Anthropology Online Trial

January 2012

A trial for Anthropology Online has already begun and will end in about two weeks, on February 6. According to the publisher blurb, "Anthropology Online from Alexander Street Press provides access to a range of anthropological writings from 19th century to the present, including ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies".

I am very curious to get your feedback on this product, whether positive or negative, and on Alexander Street Press (publishers of Ethnographic Video Online) more generally if you have any.

Palgrave Connect E-books

January 2012

We have purchased a new e-book package from Palgrave Connect, a multidisciplinary collection of 2010-2011 online books. Among the relevant subject areas: Language & Linguistics, Political & International Studies, Religion & Philosophy, Social Sciences, Media & Culture. The good news is that the books can be downloaded without annoying interfaces and DRM restrictions, and some can be used with e-readers. The less-great news is that books published in late 2011 onwards are not necessarily available in the collection, and these cannot be individually added. We would have to buy them in print or wait a year for the next package. The titles we purchased will be gradually making their way into CLUES, but for now you will still need to visit the Palgrave Connect site to browse the content.

Concordia Open Access Author Fund

December 2011

The Libraries and the Office of Research have established a fund to support Concordia authors publishing peer-reviewed journal articles in open access journals which charge author processing fees. Find out more about it or contact Annie Murray to ask questions.

TRIAL: Films on Demand

December 2011

Films On Demand, a multidisciplinary collection of over 6,000 streaming videos, is on trial at Concordia Libraries until December 20, 2011. I invite your feedback on both the online product and individual film titles.

E-books worth trying

November 2011

If you have ever been frustrated by the clunky interface of many of the e-books available through CLUES, join the crowd. Two newer e-book collections - one on trial and the other an ongoing subscription - may be worth checking out, however, for their download-friendly options and more:

• Palgrave Connect: trial ended November 22:
  7500 Palgrave Macmillan PDF ebooks, subject collections include Media & Culture, Social Sciences, Political & International Studies, Language & Linguistics. The 2011 Subject Collections are available in iPad-compatible EPUB format.
  
  
• Springer E-books Collection
  Searches automatically default to all formats, but books and book chapters can easily be isolated via the Content Type filter. An added bonus for those who enjoy owning books: click on the BUY A PRINT COPY option when viewing a chapter or book entry, and have a copy delivered to your door for about $25.00.
  
  

New ways of searching for videos

The Recent Videos list has been updated, and now includes new quick-search and subject browsing features.

New Subscription to HeinOnline

We now have a subscription to HeinOnline Law Journal Library, a resource much-requested in connection with the new Law & Society program.

Human Library event

In case you missed the What's New annoucement on our main page, take a look at the Human Library event planned for September 17.

New Material at the Libraries

April & May 2011

• On a trial basis until May 29, Filmakers Library Online, a streaming video collection of documentaries and independent films.
  
  
• The Recent Videos of Interest list has just been updated with many new titles. All but one of the newest videos come with Public Peformance Rights for worry-free classroom viewing.
  
  
• Three Development Fund Requests for material in specific subject areas have recently been approved: Law, Society & Human Rights; International Women's Issues; Sexuality Studies. Approximately 280 additional books and videos in these areas will be purchased over the next few months. Contact me if you are interested in knowing more about specific titles.
  
  
• Our new journal subscriptions, approved last year, are now almost all active:
  • Anthropology Now
  • Cahiers de recherche sociologique
  • Feminist Review
  • Social Theory & Health
  • Subjectivity
  • Symbolic Interaction
  • Teaching Sociology
  • still to come: Sociological Research Online institutional subscription

FYI: trial and video license agreement

February 2011

Some general library happenings that might be of interest:

• A trial of International Studies Encyclopedia Online has begun and will continue until February 23, 2011
• Concordia has signed a public performance license agreement with AudioCine. This will allow more feature films to be shown in classrooms.

New Video List Updated

November 2010

Starting to think about videos to show in your class next semester? Take a look at the updated Recent Videos list to see what has just been ordered, or to search for what is available Concordia-wide. All but one of the new library videos come with Public Peformance Rights.

Trial of Hein Online Law Database

October 2010

HeinOnline is a collection of resources on legal history, law, and law-related journals.

Our trial continues until October 31, 2010 and is is being organized in the context of the new Concordia minors in Law & Society and Human Rights Studies as well as the Cross-Disciplinary Research Current in Law & Society.

The HeinOnline trial collection consists of the following resources:

• Law Journal Library: Law and law-related periodicals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes through the most-currently published issues allowed based on contracts with publishers.
  
  
• English Reports: More than 100,000 of the early English cases that laid the foundation for the laws of nations under the British Empire and influenced the development of laws across many lands.
  
  
• Foreign & International Law Resources Database: International law publications, including publications of the American Society of International Law, international law yearbooks, Hague Permanent Court of International Justice series and more.
  
  
• World Constitutions Illustrated: Still under development. Includes the current constitution for every country in its original language format and an English translation, as well as substantial constitutional histories of the United Kingdom, France, Brazil and Colombia, among others.
  
  
• Harvard Research in International Law: Includes both the actual Harvard Research in International Law (originally published in the American Journal of International Law between 1929 and 1939) and Contemporary Analysis and Appraisal.
  
  

Please send me your comments and questions about this resource.

Locating Videos at Concordia

September 2010

Locating videos at Concordia to show in your classes or to recommend to students is currently still not a one-stop affair.

• Search our catalogue, CLUES. Use this help guide to find out how.
• Search the Visual Media Resources catalogue. You can also contact VMR directly.
• For ethnographic films also search Ethnographic Video Online.
• See my Recent Videos guide to browse new video lists. You will also find links there to video booking forms and more.
• Contact me for help with any or all of this.

Also feel free to send me your suggestions and requests. Note that requests should be made about one term in advance.

Anthropology Databases Compared

September 2010

If the choice of Anthropology Databases seems a bit overwhelming when trying to pick the best ones for your research or to recommend to students, these recent reviews and discussions may be of some use:

• Review: The Place of Anthropology Plus in the Age of Google Scholar, from ANSS Currents, Vol. 25, No.1. The article contains a good deal of librarianese, but the final paragraphs summarize the findings well.
  
  
• AnthroSource vs. Anthropology Plus -- An exerpt from a September 1 ANSS discussion list post by librarian Janet Steins, quoted here with her permission:
  
  "Even mentioning [the two] in the same sentence and suggesting they might be compared is in my view misleading. AnthroSource is simply a full-text and searchable file of Triple A journals.... Anthropology Plus, a combination of two long-standing indexes (Anthropological Index and Anthropological Literature), contains bibliographic records to literally hundreds of thousands of journal articles, symposia papers, book chapters, reviews, etc., going back to the early 19th century. Records are in dozens of languages and cover the world's anthropology and archaeology publishing record. Yes, Anthropology Plus and AnthroSource are both "databases", but the similarity ends there."

More Journals on EBSCO

September 2010

Our selection of databases on the EBSCO platform has significantly expanded. Academic Search Premier, a multidisciplinary database familiar to many of you and your students, has become Academic Search Complete, with approximately 3000 more journals included. Additions of interest might include interdisciplinary titles such as Subjectivity, a good number of international law journals such as Stanford Journal of International Law and Berghahn anthropology titles such as Anthropology of the Middle East. Unfortunately, however, many titles come with 12-month embargoes on full text.

We have also acquired some entirely new databases on the EBSCO platform, including:

• SOCIndex (Sociological Abstracts' main competitor)
• MEDLINE (an alternative for those who like the content of PubMed but not the interface)

TIP/REMINDER:
If you would like to see the entire selection of EBSCO databases or search a few of them at once, just start with any EBSCO database such as Academic Search Complete, and once connected click on the "Choose Databases" link at the top of the search screen:



you can then select as many databases as you would like.

ICPSR datasets

September 2010

We now have access to datasets from the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) data repository. Though never identified as a priority for Concordia Anthropology & Sociology, this has been a long-standing request of the Political Science Department. The archive consists of "more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields". Though the focus is definitely on the U.S., international and Canadian datasets are also included. See their promotional flyers for Sociology and Social Sciences.

Access Instructions:

1. Create a MyData account using a computer on the Concordia network.
2. You should then be able to login via your MyData account from anywhere.
3. To find data, use the ICPSR search page. See also the Data Use Tutorial.

ICPSR data deposit:

ICPSR also hosts a repository with a data deposit service. See the How to Deposit Data FAQs for more information.

ICPSR Concordia Contact:

For additional assistance with the database or questions about its content, please contact DLI and Political Science Librarian Alex Guindon (alex.guindon@concordia.ca OR 514.848.2424 ext. 7690).

LibX Concordia for power searchers

August 2010

The LibX Concordia browser extension has no specific anthropoogy or sociology faculty connection, though there are certainly power searchers among you. This new tool is most useful when doing research on the web from home while trying to keep easy tabs on Concordia collections and subscriptions. It also offers some neat Google Scholar search shortcuts. Opinions on it range from "wonderfully useful" to "an unwanted extra layer of confusion".

If you would like to try it out, your feedback both pro and con would be appreciated. I would also be very interested to know whether you use the Concordia VPN to connect to Concordia resources from home, in which case some of the LibX features become less relevant.

Spectrum deposit workshops

A workshop on depositing articles in Spectrum, Concordia's institutional depository, will be offered at Webster Library on October 9.

• Read the workshop invitation
• Find out more about Spectrum
• Find out more about sociology- and anthropology-related Open Access.