Medical research has come a long way since the 1918 influenza epidemic, but last year’s H1-N1 scare demonstrated how vulnerable we still are when faced with a new and highly contagious virus. Today’s population density and global travel habits increase the speed with which epidemics can turn into pandemics.

Are you interested in learning more about the history of the “French disease” or the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in the 18th century? Would you like to learn more about the field of public health as it emerged in response to epidemic diseases.
Falvey’s large collection comprises encyclopedic essays, books, primary sources in digital collections and peer-reviewed journal articles about the history of epidemics, public health, and hygiene.

The Epidemics in History Research Guide identifies numerous library resources and lists relevant Library of Congress subject headings that will improve search results in the online catalog. It includes links to sample essays, articles and primary sources in Falvey’s digital collections.
The online research guide can be found on the Course & Topic Guides page under the Guides tab on the library home page. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments that you may have.

By Demian Katz

A new semester is starting, and it probably won’t be too long before you need to find some information in the library. Fortunately, searching for library resources has just gotten easier!

The library catalog now has a new feature. In addition to searching for books in our collection, it also searches for full-text articles in dozens of our subscription databases. One search box gives you access to millions of resources, most of which you can’t find in Google.  Content included ranges from scholarly journal and newspaper articles to e-books and theses.

To try the enhanced catalog, search here .

Just type your search in the Library Catalog box and hit Find. Books and other resources found in Falvey Library will show up on the left under Books & more; articles and other electronic resources will display on the right under Articles & more.

Articles & more: The blue “Find It” buttons will help you locate full-text articles or request content from Interlibrary Loan. You can click on the tabs above the search results to refine your search and explore beyond the top ten results in each category.

Don’t give up if you don’t find what you need right away. Although our catalog should help with many of your search needs, it’s still just the tip of the iceberg.  You can also visit our Subject Guides for help with research in specific subject areas, or you can connect with a librarian online if you need a bit of human assistance.

Have fun searching, and please feel free to contact us if you have questions or problems. We will use your feedback to continue to improve our online tools.

The Communication Abstracts database, formerly on CSA, is now hosted on the EBSCO platform.  You can now search Communication & Mass Media Complete simultaneously with Communication Abstracts.  Near the top center, click Choose Databases.  A list of all the databases Falvey subscribes to will appear.  Check off the ones you would like to search. (more…)

Explore history through the 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. Learn about the English Civil War, the Restoration and 18th century political and cultural developments.

According to the publisher, “The newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. The present digital collection, that helps chart the development of the concept of ‘news’ and ‘newspapers’ and the ‘free press,’ totals almost 1 million pages and contains approximately 1,270 titles. Many of the Burney newspapers are well known, but many pamphlets and broadsides also included have remained largely hidden.”

Joseph Drury, assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University, says “The Burney Collection is an exceptionally rich database of periodicals and newspapers, invaluable to anybody interested in doing research on eighteenth-century English culture. Most of the material from the early part of the century is not available anywhere else, and there is very little overlap with Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, because ECCO for the most part doesn’t include newspapers, journals and periodicals, only printed books. Because what it includes is so ephemeral, the Burney gets you much closer, I think, to everyday cultural life — it gives you immediate responses to political events, theatre reviews, literary squabbles, fads, and fashions and so on.”

Burney, which also includes Acts of Parliament, features newspapers published in London, the British Isles and its colonies.

In addition to English literary and historical scholarship, this new database will be invaluable to political scientists, philosophers and anyone interested in delving into life in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

“Newly digitized, all Burney treasures are now fully text-searchable.”

EBSCO has acquired the Criminal Justice Abstracts index from Sage earlier this year and over the summer Falvey’s subscription switched from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) to the EBSCO interface.  I was not very enthusiastic about this change, because it meant that Villanova faculty and students lost the ability to cross-search Criminal Justice Abstracts with Sociological Abstracts, which remains on the CSA interface. The library is currently investigating whether it will be possible to switch Sociological Abstracts to EBSCO in the near future.

On the positive side you will notice that the EBSCO interface is in no way inferior to the familiar CSA interface. I encourage you to give the new Criminal Justice Abstracts a try. One of the first things that I noticed when I tested the new interface, was a larger and more focused number of results. As it turns out, Criminal Justice Abstracts contains now more than 235,000 records compared to 103,600 on the old platform. The additional records come from criminal justice core journals according to a recent EBSCO press release. Please note also that cited references can now be searched via a separate tab at the top of the search screen (see illustration), but only 130 of the 270 indexed journals are indexed with cited references. Social Sciences Citation Index is still the most comprehensive source in terms of cited reference searching.

Falvey also lost its free access to NCJRS Abstracts through the CSA interface. EBSCO stepped up and offered us free access to NCJRS Abstracts, which means faculty and students can continue to cross search it together with Criminal Justice Abstracts by selecting both databases after clicking on Chooses Databases (see illustration) at the top of the search screen. Please note that the links to the free government full text in NCJRS Abstracts are buried on the record level. The library’s FindIt button will not link to this content.

Go ahead and check out the new content on Criminal Justice Abstracts. Feel free to contact me with any feedback and comments that you may have.

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The Digital Library is now on Flickr! I created our account in June and have since added 85 images (and counting!).

Most of the images come from our collections on the Digital Library and I’ve created image sets that mirror some of the main collections there, as well as two new collections: Adverts and Scenes. As you might guess, the Adverts set contains advertisements from the pages of some of the books in our Digital Library. I’ve pulled the ones that struck me as interesting or noteworthy in some way.

The Scenes set contains Flickr-exclusive images that don’t fit into any of our regular collections. These will mainly be random photos I take while wandering around campus photographing trees.

The majority of these images are all available on the Digital Library, of course, but our Flickr account provides another point of access and highlights some of the interesting images that are easy to miss if you don’t look through every page of every item on the Digital Library. In addition, Flickr allows you to interact with our images by adding notes, tags, and comments.

Come check us out! I know I’m having fun finding images to post there, so hopefully you’ll find something new and interesting, too!

Our bound journal collection has moved to Garey Hall, but never fear! We’re here to help you get the articles you need. Even though the stacks are restricted (library staff access only), we will scan or retrieve the journals you need.

The link to Interlibrary Loan on our home page will take you to the ILLiad patron login screen where you can request electronic delivery of articles from the Falvey Library or Garey Hall collections. It’s also used to request articles and books from libraries all over the world.

As noted in a blog article by University Librarian Joe Lucia, “the items being transferred to the Garey Hall facility are mainly bound volumes containing historical runs of print journals and periodicals. A large percentage of this material is now available online. Approximately 100,000 volumes will be stored in Garey Hall once this project is complete.” The move of journals will make it possible for the library to create new spaces for users.

The ILLiad all-purpose request form is used to process your request in the most efficient way possible, whether it’s an article from our bound journal collection or an article from a library across the country. We can often deliver your article within 48 hours. Our new Garey Hall services begin on Monday, August 23rd.

If you prefer that we deliver the physical item from Garey Hall to Falvey for your perusal, use the Garey Hall retrieval request.

This new Falvey Library Blog is dedicated to library news of special interest to Communication faculty and students.  Check in regularly to find out about new books, library events, changes to resources, database trials, and other news.

For those of you I have not met, my name is Kristyna Carroll, and I am the new Communication liaison at the library.  I started at Falvey in April, and as a Villanova alum, am excited to be back on campus!  Although I will be the primary librarian,  Linda Hauck remains part of the team that provides services to the Communication Department.  To read a little more about my background, check out this post in the Library News blog.

Although I have already had the pleasure of meeting several faculty members, I look forward to working with many more of you.  And, since this is my first semester on campus, I am very excited for the students to arrive! (more…)

Kristyna Carroll, a 2007 Villanova graduate with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and honors, will staff the Bartley Business Info Center on Mondays this fall. Kristyna joined Falvey Memorial Library this summer as a social sciences and business librarian. She received her master’s degree in library and information science from Drexel University in December 2009.
She will provide research support to students, teach research sessions, and create online guides to scholarship such as her recently posted Human Resources subject guide.
Her hobby is playing ice hockey for the Philadelphia Freeze. The team is part of the United Women’s Hockey League which includes the greater Philadelphia area, from Bethlehem to Delaware.

Article and photograph Alice Bampton

While “dog days” normally refer to hot, humid weather (of which we have had far too much this summer), it is also the title of an eye-catching display that draws attention to Falvey’s newspaper collection.

Located on the kiosk near the library entrance, two posters invite the viewer to “Gaze in wonder at the 37 newspapers that Falvey receives in print,” “PAWS awhile, grab a paper over by the reference area,” and “… smell the flowers.”

Another poster tells you about the online newspapers available to library patrons.

Hanging above the kiosk are newspapers with headlines, “DOG DAYS ARE HERE!” and “DOG DAYS FULL OF BITE,” along with colorful cartoon dogs’ heads with newspapers in their mouths. As one sign notes, “We do not have a Falvey dog to bring your favorite newspaper to you, but …our Interlibrary Loan staff certainly does quite a bit of fetching!”

Judith Olsen, a reference librarian and Publications and Communication team leader, compiled the handout which lists and explains Falvey’s subscriptions to online newspapers. She and Bill Greene, Access and User Assistance, worked with display creator Joanne Quinn.

Be sure to check out the pet photographs of Buddy, Cody, Chalupa, Madison, Sammie, Maggie, Cara and Buffy, posted by our dog-loving staff!

By Alice Bampton