Streaming live today (Wednesday, January 13th) the First Annual World’s Fair Use Day is a free day-long web event that lets you listen in on the conference that is being held in Washington, DC.  If the legal use of copyrighted materials in contexts such as higher education is an important topic for you, and it is really important for all of us, why not listen in.

Welcome back everyone!

This Fall I’m trying something new.  I am offering online office hours with Adobe Connect.

Twice a week (starting September 24th), on Mondays and Thursdays from 3pm to 4pm, I will be online in a virtual meetingspace ready to help you with your research needs.  Here is the link: http://drexelmeeting.na4.acrobat.com/r55763449/

screenshot of Adobe Connect meetingspace

With this tool, you will be able to watch me demonstrate a database, explain how to collect citations with RefWorks or Zotero, or chat about your research topic, all in realtime.  Adobe Connect is AV chat ready to facilitate a real discussion and several people can be in the meetingspace at once, so a whole group can join in the conversation.

This will be a trial to see if there is interest in this kind of service.  If there is, I may be able to expand the hours I am available.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be just as available as I always have been. You can reach me in person or electronically over IM, email, or phone.

New this term, the Library has a subscription to the Contemporary Literary Criticism Online collection.  This resource brings a vast number of critical essays on contemporary literature and makes them available in fulltext, right on your computer.

Sure we’ve had around 150 print volumes of the CLC in print on our Reference shelves for a while but it was cumbersome to use.  First you had to look through the title index looking for the literary work, then grab the print volumes from the shelf and find the essays individually.

Now, with the CLC Online, you can search for essays by Keyword, Named Author, Named Work, Critic Name, and Source Publication Title giving you far more flexiblity.

This is an excellent resource for criticism on the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and short story writers alive now or who died after December 31, 1959.   But what about works by authors who lived and died before 1960? For the earlier part of the 20th century we have a hundred volumes of the Twentieth-Century Literature Criticism available in Reference. And the online resource Literature Resource Center includes biographical and critical essays for works back to the classical period.

Good tools to remember when it’s time to take ENGL103.

The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry

Looking for a poem but aren’t sure where it was published?  No problem.  The Library now has a subscription to the World of Poetry, an amazing poetry resource that can help you find that poem.

In fact, the Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry contains the full-text of more than 250,000 poems and has citations to more than 450,000 poems published in books, anthologies, and periodicals.

But that’s not all!  It also provides the complete body of work for major poets such as Shelley, Blake, Burns, Keats, Marvell, Poe, Unamuno, Heine, Baudelaire, and others.  It also includes searchable versions of many poetry reference books, and history and criticism from selected periodicals.

The advanced search features make this a very powerful resource for literary research.  The detailed subject index helps to identify poems for comparison, a frequent assignment.  The World of Poetry also gives you the ability to search for poems by words from the first or last line of a poem, an important feature which will help in tracking down familiar poems even if the poet and title are unknown.

Now that poem will be a lot easier to find.

Reflections on Heliotropia and the Future of E-journal Publishing in the Humanities

The future of scholarly communications is a hotly debated and very important topic. The Drexel University Libraries even host a fantastic annual symposium on the issue. But much of the discussion focuses on what is happening in STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) fields. So, how are scholars in the Humanities thinking about how scholarly communication is changing?

Michael Papio, a Boccacio scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Heliotropia, has written a great article drawing on his experience co-founding an open access Boccacio Studies e-journal to examine the challenges ( and possibilities) of e-publishing in the Humanities.

The article itself was published in an Open Access journal. Well worth a look.

M. Papio, Reflections on Heliotropia and the Future of E-journal Publishing in the Humanities, Storicamente, 4 (2008), http://www.storicamente.org/02_tecnostoria/filologia_digitale/papio.html

Literature Criticism Online (trial) through June 11th

For the next month the Library will have a trial subscription to the Literature Criticism Online database. The trial allows you to explore the extensive fulltext resources of Gale’s ten major literary criticism series. While selected content from each series is available online to the Drexel community in the related database Literature Resource Center, and Hagarty Library has partial runs of four of the ten series in our Reference collection, the LCO offers the fulltext access to the complete backfile of each series.

The database includes the Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 14001800, Shakespearean Criticism, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Drama Criticism, and Children’s Literature Review.

Of course, as with all of our database trials, I am very interested in hearing your response to this resource.

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism

Do those names sound familiar? Have you seen them mentioned in a journal article or heard them mentioned in a class? Want to know about their contribution to literary theory? Are you a student in History, Anthropology, Philosophy, or Political Science and are hearing about critical theory for the first time? If so, or if you have other questions about literary theory, then this is the resource for you.

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism includes more than 240 entries written by 275 experts that help explain the ideas of the major theories and theorists. It also includes entries on historical developments in criticism and the many influential schools and movements. This is an important tool for anyone getting started with critical theory. This title is updated annually.

Studies in the History of Ethics

This is a free, peer-reviewed e-journal that strives to “contribute to the philosophical understanding of perennial problems within ethics.” Many issues follow the symposia format with articles addressing a central theme. In addition to the journal itself, the site includes a detailed Links section with information about philosophy conferences, calls for papers, and links to major research resources.

Well worth a look.

Geoffry Chaucer Hath a Blog

Ok, so this isn’t really a research tool, or any other kind of tool for that matter, but is very funny. Funny in an English major kind of way. And how often do you get to practice your Middle English?

Of course this website is not just fun and games. Links to real life Chaucer, Middle English, and medieval literature web resources are provided as well.

So, welcome to my new Humanities blog! This will hopefully become an outlet for me to let you know about new resources for the humanities available to Drexel University students. Some of these will be library resources like new databases or books and journals. Some of what I will be writing about will be interesting websites available to everyone over the internet. And sometimes I will write about new tools and techniques that could help you interact with humanities information in a new way.

I welcome comments, tips and suggestions and am especially interested in hearing what tools and resources you find most helpful.