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The Latourette Library catalog now has 1000 more records for e-books, 600 of which are open-access and free to anyone. For tips on finding e-books in the catalog, including those which are open-access, check out this brief tutorial for helpful search information.
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It’s National Library Week, and during this week only ProQuest is offering free access to many of its key databases, including eLibrary (a user-friendly general reference collection of full-text periodicals, newspapers, ebooks, transcripts, and digital media content) and SIRS Issues Researcher (topical pro/con coverage of current and enduring issues, including more than 300 leading issues).
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Diigo is a bookmarking website which allows users to bookmark and tag web-pages. In addition, users can highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. Three great new Diigo tools (apps) have just been made available for Firefox – read more about this on the Diigo blog.
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Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT) keeps a yearly list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning, many of which may be familiar to you but many of which may be new and useful, especially for researchers and academics.
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BIBLES AND STUDY BIBLES ONLINE, WITH HELPS:
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Calibre is an excellent open source software program that allows the user to convert a multitude of e-books into the proper format for e-readers (such as the Kindle, Nook, etc.). In addition, Calibre includes its own comprehensive e-book viewer with full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, and more. This is a tremendous tool for the researcher who has collected a digital library of e-books in a variety of formats and who needs to convert them and manage them more efficiently.
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The millions of books (in numerous languages) which have been digitized and are available online are called e-books, and there are many ways to find them. Latourette Library has added a new page to our website to help our patrons find these books easily and quickly. You will see the link to it on the library homepage, or can access the list directly by clicking here. We hope you will find this information helpful, and please feel free to contact with specific requests, questions, or suggestions for the list.
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Here is a good “one-stop” reference site to bookmark: Martindale’s The Reference Center. The quantity and quality of the information presented here is quite astounding, and it has been a work-in-progress since 1994.
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Tracking down an older newspaper article can be a frustrating experience, but the U.S. News Archives can help. Links to numerous national newspapers (current editions and archives) are provided, and if the desired results aren’t found, a helpful link to Other Sources for News is also provided.
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A great resource for theological research, The Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL) is a select bibliography of digital books relating to the development of theology and philosophy during the Reformation and Post-Reformation/Early Modern Era (late 15th-18th c.). Late medieval and patristic works printed and referenced in the early modern era are also included.
This blog will keep you informed of new electronic resources and include some research tips.
You can either periodically check the blog for new information, or you can sign up for an RSS feed which will email you when new information is posted. A 4-minute video explaining RSS feeds is at http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. As the video explains, you will first need to choose an RSS reader. Two free Readers are Google Reader (if you already have a Gmail account, just sign in) and Bloglines.
More recent versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer allow you to select your RSS Reader or put RSS feeds into Live Bookmarks. A good tutorial for Firefox’s Live Bookmarks is at http://mozilla.gunnars.net/firefox_bookmarks_tutorial.html#live_bookmarks.
If you prefer to receive our blog entries by email, you can click on the “Sign me up!” button in the right column of this page.
Laura Raab
Director of Library Services
Latourette Library has now cataloged over 1700 e-books that are available for anyone to read. Materials that are not password protected are called open-access, and this movement is growing, although such e-books are often hard to find.
To help you quickly locate helpful e-books, we are currently cataloging in the fields of international development, world cultures, and religions, so you only need to search our catalog to find these. Go to our catalog page, enter your search terms, in the Location field type in the word “open,” and click on the Search button.
We will continue cataloging open-access e-books, so if you don’t find what you want now, please check back again later.
When researching, you may find an article you want to read but which is not available for you to read online. This happens frequently when searching databases. Send the details to library@wciu.edu, and if we have the print copy, we will scan it and email it to you. If we don’t have the print copy, we will seek it through InterLibrary Loan. The process may take several days.
Due to the time of mailing books, we can only do interlibrary loan for articles if you do not live locally in Pasadena. However, Google Book Search at http://books.google.com/ has limited previews of many books where you may be able to read up to 20% of a book. The number of pages available for viewing depends on agreements with individual authors, but you can search for the subject you want to focus in on the pertinent part. By using Google Book Search, you can substantially increase your resources for research.
OAIster is a search engine for open-access texts (ones you can read online). Most of these will be academic-level documents, and your results will not be cluttered up by commercial sites. By using OAIster you can greatly increase the number of resources for your research.
While universities don’t like people quoting Wikipedia in papers, it is a good source for learning a bit about new subjects, and often its links to other websites are extremely helpful.
Cover of Cultural Anthropology
We have just loaded Paul Hiebert’s Cultural Anthropology onto our website. Before he died he gave us permission to make this available without a password, so people other than our students and faculty may also read it. Although the book is a classic, Paul Hiebert was known for his scholarly work as well as his Christ-like life.
The file is very large and takes a long time to load. We will explore ways to make this quicker. One option will be to break it into chapters and give you the option of whether you want to open the entire thing at one time or just a portion.
Once you have the PDF file open, if you want to save it to your computer, click on File at the top of your Window, then click on Save As. Type in the name of the file and select where you want it to be saved on your computer.
We hope you find this book very helpful!
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A helpful tool may be Atlas of Global Development: A Visual Guide to the World’s Greatest Challenges, although the printing is a little difficult to read. To increase the size of the print, click on the symbol of the magnifying glass with a + sign in it. This is located below the title but above the text.
Also, if you had difficulty accessing Paul Hiebert’s Cultural Anthropology, the problem has now been fixed.
Free access to “more than 290,000 articles from more than 560 SAGE journals with content available from 1999-current. . .” until October 15th, 2010.
Rebecca Belz
Becca Belz has joined the library staff as a part-time reference librarian. She will be working closely with the library director and the WCIU faculty to provide reference and research resources to WCIU students, including obtaining journal articles and other materials through interlibrary loan . She can be reached at reference@wciu.edu – please feel free to contact her with any questions you may have about the library and its resources!
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A new site called DeepDyve provides “the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and medical research.” Subscribers can search for and preview articles for free, and then rent the corresponding journal for only 99 cents! Read more about this in Wired Campus.
Because WCIU’s edition of the Britannica Online* is so much more than just an encyclopedia, we thought it should receive special attention. The broad variety of research tools available through this website is quite impressive. It includes:
• More than 15,000 new and revised articles
• Thousands of tables and graphs
• More than 5,000 new photographs
• Hundreds of new illustrations
• More than 300 new videos and hundreds of maps
• Web’s Best Sites—Britannica editors select more than 100,000 external Web sites (continuously vetted for viability) and tag them to articles and search results.
• Britannica’s Web Search provides a sophisticated algorithm to improve results of a standard GoogleTM search.
• E-books and Primary Sources—Tens of thousands of e-books (many of them illustrated) as well as historical papers and documents are tagged to articles.
• World Data Analyst—An exclusive database of current and past statistics explores the countries of the world.
• Gateway to the Classics—An extensive collection of significant works covers literature, philosophy, history, and science.
• Full-text journal and magazine articles from more than 700 titles, through a partnership with EBSCO. Titles are hand-selected for college needs and have articles dating back three years. Articles are incorporated into Britannica’s search and correlated to specific reference articles.
• BBC & New York Times headlines provide the top stories from trusted sources through daily feeds to the site, for convenience and further research.
• Interactive World Atlas provides access to detailed Britannica maps and country data simultaneously.
• Britannica’s exclusive Workspace is a research organizer for assembling and personalizing content.
• Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary and Thesaurus with audio pronunciation is embedded in our databases and accessible from any word.
• Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Quotations offers a lively collection of more than 4,000 quotations, both contemporary and classic, for reports and presentations.
*Please note that the Britannica Online is password-protected for WCIU faculty, staff, and students.
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Web pages are often annoyingly cluttered by ads, popups, and other bits of information irrelevant to the page content itself. A great way to clean up these pages is to use Readability™, a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.
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An extremely interesting site with a lot of fascinating data about the Bible is OpenBible.info. No matter what your level of Bible knowledge, you are sure to learn something new while browsing this site! The “Labs” tab at the top of the site provides Bible data in a variety of formats.
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For students who are entering a graduate study program after years (or decades) since they were last in a classroom, the idea of engaging in academic research can be daunting, especially if most of the research will be conducted online. The Internet Detective provides a must-see tutorial on academic research basics as well as the type of resources to use or avoid.
And remember, the Latourette library staff are always happy to answer with any research questions too!
that WCIU has its very own research database? This is a resource of more than 10,000 searchable links compiled by the Latourette Library staff and specifically intended to meet the academic research needs of the university’s faculty, staff, and students. Because WCIU offers very specialized courses, this database is an invaluable tool for those in the WCIU community and one of the unique resources we offer.
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Hymnary.org is a terrific place for information on hymns, whether you’re simply browsing or doing in-depth research. It is a comprehensive index of 5,041 hymnals, 1,037,616 published hymns, scores and media files, and information from sources such as Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology, hymnal handbooks, and experts in the field. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hymnary.org now contains the entire Dictionary of North American Hymnology.
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The British Library and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) have announced that they have made available online 400 doctoral theses focusing on the Middle East, Islamic studies and related subjects. The theses – which represent a wealth of UK postgraduate research into politics, culture and society in the Islamic world – can now be downloaded for free by scholars worldwide via the British Library’s EThOS (Electronic Theses Online) service.
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The ability to critically evaluate information is key in scholarly research, particularly when dealing with resources on the internet. Here are some good resources for determining what’s good and what’s not:
Search the Bible on the Internet
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StudyLight.org allows you to search the Bible quickly and easily using your computer. Enter the words you want to find in the Enter Search Text box, select whether you want to search the whole Bible or only a part of it, and finally select the version you wish to use. There are a large number of versions available to select from.
At the left side of StudyLight’s pages, look for the Study Resources heading to find devotionals, commentaries, and many other Bible study aids.
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