Library News for Jewish Studies

Project Muse New Titles Added & eBooks in Beta

• Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (2005 - )
• Hebrew Studies 51(2010 - )
• Prooftexts 18:1 (1998 - )

New from Project Muse - browseable and searchable 300 books. Check out this new direction for Project MUSE; ebooks.

 

 

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 - 2000

This site gathers together a treasure trove of primary documents together with secondary sources on women's history in the U.S. Below is a recently added book pertaining to Jewish women.

How Did the First Jewish Women's Movement's Roots in Both Progressive Women's Activism and Jewish Tradition Shape its Activism, 1893-1936?, by Joyce Antler, Nina Schwartz, and Claire Uziel. (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2005).

Shimeon Brisman Collection - $25,000 Grant Received from Littauer Foundation

For those of you who are not familiar with the collection here is an article that briefly describes it. While we were always aware that the collection contained a significant number of rare books and rare bibliographies, in recent years we have become aware of the important provenance of many of the Brisman items. The ownership stamps, personal and organizational, provide another window into the history of these works.

A photograph from the Special Collections exhibit shows ephemera found in some of the books (a dry cleaners advertisement, a receipt of a donation to a Jewish soup kitchen) and ownership and governmental stamps on some books.

Acquiring the grant was accomplished by the efforts of individuals in the Development Office, Cataloging Unit, and Special Collections. The grant will be used to hire a part-time cataloger to create full records for those materials with only provisional ones. This will help us to know more fully the extent of the collection and to prioritize volumes for digitization and preservation.

 

 

Prooftexts -- now available online through JSTOR

This fiscal year the library was able to purchase another module of JSTOR - Arts & Sciences Collection VIII. Here is the title list for this module. Please note, Prooftexts is now available electronically though there is a moving wall of three years, so we will continue to subscribe to the print edition to fill this gap.

 

Quntres: An Online Journal for the History, Culture, and Art of the Jewish Book

If you missed the first issue of Quntres (Winter 2009), you can still read it and the second issue (Winter 2011) too. It is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, published by the JTS Libraries. 

Focus and Scope -- "The journal will be open to scholarly contributions of any length relating to any aspect of the history of the Jewish book in all of its forms.  For purposes of the journal, the Jewish book will be defined as works written or published in Hebrew characters, in any language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Persian, etc.)"

 

DLB: Dictionary of Literary Biography (400+ digitized volumes & growing)

This set includes Dictionary of Literary Biography, Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series and Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Series. It features comprehensive literary biographies written by recognized literary scholars (Prof. Lynne Tatlock, for one) and critics. You'll find profiles of more than 143,000 authors, historians, journalists, screenwriters, publishers, and playwrights - living and dead. The biographies discuss the lives and careers of the literary figures profiled, along with the critical response to their works.

Here are some volumes specifically related to Jewish culture and Arabic culture, too.

• Writers in Yiddish
• Holocaust Novelists
• Twentieth Century American Jewish Fiction Writers
• Twentieth Century Arabic Writers
• Arabic Literary Culture, 500 -925

Many other volumes include Jewish content and in them you will find entries on Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Rashi, and lesser known writers like Ilse Aichinger,Rachel Korn, and Celia Dropkin.

Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah: Sefer haMadda (Book of Knowledge) and Sefer Ahavah (Book of Love)

"The launch of the digital version of the Mishneh Torah carries a symbolic connotation as it fulfils the will of one of the manuscript’s later owners, Eleazar, son of Perahya. He stated in his will that his copy of the Mishneh Torah should always be freely available for public consultation: ‘[The manuscript should] not be sold or redeemed, nor should any single person ever take possession of it. It should rather be kept available so that all scholars can correct their own version against it, but not read from it regularly or copy from it.’ By making the manuscript available online, the Bodleian is keeping Eleazar’s legacy." --Bodleian Librares article on new digitization of the manuscript

This manuscript, signed by the Rambam himself, has been in the Bodleian Libraries since the 17th century. Read the article and view the incredibly beautiful, high-resolution scan of the manuscript.

New Features in the Classic Catalog - Fall 2011

    1.  New Icons for material type; book   film   and   electronic resource You can now sort/modify your searches to just bring up ebooks & ejournals when you limit to material type, electronic resource.

     2.  Saved Records new options Multiple Requests in one step/click

       View and Request your saved records

     3.    Freeze a book that you have placed a hold on, so that it is not returned to the stacks while you   are out-of-town.

             

     4.   QR (quick response) codes  a direct link to a catalog record. Scan the QR       code with a smartphone, then find the item in the stacks or add it to your Saved List in the  mobile  catalog.

 5.   Item Status information.

Click on this icon     for an explanation of the status of an item and what you can do about it. Below is an example of what OFF CAMPUS means.