Technology

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The library now has a subscription to over 5000 e-books from Safari Books Online, which is a recognized leader in providing technology how-to books. We opted for the most current package aka the Basic Tech Library package, so the titles and editions change regularly in the collection. Each book we subscribe to is listed in DiscoverE or you can browse the complete package online. (Note Safari has over 20,000 books online, so if you browse online you may run across titles we don’t own such as older titles or one of their subject-specific packages).

Database Title: Safari  Books Online: Basic Tech Library  http://pid.emory.edu/dzfb2
 
Dates of Coverage: most recent 2 years; current file only
 
Emory’s subscription to Safari Books Online covers technology-related books about programming languages, IT management, digital media, desktop applications, project management, and more. Publishers include O'Reilly Media, Addison-Wesley, Peachpit Press, Cisco Press, New Riders, Microsoft Press, Wrox, Adobe Press. The "Category Map" http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/categories is help you browse all the titles available to Emory

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This spring, the Emory Libraries' electronic book collection continues to grow larger with the addition of e-books published from 2011 through 2013 by Harvard University Press as part of a package distributed by De Gruyter.

Once you have logged in with your Emory ID and password, you may download titles from the De Gruyter catalog by chapter in PDF format. You may print them or transfer them to an e-reader or tablet to use as you need to. Books are added after they have been published in print, though not necessarily simultaneously.

The new e-books database is just one of many new electronic databases acquired this year by the Emory Libraries. In February, the libraries announced the availability of a series of primary-resource databases from Adam Matthew Digital, focusing on the humanities and social sciences.

Emory subscribes to a number of electronic book collections. For more information on finding and using e-books at Emory, visit our e-books research guide.

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Emory’s African historians have had a great spring. Not only has the graduate program been recognized with a high ranking (No. 6 in the U.S.) but the library’s purchase of Adam Matthew’s digital collection, Confidential Print: Africa, has made the lives of anyone studying African history much easier. 

What are confidential prints? They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments. The confidential prints related to Africa are drawn from the Colonial (C.O.), Dominion (D.O.), and Foreign (F.O.) Offices files and are extremely important primary sources. The contents include a variety of reports, dispatches, analyses, and correspondence. There are also 300 maps. The originals are housed in the Public Record Office in Kew. 

While selected parts of these confidential prints have been printed or filmed, this digitized collection provides researchers unprecedented access to these materials which cover British interests in all of Africa, except Egypt. All documents are fully text-searchable once located by assigned headings or key words. Selections were made by a distinguished editorial board.

The time frame, 1834-1966, includes the early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century, and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa, as well as the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some sample contents: 

CO 879/1-190  Africa General, 1848-1861 reveals the spread of British sovereignty in west and South Africa, including the discovery and mining of diamonds. 

CO 885/1-140 Colonies general (selected files) covers the period from 1907 to 1929. These files concentrate on disease and medicine in Britain’s tropical African colonies, including sleeping sickness, hookworm, and leprosy.

FO 341/1-3 German Empire miscellaneous covers the years 1884 to 1900. These papers focus on the West Africa Conference (also known as the Berlin Conference and Congo Conference), which took place in Berlin in 1884-85 and marked the beginning of the European powers’ ‘Scramble for Africa.’

FO 403/1-482 Africa general spans the period from 1834 to 1959. Topics covered include the Activities of the Church Missionary Society in Lagos (1850s) and the establishments of the British East Africa Protectorate (modern Kenya) and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (1890s).

FO 458/1-157 and FO 485/1-3 Liberia cover British interests in Liberia during the years 1882 to 1950.

DO 201/1-53 Commonwealth Relations Office (selected files) covers the period between 1949 and 1966. Covers the independence of a number of colonies, including Nigeria.

For a fuller listing of contents, see the Nature and Scope page on the website.

Essays to give context to the collection will soon be included. 

Confidential Print: Africa is part of Adam Matthew’s Archives Direct program of digitizing selected contents of the British Public Record Office. Similar collections for the Middle East and Latin America are also available. All Adam Matthew digital collections can be cross searched through Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.

Bob Grantham Quickfall, Western Life and How I Became a Bronco Buster. 1891. Graff 4979.

From the Newberry Library Graff Collection. 

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In January, the Robert W. Woodruff Library acquired The American West Collection: Sources from the Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana at the Newberry Library, Chicago, 1722-1938, an extensive digital archive of manuscripts and printed materials on the history and culture of western America. Derived from the Newberry’s Everett D. Graff Collection, one of the premier collections of western Americana in the US, the database documents key people, events, and images related to the early American frontier and its borderlands. Students will find histories of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, hunters, explorers, outlaws, and vigilantes. They will uncover documents on mining and the gold rush, the Mormon exodus, travel and early settlement, the railroads, agricultural development and the environment. They will also encounter documents on the imagined west—popular representations of the region like Wild West shows.

To locate these materials, researchers should pay attention to several of the database’s features. Although the interface is somewhat dated (it is in the middle of being re-designed), it provides a good deal of useful information, especially if patrons take the time to explore beyond the home page. 

Under the “documents” tab, for example, you can browse the entire collection alphabetically, or explore it by theme, region (ranging from Alabama and Ohio west to Mexico), or document type. Clicking on the “document type” link leads you to two broad categories, printed and manuscript, and thirteen additional document types: Brand Book, Broadside, Correspondence, Currency, Diary, Directory, Ephemera, Journal, Pamphlet, Periodical, Photograph, Poster, and Rare Book. Clicking on “currency” link yields early bank notes from Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio; on “posters,” announcements for theater productions from 1860s Montana, advertisements for new gold fields in Wyoming, and stage company passenger routes; on diaries, records of fur traders in the Black Hills, cowboys in Kansas, and life among the Sioux. They are all well described, like this Idaho broadside seeking horses for winter herding:

For those who wish to browse by subject or perform particular key word searches, the “searching” tab is also a good place to start. It includes a list of “popular searches”—a place for students with little prior knowledge of the subject to begin. Clicking on the subject “Buffalo Bill,” for instance, brings up more than 500 results—rare books, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, and broadsides. For those who wish to search by keyword, the site has a well-developed help page that explains the organization of search results and tips for finding useful materials. Some things to keep in mind: printed sources will appear first in results; up to 100 results can be viewed per page; enclosing search terms in double quotations allows patrons to search for specific phrases.

Finally, researchers interested in maps and images should explore the “map” tab and the database’s slideshow feature. The map tab includes over 400 maps organized by region, date and theme. (A detailed overview of how to work with maps is available on the help page.) The database's slideshow gallery, which can be found under the “additional resources” tab, also contains nearly 800 high-resolution photographs, bookplates, and sketches—including a number of Audubon illustrations.

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Did you return to Emory after the holidays with a brand-new tablet or electronic book reader? The Emory Libraries have many electronic resources available in our collection. Depending on what you're looking for and the device you're using, however, you may be limited to the ways in which you can get your reading done. We're here to help.

E-books are distributed in a variety of formats with different kinds of digital rights management. For example, you'll be able to read some formats on an e-book reader, but for others, you'll have to be logged into a computer. The differences between different e-book publisher's interfaces and rights management systems can make researching and reading can be difficult to understand.

We've compiled an E-books Guide to help you find and use e-books at Emory. In it, you'll learn more about the printing and reading rights available for each publisher, whether you can download particular e-books to portable devices. If you're in the market for a tablet or reader, we've included a chart comparing recent gadgets to help you make a decision.  

The library also offers first-generation iPads and Barnes and Noble NOOKcolor readers available for you to check out. You can borrow them for two weeks and read e-books on those, as well. If you already have a gadget on which you read electronic materials, but forgot your charger, you can borrow one from the Marian K. Heilbrun Music and Media Library.

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Early this fall, the Woodruff Library purchased a new microfilm reader and scanner called the ScanPro2000.

The machine is great--it is easy to use, fast, creates clear images, and has features, such as full-reel scanning, not available in other printer scanners. Here’s an overview of what it can do.

Clean up film:

Microfilm can be hard to read. Poor quality originals, bad scanning conditions, and use over time fades and scratches film. This is especially true of items that were filmed in-house, when libraries like Woodruff had equipment to create microfilm.

The ScanPro has various tools to clean-up bad film. It can auto-correct scans, darken or lighten text, and edit out film imperfections. It has powerful zoom capabilities and generally creates better scans than other, older readers.
 
Keyword search:

Every year the library gets microfilm copies of newspapers, popular periodicals, and unique printed material from other libraries. Some of these items are now searchable, through resources such as the British Archives Online and the History Vault, but many are not.

The ScanPro200 partially rectifies this problem by allowing you to search single pages of microfilmed text.  Here’s an image from ScanPro’s developers, e-image data, that demonstrates how this works. The search is for "Monet."

Searchability also means that you can copy and paste text from the screen into Word or Wordpad, without having save the entire page image to your hard drive.

Scan full reels:

One of the coolest features of the new reader is the auto-scanning option. The process takes some time—I recommend scanning no more than 7 pages per minute—but it’s completely automatic. It works by auto-detecting the borders of an image, scanning the image, automatically straightening, focusing and correcting image imperfections, and auto-advancing the film.

Crop, Copy, and Paste:

The images to the left show the machine’s crop features. To select an article or image, all you have to do is outline the portion of the page that you would like to have, copy it and save it as an image or paste it into a document.

Access and Support:

The reader is located on the first floor of the library in the microfilm area. It is available 24 hours; however, we ask that during working hours (8:00 A.M. - 8:00 P.M) patrons sign-up for half-hour to two hour blocks of time on a sign-up sheet next to the machine. After hours, you aren’t required to sign-up.

An overview of the machine’s features is available online here. We also offer one-on-one tutorials. To set one up, contact microfilm collection manager Jerrold Brantley at libjdb@emory.edu.

One of the challenges of getting your papers and projects done is determining how you'll go about it all. But everyone has his or her own methods and processes, which means that as far as productivity tools are concerned, one size does not fit all.

Last week we published a new guide called Productivity Tools for Graduate Students, based on a guide of the same name published by Georgia Tech librarian Crystal Renfro. We've made some changes and added a few tools of our own that we thought might make your academic work easier.

The Productivity Tools guide is organized semi-chronologically, from taking notes to creating mind maps; citing your research; organizing your time; managing your projects; writing, editing, and publishing; and storing and sharing your work.

You may notice that we've only listed a small handful of websites and apps for each of the different categories we included in the guide. There are far more than that, and we thought it might be more useful to include three or four favorites than a dozen tools you might pick through to find the one you like best.

If there's a particular productivity aid you like that isn't on our list, be sure to let us know in the comments!

Authored by:
Chris Pollette
December 4, 2012