The Library staff will spend the spring and summer revitalizing its online research guides from their current static presentation to a more user-friendly and dynamic look, using LibGuides.
LibGuides is a web 2.0 content management- and library knowledge-sharing system used to create attractive multimedia content, share knowledge and information, and promote library resources to the community. More than 1,200 libraries worldwide use LibGuides.
ProQuest, supplier of three of the Library’s magazine and newspaper databases, will be down for maintenance this weekend. From 10pm on Saturday until 10am on Sunday, Proquest Historical Newspapers, American Periodicals Series Online, and Proquest Platinum are going to be unavailable. Students working on research papers should plan ahead for the outage. Below are brief descriptions of these three databases for those who may be unfamiliar with them, with links to the Library’s Research Databases page:
American Periodicals Series Online
More than 1,000 American magazines and newspapers published between 1741 and 1940.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and ten other national and regional papers
ProQuest Platinum
2,000 magazines and scholarly journals. Also the New York Times (1980 on), Wall Street Journal (1984 on), 40 other newspapers and news services.
Google Books has begun to partner with publishers to digitize the back issues of magazines and offer them online. As part of this initiative, the entire run of Life magazine—over 1,860 issues from 1936 to 1972—has been digitized. Even though the library has issues of Life in bound volumes, it’s really fun to browse through this online collection and see the variety of topics covered by the magazine (the Berlin Airlift, the Olympics, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the Beatles to name just a few) as well as view the many photos that were the hallmark of Life. Issues are searchable, and, through thumbnail view, you can see all the pages in a given issue.
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