• It includes several collections of data we don’t subscribe to–they are in grey on the list and marked “get license”.
• You’ll need to check the box labeled “Activate IP access” and hit “start”. Select the language of the interface by clicking on the flag you like.
• Dyabola keeps a list of successful searches (i.e., ones with results) on the right; you can get back to a previous search by clicking on it, or return to the main menu by selecting Search Result Options.
• What it’s searching is authors and titles; it’s also possible to browse by subject or by DAI record number.
• Simple keyword searching appears to work fairly well
• It is possible to combine lists of search results; it’s necessary to search multi-word phrases individually and combine them into a new result…which you have to name.
• It is possible to print a list of citations
• Author searching is gender-neutral. Which is to say, use initials rather than first names.
• When you do a search it opens up a separate window without the usual browser back button and other controls
• you can right-click (Windows) or option-click (Mac) to get the Back option
• you can also click on one of the terms in Session Results on the right to get back to a set of results

Questions? Just ask!

What Tufts Has

We have a subscription to a subset of this collection, in our 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and our 19th Century British Library Newspapers collections, which means it’s a good bet we will eventually have access to all of this material. For the moment we have about fifty of the hundred and seventy-five 19th century titles listed here. That’s a conservative estimate–I’m counting titles which change names only once.

As always, if we don’t have it and you can identify what you need, we can probably get it for you via interlibrary loan.

Commentary on Newspapers and Libraries

Newspapers are hard. Pace Nicholson Baker (seriously, don’t get me started), libraries are *very* concerned about the preservation of newspapers. What’s tricky is that they tend to be collected locally, except for national papers like the New York Times and Washington Post. Ever have the local paper miss a delivery? Libraries get that, too, and we subscribe to many, many more newspapers than you do over much longer periods of time. This means we might have, for example, all of volume 68 of the New Yorker, except for number 36. Multiply by several hundred subscriptions and a hundred and fifty years….

Digitization projects tend to be market-driven, so the national papers everyone collects got done first. Local papers are being done piecemeal, local library by local library. Or they’re being done as part of larger packages by publishers or other vendors or, in this case, national libraries. Copyright concerns limit most digitization projects (in the US at least) to pre-1923 material.

National papers like the New York Times are available electronically for their whole run; we also have this arrangement for the Boston Globe and London Times. Note that the most recent x years of each of these is not covered in the same place as the older material. For the latest issues of these titles (it varies by title, but usually the last ten years or so), as well as local or regional papers, you’ll want to check Lexis-Nexis and/or Factiva.

Confused? Just ask.

Jacobs cites Nicholson Baker’s The Shallows, Bacon’s Essay “Of Studies” (it’s number L in his Essays, in print or in EEBO), Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Brown’s biography of St. Augustine, Blair’s Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, and an article by Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright called “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century“. It’s a great bibliography, and bonus points for talking about the intellectual underpinnings of the Dewey Decimal system.

• I’ve helped to write the training curriculum for our series of workshops introducing faculty, staff, and TAs to Trunk. I particularly recommend the advanced workshop on library resources and copyright I’ll be teaching with a colleague August 17th. If you haven’t registered for the basic workshop yet, please do–here’s the complete schedule of workshops.
• I went out to LA for the Sakai annual conference in June. Sakai is the learning management system Trunk is built on, and it’s a very vibrant community. I got a chance to talk to colleagues at Indiana, Michigan, and Oxford on some exciting library-related features which I’m hoping Tufts can roll out soon. In the meantime I’ve updated the directions for how to link to library resources.
• Last weekend I was at Wordcamp Boston, hosted at Boston University’s Sherman Union, a mini-conference on how to use WordPress, the software this blog runs on. There was a fun education track, with all sorts of suggestions from local colleagues on how to use WordPress to create online communities, mobile websites, and much, much else. I am *so* jealous of BU’s study abroad site.

I hope your summer has been as productive, and possibly a little more restful.

“Three Cups of Deceit” (available through Amazon) is an intriguing in-between length, about eighty pages. Krakauer has enough space to develop his theme, but it’s a relatively simple story that doesn’t fit conventional publishing requirements–it’s too long even for something like the New Yorker, but too short to make a profitable book…and padding the length to make it book size would decrease the impact. It was well worth the $3 I spent. When Kindle Singles launched earlier this year, this was the sort of thing Amazon had in mind to encourage. I’m happy new kinds of publishers are experimenting with it to create great things.

Amazon launched an ad-supported Kindle (the loathsomely-named “Kindle With Special Offers“) this week. In exchange for $25 off the purchase price of the wifi model you’ll see ads on the screensaver page and in your table of contents…thankfully not within the book itself.

Story the Second

While looking for dictionaries in the Android App Market I came across a few electronic books by major publishers at really spectacular prices. Like Peter Knox’s Companion to Ovid, which Wiley-Blackwell is selling for the princely sum of $169.99. Amazon has it for the Kindle at $148.14, or in hardback for $164.60. I am happy to report that we still beat them on price. But this marks a change–the last time I checked for books like these, none of the ebooksellers had them.

Bonus Story

Harper Collins announced a couple of months ago that they would force libraries to buy new copies of ebooks which were checked out more than 26 times. Libraries and librarians were displeased. Some are calling for a boycott.

Analysis

The good news is that ebooks are now a big enough market that publishers are starting to take them seriously. The bad news is that many are trying to use electronic means to limit traditional library rights, or to force electronic products into models designed for printed objects. Explain to me, for example, why it makes any sense at all to “check out” a stream of ones and zeroes with no physical form. There’s no reason to limit it to one user at a time…except for publishers’ reluctance to change their business model to suit new realities. Hang with us while we all explore some new options.

Confused? Here are Tisch’s free options.

• 1851 to 2007  via Proquest Historical Newspapers.
• 1985 to the present via Academic Onefile
• 1980 to the present via Lexis-Nexis

And, for traditionalists, we have print and/or microfilm coverage as well. The microfilm includes some material contributed by freelancers which had to be pulled from electronic editions after the Tasini decision.

How are our versions different? Proquest allows you to look at full-page images, so you can see what the original context of the story was, and it has good options for precise searches and browsing by date. Academic Onefile is also browseable by date. Lexis-Nexis is purely text, and search-only. I use all three for different types of searches.

Which I suppose is mildly confusing, but we compete well on price.

Updates (3/29/11)

My colleague Martha Kelehan, our social sciences bibliographer, reminds me we also have access (1980-present) through Factiva. It has a convenient dashboard of major US news sources like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times set up to allow you to see the headlines for each section and click through to read them.

Amazon reports that Kindle subscribers will have full access to the NY Times website.

Additional Update (7/28/11)

Tufts qualifies for the discounted college readership digital subscription option, which runs $7.50 per month for web and smartphone access.