NOTES FROM RAMSEY LIBRARY; 2009-12

“Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.”

~ Heinrich Heine

NEW ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

As indicated in the previous issue, this year’s materials acquisition budget has allowed the library to restore book purchases to the healthier level of a couple of years ago, to consider restoring some subscriptions we had canceled, and to contemplate new and highly desirable products. Ramsey Library is very pleased to announce the following electronic resources:

· Art Index Full Text ~ Ramsey Library has long offered an electronic version of Art Abstracts which providing citations and abstracts but lacked full text articles. This upgrade This offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of some 500 peer-selected publications with full text access to some 200 with expanded coverage of Latin American, Canadian, Asian and non-Western art, new artists, contemporary art, exhibition reviews, and feminist criticism.

· Cambridge Companions Online (SOON TO BE AVAILABLE) ~ Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Together the chapters add up to a systematic critical account of, for example Plato, Luther, Jane Austen, Tom Stoppard or Stravinsky, the French Novel or Jewish American Literature, and each title is supported by reference features such as a chronology and guide to further reading. Addressing topics and figures as diverse as Gothic Fiction and Arabic Philosophy, WB Yeats and Martin Luther, the online collection contains over 3,000 downloadable essays, taken from 322 Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics (195 volumes) and Philosophy, Religion and Culture (127 volumes). 2 new Companions have been added as part of the September 2009 update.

· Cambridge Histories Online (SOON TO BE AVAILABLE) ~ The Cambridge Histories have become an established and essential component of the academic research library, and now, for the first time, over 250 of these well-known, used and trusted volumes are available online, adding immense value to the texts and enhancing any aspect of historical research. 3 new volumes have been added to Cambridge Histories Online as of May 2009, bringing the total number of volumes included in the collection to 258.

· Oxford Scholarship Online (SOON TO BE AVAILABLE) ~ A large and rapidly expanding cross-searchable library which offers quick and easy access to the full text of 3,036 Oxford books in Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Literature, Classics, History, Law, Business, Psychology, and Music with new and recently-published books are added each year.

RECENT NEWS OF NOTE

· Open Access to Research Is Inevitable
“I now believe that having public access to most scholarly communications is inevitable,” said David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. “Faculty are coming to understand, finally, that this has to happen if they’re going to have the most scholarly opportunities to get things done.”

· Course-Pack Company Loses Copyright Lawsuit
“A business in Ann Arbor, Mich., failed in its attempt to get around a legal precedent that guides the procedures for copying course packs.”