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The New Issue of Expositions is Philosophy-Rich

  • Posted by: Nikolaus Fogle
  • Posted Date: December 21, 2012
  • Filed Under: Library News

The new issue of Expositions, the interdisciplinary journal of the Villanova Center for Liberal Education, features a number of selections that will be of particular interest to students and scholars of philosophy:

Expositions Vol. 6, No. 2 (2012)
V.C.L.E. is pleased to announce the publication of “Expositions” Vol. 6, No. 2. There is an interview with Alasdair MacIntyre (conducted after his recent visit to Villanova). An Academic Roundtable on Daryn Lehoux’s recent work in the history and philosophy of science, “What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking.” A discussion of teaching Cervantes’ masterpiece, “Don Quixote,” and a review of Brad Gregory’s “The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.”

For additional information: http://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/
If you have questions, please contact: gregory.hoskins@villanova.edu


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Library Honors Celina Wildemann – Student Employee of the Month

By Alice Bampton

Celina Wildemann, a senior biology major, is Falvey Memorial Library’s latest student employee of the month. A native of Middletown, R.I., Celina has worked for the Digital Library since her first year at Villanova University, scanning books and documents (see “1611 King James Bible now online”). Celina also worked in the Digital Library last summer.

The University Staff Council (USC) at Falvey selects a student employee of the month based upon nominations from the department supervisors of student employees. Digital and Special Collections Curatorial Assistant, Laura Bang, the supervisor who nominated Celina, says “She is a dedicated worker with great attention to detail. … Celina also has a great attitude and is often excited about the materials she scans for us. She is also involved in several campus activities but balances the load very well. She is an exemplary worker among the Digital Library students, and she is quick to mentor other students.”

Celina sings in the St. Thomas of Villanova Parish choir and is a board member of the pastoral musicians. Among her other campus activities are raising money for the eighth annual “Walk for Water (for Wasala)” and participating in intramural dodge ball and outdoor soccer. She led a Habitat for Humanity trip to Slidell, La., during the fall break.

She says, “I like to smile. I also love cats, the fall season, sports, snowboarding and running.” Celina plans to attend physical therapy school next year.

Be sure to look at the illustration of Celina, created by Joanne Quinn, Falvey’s design specialist. The color illustration is posted on a pillar behind the circulation desk.

The student employee of the month idea originated with Manager of Access Desk Services Phylis Wright who, with University Librarian and Library Director Joe Lucia and the Falvey USC team, chose this way to honor student workers. At the start of the semester Phylis asks library supervisors for nominations of outstanding student employees. She notes that the USC team “received so many [nominations] that our . . . team is finding it a difficult task to choose . . . [the winners]” – a very nice comment on the quality of Falvey’s student workers!


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Open Access Rules in France: Persée, érudit, and revues.org

Interlibrary loan is often the only way to get hold of foreign-language-journal articles here at Villanova, given the University’s focus on undergraduate education and the limited demand for academic journals in languages other than English. The library’s foreign language subscriptions are generally only available in print, further complicating access in a time when online access is the norm. The French academic publishing environment took its time to embrace online access, but the wait was well worth it. Today the archives of a large number of humanities and social sciences journals published in France and Quebec are freely available online. Three open access platforms preserve French scholarship: Persée, érudit and revues.org. All three platforms are partially integrated with each other to improve content discovery.

Named after Perseus, the legendary hero of Greek mythology, Persée is an open access archive of French academic journals initiated by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research in order to preserve and disseminate French scholarship. Over the years Persée has expanded to include social sciences journals, besides the original humanities journals, as well as French Canadian journals and dissertations archived on the érudit platform. Most of the journals archived in Persée have a moving access wall restricting access to current content to subscribing institutions. Persée currently archives more than 135 academic journals and over 400,000 articles, mostly in French. It indexes an additional 38 French Canadian journals which are archived on the érudit platform. Anybody with an internet connection can search the complete archive and browse individual journals.

Like Persée, revues.org is an open access journal platform. It is part of the OpenEdition portal run by the Centre pour l’édition électronique ouverte (Cléo) in Marseille. While the back issues of all 381 journals archived on this platform can be accessed freely by anyone, the access to current content of some journals is restricted to subscribers. In some cases free online access is limited to html format, and only subscribers are permitted to download articles as PDF files. The archives of some journals are divided between the Persée and revues.org platforms with the deep back files stored in Persée and the more recent years available on revues.org.

 

Both the Persée and the revues.org platforms include central search boxes which will search the content of all archived journals while also allowing the reader to search or browse individual journals. Aside from proper names, search terms should be entered in French since most of the publications are in French. Interested readers can bookmark their favorite journals or set up email alerts (via an RSS feeds) for new content. The journal articles archived in Persée and revues.org are at least partially indexed in various library databases, such as the International Medieval Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, and L’Année Philologique. The familiar blue Find It button will link directly to the open access journal titles archived in Persée. The library is still in the process of establishing a similar link to journals on the revues.org platform. All articles include citations with a date stamp, URL and sometimes a digital object identifier (DOI). Persée also has a citation export function which will download citation information to EndNote and RefWorks.
Most of the journals archived in Persée and revues.org are not part of the Library’s journal subscriptions, so that adding these platforms to the Library’s full-text-link service considerably expands access to foreign language journals. As for the limited number of French journals to which Falvey subscribes, among them Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française and the Revue philosophique de Louvain, adding these titles to the Library’s E-Journal Finder will increase overall accessibility.

I hope this description will encourage you to take a look at these open access journal platforms and to browse available journals in your subject area. What is your favorite open access scholarly resource? Email the name and URL directly to me (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post it online, and I will feature it in a future blog post.


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“A Little Fleet” in Proofreading

The latest title to become available for online proofreading is one of Jack Butler Yeats books for children, A Little Fleet.  The book describes the history and adventures of several fanciful ships, and it is filled with memorable illustrations by its author, who also happens to be the subject of one of our online exhibits.

This is a very slim volume, so it won’t be available for long — dive in now at the project page if you want to help (and see our earlier blog post for details on the proofreading effort).


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Sorcerers' Semester: Harry Potter and the Readers of Falvey

By Rob LeBlanc

After nine weeks of day-long, live reading from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., the loyal readers at Falvey Memorial Library successfully completed all seven Harry Potter books on Thursday, Dec. 6 at 4 p.m.

Not to be derailed by severe weather, flu season or “pesky exams,” the final (extra) day of reading carried us over the finish line in fine style. We envisioned this multi-week event as a nostalgic look back at a series that helped define a generation, and thanks to the help of a host of readers from all divisions of the Villanova University community, we were more than successful.

Over 50 separate readers participated, and their creative reading styles brought smiles to our faces.  More than one couple read in tandem – one doing the dialogue and the other the text. Many readers tried out their acting chops by giving voices to the famous characters. One reader used Skype to read a chapter from Iowa! We even (gasp!) had a few children read from these “kid’s books.”

Leah Fett, costume winner

Faculty, staff and student readers, especially the members of the University’s Harry Potter fan club (Epilogue: the Villanovan Order of the Phoenix) and the Villanova Quidditch team took turns at the microphone, lending hours of their personal time to bring J.K. Rowling’s famous stories to life each week in the library’s 24/7 lounge.

Two of our regular readers won substantial prizes for their loyal participation. Graduate student Leah Fett won an iPod shuffle for our Halloween Costume contest with her fantastic (and extremely accurate)  Slytherin prefect costume.

Each reader was also entered into a raffle each time they took a turn reading, and one of our most loyal participants, Chelsea Peláez, won our grand prize: a Kindle with all seven Harry Potter e-books!

Chelsea Peláez, raffle winner

All and all, our readers came away with fond memories, a rekindling of their childhood love of the Potter books, and a few extra ounces (pounds?!) in the form of tasty snacks, including “authentic” butterbeer, contributed and arranged by our fabulous Outreach team.

In addition to all our faithful readers, I would especially like to thank the Falvey staff and student workers for all their time and support. Without their tireless proctoring and reading, we could not have succeeded in this wonderful project.

Many thanks and Happy Holidays!

Photographs by Alice Bampton, Laura Hutelmyer, Robin Bowles and Luisa Cywinski


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Demian Katz, Library Technologist & Developer, Contributes to Recently Published Book

By Alice Bampton

Demian Katz, library technology development specialist and published author, contributed to a recently published book, Library Automation and OPAC 2.0: Information Access and Services in the 2.0 Landscape. Katz co-authored a chapter in the book with Andrew Nagy, a former Falvey technology development specialist who now works for Serials Solutions. The book, by Jesus Tramullas and Piedad Garrido, was released in July by IGI Global.

Katz and Nagy wrote chapter four, “VuFind: Solr Power in the Library.” An abstract of their work states, “Apache Solr, an open source Java-based search engine, forms the core of many Library 2.0 products. … The popular VuFind discovery tool was built to provide a library-friendly front-end for Solr’s powerful searching capabilities, and its development provides an informative case study on the use of Solr in a library setting.”

VuFind is open-source library software developed at Falvey. VuFind replaced the traditional OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) used to search a library’s holdings.

Katz recently celebrated his three-year anniversary at Falvey.


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ICPSR Research Paper Competition – Due 1/31

Students:  Have you just completed a research paper?  Faculty:  Have you just read an outstanding research paper?  Why not submit it to The ICPSR Research Paper Competition?

ICPSR invites submissions for our 2013 Research Paper Competition from undergraduates and master’s students at member institutions. The purpose of the competitions is to highlight exemplary research papers based on quantitative analysis. We are holding three contests this year:

All competitions are open to students currently pursuing or who recently received undergraduate or master’s degrees.

The awards are $1,000 for first place and $750 for second place in each category.

More information is found here: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/ICPSR/prize/index.html


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"Window Shopping": Whatever Your Major, Computing Sciences Is for Everyone

 

By Alice Bampton

“Whatever Your Major, Computing Sciences Is for Everyone,” the current exhibit in Falvey’s cultural window space, coincides with Computer Science Education Week, which is celebrated Dec. 9 – 15 this year.

Department of Computing Sciences faculty collaborated with Joanne Quinn, Falvey’s design specialist, to create the exhibit.

“Computing Sciences Is for Everyone” includes digital slide shows, a selection of books with interesting titles (including some written by computer science faculty members), magazines “whose covers and lead stories suggest the breadth of the computing discipline,” a model human brain, a Lego® robot, an original work of art, various informational posters, a white banner filled with binary code and a collection of computer-related comic strips. Quinn created the title banner and compiled the comic strips. Lillian (Boots) Cassel, PhD, Mary Papalaskari, PhD, and other computer science faculty created the rest of the exhibit.

Frank Klassner, PhD, made the Lego® robot that has a programmable control device, the program of which directs the robot’s movements. Dr. Klassner, according to Dr. Cassel, “is a well-known expert in Lego® robotics and their use in teaching and learning.”

(more…)


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Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics : Trial from Wiley Online Library

 

The Library is making The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics available to the entire campus as a trial ending Jan. 10. Let us know what you think!

The Encyclopedia, published in November, is an online comprehensive reference resource covering the highly diverse field of applied linguistics.  Coverage includes “27 key areas of the field, including Language Learning and Teaching, Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Assessment and Testing, Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Discourse, Cognitive Second Language Acquisition, Language Policy and Planning, Literacy, and Technology and Language.”

Additional features available with the online resource includes regular additions and updates to articles, including new entries, to keep the Encyclopedia current and cutting edge and a wealth of additional material, including sound files, and direct links to cross referenced articles, creating a multifaceted learning experience. Entries are available in both HTML and PDF, enabling users to print in a clean, easy-to-read format, which includes citation and cross-references. The encyclopedia is easy to navigate with 24/7 access to this major resource.

A List of Entries, in PDF format, found in the Encyclopedia is available for review.

Comment below or contact Susan Ottignon with your feedback before Jan. 10.

 


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Debut of the Aurelius Digital Humanities Initiative

By Laura Bang

On Nov. 15, Falvey Memorial Library debuted its new digital-humanities program, the Aurelius Digital Humanities Initiative. The digital humanities (DH) is a growing academic movement exploring the intersections of humanities scholarship and technologies, and it will have an important impact on future humanities scholarship. As such, the Library is pleased to offer support for DH projects as well as foster a digital-humanities community at Villanova University. Although we have yet to publish DH research, we are currently working with faculty on three digital-humanities projects and have already spoken with other faculty about possible future projects.

We are planning a more formal launch of the Aurelius Digital Humanities Initiative in the spring semester, in which we anticipate having some finished projects to share. In addition, we will hold monthly get-togethers for those interested in DH to meet and hang out, as well as occasional workshops.

I am very excited about bringing digital humanities to Villanova University, and I hope you will be, too. If you have any questions, comments or ideas, please feel free to get in touch with me at laura.bang@villanova.edu – I would love to hear from you!

Follow along on Twitter and/or on the new DH blog!


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Last Modified: December 11, 2012

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