Friday, February 27, 2009

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online

Would you like to hear how a Jewish cantillation (“Bereshit bara,” 'In the beginning', Genesis 1:1-5) sounds, as performed by Menashe Cohen in 1970? Or perhaps you would like to listen to a Berber wedding song, ahwash, from the Anti-Atlas, performed by Berber women and recorded in 1979? Or an excerpt from Pi-p'a-chi performed by an instrumental ensemble of dizi (ti tse) and the sanxian, as well as wooden sticks and a gong?

All of these recordings are available to you online via the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, a reference source with thousands of pages of material and 700 entries by expert contributors. Its content includes audio examples, illustrations, photographs, and drawings, song texts and score examples, charts and maps of world regions. It’s fully searchable, as well as browsable – you can browse by Audio Tracks, Audio Albums, People, Subjects, Genres, Instruments, Ensembles, Cultural Groups, and Places, as well as by Genres. And you can create and save playlists within the system (just be prepared to download the free Sibelius Scorch browser plug-in to play music online from the Encyclopedia).

If you’re interested in enhancing your research and your understanding of cultures and regions, do take a look at this versatile, online multimedia encyclopedia.

At your service,
Cheryl

Monday, February 23, 2009

Transliteration Tables




The ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts are the scanned, full-text, standard transliteration tables for Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Ladino, Malay, Mongolian, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Sanskrit, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu, and Yiddish, among other languages. Links in the tables are to PDF files that require the Adobe Acrobat Reader (the free Reader may be downloaded from the Adobe web site).

At your service,
Cheryl

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

A reception for GSAS students

For GSAS students: please join research and collections librarians from across Harvard’s libraries for an informal gathering on Wednesday, March 4th, from 4:30 to 6:30 PM in the Edison and Newman Room at Houghton Library. Hors d'oeuvres, wine, beer, and other beverages will be served.

I hope very much to see you there!
Best wishes,
Cheryl

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Getting Your Hands On On Order / Ordered Received Books


Ever search HOLLIS and find that a book you want is listed as “On Order” or “Ordered/Received”? Would you like to know the fastest way to get your hands on it?

Go to the Request "On Order" or "Ordered-Received" Materials form (it’s located on the HCL home page) and fill in the information it requests. If the book is on order, as soon as it arrives in the library it will be processed and made available to you (they’ll send you an e-mail notice that it’s in). If the book is ordered/received, the library will process it quickly and make it available to you (again, they’ll send you an e-mail notice that it’s in).

It’s all about getting the books to you.
At your service,
Cheryl

Friday, February 13, 2009

Web-Based Research Guides Created So Far for Spring 2009

Here are research guides I've created (some in collaboration with other librarians, as noted) so far for Spring term 2009; if you'd like me to create a guide for your course please do e-mail me, at: claguard@fas.harvard.edu):

Library Research Guide for John Huehnergard's Social Analysis 74: Visible Language: Writing Systems, Scripts, and Literacy,

Library Research Guide for Ian J. Miller's Historical Study B-67:Japan's Modern Revolution,

Library Research Guide for Hue-Tam Ho Tai's Core Course:Foreign Cultures 60 — Individual, Community, and Nation in Vietnam,

Library Research Guide for Jay M. Harris's Culture and Belief 13:The Contested Bible, The Sacred-Secular Dance,

Library Research Puzzle Guide for East Asian Studies 210 / History 2628 / Religion 3015: Asia in the Making of the Modern World, a Graduate Seminar in General Education,

Library Research Guide for Elizabeth D. Lyman's English 97 Seminar: Going to Extremes: Literature of Moderation and Excess,

Library Research Guide for Ofrit Liviatan's Freshman Seminar 42k:Comparative Law and Religion,

Library Research Guide for Professor Stephen Greenblatt's and Professor Louis Menand's Humanities 10 Colloquium,

Library Research Guide for Nicole D. Newendorp's Social Studies 98gf:Modernity and Social Change in East Asia,

and

Library Research Guide for Harvard College Student Advocates for Human Rights.

There are more to come, as I'm working on 6 other guides for Spring courses and workshops right now. If you would like a guide, I'll be glad to create one (I can usually just work from your syllabus, and I can link the guide directly off your course site).
At your service,
Cheryl

Search the Harvard-Yenching Newspaper Collection Online

You can search Harvard-Yenching Library’s Newspaper Collection online, at: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/harvard-yenching/collections/newspapers/search.cfm. The collection is searchable by language (Chinese, English, Japanese, Khazakh, Korean, Uighur, and Vietnamese), region (China, Europe, Hong Kong/Macao, Japan, Korea, North America, Russia/USSR, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Vietnam), and format (print, microform, and electronic), and access search points include city, title, call number, and year. You can opt to include holdings stored off-site at the Harvard Depository in your searches. There’s an in-depth Search Help section, too.

Many researchers have already noted this has been very useful to them; hope it’s helpful to you, too.
At your service,
Cheryl

The Index of Jewish Periodicals and RAMBI

Two databases anyone doing research in Jewish studies will want to know about are:

The Index of Jewish Periodicals is an index on Jewish history, activity and thought. The database provides a guide to English-language articles, book reviews, and feature stories in more than 160 journals devoted to Jewish affairs. The file is intended for students of Jewish thought and others interested in contemporary Jewish and Middle Eastern affairs, with journal coverage going back as far as 1988,

and

RAMBI: The Index of Articles on Jewish Studies is a selective bibliography of articles in the fields of Jewish studies and the study of Eretz Israel. Material here is gathered from thousands of periodicals and from collections of articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages, mainly from the holdings of the Jewish National and University Library, a world center for research on the Jewish people and Eretz Israel.

I'll continue to highlight resources of interest to my areas of liaison with future posts. Hope this information is helpful to you.
At your service,
Cheryl

Oxford Islamic Studies Online

If you are doing any research in Islamic studies you will probably want to take a look at Oxford Islamic Studies Online. Contents include: features articles, biographies, primary texts, Qur'anic materials, and books by scholars in areas such as global Islamic history, concepts, people, practices, politics, and culture, with articles from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Islamic World: Past and Present, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, The Oxford History of Islam, and What Everyone Needs To Know About Islam. The Koran Interpreted (a verse translation by A.J. Arberry) and The Qur'an (a prose translation by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem) are also included, as is the first electronic version of Hanna E. Kassis's A Concordance of the Qur'an and a date converter from western to Islamic dates and vice versa.

Hope this is useful to you -- I'll provide more highlights of individual resources in upcoming posts.
At your service,
Cheryl

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Have a Citation and and Want the Article? Use Citation Linker

If you have a citation to an article, and would like to get hold of the article itself, Citation Linker may be the easiest way to locate either an online or print copy at Harvard.

For example, if you have this article citation and want to get hold of the actual article...

Jones, Wendy S., “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain,” ELH, 2008 Summer; 75 (2): 315-343.

...you need first to locate the journal (ELH), then find the particular article (“Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain”) in Volume 75, Issue 2, Summer 2008, starting on page 315 in that journal.

Go to the Citation Linker (it's located on the Harvard Libraries portal page) and fill in the information the system prompts you to provide (journal title, volume, issue, date, starting page of the article), then click the purple Find It At Harvard button.

If Harvard owns the journal in electronic format, clicking the purple Find It At Harvard button will take you to a link message telling you where the electronic article is located, and clicking the link will take you there.

Those steps will get you to an electronic copy of an article if Harvard owns it online. It takes a couple more steps to find printed articles:

When you click the purple Find It At Harvard button, if you get the link message, “Check holdings in HOLLIS Catalog,” click that link -- it does an automatic search of the HOLLIS Online Catalog to find out which Harvard libraries own the journal in print.

Journals are usually shelved in two different places in Harvard Libraries. Current journals (published within the last year or so) are shelved in one area, while older journals are usually bound together in large book form and are often shelved alongside the books in the library stacks.

At Widener Library: Current issues of journals are in the Periodicals Reading Room on the 1st floor, and older, bound journals are shelved by call number in the Stacks. Note the call number HOLLIS provides to find journals at Widener, and use the Widener Call Number Location Chart to find older issues shelved among the books.

Hope this information will get you to the articles more surely and quickly!
At your service,
Cheryl

Monday, February 9, 2009

And on a Related Note: Editing Images

If you haven't yet seen the site, Picnik, you might want to take a look at it. It's a free, web-based site that lets you crop, resize, and rotate images in real-time -- it works with PCs, Macs, and Linux, and did I mention: it's free? It's worth repeating. And it's easy to use, too.

Referred to me by my friend and HCL colleague, Enrique Diaz, this is a site I make use of all the time.

At your service,
Cheryl

Image Collections at Harvard


Lately a number of the researchers with whom I’ve been working have been very interested in finding images online, so I thought I’d highlight a few of the image collections to which you have access as a Harvard researcher:

AP Multimedia Archive (AccuNet): a searchable database of over 700,000 Associated Press photographs, charts and other graphics from the 1840s to the present. Captions and credits are included, and images can be downloaded for later use. This database can be searched by topic, location, date and concept.
ARTstor: a database of digital images and accompanying scholarly information for use in art history and other humanistic fields of learning, including the related social sciences. The ARTstor Digital Library includes approximately 300,000 images covering art, architecture and archeology.
CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online): contains digital images and detailed descriptions for over 115,000 works of art from major museums in the United States and Canada. Simple or advanced modes allow searching by artist, title of work, date, medium, subject, collection, and location. The standard for image resolution is 1024 x 768 pixels. Images may be printed and exported for educational purposes.
Directory to Photographs at Harvard: an online guide to the photograph collections held in libraries, archives, museums, and teaching hospitals throughout Harvard, an estimated total of 47 repositories holding approximately 7.5 million photographic images. The Directory serves as a general reference for researchers interested in exploring the collections and offers a bird’s-eye view of resources that span more than a century and a half, from the dawn of photography to the present day.
Finding Images of East Asia at Harvard and Beyond: a research guide created by Harvard College Librarians for locating Chinese, Japanese, and Korean images at Harvard and outside of Harvard.
MasterFILE Premier (EBSCOhost): full text of 2,000 journals in a broad range of disciplines including general reference, business, education, health, general science, and multi-cultural issues.
Oxford Art Online: a comprehensive art reference work covering all aspects of Western and non-Western visual art: painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic and decorative arts, and photography from prehistory to the 1990s. It includes the full text of The Dictionary of Art (1996, 34 volumes), a landmark reference work containing more than 45,000 articles contributed by 6,700 scholars from 120 countries. Each year, new articles are added to enhance the coverage of significant areas of the visual arts with the participation of more than 1,000 international art historians.
Visual Information Access (VIA): a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard and Radcliffe, including information about slides, photographs, objects and artifacts in the university's libraries, museums and archives. To date only portions of each repository's holdings are described in the online catalog. As available, thumbnail images are linked to the catalog records.
WikiMedia Commons: a repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files.

Hope you find some useful images here! but do be aware that the materials available through these collections are just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to image collections, certainly here at Harvard. There are many more -- and I'll be glad to point you to them if you need more for your research.

At your service,
Cheryl

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Virtual Edo

A colleague recently put me onto this site: Edo Japan, a Virtural Tour. It includes an interactive map (highlighting places of interest, for example: Senkakuji, the Temple of the 47 Samurai), an Art Gallery of Ukiyoe from the Edo period, and links to web sites of related interest. Much of it is done beautifully, and is worth a look.

At your service,
Cheryl

Monday, February 2, 2009

Have You Met Adam Matthew (Digital) Yet?

The Harvard Libraries have acquired several digital collections from the UK publisher, Adam Matthew Digital, and since these collections seem likely to be of interest to many researchers in my areas of liaison, I'd like to make sure you know about them. They include:

China, Trade, Politics & Culture, 1793-1980: Sources from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library, London: a project that provides a wide variety of original source material detailing China’s interaction with the West from Macartney’s first Embassy to China in 1793, through to the Nixon/Heath visits to China in 1972-74;

Defining Gender Online: Five Centuries of Advice Literature for Men and Women (1450-1910): ten thousand images of original documents focusing on advice literature for men and women;

Empire On-Line: provides access to images of original documents and printed materials relating to the British Empire in Africa, Australasia, the Americas, Oceania, and South Asia;

India, Raj and Empire: drawing upon the manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland, this searchable online resource provides access to digital facsimiles of diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. The collection documents the relationship between Britain and India in an empire where the Scots played a central role as traders, generals, missionaries, viceroys, governor-generals and East India Company officials. The dates of the documents range from 1710 to 1937;

Macmillan Cabinet Papers On-Line: provides online access to nearly 30,000 images of original documents from the Macmillan administration (January 1957-October 1963) as well as materials from the first three months of the Douglas-Home administration (October-December 1963); and

Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007: a portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world.

If you take a look, you'll see what extraordinary resources they can be to support your research and teaching. Hope this information is useful!

At your service,
Cheryl