subscribes to ERIC through CSA and ProQuest. Part of the advantage of searching via these other platforms is that we are also able to provide “find it” links to full text content held on other resources to which we subscribe. These find it links also take you back to the ERIC website, particularly for ERIC documents. In addition, the CSA version also divides results according to peer reviewed and other material and provides some citation information. CSA also provide good search tools, which allow you to do things like access the search history and set up alerts and RSS feeds.

Anyway, the content provided by the website underpins the products to which we subscribe. Their new RSS feed is actually a little easier to use than our subscribed database because it is not necessary to create a user account and login. They also continue to digitize their backfile of ERIC documents.

Image searching

A colleague sent through a link to a useful tutorial on image searching recently. Some arts education courses have students look for images and this tutorial has a useful emphasis on copyright issues. The Library has a listing of image resources, both subscribed and public access, that I sometimes show students. Some of these resources make it clear that images can be used for educational purposes.

The other emerging area, which this tutorial mentions, are those made available via a Creative Commons license. People who upload their photos to Flickr, for example, can stipulate the kind of use they allow and you can search specifically for items with Creative Commons licensed content. I have been using photos from Flickr for our subject guides, for example.