What's New

New Access to Historical African-American Newspapers

The Libraries have purchased the database African American Newspapers, Historical from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers Collection. This collection "offers primary source material essential to the study of American history and African-American culture, history, politics, and the arts. Examine major movements from the Harlem Renaissance to Civil Rights, and explore the everyday life of African Americans." This digital collection consists of 20th-century newspapers that can be searched simultaneously as African American Newspapers, Historical, or individually as: Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles Sentinel, Atlanta Daily World, The Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Philadelphia Tribune, and Cleveland Call and Post.

If you would like a demonstration or more information about this resource, please contact subject librarians Rudolph Clay rudolphc@wustl.edu or Makiba Foster mfoster@wustl.edu.

Interlibrary Loan Not Available Jan. 9

The Libraries have scheduled an update for the Interlibrary Loan (ILLiad) server on Wednesday, Jan. 9. The ILLiad service, which allows users to request materials not owned by WU Libraries from other libraries worldwide, is expected to be unavailable for about five hours, beginning at approximately 8 a.m.

We apologize for any inconvenience this necessary work causes. Please contact Interlibrary Loan (ill@wumail.wustl.edu or 314-935-5442) with any questions.

Classic Catalog Service Interruption Nov. 28

The Libraries’ online “Classic” Catalog will be unavailable Wednesday, Nov. 28, from 10 a.m. until approximately 4 p.m, as updates are made to the system. During those hours, users may use the MOBIUS catalog to find local holdings. Go to http://searchmobius.org/search/.To see WU holdings only, choose the Modify Search or Limit/Sort Search option and select Washington Univ from the Location menu.

ProQuest Outage Saturday, May 5

ProQuest® will be performing infrastructure maintenance from 9pm this Saturday, May 5, 2012 until 9am the next morning (a 12-hour window).  During this time none of the following databases will be available:

    Accounting & Tax
    American Film Institute Catalog
    American Periodical Series Online
    ARTBibliographies Modern
    ASSIA
    Avery Index
    Chicago Tribune, Historical (1849-1988)
    Design and Applied Arts Index
    Digital Sanborn Maps
    Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker
    Dissertations & Theses (ProQuest)
    Early English Books Online (EEBO)
    Ethnic NewsWatch
    Film Index International
    GenderWatch
    GeoRef
    Gerritsen Collection - Women's History Online
    Index Islamicus
    International Bibliography of Art
    International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
    International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text
    International Index to Performing Arts Full Text
    Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
    Literature Online (LION)
    New York Times, Historical (1851-2008)
    PAIS Iinternational and Archive
    PILOTS
    Social Services Abstracts
    Wall Street Journal, Historical (1889-1994)
    Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

We apologize for any inconvenience this outage causes.

Scopus now available to all of WUSTL

Exciting news! The entire campus now has access to Scopus, a multidisciplinary database, the "world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature." It contains over 46 million records, 70% with abstracts, and also includes over 4.6 million conference papers. Although strongest in science and technology, there is significant coverage in arts & humanities and social sciences. Scopus includes all of Medline, 1949 to present. It offers sophisticated tools to track, analyze and visualize research. (For many years, this has been a database only available to medical campus users and Danforth campus users who trek down to the medical campus.)

Scopus is probably most similar to Web of Science. It includes cited and citing references, h-factor calculations and several other analysis tools. For some disciplines, source documents may go back to 1960; in Web of Science we have 1970+. Of course older articles can be found in both tools when they are cited by newer articles. Scopus may be better than Web of Science for author searching because it is better (though not perfect!) at disambiguation of authors with similar names. Author name disambiguation is a difficult problem, especially important when you analyze impact, etc. Scopus includes SciImago Journal Rank and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) for its sources. There are many tutorials available, for Sciverse (which includes ScienceDirect, Scopus and web searching) and for Scopus.

Contact your subject librarian if you have questions or comments about this database.

Latin American Newspapers Purchased

The Libraries have purchased Latin American Newspapers, Parts I and II from the Center for Research Libraries. This digital collection provides more than 80 fully searchable newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere. These two collections provide unparalleled coverage of events from Latin America, spanning 1822-1922.

A full title list is available here.

Highlights from the collection:

• El Mercurio [1914–22] - An important Spanish-language paper published in Santiago, often considered Chile's newspaper of record.
• O Estado de São Paulo [1876–1922] - This title (published as A Provincia de São Paulo until 1889) traces Brazil’s history from an empire to a republic, and stands as one of Brazil’s premiere newspapers.
• La Prensa (Buenos Aires, Argentina) [1869–1922] - This title, founded in 1869 by Dr. Jose Clemente Paz, was considered among the most significant newspapers in the world by the turn of the century.
• Mexican Herald [1895–1915] - An English-language title bringing international and local news to the American expatriate community in Mexico.

 

ProQuest Databases Outage Saturday, February 4

As announced on October 20 (see this post), ProQuest is having another outage this weekend for system maintenance, for 12 hours beginning at 9pm Saturday, February 4.  All the same databases as on that post are affected: all the databases on the ProQuest interface, and the Chadwyck-Healey databases on chadwyck.com.  We apologize for any inconvenience this outage causes.

WU Libraries Join HathiTrust

Membership gives WU users access to millions of full-text volumes

As of January 1, 2012, the WU Libraries joined the HathiTrust Digital Library, whose goal is to digitize, preserve, and increase online access to library collections. The trust derives its name from hathi (pronounced "HAH-tee"), the Hindi word for elephant.

HathiTrust began in 2008 and has grown to over 10 million volumes. Content covers subjects and disciplines in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences in more than 425 languages. 

WU faculty, students, and staff can:

• Download 2.7 million+ volumes in the public domain

• Search the full text of 10 million+ volumes

• Create personalized collections of items in HathiTrust

You can search for HathiTrust items directly from the WU Libraries' website using the eBooks tab. To limit to full-text volumes, check "full view only."

You can also search directly from the HathiTrust catalog. For more information and advanced search options, visit the Libraries' guide at http://libguides.wustl.edu/hathitrust.

For questions, contact Brian Vetruba (bvetruba@wustl.edu; 314-935-4824; IM/chat).

Ebooks Tab Added To Search Box

Locating the thousands of ebooks available through Washington University Libraries just got simpler.

By clicking on the “eBooks” tab on the library homepage, users can limit a search to resources accessible in an ebook format. The newly launched search tab also identifies three different search routes—the library’s discovery catalog, Google Books, and HathiTrust—which together encompass the full range of ebook resources available.

As e-resources continue to grow and evolve, so do digital formats and download restrictions and e-reading devices. To help WUSTL users navigate these varying factors, a research guide is available, along with WU librarians happy to discuss any issues and answer questions.

New Resources Bring Fashion, Renaissance to Life

In recent weeks, the Libraries have added several fascinating and useful online tools to the growing pool of resources available to the WUSTL community.

The Berg Fashion Library (Oxford University Press) is an online resource now available through the catalog, databases, and Fashion research guide. Featuring fully cross-searchable text and images, it covers world fashion and dress, from pre-history to the present day. The collection includes the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion online, ebooks, reference works, images, and much more. More information about the content is available here.

Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) – Renaissance and Reformation is also newly available online. OBO Renaissance and Reformation is a tool to quickly find significant and reliable resources (reference works, books, journals, archives, websites, and more) on selected topics in history and culture from the 14th through the 17th centuries. Articles are written by well-known and respected scholars, including Washington University’s Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History, William Wallace (see Michelangelo Buonarroti). Updates and new entries will be added on a regular basis. To learn more, visit About OBO. WU Libraries also subscribe to OBO Islamic Studies and OBO Social Work.