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:

• Grove Dictionary of Art 
• Encyclopedia of Aesthetics(2nd edition)
• The Oxford Companion to Western Art
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts, 2006
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture, 2007
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials & Techniques in Art, 2008
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art & Architecture, 2009
• The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, 2010
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, 2012

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 courtesy of Oxford University Press.

By Laurie Ortiz Rivera

With today’s overabundance of information and misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed in identifying what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate. This is the reality of many of us who want to be very well-informed on different topics.

Recently, Falvey Library subscribed to the Oxford Research Encyclopedias of Education to give access to more than 1,000 articles from a prestigious publisher Oxford University Press. The editor, George W. Noblit, wrote:

The ORE of Education provides thorough and balanced syntheses of what is known, what is disputed, and what is in progress in education research. The syntheses will be gateways to new domains of inquiry, providing provocative ideas and incisive critiques as well as addressing the broad controversies that mark education. The ORE of Education will be the singular resource for access to all that is known and all that is being thought in and about education. (Noblit, 2022).

The Oxford Research Encyclopedias covers topics in these general categories:

• Education and society
• Curriculum and pedagogy
• Education, change, and development
• Education, cultures, and ethnicities
• Educational politics and policy
• Educational theories and philosophies
• Educational administration and leadership
• Educational purposes and ideals
• Education, gender, and sexualities
• Educational systems
• Research and assessment methods
• Professional learning and development
• Cognition, emotion, and learning
• Alternative and non-formal education
• Educational history
• Globalization, economics, and education
• Languages and literacies
• Technology and Education
• Education, health, and social services

We enjoy the Encyclopedia’s capabilities to offer multimedia content and cross-links embedded so that readers can follow the rigorous standards of academic publishing. Log into our collection of Oxford Research Encyclopedias to access peer-reviewed summaries on an ever-growing list of topics.

Laurie Ortiz Rivera, PhD, is Subject Librarian for History, Art History, Education & Counseling at Falvey Library. 

By Jutta Seibert

Faculty looking for short texts to introduce students to a new subject value the Very Short Introductions (VSI) series from Oxford University Press for their clarity and brevity. The complete VSI series with close to 700 individual titles is now available to the Villanova community via a dedicated VSI gateway. The series has broad interdisciplinary appeal with a sizeable number of STEM titles in addition to arts and humanities and social science topics.

Take a closer look at VSI the next time you are looking for concise and authoritative information about a complex topic. Each volume is written by a specialist for a general audience with little or no previous knowledge of the subject. The scope of this series is impressive: it includes a suite of basic business subjects such as accounting, taxation, and marketing; STEM topics range from engineering and physics to medicine and mathematics; arts and humanities subjects come from a wide variety of disciplines as is to be expected.

Individual volumes rarely exceed 160 pages in keeping with the series title. Readers can expect concise overviews, brief outlines of current research directions and references to seminal texts. The VSI platform makes it easy to discover suitable volumes and chapters. Readers may set up personal accounts to manage a list of favorite chapters. Alternatively, they can also download citations containing persistent URLs. Those who would like to download individual chapters will need to use the print function to create a pdf document first.

You can find a link to the complete collection on the Library’s Databases A-Z list. Records for individual volumes can be found in the Library’s catalog. Note that the catalog includes records for selected VSI volumes available through ProQuest as well as for print volumes. Readers who prefer to browse and search all published VSI volumes simultaneously should use the link on the A-Z list.

Interesting subjects abound in a series this large: for example, anyone seeking to gain a better understanding of the current global health crisis will find the volumes covering the history of pandemics, epidemiology, viruses, and public health particularly interesting. The sheer scope of the series can be overwhelming at first: aesthetics, art theory, artificial intelligence, Augustine, Catholicism, climate, critical theory, biometrics, citizenship, environmental politics, evolution, feminism, free speech, globalization, the Harlem Renaissance, human rights, the Koran, literary theory, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the periodic table, privacy, number theory, and the Silk Road. And this is just a small sample of the topics covered!

Visit the VSI database to discover subjects that you are interested in, and let us know how you feel about this latest addition to the Library’s ever-growing collection.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

E-book. (Photo courtesy of Vikas Pawar on unsplash.com)

By Susan Turkel

We know you miss roaming the Falvey stacks and seeing, smelling, and touching all of those ink-on-paper books. We miss them, too! But the library can still provide you with countless hours of research and reading pleasure, thanks to bountiful collections of e-books!

Permanent e-book collections

Believe it or not, Falvey’s catalog includes around a million e-books! To find an e-book, simply enter your search terms (author, title, subject words, etc.) into our Search Everything box (above). Click Books & Media, and then limit your results to Collection=Online. You can also view the Articles & More page for your search, then limit your results to Format=eBook.

Our e-book collection is diverse and ever-growing. The million books listed in our catalog range from Early English Books Online (virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700) to the entire collection of Safari e-books on software, networking, and other techy subjects ,including more than 11,000 published within the last five years.

A recent book from Oxford Scholarship Online

Falvey recently purchased the entire (and growing!) collection of e-books published by Oxford University Press and delivered to you on the Oxford Scholarship Online platform. These books include titles in the social sciences and humanities, and at last count we had more than 16,000 in our catalog. Nearly 100 new items are added every month!

For more information about our current e-book collections and how to make use of them, visit our guide to using E-books at Villanova.

Temporary access to MORE e-book collections

Several publishers have opened up their entire catalog of e-books for access to non-subscribers during the current crisis. We are grateful for the increased access to important scholarly works, given that all the print books we’ve purchased over the years are currently “out of circulation.” These publishers include MIT Press, ScienceDirect, and many academic presses through the Project Muse platform.

MIT Press search page

In addition, you can find more than 30,000 titles on all subjects in the expanded University Press Scholarship Online. This package includes works from the University of California Press, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Stanford University Press, University of Chicago Press, Yale and Stanford University Presses, and NYU Press among many others.

See the Temporarily Available Online Resources page for a more complete list.

Getting help

Still have questions? Please feel free to reach out to Falvey via Live Chat or by emailing ref@villanova.edu. Librarians and staff are available 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday–Friday.

To stay up-to-date on Falvey’s resources at this time, please visit our Falvey Memorial Library COVID-19 Updates and Resources webpage. The Falvey Virtual Library is always open and here to support you.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Susan Turkel

The Library has recently purchased online access to Oxford Scholarship Online, a full-text collection of ebooks published by Oxford University Press.

This growing collection includes more than 16,000 titles in 20 subject areas, and covers books published from 1963 through the present. Nearly 100 new items are added to the database every month.

Oxford Scholarship Online offers books in these 20 subject areas

You can find these Oxford ebooks by searching the Falvey catalog for “Oxford Scholarship Online” as the author. You can also access the Oxford Scholarship Online database directly and search for words from the full text, author, title, and more.

Oxford Scholarship Online ebooks may be viewed on screen or downloaded as PDF on a chapter by chapter basis. For help using Oxford University Press ebooks, as well as ebooks from a variety of publishers, visit our guide on ebooks at Villanova.

You can find Oxford Scholarship Online—and a wide variety of other online digital collections provided by the Library—on our Databases A-Z page.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.