A bunch of new DVDs on a diverse set of topics have recently arrived in the library. See the whole list, or check out some highlights below.

Half the Sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide

Documentary Film (2012)
Inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s groundbreaking book, HALF THE SKY: TURNING OPPRESSION INTO OPPORTUNITY FOR WOMEN WORLDWIDE takes on the central moral challenge of the 21st century: the oppression of women and girls worldwide.

Take an unforgettable journey with six actress/advocates and New York Times journalist Kristof to meet some of the most courageous individuals of our time, who are doing extraordinary work to empower women and girls everywhere. These are stories of heartbreaking challenge, dramatic transformation and enduring hope. You will be shocked, outraged, brought to tears. Most important, you will be inspired by the resilience of the human spirit and the capabilities of women and girls to realize their staggering potential.

Money, Power & Wall Street
Documentary Film –  A Frontline Production (2012)
In a special 4-hour investigation FRONTLINE tells the inside story of the struggles to rescue and repair a shattered economy exploring key decisions missed opportunities and the unprecedented and uneasy partnership between government leaders and titans of finance that affects the fortunes of millions of people around the world.

First Position
Documentary Film (2012)
Every year, thousands of aspiring dancers enter one of the world’s most prestigious ballet competitions, the Youth America Grand Prix, where lifelong dreams are at stake. In the final round, with hundreds competing for only a handful of elite scholarships and contracts, practice and discipline are paramount, and nothing short of perfection is expected. The box office hit documentary, Bess Kargman’s award-winning FIRST POSITION follows six young dancers as they prepare for a chance to enter the world of professional ballet, struggling through bloodied feet, near exhaustion and debilitating injuries, all while navigating the drama of adolescence. A showcase of awe-inspiring talent, tenacity and passion, FIRST POSITION paints a thrilling and moving portrait of the most gifted young ballet stars of tomorrow.

Slavoj Zizek, the Reality of the Virtual
Interview (2007)
Slavoj Zizek is a realist thinker. Zizek is always trying to think from the standpoint of the real and, at the same time, to think through the standpoint of the real. Going beyond the Lacanian Real what resists symbolization or marks the limit that is both obstacle and access to the real this is an examination of those real elements (which may or may not resist symbolization) that constitute the nodal points of our worldly existence, the points that undermine all systematic attempts to determine this existence in advance and by means of externally derived iron laws. It is unlikely that Zizek himself would put the matter in this fashion. This is because his strategy is precisely to flirt with iron principles (what he has most recently named lost causes) in order to expose how the political contingencies of our world are nowadays veiled by a palliative language that uses the alibi of contingency to defeat principles…

Albert Nobbs
Feature Film (2012)
Nominated for 3 Academy Awards including Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs) gives a “powerhouse performance” (New York Post) as a woman who passes as a man in order to work and survive in 19th century Ireland. Some thirty years after donning men’s clothing, she finds herself trapped in a prison of her own making. Also starring a prestigious international cast including Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer, Brendan Gleeson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, ALBERT NOBBS is a “terrific” (IndieWIRE) film adapted from the short story by Irish author George Moore.

*DVD cover photos and summaries from amazon.com.

Nikolaus Fogle, Falvey’s philosophy librarian, publishes news from the world of philosophy. Read it here on a regular basis.

Stay connected. The Falvey Blogs cover library news, history, political science, social sciences, business, philosophy, nursing, digital humanities, library technology development and the Digital Library.

There appears to be a network outage in the Philadelphia area on one of the routers utilized by the University’s internet service provider (ISP). UNIT is working with them to resolve the routing problem.

In the meantime, using the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) appears to be an acceptable short term work around  for faculty and staff. Here are instructions on how to install/use it.

http://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/unit/MobileComputing/gateway0.html

Students who live outside of the Philadelphia area may contact us directly for research assistance at either 610-519-4270 or at ref@villanova.edu. Our online chat may also be available from the homepage. Look for the green “Ask a Librarian: Live Chat” button in the lower right hand corner of the screen.

We apologize for any inconvenience this network outage may cause our users and colleagues.

JSTOR joined the ever-growing circle of e-book publishers late in 2012 starting with a collection of around 15,000 e-books from a range of well-respected university presses such as those of Penn, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, California, North Carolina and Columbia. Among them is a small number of non U.S. publishers, such as Boydell and Brewer, Edinburgh University Press and the University of Toronto Press. The complete list of available JSTOR book titles is available for review.

The Library is currently testing the e-book-publishing waters with a boutique collection of history titles. Army at Home by Judith A. Giesberg, PhD, is a familiar title here at Villanova University. While a few of the JSTOR books are duplicated in the library’s print collection, most of the JSTOR titles are new. JSTOR books owned by Villanova can be found in the library’s catalog as well as in the JSTOR database.

JSTOR books are seamlessly integrated with other JSTOR content. Just as journal content is fully searchable, so are the e-books. Search results can be filtered into results from journal articles and books simply by clicking on the newly added Book tab on the results screen. To include titles not owned by the Library in the results list, switch from “Content I can access” to “All content.” Books not available to Villanova faculty and students are identified by an X-icon next to the check box.

Each book has its own landing page with such features as stable URLs, a link to JSTOR book reviews, abstracts, the table of contents and the first 100 words of each chapter. Unfortunately, not all books are equal, and the different access options can be confusing. Some books are only available as single-user titles. Chapters from a single-user book can only be viewed by one person at a time. Downloads are available, but require registration for a free JSTOR account, and the downloaded PDF files cannot be printed. Single-user books have a security key icon on the book landing page which reminds the reader of the access limits. Multi-user books are as easy to access as JSTOR journal articles.

Use the links below to explore the different access models to JSTOR books.

• Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.
  This title is not part of the Falvey collection. Villanova faculty and students can link to book reviews, read the abstract, the table of contents and the first 100 words of each chapter.
• Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850.
  Villanova faculty and students have full access to the contents of this book.
• Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm.
  This is a single-user title with limited access.

A detailed overview over the JSTOR book program is available online. Questions or comments? Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

Despite their popularity, the Cambridge Companions are not the only user-friendly scholarly compendia to the different areas of philosophy. In addition to the Cambridge series, the library provides access to several other series of guides, notably the Continuum Companions, Blackwell Guides, and Oxford Handbooks. These typically follow the model set by the Cambridge Companions: each volume presents specially-commissioned articles that orient the reader in a given topic, while in most cases also setting out the author’s own position as a point of entry to the wider debate. These series also draw authors who are experts on their topics, so the quality is consistently high. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see the same authors cropping up repeatedly across several series.

And as with the Cambridge Companions, these series are good for providing a foundation in a topic, and pointing out avenues for further investigation. Titles invariably contain representative bibliographies, and the essays themselves provide context for other important authors and their contributions. The Continuum Companions do a particularly nice job of supplying extras. The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism, for example, includes a list of important journals and professional organizations, and directs readers to the Pragmatism Cybrary, an internet hub for pragmatism scholarship. Similarly, The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy comes with a glossary, a contextual timeline, and a list of research resources.

The main drawback to these other series is that, unlike the Cambridge Companions, they are not generally available online. There are times when this is less than ideal. The Oxford Handbooks in particular tend to be large, bulky things that are difficult to read comfortably. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from using them, since they often contain valuable content not available elsewhere. For instance, an entire third of The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy—seven essays—is devoted to “problems of method,” an important topic to which the rival Continuum volume gives only a single essay. (At the moment there is no general Cambridge volume for continental philosophy). Oxford is also the first to deliver a volume (coming soon to Falvey) focused on philosophy and neuroscience, an area that is attracting great attention at present.

A list of our holdings for each of these series can be obtained by doing a title search in the catalog for “Continuum Companion,” “Blackwell Guide,” or “Oxford Handbook.”

By Linda Hauck and Merrill Stein

E-Book Survey at Falvey, Spring 2012

Anyone with even a passing interest in reading books, book publishing, libraries or gadgets has noticed that e-books have finally reached that long predicted tipping point to become mainstream. They’re not just for geeky gadget lovers anymore. To glean a clearer picture of how they’d like to see the library collection evolve, we took a closer look at how students and faculty are using our e-books.

History of e-Books at Falvey

E-books (not just digital encyclopedias) have been a part of Falvey Memorial Library’s collection mix since well before the tipping point. In the 1990s Falvey joined a library consortium to purchase a collection of individual titles via NetLibrary, an academic e-book pioneer that has since been acquired by EBSCO Publishing.

Our very first e-books weren’t online at all. In the mid 1990’s the Library purchased CDs with the text of Past Masters and the Library of Latin Texts , both of which were not online. We subscribed to our first online e-book collection, Patrologia Latina, in 1997.

In 2008, the reference librarians undertook a major initiative to shift our reference book collection from print to online. In that year we significantly expanded access to digital encyclopedias, directories, compendia and handbooks. Since we started tracking e-book purchases as a distinct “book” material type, spending on e-books vs. print books has grown from 9.9% in 2007/8 to a plateau of 12.6% in 2008/9 and 12.4% in 2009/10 with a jump to 22.6% in 2010/11.

Falvey’s absolute spending on e-books is much closer to the average spent on e-books in 2011 by graduate and professional libraries than undergraduate libraries, according to a 2011 Library Journal article. However, at 2.9% it is well below the median for graduate/professional libraries (4.5%), undergraduate libraries (3.4%) and also $1million-acquisitions-budget libraries (4.4%).

Our Survey

Until now our understanding of e-book usage patterns by Falvey Memorial Library patrons has been viewed through the prism of usage statistics and unstructured conversations with students and faculty. To view e-book usage from another angle, an online survey was made available, via a link on our website banner, to self-selected respondents during four weeks in the spring of 2012. Six questions looked at the use of Falvey e-books, purpose for use, device used for access, perceived usability and discovery modes. To encourage participation, respondents were entered into a random drawing for one of three $20.00 gift cards.

In total, 88 participants responded, including nearly even numbers undergraduate (45.6%) and graduate students (43.3%). Of the remaining respondents, seven (7.8%) were faculty members and six (6.6%) were staff members or other. The low response rate by faculty makes any conclusions about e-book behavior and preferences for these community members tenuous. (more…)

Sociology blogs are a great place to keep up to date on current trends in sociology and read sociological perspectives onto today’s issues and news. Here is a selection of noteworthy blogs in sociology.

Sociological Images

—  See the General Social Survey (GSS) in action: Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Sociological Images is designed to encourage all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief sociological discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry.

 Montclair SocioBlog

—  Interested in studying Facebook? Check out America’s Team is Not in the Super Bowl.

A blog by some members of the Montclair State Sociology Department — what we’ve been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing.

Everyday Sociology

Welcome to Everydaysociologyblog.com, a site that features interesting, informative, and most of all entertaining commentary from sociologists around the United States. Come to this site regularly to get a sociological take on what is happening in the news (and on what should be in the news).

Racism Review

RacismReview is intended to provide a credible and reliable source of information for journalists, students and members of the general public who are seeking solid evidence-based research and analysis of “race,” racism, ethnicity, and immigration issues, especially as they undergird and shape U.S. society within a global setting. We also provide substantive research and analysis on local, national, and global resistance to racial and ethnic oppression, including the many types of antiracist activism.

Understanding Society (Daniel Little)

This site addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in “understanding society”? The blog is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time. Look at it as a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science and some foundational issues about the nature of the social world.

A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book

My name is Dan Hirschman and I am a (budding) Sociologist. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan in Sociology and the certificate program in Science, Technology and Society (STS). Broadly, I am interested in economic sociology, the sociology of economics, organizations, and science studies. Specifically, I am interested in the interaction of quantification, law, organizations and knowledge-production.

Family Inequality (Philip N. Cohen)

On this site I keep a running account of the connections between families and inequality. The nature of this relationship is one of the central problems of inequality in modern societies. To the extent that our well-being is determined by the family we land in, our imagined meritocracy is more illusion than achievement.

Judith (Judy) Olsen will be retiring from Falvey Memorial Library in February. In addition to her role as the Communication and Publications team leader, Judy also served as the subject librarian liaison to the English and Theatre departments and the coordinator for that humanities liaison team.

With University Librarian Joe Lucia, Judy and other Communication team members, Joanne Quinn, Corey Arnold and Gerald Dierkes, assembled the successful application for 2013 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award for the university level, conferred by the national Association of College and Research Libraries and YBP Library Services.

Judy was a member of Falvey’s Management Policies Group and Resource Council, and served on the University Middle States Institutional Self-Study. Most recently, at Lucia’s request, she initiated two task forces to enhance communication during the recent Falvey renovation and Learning Commons integration.

She began her tenure at Falvey in 1988 as a reference librarian although, in the 1970s, she worked in reference part time before joining Cabrini College (Radnor, Pa.) as Readers’ Services Librarian. At Cabrini, she managed circulation, reserves and the education curriculum collection while also teaching research workshops and fielding reference questions.

The Falvey reference position was a good fit for Judy although moving to a busy university library was not always a smooth transition. “After my first incredibly busy evening shift, I was so distracted I drove most of the way home without turning on my car’s headlights,” she remembers.

At Falvey, she became the English subject librarian and, later, the Theatre subject librarian. “The English department is an integral library partner, and I have especially enjoyed working with their students and faculty. Teaching the Theatre dramaturgy students has been a delight and a real learning experience,” she notes.

Judy has taught research strategy sessions for both departments, but also Honors, journalism, communication, business, biology, liberal studies and art history, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. With colleagues, she led international student orientations for the Office of International Student Services and taught summer sessions for Campus Ministry’s Books ‘n Hoops camps. (more…)

German Studies Association Conference

Portrait of "Bolax when he went to college." (Facing p. 158.)

One of the latest of our books to be made available as a Project Gutenberg ebook is Bolax: Imp or Angel–Which? by Mrs. Josephine Culpeper. Besides having one of the most fantastic titles I have ever encountered, this book is a fictionalized biographical account of Mrs. Culpeper’s son, Bolax, who attended the boys’ academy at Villanova for a few years before transferring to another school.

Mrs. Culpeper raised her family in the area — in Wayne on the Main Line — and our copy of the book was presented to Villanova College (as it was then) by the author. In an inscription at the front of the book, Mrs. Culpeper explains the origin of Bolax’s name:

“The odd name comes from the boy’s father calling him bowlegs because as a baby he walked crooked. The boy caught the sound as Bolax and was so called until quite a big boy.”

An unsigned note below Mrs. Culpeper’s explains the Villanova connection (as well as revealing Bolax’s real name):

“In 1892-93 the son of Mrs. Josephine Culpeper, Osmond J., attended classes at Villanova, to which reference is made in her pages. Mrs. C– lives at Wayne, Pa.; it was from thence that the little ‘Bolax’ was sent to St. Thomas of Villanova….”

There is also a letter inserted between the pages after the above notes, in which Mrs. Culpeper says that the book is “true to life” and that she “kept a diary of all [her] children’s saying and doings and from this wrote the book.”

The book follows the escapades of Bolax from the age of five to fourteen. He has an older sister named Amy as well, but the primary focus is on Bolax and his struggles to be a good Catholic boy. Among his adventures and misadventures, Bolax goes for a “real piggie-back ride” (p. 13), a picnic with his Sunday school class (p. 42ff.), and his first confession (p. 62). Bolax declares his wish to attend the school at St. Thomas’ College on page 70 and he is admitted on page 77, even though at nine he is two or three years younger than their youngest pupils. Bolax attends the boys’ preparatory school that eventually became Malvern Preparatory School. Some of the noteworthy mentions of life at Villanova include the description of Bolax’s first two weeks (p. 83ff.), an epidemic of scarlet fever (p. 155-6), and slang expressions in use at the school (p. 159).

Bolax describes one of the priests at Villanova on
page 84 and a marginal note poses a possible
candidate for the real-life Augustinian alluded to
(“Evidently Father Charles McFadden is meant”).

There are some interesting scenes and insights into late-19th-century life in the Philadelphia suburbs, but it is a rather oddly written book that incorporates many different writing styles that don’t really blend well. Besides the (fictionalized) biographical narrative, there are epistolary passages and several didactic passages — on topics ranging from the lifecycle of the ladybug (p. 35-6) and how to raise good little boys (p. 52-60) to a “pleasant controversy” of differing religious views (p. 29-32). Of course, the writing also incorporates the casual racism that was common at the time. In addition to the variety of writing styles, there are also quite a lot of typos and grammatical mistakes — some of which a previous reader tried to correct in pencil (see, for example, the third line of page 13) — which makes the book seem like an early-20th-century version of a vanity press publication. Despite these flaws, Bolax is still a good read for those interested in the social history of the Main Line, late-19th/early-20th-century Catholic life, or the history of the prep school at Villanova.

If you’re interested in seeing the marginalia, you can view the page images of Bolax in our Digital Library. For a cleaner reading experience, you can download the ebook or view it online at Project Gutenberg. You can read more about our proofreading project here.