From an endless array of resources and support, to a dongle for your Mac, you’re likely to find everything you’re looking for at Falvey Library! Keep scrolling for your library essentials guide. Graphics created by Joanne Quinn, Director of Communication and Marketing. Press CTRL and + to zoom in.
Drop by the library for a print copy!
By Laurie Ortiz Rivera
Falvey Library provides access to Grove Art Online, a product from Oxford University Press. Grove Art is an authority on visual arts, offering global coverage in collaboration with thousands of scholars and specialists worldwide. Through a single gateway, users can access, and cross-search art reference works including:
It has a search engine with sophisticated filtering options to refine by source, type, subject, and availability, with the possibility to save, print, or share articles. In addition to the vast number of entries (30,000 signed and peer-reviewed articles accompanied by images, bibliographies, and links to additional resources contributed by nearly 7,000 international scholars), Grove Art features learning resources (subject guides, timelines, and resources for educators designed by the Museum of Modern Art, NY) for use in art and art history classrooms.
Please, send us your feedback, and remember that you can request a new resource for the library. Feel free to contact Laurie Ortiz-Rivera, History and Art History Subject Librarian, if you need more information.
Laurie Ortiz Rivera, PhD, is Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Library.
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash
Villanova faculty and students now have access to Pitchbook. Pitchbook provides data on companies, investors, and deals in the private equity and venture capital space.
Pitch book offers screeners for companies, deals, funds, investors, and service providers. These are not your typical screeners limited to filtering by geography, profitability, and industry. The screeners are much more granular than most, including specialized criteria relevant to rapidly evolving businesses with deal types, debt characteristics, web and social media metrics, verticals, and patent holdings, to name a few.
The Pitchbook Library Research Center has reports on industries, technologies, and public and private market performance and benchmarks. Here, you’ll find surveys on sustainable investment, European M&A activity, and reports on agtech and food as medicine. Pitchbook is the best tool at our disposal for learning about emerging businesses. If you’re looking for firms working on renewable ocean energy, youth banking, anti-aging, smart packaging, or cannabis beverages, browsing the emerging spaces will get you there.
Use cases for Pitchbook include business development and marketing, tracking competitors investments, environmental scans for innovative products and services, finding potential investors, analyzing industry and vertical trends, and finding Villanova alumni.
Access Pitchbook with your Villanova email address. Downloading is limited and regrettably our subscription does not include live support, the mobile app or Excel add on.
Linda Hauck, MLS, MBA is Business Librarian at Falvey Library.
Sinéad O’Connor. Image courtesy of Michel Linssen (Getty Images).
“Maybe it was mean, but I really don’t think so. You asked for the truth and I told you.”— Sinéad O’Connor
Shuhada’ Sadaqat (previously Magda Davitt), known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, Grammy Award-winning artist, passed away Wednesday, July 26, at the age of 56. The Irish singer-songwriter was known for her “powerful, evocative voice” and her “political provocations onstage and off.”
O’Connor was discovered by Paul Byrne, a drummer with ties to the Irish band U2, when she sang “Evergreen,” the theme from A Star Is Born at a wedding. She would go on to release 10 studio albums. Her breakout album, 1990’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” included O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” The album won O’Connor a Grammy Award in 1991 for best alternative music performance.
Through her life, O’Connor spoke out against abuse in the Catholic Church, social injustice, commercialism, and misogyny in the music industry. She was also an advocate for mental health. Never backing down in her convictions, which “became increasingly erratic” towards the end of her life, O’Connor “rarely shrank from controversy, but it often came with consequences for her career.” As she stated in her memoir, “Everyone wants a pop star, see?…But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.” O’Connor did just that, as Dave Holmes writes in Esquire, “Ireland on the day of Sinéad’s death is vastly different from the country she was born into…A once-repressive country has become one of the world’s most progressive.”
Dig deeper to learn more about O’Connor.
Falvey Library Resources:
Additional Resources:
References:
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.
Famous Hollywood Hills in California, USA. Hollywood Sign. California Photo Collection.
By Kallie Stahl
This summer Falvey Library is going to the movies! Well, we’re using our beloved Library’s resources to research the coolest film scenes set in libraries. So grab a seat and a box of popcorn because the we’re going to look at when libraries go to Hollywood.
The Mummy (Universal Pictures). Image courtesy of IMDB.
Yes, the 1999 cinematic masterpiece starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
The Mummy has a bit of everything…adventure, horror, comedy, and romance. The film is one of the last “action-adventure” films produced before the rise of the superhero blockbuster. Not overly dramatic or serious, the show never gets too dark, offering audiences plenty of opportunities to laugh despite the ongoing conflict with the awakened mummy, Imhotep.
While The Mummy doesn’t feature an iconic library (like the University of Pennsylvania’s Fisher Fine Arts Library in the film Philadelphia), books play a crucial role throughout the movie. One of the main characters, Evelyn “Evy” Carnahan (Rachel Weisz), is a librarian and aspiring Egyptologist working in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. The introduction to the character is a fun scene, as she accidently knocks over every bookshelf in the museum’s library.
Books drive the storyline, as Evy, her brother Jonathan (John Hannah), and Richard “Rick” O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) travel to the lost city of Hamunaptra to find the book of Amun-Ra. On their trip, Evy reads a page from the Book of the Dead, which resurrects the mummy. Not to spoil too much of the plot, but Evy’s ability to read hieroglyphs proves helpful in solving the mummy’s mystery (“Take that, Bembridge scholars!”) You can watch the movie using Falvey’s Interlibrary Loan service.
Looking for more libraries featured on film? Explore the resources below.
Libraries on film in Falvey’s collection:
More movies featuring libraries via Interlibrary Loan:
Want to win a cool “Falvey Says Read” tee shirt? Email your favorite movie library to libraryevents@villanova.edu, and we’ll pick a winner at random!
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.
By Kallie Stahl
To quote the band Aqua, “I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world.”
If you’ve read Shawn Proctor’s blog, or you’ve seen the numerous memes surrounding this summer’s biggest rival, then you know it’s Oppenheimer vs. Barbie. Proctor covered Christopher Nolan’s film on Wednesday, and I felt Barbie deserved equal coverage. After all, she’s everything. He’s just Ken.
Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Short Review:
Both films hit theatres Friday, July 21. I didn’t score tickets to an early screening of Barbie (as Proctor did with Oppenheimer), so I’ll leave the review to Manohla Dargis of the New York Times:
“Like Air, Ben Affleck’s recent movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan, as well as other entertainments tethered to their consumer subjects, Barbie can only push so hard. These movies can’t damage the goods, though I’m not sure most viewers would want that; our brands, ourselves, after all. That said, [director] Greta Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the Barbie that could have been. Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.”
View Barbie showtimes here.
The Story Behind the Movie:
Fast facts courtesy of www.barbiemedia.com and USA Today:
Further Reading with Falvey Library Resources:
References:
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Some of her favorite Barbie dolls of the 90’s: Bead Blast Barbie Doll, Olympic Gymnast Barbie Doll, Movin’ Groovin’ Barbie Doll, and Dorothy Barbie Doll (The Wizard of Oz).
The Disability Pride flag by Ann Magill (public domain).
July is Disability Pride Month. Celebrated during the seventh month of the year, the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), passed on July 26, 1990, prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. As we celebrate Diversity Pride Month, we must continue to fight for disability justice and equitable access.
The Falvey Library resources listed below amplify voices and experiences of the disability community. No list of this nature could ever be comprehensive, but we hope the links below serve as a starting point. As Dr. Carlie Rhoads writes, “The disability community is hurting from a lack of representation…This representation extends from our day-to-day lives, to employment, to government, to positions of leadership, and even media of all sorts. This month affords us all a great opportunity to lift up the disability community and shine a spotlight on people who are often marginalized, forgotten, or explicitly discriminated against. All voices should be equally given a chance to speak!”
For more Disability Pride Month resources, read Annie Stockmal’s blog. Looking for a specific resource? Please feel free to get in touch with our librarians at ref@villanova.edu.
Resources available at Falvey Library:
References:
Rhodes, Carlie. (2021, July 15). Celebrating Disability Pride Month. American Foundation for the Blind. https://afb.org/blog/entry/celebrating-disability-pride-month
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.
Hua Hsu. Photo: Devlin Claro.
Last week, Hua Hsu was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Stay True.
The narrative centers around Hsu and his friendship with University of California, Berkeley classmate, Ken. Two different identities, Ken, whose family had been in the United States for generations, represented everything that Hsu, a first-generation Taiwanese American, defined himself against—mainstream America. The two became friends, both agreeing that despite their differences, “American culture didn’t seem to have a place for either of them.”
Three years after their initial meeting, Ken is killed in carjacking in Vallejo, Calif., in July 1998, after a party in Berkeley. “Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend-his memories-Hsu turned to writing…A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.”
Hua Hsu is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. A staff writer at The New Yorker, Hsu’s work has been published in Artforum, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Wire. A former fellow at the New American Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Hsu is a professor of Literature at Bard College. He received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from Harvard University.
For more information on Hsu, dig deeper and explore the links below:
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library.
Photo courtesy of Kallie Stahl.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour began last night at Lincoln Financial Field. Performing for sold out crowds Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Swift’s tour “marks the stadium’s second three-night residency; the first was Bruce Springsteen, naturally (and his dates weren’t even consecutive).” Born in West Reading, PA., and spending time in Wyomissing, PA., and Stone Harbor, NJ, Swift has many ties to the Philadelphia area. This weekend marks Swift’s first time performing in South Philly since 2018.
Whether you’re a Swiftie, or just interested in learning more about the cultural phenomenon surrounding the pop star, check out the Falvey Library resources below:
Local resources:
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Her favorite Taylor Swift album is Folklore (pictured above).
