Irish nationalist Roger Casement is occasionally mentioned in this blog, as when one of our images was used to illustrate a novel inspired by his life. Our latest Distributed Proofreaders project is a posthumously-published volume which highlights a lesser-known aspect of the man’s life: his poetry.

To help create a new electronic edition of this rarely-seen book, you can read this earlier blog post to learn about the process, then join in the work at the project page.

Founded in 1908 as the investigative branch of the Justice Department against the opposition of Congress by executive order of President Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation was charged with the investigation of violations of federal statutes. As its powers and influence increased in the face of internal and external threads, the Bureau was repeatedly accused of acting outside the law. Eight years later the Bureau employed three hundred agents, a steep increase from the modest thirty-eight investigators hired in 1908. In 1916 the Bureau was charged with counterintelligence and the investigation of radical activities in the U.S. J. Edgar Hoover, who was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, cleansed the Bureau of its corrupt elements. He remained in his position when the Bureau was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

The Bureau of Investigation case files are hosted on the EBSCO Fold3 platform. The files are labeled as FBI case files while the collection itself is called Bureau of Investigation case files. It consists of four series, Bureau Section Files, Mexican Files, Miscellaneous Files and Old German Files. Although browsing is an option, it is not a productive approach as file names consist mostly of numbers and personal names. The basic keyword search is a good starting point. Results can be filtered and searches can easily be modified. Scanning documents is at times challenging as the pages of some files are lined up from right to left.

The case files cover the years 1909 through 1921 and contain reports and documents related to World War I and the surveillance of groups suspected of un-American activities. The Bureau’s agents regularly reported about labor organizations, the radical press and “Negro subversion.” The case files include pamphlets and magazines published by the “radical press,” such as complete issues of The Masses. Interesting examples from the collection include Babe Ruth, who was investigated as an “alleged slacker,” a.k.a. draft dodger, Joseph McGarrity, whose surveillance files are part of the Old German Files as he was considered a friend of the Germans, and Emma Goldman, the well known anarchist.  Margaret Sanger’s activities were closely watched as well. Her files include pamphlets about her speaking engagements and some of her publications. The short but politically turbulent time period covered by the case files will guarantee many interesting discoveries.

Links to the collection can be found in the online catalog, on the Databases A-Z list and on the history subject guide. Questions or comments? Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest covers all aspects of resistance, rebellion and revolution over the past 500 years with over 1,500 entries ranging from 250 to 5,000 words about events, people, organizations and movements. Annual updates ensure coverage of current events. Recent updates included articles about the Tea Party and Howard Zinn.

Entries range from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution, from May Day to Solidarnosc, from Utopian communities to anarchism, from Greenpeace to Earth First!, and from civil disobedience and non-violence to fascism and terrorism. While most biographies are on the shorter end of the spectrum, those about key actors and thinkers from Marx  to Lenin and Mao provide a good overview. Major revolutions are well covered and linked to numerous related entries. In the case of the French Revolution these include separate articles on the counterrevolution, radical factions and organizations, women, and historians’ interpretations. The Encyclopedia is particularly helpful in researching more unfamiliar protest movements, such as Native American protests, the Québécois independence movement or the events of the red summer of 1919.

Contents are accessible via the A-Z list as well as through keyword searching. Search results can be narrowed by subject, place, period, people and key topics. The “China” place facet narrows the keyword search for China from 191 results to 41. This approach makes it easy for students to move beyond the article on the Chinese Communist Revolution to a quick review of the history of protest movements in China.

Current events seem to be adequately covered although the Encyclopedia lacks an entry about the Arab Spring while there are entries covering al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. In a nod to the current interest in film studies, the reader will find articles about such classics as the Battle of Algiers, Battleship Potemkin and October. References and suggested reading lists are up-to-date and a great starting point for undergraduate students. Access to the online Encyclopedia is provided through the library’s catalog.

Questions or Comments? Don’t hesitate to contact us.

If I had to make a list of the five most important library research tools for historians, I would put WorldCat at the top of the list without a moment’s hesitation. While in the past, scholars were limited to local libraries, print bibliographies and the occasional visit to other libraries, today WorldCat provides them a gateway to the global print collection. WorldCat thus levels the playing field between the top-tiers research libraries and smaller libraries, such as Falvey Memorial Library. Our history students can discover and request basically all the published books on any given topic with the help of WorldCat. If they would only knew about WorldCat!

Remember the student who told you that there is nothing published about her topic? Did she know about and search WorldCat? Remember the student who told you that the library does not have any books about his topic? Did he know about interlibrary loan and how to request books from other libraries via WorldCat? The majority of history students are unfortunately not familiar with WorldCat, and the few who do know about it are often intimidated by some of its unnecessarily complicated search features.

Falvey’s 2012 Research Center Intern, Matt Ainslie, has put together a Brief Introduction to WorldCat, a short online video tutorial that will introduce your students to WorldCat. His Brief Introduction to the Chicago Manual of Style has been widely popular with our students. At last glance, it was viewed more than 1,200 times. Given the unexpected popularity of the Chicago Style tutorial, I would like to hear your ideas and suggestions for additional tutorials.

Cambridge University Press re-designed the interfaces of two popular reference collections: Cambridge Histories Online and Cambridge Companions Online. The old interface had various usability issues, which left the user at times frustrated. The new interface is less cluttered, more user-friendly and its attractive design and color scheme are pleasing to the eye.

Did you know that Cambridge University Press continues to add new and old print titles to the Cambridge Histories Online collection? In 2012, six back-list titles and seventeen new titles were added. Noteworthy among the new titles is The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865 by William Earl Weeks, not to be confused with the 1993 volume authored by Bradford Perkins. The remaining three volumes in the series are slated for publication later this year. Forthcoming in 2013 is the second volume of the Cambridge History of Science series entitled Medieval Science. New 2012 titles include:

• The Cambridge History of Religions in America edited by Stephen J. Stein
  (Volumes I-III: Pre-Columbian Times to 1945)
• The Cambridge History of War, Volume 4: War and the Modern World edited by Roger Chickering, Dennis Showalter and Hans van de Ven
• The Mughal Empire by John F. Richards
• The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature by Dale M. Bauer
• The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature edited by Clare A. Lees

The interface for Cambridge Companions Online mirrors the Cambridge Histories Online interface except for the crimson color scheme. The Companions focuses on philosophy, religion, culture, literature, classics and music.

When did you last browse either one of these remarkable collections? It may be time to take a fresh look.

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.

With the acquisition of the ATLA Historical Monographs collections, Falvey has added close to 30,000 new core titles in religion to its digital collections. Why would historians be interested in this collection? Read on to find out or simply visit the collection online to browse or search its content. Titles in the collection have been published between the 16th century and 1923 and cover a wide range of subjects. In addition to the more predictable histories of congregations, topics range from personal recollections of missionaries, including accounts of the opium war, to missions to Native American peoples, to the position of different churches vis-à-vis slavery in North America. This collection adds a wealth of new primary sources to the Library’s collection.

As with many other digital collections, this collection was originally filmed on microform for preservation and mass distribution purposes. Today these core titles are available in digital format as two distinct collections: ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: Series 1 (16th Century to 1893) and ATLA Historical Monographs Collection: Series 2 (1894 to 1923). Falvey owns both collections. Hyperlinks to ATLA Historical Monographs Series 1 and Series 2 can be found on the Library’s Databases A-Z list and the online catalog has records with links for each individual work.

Religion and philosophy are the core subjects, but interested readers will also find works on science, medicine, history and law. While theology is its own distinct discipline today, early modern theologians were often also scientists, doctors, historians, lawyers or philosophers. Therefore, a fair number of works from other disciplines are covered in this collection. Eight overview essays, located on the virtual reference shelf, give the reader a better understanding about the time periods in which works in the collection were written. The essays cover topics such as the Great Awakening, the history of the Catholic Church in America, the changing role of religion in the U.S. from 1850 to 1923, Cristian missionaries in China, and the economics of religious publishing in 19th century America.

This EBSCO collection offers a range of features which include PDF files and abstracts of all works, permalinks, bookmarking, personal notes, personal accounts, citations in all major styles, and an export function to RefWorks or EndNote. The full text view, a.k.a. the Digital Archives Viewer, makes it easy to jump to any page, illustration or chapter; browse a work page by page; bookmark individual pages; and search individual pages or the complete work. The full-text search is executed by optical character recognition software (OCR), and the reliability of search results depends on the quality of the original microfilm. The majority of titles are written in English with a strong showing of German, French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. The virtual reference shelf on the search and results screen includes a handy link to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Pre-19th Century Terms & Definitions to assist the reader in understanding the texts at hand.

Questions or comments?  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.

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.

Are you tired of repeating the basics of Chicago Style notes and bibliographies to your students?
Are your students confused about how to format first and subsequent notes following Chicago style?

Clear up some of your students’ confusion by referring them to Falvey’s Brief Introduction to the Chicago Manual of Style.  Research Center intern Matt Ainslie has created a brief online tutorial (4 min.) in which he demonstrates step-by-step how to cite a sample source in the first note, in subsequent notes and in the bibliography.

The tutorial includes a link to the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide, which is basically a short list of templates for first notes, subsequent notes and the full bibliographic entries for commonly cited sources such as books, chapters, journal articles, dissertations and even web sites.  The Quick Guide is easy to use and a great reference tool for undergraduate and graduate students alike.  It includes a link to the full text online version of the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

Please contact me with your ideas and suggestions for additional tutorials.

Genealogical research has a passionate following outside of the academic world, a fact that is reflected in the often impressive genealogy collections of public libraries.  Now Villanova faculty members are planning to add genealogical research projects to their undergraduate history syllabi.  Welcome to the digital new world of genealogy: like in so many other areas of research, the time of dusty old books and reels of microfilm has passed and online databases have taken their place.

Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest are two of the major genealogical research tools currently on the market.  Both are available on trial basis until March 15 to Villanova faculty and students.  Discover a wealth of genealogical materials such as U.S. census data (1790-1930), church records, county census data, immigration ship lists, passport applications, Freedman’s Bank records, Revolutionary War pension applications, even international data from the UK, Canada and Germany.

I strongly encourage you to evaluate both resources and send me feedback about their usefulness in the classroom. For more detailed information about the contents of ancestry library edition and HeritageQuest Online, please consult the comparison chart provided by Proquest.  Contact me directly (jutta.seibert@villanova.edu) or post your comments online.