The University of Kansas Libraries

What's New in the KU Libraries

Spring Semester 2006

Library Annex and Reviewing Titles
The Libraries have begun review of collections in Watson and Anschutz libraries to determine which books and journals need to remain in on-site collections and which can be transferred to the new Library Annex on KU's west campus. Any title currently classified in a Dewey number that is selected to remain in a main-campus collection will be reclassified to a Library of Congress number.

Our current focus for review is Dewey collections 500-599 (Natural Science and Mathematics), 600-699 (Applied Science), and 800-849 (American, English, German, and French literature). These collections can be reviewed online at http://www.lib.ku.edu/annex/onlinerev.shtml or physically.

A list of collections under review, with dates for online and physical review, is on the Annex web site at http://www.lib.ku.edu/annex/schedule.shtml. Online review for 500-599 ends March 1. Online review for 600-699 and 800-849 ends June 1. (Physical review ends sooner; please consult the schedule for specific dates.) Additional sequences and review schedules will be announced soon.

The Library Annex on KU's west campus is slated for completion in April 2006. It is designed on the high-density model pioneered by Harvard University and adopted by over 50 other research libraries. Additional information about the Annex can be found on the Libraries' web site at http://www.lib.ku.edu/annex/.

LibQUAL+ Survey
Later this spring, the KU Libraries will participate in the 2006 LibQUAL+ survey. LibQUAL+ is a program of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is a research and development project undertaken to define and measure library service quality across institutions and to create useful quality-assessment tools for local planning. The survey is directed toward faculty, staff and students. The KU Libraries participated previously in 2003 and 2000. For more information: http://www.lib.ku.edu/assessment/

Government Information Resources @ KU
The Libraries have a redesigned Government Information Page with a new feature - a rolling 'interesting features' section. The Libraries will use this to highlight items of particular relevance to users, and features will be changed on a regular basis. See: http://www.lib.ku.edu/govtinfo/. The rotating feature is on the right, under the heading 'New and Interesting Resources.'

Kansas Union Services in the Libraries
A cooperative effort between the Libraries and Kansas Union Food Services has brought coffee service and snack bars into Spahr Engineering and Anschutz Libraries over the past year. Early in the spring semester, this service will be extended to Watson Library, situated near the 3rd floor entrance.

Serials Review
In August 2005, the Libraries initiated a review of all collections budgets, including serial commitments, in anticipation of a $450,000 fiscal shortfall over the next three years if current spending commitments are maintained. During the fall semester, each department and program, in concert with the Libraries' subject specialists, nominated serial titles for cancellation. These titles are listed on the Libraries Web site at http://www.lib.ku.edu/serialsreview/cancel2006.shtml.

Faculty are encouraged to submit comments on specific titles that should be retained by February 15, 2006, so that final cancellation decisions may be made by March 1. An online feedback form is part of the serials web site.

ESRI Data and Maps and Digital Books
GIS users at KU now have online access to the data and digital manuals that accompany ArcGIS software. These are also known as 'ESRI Data and Maps' and 'Digital Books,' and can be downloaded at: http://gis.lib.ku.edu/esri_data_maps.shtml. The datasets provide a wide array of vector and raster data for the world, and the software manuals are comprehensive guides to ESRI applications. Please contact Rhonda Houser for more information (rhouser@ku.edu, 864-1238).

Library Refurbishments
The Regents Center Library at the Edwards Campus received new carpeting and was repainted over the semester break. Funding for these improvements was provided by the Edwards Campus administration and the KU Libraries. On the main campus, in Watson Library, new carpeting was laid on levels 3 and 4 west.

New Reader Printer for collections preserved in micro-opaque formats
The Library is purchasing a specialized microform reader printer that will provide digital and hard copy images from the collections preserved in micro-opaque formats. The device, distributed by RMC Imaging, will also provide images of material in microfilm and microfiche formats. It will be installed on level 4 Watson when received during the spring semester.

Athletics Hall of Fame and University Archives
University Archives staff, Spencer Research Library, have worked with the designers for the new Booth Family Hall of Fame, in Allen Fieldhouse, to identify and copy hundreds of photographic images for use in the displays. The photos, drawn from the one million-plus images held in the Archives, relate to many sports at KU, including basketball, football, swimming, golf, and track; and depict players, teams, coaches, buildings and events. In addition, more than 30 artifacts of KU sports history will be on loan, including banners, pennants, track and field medals, a gym bag from the 1968 Orange Bowl, and Olympic memorabilia from KU track star Everett Bradley who won a silver medal in the pentathlon at the 1920 Olympic Games.

Increase in Manuscript/Archival Finding Aids
Since fall 2005, more than 400 new finding aids, most representing manuscript holdings of the Department of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, have been published and made available on the web. See: http://hdl.handle.net/10407/7372013700. These important research tools provide ready access to a wide variety of primary source materials, such as correspondence, diaries, and drawings. Work is now underway to provide online finding aids for record groups of KU materials held in the University Archives.

African American History Recalled
A new exhibit at the Spencer Research Library honors African American state legislators: "Shaping Kansas Politics: The African American Legislator." It can be viewed at Spencer Research Library from now through mid-March and online at http://spencer.lib.ku.edu. The exhibit contains items from KU's extensive holdings of African American history and calls attention to African American political leadership. Staff welcome requests to provide gallery talks, class presentations, etc.

Women's History Collection Strengthened
Three manuscripts that will support teaching and research in women's history recently were acquired for the Department of Special Collections: a century-old minute book kept by a women's club in Concord, New Hampshire; an 1880s pocket diary written by a young woman resident of Allegheny County, New York; and an early 20th century diary kept by a Clinton County, Ohio woman in her early 20s. Each is rich in details of social history.

New Electronic Databases and Journals since August 2005
American Poetry contains over 40,000 poems by more than 200 poets, covering the Colonial period to the early twentieth century, and drawn from over 1,200 printed sources. The collection begins with early Colonial poems such as John Wilson's 'A Song of Thanksgiving for the Lasting Remembrance of God's Wonderful Works' (1603), William Morrell's 'New England' (1625) and the complete works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, and continues through to early twentieth-century writers such as Adelaide Crapsey and Vachel Lindsay. For the first time, major canonical poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and important literary groups, such as the Transcendentalists and the Knickerbocker school, can be read alongside substantial bodies of work by less familiar names such as Elizabeth Akers Allen, Richard Emmons, Lemuel Hopkins and Emma Lazarus.

AskART is an online database listing over 35,000 American artists from the early 16th-century through the present. Criteria for artist inclusion are that the artist was born in the United States, spent a significant part of his/her career here, or, although briefly in residence, created work of ongoing historical interest to Americans. The Summary page for each artist includes the artist's name, birth & death dates, state of strongest affiliation, and most notable style or subject matter. Free public access is available at www.askart.com to some parts of the artist's entry, such as bibliography, art work for sale with images and gallery names, and museums that own work by the artist. Additional biographical information about the artist, his/her work, and the auction prices paid for his/her work can only be accessed as a subscribing member. KU has one membership available for library users in the Art & Architecture Library. Ask at the desk for assistance in using the full content of this resource.

Bibliographic Index Plus (BI+) indexes over 350,000 bibliographies covering the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and technology. It also includes approximately 100,000 full-text bibliographies in many languages. Content comes from over 2,800 journals and 5,000 books each year. Bibliographic essays, literature reviews, serial bibliographies and bibliographies appearing as regular features are among the resources cited. The file covers 1982 to the present and is updated daily. We have free access to this Wilson database for one year, through 10-31-2006.

CCH Tax Research Network (Licensed by the School of Business for KU-wide access (limit of 35 simultaneous users)). CCH Tax Research Network provides searchable, full-text coverage of numerous federal and state tax publications.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Han da wen ku CHANT is an on-going project of collections of all Chinese ancient texts, containing 6 databases. 1. Oracular Inscriptions on Tortoise Shells and Bones (Jiaguwen): Based on major collections in China and overseas of oracular inscriptions on 53,834 pieces of original tortoise shells and bones with a complete table of all Jiagu characters with orthographic translation and individual numbers in the Leizuan. 2. Excavated Wood/Bamboo and Silk Scripts (Zhu jian bo shu): A corpus of all published Jianbo texts of approximately 1.4 million characters, with interpretation scripts, notes, and punctuations. 3. Database of Bronze Inscriptions. Database of Bronze Inscriptions (Jin wen) : Based on the "Compilation of Yin and Zhou Bronze Inscriptions" published by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. There are 12021 bronze vessels with 18,000 copies of the original inscriptions. 4. Database of the Entire Body of Extant Han and Pre-Han (pre-220AD) Traditional Chinese Texts (Xian Qin Liang Han): Texts were based on the Sibucongkan edition. 5. Database of Traditional Chinese Texts of Weijin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (220-589AD) (Wei Jin Nan Bei Chao): Contains the entire corpus of traditional texts of a specific period. 6. Database of the Entire Body of Extant Chinese Encyclopedias (Leishu): It contains all major Leishu from the Weijin (i-f ) period to the Qing Dynasty, including Qun shu zhi yao, Taiping yu lan, Ce fu yuan gui and Yongle da dian.

Harper's Weekly (HarpWeek) Civil War Segment (1857-1865) HarpWeek provides electronic access to Harper's Weekly, the illustrated 19th century "national newspaper," an important resource for examining 19th century America on a cumulative week-to-week basis. Through this database one can discover news stories, illustrations, cartoons, editorials, biographies, literature, and advertisements that shaped and reflected public opinion of the times. The Civil War Era segment covers the period 1857 - 1865, and begins with the inaugural issue, Jan. 3, 1857. Prior to the Civil War the journal provides coverage of such events as the economic panic of 1857, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the attempt to lay the first transatlantic cable, and the presidential election of 1860. With the onset of the Civil War, the journal devotes its efforts to covering the conflict with detailed reporting, vivid illustrations, and influential commentary. Readers can follow news and views from the battlefront; intense policy debates concerning emancipation, the draft, financing the war, and civil liberties. This segment concludes with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the war, and the beginning of Reconstruction.

Jitsu An online version of the character dictionary originally compiled by Shirakawa Shizuka. Part of Japan Narejji (Japan Knowledge) database.

Journal Citation Reports on the Web is a multidisciplinary research tool that provides a systematic, objective way to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories. JCR(r) Web is available in two editions: the Science Edition covers over 6,100 leading international science journals from the ISI database. The Social Sciences Edition covers approximately 1,800 leading international social sciences journals from the ISI database. It includes what subject matter each journal covers (Scope Notes), what journals are related by citation or subject, what each journal issue contains and where the journal can be found. Enhanced data display provides more tools for analysis, including a display of key citation data and a graphical display of cited or citing journal data. Please consult the library catalog for data available from previous years. Coverage for the Web version begins with 2004.

Marquis Who's Who on the Web allows users to locate biographical information about more than one million individuals in more than 800 occupations using a single search and is updated daily. The database includes biographical data from the following Marquis Who's Who titles: Who's who in America; Who's Who in the East; Who's who in the world; Who's who in the Midwest; Who's who of American women; Who's who in the South and Southwest; Who's who in science and engineering; Who's who in the West; Who's who in American law; Who's who in media and communications; Who's who in medicine and healthcare; Who's who in entertainment; Who's who in finance and business; Who's who in American education; Who's who in American nursing; Who's who in 20th century America; Who's who in religion; Who's who of emerging leaders in America; Who's who among human services professionals; Who's who in American history, 1607-present.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts is published by the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice's National Criminal Justice Reference Service, an information clearinghouse for people involved with research, policy, and practice related to criminal and juvenile justice, and drug control. The NCJRS Abstracts Database contains summaries of over 174,000 U.S. and international publications, including federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, audiovisual presentations, and unpublished research. It is available free with our subscription to Criminal Justice Abstracts.

OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production. It is a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. Freely available material accessible through institutional repositories like KU ScholarWorks are searched through OAIster.

Oxford English Dictionary Online The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet. As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence, i.e. the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry. In a complex entry with many strands, the development over time can be seen in a structure with several "branches."

Oxford Reference Collection has been upgraded from the Core Collection to the Premium Collection. The number of simultaneous users is 5. The Premium Collection enhances the 100+ books in the Core Collection with an expanding range of key titles in the acclaimed Oxford Companions series plus the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. This means an additional 140,000 entries, including 50,000 longer, in-depth, signed entries with bibliographies.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) provides online access to over 2 million dissertations and master's theses, many of which are available in full text for immediate downloading. Citations are available for dissertations dating from 1861 and full text online from 1997 for over 1,000 schools submitting to the ProQuest UMI database. More than 55,000 new citations are added to the database every year.

Research Insight on the Web contains financial, statistical, and market data for U.S. and Canadian corporations, banks, savings and loans, ADR's/ADS's, business segments, geographic areas, industry composites and indexes. Includes coverage of annual and quarterly income statements, balance sheets, cash flow and supplemental data on publicly held companies. Research Insight on the Web is updated on a daily basis and requires a special plug-in to run through Excel. It supplements Research Insight on CD-ROM.

Value Line Research Center includes on-line access to Value Line's leading publications covering stocks, mutual funds, options and convertible securities as well as special situation stocks. It includes full subscriptions to: The Value Line Investment Survey; The Value Line Investment Survey - Small and Mid-Cap Edition; The Value Line Mutual Fund Survey; The Value Line Daily Options Survey; The Value Line Special Situations Service; The Value Line Convertibles Survey; and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

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