June 2010 Archives

June 1, 2010

Oxford University Press and Yale Library Need Your Help to Evaluate Oxford Bibliographies Online

Yale Library is engaged in year-long collaboration with Oxford University Press to evaluate a new family of scholarly databases: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO). Your feedback will be instrumental in improving and tailoring OBO so that it best meets your needs. OBO is designed to help scholars and students find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly resources in whatever form or format they appear--from books, chapters in books, and journal articles to online archives, data sets, and blogs. OBO is arranged in portals: Atlantic History, Classics, Criminology, Islamic Studies, Philosophy, Renaissance and Reformation, and Social Work.

What does your participation involve? OUP asks that you complete 4 online surveys and 2 focus groups over the next 12 months. You may drop out at any time for any reason.

Incentives: In return for your time, you will receive some gifts during the assessments from Oxford University Press. To start, you will receive a gift bag, mug, and USB drive (quantities limited and available while supplies last). After you complete the first survey, you will be entered in a drawing for a Kindle (one name will be drawn at random, only Yale faculty and students are eligible to enter).

Eligibility for Participation: Open to Yale faculty and students.

If you are willing to participate, please send an email to kathleen.bauer@yale.edu with the following information: your name, academic department/school, and status (faculty, graduate student, or undergraduate student).

Posted by Yale University Library on June 1, 2010 11:38 AM

June 18, 2010

Annual Report of the Librarian Now Available

Connecting the Dots: Annual Report of the Yale University Librarian for 2008-2009 is now available here (PDF).

Annual reports from previous years, along with the current and previous issues of Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library, are available at: http://www.library.yale.edu/notabene/. An RSS feed allows visitors to register for automatic updates when new materials are published to the Nota Bene site.

Posted by Yale University Library on June 18, 2010 9:37 AM

June 21, 2010

Help Us With A Quick Web Study And Receive a $10 Gift Card

Yale, in partnership with the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Irvine, is conducting a study funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to evaluate the use of topics to facilitate image and full-text search, in the context of teaching, learning, and research. Look for signs by public workstations in Sterling Memorial Library and Bass Library.

Contact topicmodel@mailman.yale.edu if you have any questions or want to learn more about the study.

Posted by Yale University Library on June 21, 2010 3:46 PM

June 25, 2010

Yale Library Gets NEH Grant to Digitize Original Documents on New England¹s Native Americans

New Haven, Conn..-Yale University Library has received a grant of $250,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support "The New England Indian Papers Series: The Connecticut Colony Collection, 1603-1783," an online compendium of important and rare historical documents relating to the Native American peoples of Connecticut during the colonial period from First Contact to 1783. The grant is part of the NEH's "We the People" program, which encourages and strengthens the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture.

For years, scholars and tribal members interested in New England Native Americans have been hampered by a lack of published primary source materials, despite the existence of thousands of relevant documents. Equally problematic for researchers is the dispersion of original materials across a number of repositories, mostly throughout the Northeast. Archaic or poor handwriting or restrictions placed on worn and fragile papers also make research time-consuming and costly.

"In today's technology-driven age, students, teachers and scholars need a varied but reliable source of information when researching topics such as New England Indian communities," said Paul Grant-Costa, the project director and the Executive Editor of the Yale Indian Papers Project. "By gathering related primary resources from various institutions together in one place and making them readily accessible, both visually and intellectually, 'The New England Indian Papers Series' brings research about New England Native Americans into the 21st century."

Several institutions with significant New England Indian collections - including Yale, the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives and the National Archives of the United Kingdom - have formed a collaborative archival and educational initiative called the Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP). Based at Yale's Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, the project will address the restoration of lost history by publishing an electronic database, "The New England Indian Papers Series." As the first in the series, "The Connecticut Colony Collection" will comprise over 1,400 primary source materials written by, about or for Connecticut Indians. Taken together, the documents reveal a continued Native American presence in the region, as well as the Native American experience in a colonial world. The database will allow researchers and the general public to explore nearly 400 years of New England Native American history, community, culture, sovereignty, land, migration, law and politics, as well as issues of gender, race, and identity.

"The Yale Indian Papers Project builds on the rich tradition of scholarly editing based at Yale that began with W.S. Lewis's magisterial 'Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole,' " said Margaret K. Powell, the W.S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director of the Lewis Walpole Library, "The project also establishes connections between 18th-century British history and culture and the Native Americans in New England, allowing us to think broadly of a Native Atlantic world."

For more information on "The New England Indian Papers" or the Yale Indian Papers Project, visit http://www.library.yale.edu/yipp/ or contact walpole@yale.edu.

Posted by Yale University Library on June 25, 2010 2:29 PM

June 30, 2010

The United States and the Two Koreas: 1969-2000 - New Collection of Digital Documents Now Available

The Yale Library has purchased a new collection of digitized declassified documents, The United States and the Two Koreas: 1969-2000.

The National Security Archive's collection on U.S.-Korean relations covers both diplomatic, security, and economic relations between the United States and its ally, South Korea; and the challenges to the U.S. posed by an adversarial North Korea. It spans events dating from the Nixon administration's response to the April 15, 1969 downing, by North Korean MiG-17s, of a U.S. EC-121 reconnaissance plane over the Sea of Japan, to efforts during the Clinton years to deter Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions. The collection contains approximately 1,800 records documents released by the State Department, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies, as well as historical material compiled through research at the National Archives and the presidential libraries.

Read more and access the materials through the Digital National Security Archive (a major source of declassified government documents) at: http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/collections/content/KO/intro.jsp

Posted by Yale University Library on June 30, 2010 11:41 AM >