The Lamont News-List November 22, 2005

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* The Lamont News-List lamref(a)fas.harvard.edu November 22, 2005 http://hcl.harvard.edu/lamont *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Lamont Library Factoid: On a typical day, our Reference Room printers use up to 3.5 reams of paper--or about 1750 single-sided sheets. You've wanted a cost effective solution that's also environmentally sound. It's arrived! Our Reference Room computers now allow duplex printing of PDF files. If you're not sure how to select this option, ask at the Desk and we'll show you what to do! ********************************************************** IN THIS ISSUE: -- E-Research Cool Tool Academic and scholarly books that you can search--and read--online! -- Lamont Library Hours over the Thanksgiving Break Just in case you'll be around! -- Power Searching Tip no. 2: "Availability" v. "Holdings" screens in the HOLLIS catalog -- A few good books that are new on our shelves Perfect to take with you for a long weekend of reading! ********************************************************* E-RESEARCH COOL TOOL Academic and scholarly books that you can search--and read--online! ebrary http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:ebraryxx Chances are good that if you've found a book in HOLLIS with an "internet link," it's one of the more than 25,000 digitized items that the Harvard Libraries make available to you through a collection called ebrary Academic Complete. Ebrary titles come from some of the most respected publishing houses in the business: MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Knopf, and Kluwer (among others). That means that you can count on getting authoritative content across the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and their subdisciplines. You can count on the currency of that content as well. The majority of books in the ebrary collection have been published within the last 5 years. In ebrary, you're given simple and advanced searching options and, as in HOLLIS, you can search by author, title, publisher, special subject terms, or some combination of these. Keyword searching is an option in ebrary, too. If you've only experienced ebrary through a HOLLIS link, you may not have discovered the features that make it such a good research tool. Once you sign in to the ebrary database and set up your (free) password-protected account, here's just a few of the things that you can do: ** create your own online bookshelf of titles. Store the books you want to return to later in your virtual research space. You can check them out for as long as you like or as long as you need and you'll never accrue fines . . . or get a recall notice! ** bookmark the page or pages in a book that are especially important to your work. ** highlight important passages in the online books you're reading. They'll automatically be saved to your bookshelf for future reference. ** annotate the text you're reading using the "Notes" tab. You can keep track of ideas as they occur to you, and your notes will be saved to your bookshelf for later review. ** copy and paste text from an ebrary item into a Word document you're working with. Ebrary will even generate a bibliographic citation automatically and in a style (like APA or MLA) that you specify. A nice research bonus is the set of "Info Tools" that ebrary puts at your disposal. Highlight a word, right click on your mouse, and a dictionary definition will appear. Ask ebrary to "explain," and a more detailed encyclopedia entry will put a person, place or concept in its larger contexts. Foreign words and expressions can even be translated on the spot. Ebrary doesn't allow you to download entire books, but you can print portions of them out: 10 pages at a time or a total of 40 per session (due to copyright rules). Download the free ebrary reader to your laptop or PC and try your hand at exploring. Or just go browsing: ebrary uses subject terms like those in the HOLLIS catalog to help you find your way! You'll find an ebrary "Quick Guide" at http://tinyurl.com/bukbt ********************************************************* LAMONT LIBRARY HOURS DURING THANKSGIVING BREAK: When we're open, when we're not, and what to know about reserves readings Wednesday, November 23 library closes at 4:45 p.m. Thursday, November 24 CLOSED Friday, November 25 8:00 a.m. - 4:45 p.m. Saturday, November 26 8:00 a.m. - 4:45 p.m. Sunday, November 27 library opens at noon DID YOU KNOW? Unless it's the only copy or the last copy of an item, you can take reserves readings with you for the holiday weekend. Checkout begins at 2 p.m. on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23. Just be sure to return reserves materials by 9 a.m. on Monday November 28. ********************************************************* POWER SEARCHING TIP: no.2: "Availability" v. "holdings" screens in the HOLLIS catalog "Location, location, location." At an institution that has close to 100 libraries, the physical and intellectual siting of materials listed in HOLLIS (by building and call number) is obviously critical. But we've probably all had the experience of jotting down a call number and heading straight for the stacks, only to find out that the books aren't where they should be or the library doesn't have the journal issue that we need. Taken at face value, location information can indeed be deceiving. That's why the HOLLIS catalog provides you with links to "availability" and "holdings" screens. You'll find them listed after an item's call number, sitting side by side. But which of these links should a puzzled undergraduate follow? Here's our rule of thumb: When you come across a *book* in the HOLLIS catalog, the "availability" screen is always essential. "Availability" tells you about the status of the item: if it's in the building and (presumably) on the shelf, missing from the collection, on reserve, and so forth. You could click on the holdings information, of course, but you wouldn't learn much more than you already know: that a copy of the book is owned ("held") in one or more places in the Yard (or just beyond). When you're after a *journal* or *magazine* (materials that librarians call "periodicals"), the reverse is actually true. Since libraries rarely let patrons check journals out, availability shouldn't be at issue. In theory at least, if the library is open and its materials can't leave the building, you should always be able to get your hands on them there. For periodicals, then, HOLLIS "holdings" screens are key. That's because holdings verify the particulars of the coverage--the extent to which a library's subscription is complete. Let's say you want to look at the very first issues of _Forbes_ magazine, which dates back to 1918. Unless you checked the holdings information, you might not realize that Lamont began getting issues of _Forbes_ much later--our subscription started in 1979, with volume 123. So plunging headlong into our Periodicals collection on Level 2 would waste good research time, and ultimately, land you back at the HOLLIS catalog--or at the Reference Desk. It's not that the availability screen tells you nothing about a periodical. But making sense of the information there often takes more effort and more time. Availability screens list each individual volume on a separate line, and the list often doesn't follow a chronological order. Holdings screens answer your questions at a glance by clearly presenting volume ranges. Holdings screens will tell you other things, too: if issues are missing, for example, or whether portions of the journal are in the Harvard Depository. And by the way: if you've wondered about the strange term "current receipts" that sometimes appears in the holdings information, it's language librarians use to indicate the recent issues of periodicals that have arrived. "Current receipts" information can be an important navigational aid. In Lamont, current issues of magazines and journals are arranged alphabetically on Reference Room shelves; current receipts of many Widener publications, some arranged alphabetically, some by region, and some by call numbers, are displayed on shelves in the first floor Periodicals Reading Room. ********************************************************* A FEW NEW TITLES ON THE LAMONT SHELVES Perfect to take with you for some long-weekend reading! *** CHASING THE DEVIL'S TAIL: A MYSTERY OF STORYVILLE, NEW ORLEANS, by David Fulmer. Harvest, 2001. [NEW BOOK SHELF PS3606.U56 C49 2003] Storyville, 1907: In this raucous red-light district, where two thousand scarlet women ply their trade, where cocaine is sold over the counter and rye whiskey flows freely, there's a killer loose. Someone is murdering prostitutes and marking each killing with a black rose. Fulmer's novel, his first, was a _Booklist_ "Best New Mystery Series" winner and an _L.A. Times_ Book Prize Finalist. *** WORMWOOD FOREST: A NATURAL HISTORY OF CHERNOBYL, by Mary Mycio. Joseph Henry Press, 2005. [NEW BOOK SHELF QH543.5 .M93 2005] Twenty years after the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, intrepid journalist Mary Mycio donned a dosimeter and camouflage protective gear to explore the world's most infamous radioactive wilderness. And she is shocked to discover that the area surrounding Chernobyl has become Europe's largest wildlife sanctuary. Like the forests, fields, and swamps of their unexpectedly inviting habitat, both the people and the animals are all radioactive. Cesium 137 is packed into their muscles and strontium-90 is in their bones. But quite astonishingly, they are thriving. *** The LAVENDER SCARE: THE COLD WAR PERSECUTION OF GAYS AND LESBIANS IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, by David K. Johnson. U of Chicago Press, 2004. [NEW BOOK SHELF JK723.H6 J64 2004] The McCarthy era is generally considered the worst period of political repression in recent American history. But while the famous question "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if more discreetly: "Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?" David Johnson, a historian, relates the frightening and largely untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered a national security threat. *** WHY DOES LITERATURE MATTER?, by Frank B. Farrell. Cornell U P, 2004. [NEW BOOK SHELF PS221 .F37 2004] Farrell maintains that recent literary theory has badly misread findings in the philosophy of language and the theory of subjectivity. That misreading has tended to endorse ways of understanding literature that make one question its importance overalll. Farrell's book attempts to provide an answer. Among the writers discussed are John Ashbery, Amit Chadhuri, James Merrill, W.G. Sebald, Cormac McCarthy, and Marcel Proust. Philosophers important to his argument include Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Martin Heidegger, and Bernard Williams. The literary theorists addressed are Stephen Greenblatt, Marjorie Perloff, and Paul de Man. *** THE GREAT DECEPTION: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE EUROPEAN UNION, by Christopher Booker and Richard North. Continuum, 2003. [NEW BOOK SHELF JN15 .B6393 2005x ] This book tells the "inside story" of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single supranational government. The book shows how Britain's politicians, not least Tony Blair, have consistently been outplayed in a game--the rules of which they never understood. It ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the "project" has overreached itself, and is a gamble doomed to fail. *** FALLINGWATER RISING: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, E.J. KAUFMANN, AND AMERICA'S MOST EXTRAORDINARY HOUSE, by Franklin Toker. Knopf, 2005. [New Book Shelf NA737.W7 T65 2005x] Wright's Fallingwater house made America fall in love with modernist architecture, according to Franklin Toker. The analysis of Wright's character and creativity, the often lyrical evocations of his buildings, and the insightful overview of the modernist intellectual milieu of the 1930s make the book a wonderful exploration of the psychological and social meaning of architecture. *** THE ELEMENTS OF MURDER: A HISTORY OF POISON, by James Emsley. Oxford, 2005. [New Book Shelf HV6553 .E47 2005x] Emsley combines history, chemistry, and true crime in this compelling account of murderous chemical elements. Mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, and thallium-- all have caused death, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. Through vividly told stories of innocent blunders, cunning poisoners, and deaths that remain a mystery, he uncovers the dark side of the Periodic Table. *** NEOCONOMY: GEORGE BUSH'S REVOLUTIONARY GAMBLE WITH AMERICA'S FUTURE, by Daniel Altman. Public Affairs, 2004. [New Book Shelf HC106.83 .A45 2004] The neoconomy is a place where taxes have disappeared on everything except your labor. In this compelling book, Daniel Altmann explains how the White House began dismantling the tax system, passing their tax cuts off as a cure for stagnation; how Bush locked the nation on his chosen path, incurring huge risks while casting the nation into debt; and finally, how the whole gamble might play out. _Neoconomy_ was a _Publisher's Weekly_ Best Book of 2004. ********************************************************* HAVE A TOPIC you'd like to see us cover in a future issue of the Lamont News-List? A research question you need answered? A tip you want to pass along to other Lamont News-List readers? All suggestions welcome! Send your thoughts and comments to sgilroy(a)fas.harvard.edu. ********************************************************* You received this email because you subscribed to the Lamont News-List. 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