The USF Libraries Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center was recently created at the USF Tampa Library. Its mission is to mission is to cross international boundaries to engage information specialists, scholars, educators, students, analysts, and activists in a centralized, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and synergistic approach to genocide education, mental health and public policy, and prevention.
Several events and exhibits have already taken place and more are to come. The Center is also looking for a scholar-librarian to become its Head.
Please take note that the RefWorks open door seminar on Wednesday, February 25, 5:00-6:00PM will take place in LTB 2153.
All others remain, next door, in LTB 2152.
A quick reminder about our open door seminars this week:
Database Searching
Wednesday, February 25, 12:00-1:00PM
or
Thursday, February 26, 5:00-6:00PM
Learn to select and access the best databases for your subject, search their content and find full-text articles.
RefWorks
Wednesday, February 25, 5:00-6:00PM
or
Thursday, February 26, 12:00-1:00PM
Learn how to use this citation management system that makes building bibliographies a flash.
These seminars are open to all; no registration required. The seminars are cancelled if no one is present 10 minutes after the hour.
All seminars are in LTB 2152.
The University of South Florida Tampa Library is performing an analysis of Interlibrary Loan practices, with the intention of becoming more efficient and providing better services to our patrons. One important part of this process is hearing from the people who use this service. We would greatly appreciate if you could take the time to fill out this brief survey and let us know how we are doing. There are only seven questions so it should not take much of your time.
Here is the link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=V_2fxgx6iECN_2bSZY4NlTZ4Kw_3d_3d
If you would rather speak by phone or have additional comments or concerns, please contact Jared Hoppenfield at (813) 974-6266 or jhoppenf@lib.usf.edu.
Note: the ILL services at USF Poly still rely on the ILL office in Tampa. So your answers to the survey would be appropriate.
The Magnum Photos collection is now available in ARTstor.
This first launch of more than 73,000 high-quality photographs of major world events and personalities provides the academic community with access to a selection of Magnum’s iconic images. The ARTstor and Magnum Photos collaboration will showcase a total of 80,000 images by this world-renowned group of documentary photographers.
This collection relates to courses of study across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and beyond. The ARTstor community will now be able to access high-quality photographs from around the world, covering industry, society and people, places of interest, politics, news events, disasters and conflict, from the late 1930s to the present day. From the Spanish Civil War to the Gulf War, from Marilyn Monroe to Paul Newman, from John Updike to Toni Morrison, from Christian Dior to Oscar de la Renta, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the crisis in Chechnya, these images capture wars, celebrities, authors, fashion designers, and defining moments in our shared history.
Magnum Photos International, Inc., is a cooperative founded just after World War II and owned today by its 80 prominent photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt, Josef Koudelka, Rene Burri, Hiroji Kubota, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Alex Webb and dozens of others. Magnum was created from the belief that photographers must have a point of view in their imagery that transcends any formulaic recording of contemporary events. “Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on, and a desire to transcribe it visually,” said Henri Cartier-Bresson.
For these databases and other library resources visit http://www.poly.usf.edu/library. Click on “Search the databases” to begin.
The Wiley InterScience database will be down for maintenance again on Monday, February 16th, from 4:00 AM Eastern for a period of approximately 1 hour.
Springer Science+Business Media launched a new website called AuthorMapper.com. This free website is an “analytical online tool for discerning trends, patterns and subject experts within scientific research.”
Currently, AuthorMapper.com searches over three million journal articles to deliver a variety of useful information. The current searchable content is from all Springer journals, and metadata from other STM publishers will be included in the near future. The tool can provide a variety of analyses, such as keyword tag clouds and “Top 5″ bar charts for various important metrics, and includes an interactive world map of the results. AuthorMapper.com’s advanced search function also allows complex queries using keyword, discipline, institution, journal and author. The results can identify new and historic scientific trends through timeline graphs and bar charts of top statistics, allowing for identification of trends in the literature, discovery of wider scientific relationships, and locating other experts in a field of study.
Due to construction work in the parking lots, the library dropbox is temporarily unavailable. We will keep you posted on when (and possibly where) the box will be accessible.
Of course, returns at the Library’s front desk are always possible.
The USF Libraries have acquired three new databases in music from Alexander Street Press: African American Song, Contemporary World Music and American Song. While currently in the building phase of these collections, Alexander Street Press expects that American Song will be at 50% and Contemporary World Music at 90% completion by the end of 2009.
African American Song
Covering jazz, blues, gospel, and other forms of African American musical expression, African American Music will contain over 50,000 tracks of music to document the history of African American music in sound. The collection contains recordings by the top names in the history of black American music. At least 5,000 of the tracks are rare or never-before-published, and the other 45,000 are in-copyright and included through arrangement with distinguished labels. The entire available catalog of Document Records, the world’s largest collection of rare and vintage blues, jazz, gospel, spiritual, boogie-woogie, and country recordings, is included. There are more than 2,300 performers spanning more than a hundred years—Duke Ellington, Sophie Tucker, Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie, Chicago River Kings, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Blind, and hundreds of others. Through an agreement with the Library of Congress the collection includes field recordings of spirituals, farming and labor songs, war songs, drinking songs, children’s songs, and more. You’ll also find field recordings from Haiti, the Caribbean, and the American South, as recorded by Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary Elizabeth Barnacle, whose travels documented traditional culture and musical expression, including traditional folk songs, spirituals, ceremonial songs, and political songs.
Contemporary World Music
Contemporary World Music will contain 50,000 tracks that delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent. The database will contain important genres such as reggae, world beat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more. This database is a complementary database to Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries. It includes a blend of contemporary and traditional world music recordings from many labels throughout the world. The focus is concentrated on contemporary genres, such as fusion and world beat. Users can trace the history of a people’s music by comparing the traditional styles with the modern interpretations offered in this database. Many of the titles are encyclopedic in their breadth of coverage. The Voice of the People from the Topic label, a 20-volume series of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditional music, is here in its entirety, as will be the Passage to India Series from Navras. Liner notes to all the albums are included (in PDF format) as well as static URLs to each track and album in the database.
American Song
American Song is a database that will contain 50,000 tracks of music from America’s past. The database will include songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.
American Song will focus on American roots music and pre-1960 American popular music but it also encompasses the great American musical genres including country, folk, bluegrass, Western, old time, American Indian, blues, gospel, and shape note singing - combined with powerful recordings by artists such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Sleepy LaBeef, the New Lost City Ramblers, Otis Clay, Shawn Colvin, The Lilly Brothers, Merle Travis, and many others. Liner notes to all the albums are included (in PDF format) as well as static URLs to each track and album in the database. Future additions include music from King/Starday Records with content added on a regular basis.
For these databases and other library resources visit http://www.poly.usf.edu/library. Click on Databases by “Search the databases” to begin.