What's New in the Grinnell College Libraries, Spring 2011

New Faces

Biva Rajbhandari '12, Reference Assistant

Nathan Clubb '10, Evening Circulation Supervisor, Burling Library

New Tools, Databases and Other Collections

• Send us a Text Message! Text (712) 560-9033 for brief answers to your simple questions. Reference help is also available in-person at Burling and Kistle Science Libraries, via instant messaging, e-mail, phone and by appointment.
• Digitale Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker (DKV): This digital collection covers works of major German-language authors spanning eleven centuries and includes historical, philosophical, theological, political and art history texts. Collections of essays, speeches and other non-literary material add context and background material. Each text has been carefully edited and prepared.
• Literature Online (LION): A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 315 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.
• ACM Digital Library: Includes the full text of every article ever published by the Association for Computing Machinery (in journals, transactions, magazines, newsletters, SIGs, and conference proceedings) plus bibliographic citations from other major publishers in computing.
• Art & Architecture Complete: A comprehensive database that provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for 730+ academic journals, magazines and trade publications with full text for over 330 periodicals and 215 books, as well as selective coverage for over 70 publications, and an Image Collection of over 64,000 images provided by Picture Desk and others.
• Red Stockings: A microfilm collection providing an archive of the Feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Listening Room Hours Change

The Listening Room will have limited access from 8:00 p.m. each evening until half an hour before Burling Library closes. During that time patrons may ask at the Burling circulation desk to check out Listening Room items and to use the equipment for those items.

Archon and the Iowa Room

Finding aids for manuscript collections, pamphlet files, and college archives are now fully searchable thanks to open source software called Archon. This site is a work in progress, and not all materials are yet included, but we are adding material every day. To try it out, go to http://libweb.grinnell.edu/archives/.

Better Lighting in Burling

We have increased the lighting levels on Burling’s third and fourth floors to provide a greater sense of welcome and well-being for library patrons. We worked closely with Facilities Management to minimize impact on energy usage.

Online Journal Transition

 As a result of the 2009-10 Serials Review, the Libraries gained the budget flexibility to add a significant number of new journal and database subscriptions and an additional pay-per-view service. All of the new subscriptions (103) and the pay-per-view service were specific requests by individual faculty which were then prioritized at the department or concentration level. To create the budget flexibility we needed to add these new subscriptions, departments and concentrations recommended ending or changing formats for 488 existing subscriptions (canceling 145 and changing formats for 343). Some of these new subscriptions began during the fall and all the rest began in January.

Our new pay-per-view service complements the Elsevier ScienceDirect pay-per-view service that has been in operation since June 2008. The Wiley pay-per-view service provides article- and chapter-level access to approximately 1,500 journals, 9,000 books, and hundreds of multi-set reference works and other publications of John Wiley & Sons, Blackwell, and other well-known scholarly publishers owned by the Wiley corporation. Wiley pay-per-view has been in operation since early September.

Overall, through a thorough review of our subscriptions we have significantly increased the number of resources to which the campus has access within this year's budget allocation.

Titles Added to our Reference Collection

Encyclopedia of Africa. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editors. Oxford University Press, 2010. REF DT3 .E53 2010

Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments, and Amending Issues, 1789-2010. John R. Vile, editor. ABC-CLIO, 2010 (3rd ed.). REF KF4557 .V555 2010.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States. Emmanuel S. Nelson, editor. Greenwood Press, 2009. REF PS153.S39 E53 2009

Encyclopedia of Human Rights. David P. Forsythe, editor. Oxford University Press, 2009.  REF JC571 .E673 2009

Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. David A. Leeming, Kathryn Madden, and Stanton Marlan, editors. Springer, 2010. REF BL53 .E43 2010

Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions. (8th ed.). Gale Cengage Learning, 2009. REF BL2525 .M449 2009

Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian. Barry T. Klein, editor. (15th ed.). Todd Publications, 2010. REF E76.2 .R4 2010