Graduating This Spring? Sign Up for an Alumni RefWorks Account

Harvard graduates can sign up for an alumni account that will allow the use of RefWorks as long as Harvard continues to subscribe to it. To create an alumni account, just go to the Harvard Citation Tools iSite: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=citationtools&pageid=icb.page334472.

You can find instructions at that page for backing up references and creating your own alumni account.

At your service,
Cheryl

Maps with an Attitude

Tomorrow a new exhibition opens at the Harvard Map Collection: Maps with an Attitude: Cartographies of Propaganda and Persuasion, explores ways maps have been used to express points of view by examining more than a dozen maps which framed major conflicts of the 20th century, from World War I to the Bosnian War.

Items on display include a pre-World War I map depicting the nations of Europe as individuals; a World War II map, produced just after the start of the blitz in England, portraying the number and site of every English bombing raid in Germany; a 1955 map produced by Time magazine portraying communist China and the U.S.S.R. as a red-hued landmass looming over Japan, South Korea and U.S.-controlled Formosa; and a map portraying Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, ringed by Serb tanks and rocket launchers.

Maps with an Attitude: Cartographies of Propaganda and Persuasion will be on display in the Harvard Map Collection in Pusey Library through August 14, 2010. Click here for the Map Collections' hours, and click here for directions to the Map Collection.

At your service,
Cheryl

Harvard Undergraduates Eligible for MIT Borrowing Privileges

As of April 5, 2010, Harvard undergraduates are eligible for MIT borrowing privileges (HCL and MIT have had a reciprocal borrowing program for faculty, staff, and graduate students since 1995). Harvard students can enroll for MIT library privileges either online at the HCL web site or in person at the Library Privileges Office in Widener Library Room 130 (M-F, 9am – 4:45 pm), where you’ll just need to present a valid Harvard ID.

You’ll receive a form to complete and take to the Hayden Library at MIT (14W-100, 160 Memorial Dr., Cambridge) where you’ll get a library pass valid through the end of the spring term. You can borrow from the Dewey (social sciences and management), Hayden (humanities), Lewis Music, Library Storage Annex (by appointment only), and Rotch (architecture and planning) libraries. This pilot for undergraduates will be assessed after 14 months, with both Harvard and MIT collecting data and conducting surveys to determine the program’s value.

For additional information about MIT borrowing privileges visit the HCL website or just call the Library Privileges Office at 617-495-4166.

At your service,
Cheryl

Do You Use JSTOR? Tell Me About It, Please

If you use JSTOR for your research, and have particular likes and/or dislikes about the current version of the database, please let me know what they are. As you can see from this blog post at my other blog, for Library Journal, I have some issues with it, and their Associate Director for
Education & Outreach has invited me to talk with her and one of their product managers about the database. I would like to gather information from scholarly researchers on what works well for you, and what might not work so well, so I can share it with the JSTOR folks.

You can simply comment to this blog, or to my e-Views blog, or send me e-mail directly (at: claguard@fas.harvard.edu) if you have any information you'd like to share.

Thanks for your help, and I continue to be --
At your service,
Cheryl

Books in Books: an online exhibition

Houghton Library launched today a new online exhibition, Books in Books: Reflections on Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages. It's a joint project of the Houghton Library and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, and Chair, Medieval Studies Committee, and is a complement to the General Education Program course “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 16, Openings: The Illuminated Manuscript” taught by Professor Hamburger. A physical exhibition of the same name opens April 5th in Houghton Library.

If you're interested in medieval manuscripts, take a look at Houghton's Digital Medieval Manuscripts, a good resource for studying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe. It gives strategies for searching Houghton's medieval manuscripts plus links to bibliographies related to these materials.

At your service,
Cheryl

Exploring Reading Online: New Site

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History is "an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries." The site contains over 1,200 books and manuscripts which offer over 250,000 pages of web-accessible materials about reading.

Take a look to find out more about this hot intellectual and cultural topic.

At your service,
Cheryl

The Digital Collections of Harvard College Library

The Digital Collections of Harvard College Library is now available on the College Library web site. It features an index page called Explore the Collections that leads to individual descriptions each of HCL’s collections, as well as to information about Projects in Progress and other Harvard resources. There is also a page describing the HCL Collections Digitization Program.

There's a plethora of fascinating material here, and I hope it is useful to you for your research and study.
At your service,
Cheryl