Knox College Library News

Seymour Library’s Unnamed Newsletter

10 October 2006

The summer-gone edition

“I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.”
–Gwendolyn Brooks

In this issue…

• Some library staff move on, some library staff move in
• Home (page) Improvement/New online services and collections
• Just browsing around for a new book?….
• ….about Africa?
• Homecoming hours at the library

Staff move on, staff move in

We said goodbye this summer to Public Services Assistant Cuqui Frau, who will be living with her family in Barcelona for the next two years, and to special collections supervisor Matt Norman, who is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Civil War Era and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College this year.

In August we welcomed the return of Trisha (Hickey) McFall, Knox ’96, as Public Services Assistant. And Scott Dorris joined us on Labor Day as Assistant Librarian for Instructional Services just in time for our fall orientation program for first-year students. Scott is a recent graduate of the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences and has an undergraduate degree in anthropology from Penn State. You’ll find Scott in the office at the north end of the Seymour Library reference room and at x7432.

And we’re pleased to have 2006 Knox graduate Chor Lee working with Sharon Clayton on a post-baccalaureate project to catalog musical scores and recordings in the CFA library.

With Scott added to our reference staff, we’ve reassigned all of the librarians’ departmental liaison duties. Contact the librarian – Sharon Clayton, Scott Dorris, Anne Giffey, or Laurie Sauer — listed for your department below for assistance with library instruction, collection development, and other library services.

AnSo : Scott
Art : Anne
Biology : Sharon
Biochemistry : Sharon
Black Studies : Scott
Chemistry : Sharon
Classics : Scott
Computer Science : Anne
Economics : Scott
Education : Anne
English : Scott
Environmental Studies : Laurie
Gender & Women’s Studies : Anne
History : Laurie
Journalism : Scott
Latin American Studies : Scott
Mathematics : Anne
Modern Languages : Sharon
Music : Anne
Philosophy : Scott
Physics : Sharon
Political Science : Scott
Psychology : Sharon
Religious Studies : Scott
Sports Studies : Anne
Theatre & Dance : Anne

Home (page) Improvement
The library’s web site [library.knox.edu] was thoroughly revised and rearranged this summer with the goal of making more collections and services directly accessible from the home page. You can, for instance, now search for a book by its title from the home page without going first to a search screen for our online catalog. And the Quick Links drop-down menu in the upper right corner is loaded with similar direct links (to the A-Z list of databases, to the WorldCat catalog, etc.).

The migration of traditional research tools from printed volumes on library shelves to digital resources accessible through the Internet continues its inexorable advance, along with the continuing creation of new resources that take advantage of the digitization of nearly everything to gather a variety of academic publications in ways we never dreamed of back when we were young and without a network. Databases and online collections newly licensed this year and accessible through the ‘More news’ link at library.knox.edu or through the Selecting a journal database: A-Z list on the home page are:

Anthrosource, an index and online archive of journals from the American Anthropological Association

Book Review Index Plus is the online version of the Book Review Index that has been an essential guide to academic book reviews since 1965. Now you can search all reviews of the last forty years in one fell swoop. Full text of many reviews is included, for the rest there are links to tell you whether we have online or hard copies of each review. We’ve dropped our subscription to the print publication in favor of online access.

Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO). Along with full text of some monographs, journals, and conference proceedings, CIAO also includes papers from NGOs, foundations, and research institutes on international politics and relations. Coverage begins in 1991.

Columbia Earthscape “connects the Earth and environmental sciences with their social, political, and economic dimensions.” Like CIAO, it is an interdisciplinary collection of material in a variety of formats including unpublished lectures and conference papers, images and animations, data sets, books and chapters from books, and academic journal articles.

International Political Science Abstracts indexes and abstracts 110,000 articles that have appeared in 900 political science journals since 1989

Latin American Newstand provides full-text access to articles in 37 Latin American and Puerto Rican newspapers. This resource also includes the relatively brief news items from the BBC Monitoring Newsfile, which are not limited to Latin America. Latin American Newsstand supplements our subscription to the ProQuest International Newstand.

RILM Music Abstracts indexes and abstracts articles, reviews, conference proceedings, and other material appearing in more than 500 academic music journals.

Approximately 75 databases, full-text collections, and other reference and research resources are now available on the library home page at Selecting a journal database: A-Z list You’ll also find them sorted by subject there.

And, finally, this humble newsletter will be permanently archived at our home page’s ‘More news‘ link.

Just browsing around…
A few of the more memorable books we saw arrive in the library this summer and so far this fall are:

Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga, a sequel to her Nervous Conditions, the politically charged coming of age novel taught in our First Year Preceptorial during its recent long run as ‘Exploring Human Identity.’

Winkie, a new illustrated novel by Carol Chase’s brother Clifford. The protagonist is a teddy bear – a teddy bear on the run – a teddy bear on the run from federal law enforcement officials. That’s all we can say.

Speaking of Chinese, which describes itself as being ‘for the person who wants to know more about Chinese without learning to speak or write it, or who is about to begin learning it.’ Hmmmm…..they’re not talking about us, are they?

And speaking of China, also look for Wang Hui’s China’s New Order: society, politics and economy in transition, kind of an East Asian equivalent of the immortal Politics and Change in the Middle East.

An inconvenient truth by Al Gore. If we’ve got the book in our browsing collection, can the DVD of the first major documentary to be derived from a PowerPoint presentation be far behind? We think not.

And speaking of global warming — not that we would dare to link it to any particular hurricane — in less than a year, several significant books on the Katrina disaster have appeared, including Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge, and 1 Dead in Attic, a collection of columns by Chris Rose published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune after the hurricane. And, of course, there are the official stories: The White House’s The federal response to Hurricane Katrina: lessons learned, and the bluntly titled A failure of initiative: final report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. The last two are currently checked out, but if you must read them now, complete texts are online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/reports/katrina-lessons-learned.pdf and http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/katrina.html

And finally a last-minute addition of two recent books on North Korea: Jasper Becker’s Rogue Regime and Crisis on the Korean peninsula: how to deal with a nuclear North Korea by Michael O’Hanlon and Mike Mochizuki.

Just browsing around for a book on Africa
Our forthcoming first look in CFA this fall at the recent gift of African pottery from Keith Achepohl (Knox ’56) has inspired us to devote the library’s topical bookshelf (next to our 2-week browsing collection bookshelf) to books on African arts, culture, history, and politics. For Hearth and Altar, the catalog published last year of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Keith Achepohl collection of African pottery, is an eye-opening interdisciplinary introduction to African ethnography, aesthetics, geography, and history. It’s the most successful sort of book – one that educates its readers but also leaves them wanting to know much, much more. We hope that these recent titles from our collections will enable some of us to take a step in that direction.

Homecoming hours at the library
Seymour Library will be open until 9 p.m. on Friday, October 13, and from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. on Saturday, October 14. The Special Collections and Archives reading room will be open Saturday from 9 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. The library will open at 11 a.m. as usual on Sunday.