Historians and students and scholars in other disciplines implement The Chicago Manual of Style to cite resources used in their research papers. Find out how to cite a sample source in the notes and works cited list (bibliography). Falvey created an online tutorial demonstrating how to do this.
See the History and Political Science blog post for more information and helpful contacts.
A fourth-century saint, a Catholic bishop of the North African city of Hippo, a Doctor of the Church, a biblical exegete, a philosophical thinker, an early Church Father and a writer of some of the most influential books in the history of Western civilization: Augustine is one person about whom every student at Villanova University, a Catholic and Augustinian community, will learn. But when students need to do library research on Saint Augustine of Hippo, where do they begin?
Question: How do I begin library research into Augustine?
Answer: You may want to contact the subject librarian for Theology and Religious Studies, Darren Poley. His office is Falvey 234, phone 610-519-6371 or email darren.poley@villanova.edu.
Another first step is to think about what you are seeking. Are you looking for the writings of Saint Augustine in Latin or an English translation? Do you want books and articles about Augustine written by scholars? Do you just want to look up a short, authoritative reference article on an Augustine-related topic? Is your research centered on something specific to his life or place in history (Augustine as a Christian philosopher, for example)?
Question: Where can I find the writings of Saint Augustine in Latin or in English translation?
Answer: Augustine’s original writings, which are in Latin, can be read in print or online. The Corpus Christianorum Series Latina and the Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) are series with critical editions of Latin texts. The “Patrologia Latina” series edited by Jacques-Paul Migne, which includes Augustine’s Latin works, is available in print (Falvey West stacks) and online.
Advanced researchers looking for an authoritative database of Augustine’s works in Latin should investigate the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense (CAG 2). The Past Masters database has most of his works that have been translated into English, as well as the complete works in Latin. The works in English in Past Masters are from the best series of translations in print: The works of Saint Augustine, a translation for the 21st century. Since most students are looking for English-language resources, Writings of Saint Augustine and the Ancient Christian Writers series are other good English translations of Augustine’s major works.
Question: How do I discover books and articles about Augustine written by scholars? (more…)
Both are new entries in The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, the second edition of which is now available online. Ideally suited for undergraduate students, each article delivers a thorough description of its topic and concludes with a recommended reading list. You can also browse the table of contents to generate ideas for paper topics.
Jutta Seibert covers the new edition in her Philosophy topic blog: “The interested reader encounters a brave new world expressed in neologisms such as Savior Siblings, Genetic Exceptionalism, and Open Source Software, terminology which largely did not exist back in 1998.”
Carol Weiss, Villanova Institute for Teaching and Learning (VITAL) director, and her assistant, Ramona Kuczewski, planned the New Faculty Orientation program, part of which was held in Falvey Memorial Library. University Librarian and Director Joe Lucia welcomed faculty and introduced librarians and staff. Jutta Seibert, Academic Integration team leader, coordinated the Library’s portion of the orientation. Faculty were encouraged to sit in groups according to discipline for informal discussions with liaison librarians.
Lt. John Krewer, Lt. Timothy Rustico and Theodore Arapis
Patrick J. Okernick and Jutta Seibert
Sue Ottignon, Francois Massonnat and Salvatore Pappalardo
By Kimberley Bugg
Barbara Quintiliano, librarian, works with graduate student Bharath Chouta
Librarians are available to help with your research needs. You will find their offices located on the library second floor (Rooms 220-230) in the Research Center of the Learning Commons. You may contact them in a variety of ways: in-person, chat, phone and email. Whether you are in the building or elsewhere, you can call a librarian at 610-519-4273 or email a librarian at ref@villanova.edu.
In Person: Much like faculty, librarians maintain office hours during the week and are available on Sundays.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday: 9am – 8pm
Thursday: 9am – 6pm
Friday: 10am – 4pm
Sunday: 2pm – 8pm
During office hours you can walk right into the Library and request to see the on call librarian immediately. You can also contact a subject librarian directly to set up an appointment.
Chat: Librarians are available by chat during office hours, as well as 8pm- 10pm on Mondays and on Saturdays from 1pm to 5pm. Chatting with a librarian is easy: simply find the green dot at the bottom of the library website and open a chat box:
For more information, go to the Contact Us library web page.
Kimberley Bugg is the Information and Research Assistance team leader.
The announcement of Villanova University’s partnership with the Kuali Foundation in the development of the Kuali Open Library Environment (OLE) was made in June at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference. University Librarian and Library Director Joe Lucia spearheaded the effort to join with Kuali in the development of their open source library management system.
Lucia summarized his commitment to the community source model for development of an enterprise-scale library system by saying, “We are excited to join the Kuali OLE initiative. It represents a major step in deepening library collaboration through the creation of tools and infrastructure designed from the ground up to deal with the challenges and mandates of the digital environment.”
This initiative reflects Falvey Memorial Library’s strategic plan, which calls for a “pragmatic commitment to open source technologies and open culture approaches to internal, inter-institutional, regional, and national collaboration and resource sharing.” (more…)
Demian Katz, technology development specialist, has co-authored “Content Integration: Creating a Scalable Common Platform for Information Resources,” published in the March 2012 issue of Computers in Libraries. The other author, Max Berenstein, is a product manager at Elsevier, a publisher of scientific, technical and medical information.
In their article, Berenstein and Katz discuss solutions, such as SciVerse Applications, developed at Elsevier, and VuFind, developed at Villanova University, which can be used “to help institutions better aggregate, manage, and expose licensed and in-house content.”
A sidebar, “Application Development: A Collaborative Process,” features Katz highlighting his interaction with Berenstein “to create the VuFind template application, a scalable and inexpensive new way to expose library resources within the OpenSocial universe .”
VuFind is open source library software developed at Falvey. Katz is the current lead developer, but he says, “I’m certainly not solely responsible for its content – a lot of people around the world have contributed code; I just take all the contributions and put them together into the finished product.” VuFind replaced the traditional OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) used to search a library’s holdings.
Falvey’s Technology Development team—Katz, David Lacy and David Uspal—develops “major features for the … Library web site.”
Also contributing: Gerald Dierkes
Ancestry — Library Edition is now available at Falvey Memorial Library. Access to Ancestry is available via the library Databases A-Z list as well as from the History and Biographies research guide pages.
Ancestry encompasses a vast collection of genealogical data which trace the history of millions of individuals, going back as far as 1300 in some cases. The collection consists of census data, vital records, directories, photos and more. Faculty members in the History Department are already planning student research projects with Ancestry data sets for the coming semesters.
For more information, see Jutta Seibert’s blog on this new resource.
By Robin Bowles
What is the best database for Biology articles?
The best bet for comprehensive biology research is Biological Abstracts. If your topic is animal related, you should also check Zoological Record. You can use PubMed for biology topics, but be aware that it contains a vast amount of medical literature that won’t be useful to you. Google Scholar (which is not really a database) and Scopus also have many good scholarly articles for biological research.
How do I pick good search terms when looking for articles?
The key to choosing effective search terms starts with answering one question: “What words or phrases will appear only in articles that interest me?” For example, if you are researching “how little brown bat colonies cope with white-nose syndrome,” you should select those words or phrases that will only appear in articles on your topic, in this case the phrases “little brown bat” and “white-nose syndrome.”
Your next step is to combine those search terms into an AND statement: “little brown bat” AND “white-nose syndrome.”
Then take it one step further and look for other terms and phrases that are synonymous with the ones you’ve already picked.
You may turn to Wikipedia and discover that other names for the little brown bat are “little brown myotis” and “Myotis lucifugus.” “White-nose syndrome” is also written as “white nose syndrome” or “WNS” and is believed to be caused by the fungus “Geomyces destructans.”
Wait a minute! Did you just use Wikipedia?
Yes, Wikipedia is a good place to look for alternate names and terms. I’m using it here to inform my search strategy, not as a research source itself. (more…)
You’ve located an article on the “Articles & more” section of the library catalog or from a library database that you want to use for your paper. But how do you get the full text of the article?
When you click 
(the Find It button), you are taken to the 360Link page. This page allows you to access the article you found.
Here is what the 360Link page looks like:
(Click the image for larger view)
From this page, you can do a number of things:
1. Click “Article” to get the full text of the article. You can also click “Journal” to browse the contents of the specific journal the article was published in. Or click the name of the database to browse or search that specific database.
2. If the full text of an article is not available, you can click a link to request it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL), also called ILLiad.
3. You can export the citation of the article to RefWorks. (Find more information about using RefWorks.)
Note that the Catalog link on the 360Link page will take you to the library catalog if Falvey has a print subscription to the journal you want.
Disclaimer! This article touches on the highlights of the 360Link page. If you have further questions, or are having trouble accessing articles, please contact us via email or call (610) 519-4270.
More Quick Tips.
