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.

Words, words, words

I updated the ESL libguide today with a link both to the “Australian Word Map” and the Macquarie Dictionary “Aussie word of the week.” Both of these were mentioned in a recent post in the education.au blog. I have also added the Word Map to the tag cloud of curriculum resources for teacher education.

The Australian Word Map allows users from different regions to add their comments on word variations in different areas. I was confused recently when a friend referred to being “dinked” on a bicycle. Since I can only recall using the much more prosaic “double” we decided that it must have been a regional thing.

The word this week from Aussie word of the week is “bloody”.

The Library has subscription access to quite a few online dictionaries including the Macquarie and the big “multi-volume”  Oxford English Dictionary. After logging in the easiest thing to do is bookmark the site and then each time you return it should prompt you for your RMIT University login details.

APA style guide to electronic references

We have just received the APA style guide to electronic references. It comes as a download from the catalogue entry.

As it says on the website:

Expanded and updated from the Electronic Resources section of the Fifth Edition of the Publication Manual, this comprehensive yet succinct style guide in PDF format offers up-to-date information on formatting electronic references in APA style. With more than 40 example references, the APA Style Guide to Electronic References outlines for students and writers the key elements to include in references to electronic sources, with numerous examples.

Among the new examples are dissertations and theses; bibliographies; curriculum and course material; reference materials, including Wiki; gray literature, such as conference hearings, presentation slides, and policy briefs; general interest media and alternative presses such as audio podcasts; and online communities, such as Weblog posts and video Weblog posts. Students and writers will find this guide indispensable as well as convenient to download and use when citing electronic references.

Online reference books

There was a recent update to the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary with words and phrases between ‘proter’ and ‘purposive’ being added. Examples include ‘psycho-educational’, ‘public domain’, ‘puh-leeze’ and ‘punditocracy.’

You don’t need to come down to the library to consult the 20 volumes, however, because the OED is one of an expanding range of online reference items that the Library has subscribed to in recent years. There are links both via the listing of reference items (click on the ‘General dictionaries’ tab for the OED) and from the findit link in the catalogue entry for individual items.

Anyway, see the OED website for an explanation the inclusion of the several of the words, including ‘puh-leeze’:

Respelling is often used to convey qualities, such as emphasis or accent, which are easily distinguished in speech but difficult to express in written form. In this case, the respelling of ‘please’ to indicate an emphatic or sarcastic pronunciation has become sufficiently well established to warrant inclusion in the OED as a separate entry.