Falvey Memorial Library recently subscribed to a large package of social science journals from Sage Journals Online.  These titles are now available in full text online through library resources.

The My Tools feature of Sage Journals Online allows users to establish email alerts, saved searches, marked citations, and favorite journals through personal accounts.  If you need assistance setting up a personal account or taking advantage of these tools, please contact Kristyna.

Here are some highlights from the newly acquired titles from the Research Methods & Evaluation Collection.  Check back with this blog for more highlights from other disciplines!

Action Research
Holdings: 2003 – present
Action Research is an new international, interdisciplinary, peer reviewed, quarterly published refereed journal which is a forum for the development of the theory and practice of action research. The journal publishes quality articles on accounts of action research projects, explorations in the philosophy and methodology of action research, and considerations of the nature of quality in action research practice.

Qualitative Inquiry
Holdings: 1997 – present
Qualitative Inquiry (QIX) provides an interdisciplinary forum for qualitative methodology and related issues in the human sciences. The journal publishes refereed research articles that experiment with manuscript form and content, and focus on methodological issues raised by qualitative research rather than the content or results of the research. QI also addresses advances in specific methodological strategies or techniques.

Statistical Modelling
Holdings: 2001- present
Statistical Modelling’s primary aim is to publish original and high-quality articles that recognize statistical modelling as the general framework for the application of statistical ideas. Submissions must reflect important developments, extensions, and applications in statistical modelling. The journal also encourages submissions that describe scientifically interesting, complex or novel statistical modelling aspects from a wide diversity of disciplines, and submissions that embrace the diversity of applied statistical modelling.

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) records are now searchable in Falvey Library’s catalog, using the Search tab.

To perform a search, click the Search tab, then the Books & More tab.  Type your search phrase: ICPSR + keywords.  For instance, see the results of a search for ICPSR crime women.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research holdings include several time series and other types of aggregate data, its holdings consist mainly of raw data derived from surveys, censuses, and administrative records. The data holdings contain some 6,000 studies and 450,000 files that cover a wide range of social science areas such as population, economics, education, health, social and political behavior, social and political attitudes, history, crime, aging, and substance abuse.

The Communication Reference Blog has been expanded to create the new Social Sciences Blog.  Although the blog will include all the same great posts about new books, featured resources, and library news, it will include topics of particular interest to Communication, Psychology, Sociology, Education, and Gender/Women’s Studies students and faculty.  Students and faculty in these departments will be able to discover new library resources in interdisciplinary areas of interest, in addition to monitoring only those posts related to their own discipline.

Either follow the Social Sciences Blog, or check in with a particular feed:

• Communication
• Psychology
• Sociology and Criminal Justice
• Education and Counseling
• Gender/Women’s Studies

Please feel free to suggest topics to be covered in this blog!

The history/sociology liaison team lost one of its original members – David Burke, who will devote more time to resource management and the creation and organization of metadata in Falvey’s growing digital library.

Laura Bang, a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s library science school, replaces David on the liaison team. Laura joined Falvey this past spring as a curatorial assistant in Special and Digital Collections. Originally from Santa Barbara (Ca.),  Laura received her bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Bryn Mawr College. Last summer, while in graduate school, Laura worked at the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany. Laura noted that the IYL is located in a fifteenth-century castle and that her work there was her “favorite experience in library school.”

Jutta Seibert, coordinator of Academic Integration, continues as team coordinator and Alice Bampton, Visual Resources librarian, remains on the team.

EBSCO has acquired the Criminal Justice Abstracts index from Sage earlier this year and over the summer Falvey’s subscription switched from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) to the EBSCO interface.  I was not very enthusiastic about this change, because it meant that Villanova faculty and students lost the ability to cross-search Criminal Justice Abstracts with Sociological Abstracts, which remains on the CSA interface. The library is currently investigating whether it will be possible to switch Sociological Abstracts to EBSCO in the near future.

On the positive side you will notice that the EBSCO interface is in no way inferior to the familiar CSA interface. I encourage you to give the new Criminal Justice Abstracts a try. One of the first things that I noticed when I tested the new interface, was a larger and more focused number of results. As it turns out, Criminal Justice Abstracts contains now more than 235,000 records compared to 103,600 on the old platform. The additional records come from criminal justice core journals according to a recent EBSCO press release. Please note also that cited references can now be searched via a separate tab at the top of the search screen (see illustration), but only 130 of the 270 indexed journals are indexed with cited references. Social Sciences Citation Index is still the most comprehensive source in terms of cited reference searching.

Falvey also lost its free access to NCJRS Abstracts through the CSA interface. EBSCO stepped up and offered us free access to NCJRS Abstracts, which means faculty and students can continue to cross search it together with Criminal Justice Abstracts by selecting both databases after clicking on Chooses Databases (see illustration) at the top of the search screen. Please note that the links to the free government full text in NCJRS Abstracts are buried on the record level. The library’s FindIt button will not link to this content.

Go ahead and check out the new content on Criminal Justice Abstracts. Feel free to contact me with any feedback and comments that you may have.

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Faculty and students in modern languages, history, and global studies occasionally need to watch DVDs coded for different regions and systems. While the Library has always endeavored to buy the requested films in a format that can be played on its public viewing stations, many of the titles are not produced for the mass market and not available for Region 1, the U.S.A. and Canada only. (Please click here for more information on DVD formats and region codes.)

Since faculty requested multi-region, multi-system DVD players for use in the Library in the recent faculty library survey, the Library recently outfitted one of its public viewing stations with such a DVD player.

Drop in and enjoy your movies. Headsets will be provided but popcorn is strictly B.Y.O.P. The viewing stations are located on the first floor.

The Library’s liaison librarians are ready to assist you with the purchase of foreign films for your classroom needs.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments that you may have.

Among the many DVD’s acquired by the Library this year is one stand-out, Eastern State: Living behind the Walls. This documentary, written and directed by Tony Alosi, gives a brief history of Eastern State Penitentiary, followed by a description of life in the prison during its final decades.
When it opened in 1829, Eastern State was viewed throughout the western world as a major innovation in penology, bringing visitors from around the world (including Charles Dickens in 1842). Through the nineteenth century, it emphasized personal reflection within solitary confinement as a key component of rehabilitation, a philosophy finally dropped when too many prisoners developed insanity. The video also gives some details to Al Capone’s incarceration (who continued to run the Chicago mob from his cell) and the prison’s one successful jailbreak carried out by Clarence Klinedinst and Willie Sutton. The penitentiary closed in 1972.
The film gives an honest look at life within Eastern State as detailed through interviews with former staff and inmates. They provide some frank descriptions of the violence and rape the prisoners regularly endured, both from each other and from the guards. Former inmates describe how they turned their individual lives around. The film ends with scenes from a reunion of inmates and staff thirty years after the prison closed. Interspersed throughout the film are shots of the decayed prison as it appears today.
Of course, if you find the film interesting you can visit the prison itself in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. The program director is a Villanova Alumnus—Sean Kelley (class of 1991).
David Burke

Watch the film trailer on YouTube or read B. Belbot’s short article on Eastern State Penitentiary from the Encyclopedia of Prisons & Correctional Facilities.
Film website

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments that you may have.

Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment, which tested the limits of obedience is back with a modern twist: Participants were made to believe that they were contestants in a TV game show playing “The Game of Death (Le jeu de la mort).” Christophe Nick, the producer of the documentary, and some of the duped contestants claim that the power of media contributed greatly to the unexpectedly high compliance rate of 80%, considerably higher than Milgram’s compliance rate. Read Robert Mackey’s article on the New York Times blog to find out more.

Falvey has Obedience, the documentary of Migram’s original experiment as well as his book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. You may also be interested in a recent biography:  The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram. We now have a new chapter to add to his biography.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments that you may have.

Watch the French original, LaZoneXtreme on YouTube.

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) edited by G. Ritzer, one of the standards reference works in sociology, is now available online. This new edition replaces the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Sociology (2000), a set of five volumes with 397 entries edited by E. F. Borgatta and R. J. V. Montgomery. The new edition is over twice the size with 11 volumes and 1,786 entries. It covers a number of new and expanding fields such as the “sociology of consumption and sport” and “body and cultural sociology.” Starbucks and Whole Foods Market are represented as well. Updates are added at least twice a year. Among recent updates were entries on macrosociology, consumer society, gun control and online social networking.

The online Encyclopedia includes a time-line that lists “over 700 of the most influential events, figures, and publications to have made an impact on the field.”  Essays on Theory and Methods are helpful overviews for new students in the field. All key thinkers and concepts are included. More detailed essays can be found in the Blackwell Companions to Sociology, which are also available online.

Bookmark the Encyclopedia for daily use or access it via the Library’s web site. Links can be found in the online catalog as well as on the sociology subject guide.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments that you may have.

Falvey recently acquired a number of online Blackwell Companions to Sociology. The essays published in this series are suitable introductory reading for students. Each chapter includes a detailed list of references. The e-format (pdf)  facilitates the integration of specific chapters into online syllabi and/or WebCT course modules. All links to individual chapters are routed through a library server, which will prompt students and faculty alike to authenticate themselves, thus avoiding any potential copyright issues. Multiple students can consult each companion simultaneously.

• The Blackwell Companion to Major Classical Social Theorists (2003)
  Includes chapters on Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Parsons among others.
• The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists (2003)
  Includes chapters on Emerson, Foucault, Elias, Habermas and Butler among others.
• The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (2009)
  Includes chapters on contemporary sociological theory, the future of social theory, the sociology of religion, demography, and the sociology of the body among others.
• The Blackwell Companion to Criminology (2004)
  Divided into 6 parts: Crime, justice, and societies – Juvenile delinquency and justice for youth – Punishment and its alternatives – Gender and the masculinity of crime – Capital, power, and crime – Globalization, crime, and information.
• The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (2004)
  More than 30 essays on all aspect of the field.
• The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities (2005)
• The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (2004)

For a complete lists of all Blackwell Companions to Sociology available at Falvey, print as well as online, click here.
Links to the online Blackwell Companions to Sociology can be found in the catalog, on the Library’s subject guides for sociology and criminal justice as well as under E-reference – Sociology.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments that you may have.