New Acquisition - Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press

The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press is a great resource for primary source material from the USSR and Russia. It presents selections from the Russian press, translated into English, from 1949 to the present. Sources excerpted include Pravda and Izvestia, as well as about 40 other publications not available in the U.S. The databases can be searched by keyword or browsed by date, and articles are available both as full text and page image.

Want to read the Soviet press coverage of Stalin or the Russian press coverage of Putin? Then this is the resource for you!

New Acquisition - China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980

China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793-1980 is a digital database that provides a wide variety of original source material detailing China’s interaction with the West from Macartney’s first Embassy to China in 1793, through to the Nixon/Heath visits to China in 1972-74. It provides multiple perspectives—from politicians, diplomats, missionaries, business people and tourists—and documents many of the key events that happened in this period. There are also significant sources describing the lives and work of missionaries in China from 1869-1970, including extensive and fully searchable runs of missionary periodicals, e.g., The Chinese Recorder, Light and Life Magazine, The Land of Sinim: The North China Mission Quarterly Paper.

This online collection includes substantial collections of unique manuscript materials and rare printed materials including missionary periodicals, atlases and books which help to contextualize the other sources. In addition, this project offers over 400 color paintings, maps and drawings by English and Chinese artists, as well as countless photographs, sketches and ephemeral items, depicting Chinese people, places, customs and events, which provide a striking visual accompaniment to the documentary images.

The manuscript materials were developed from collections held at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the British Library in London, and supplemented by additional sources from Cambridge University Library, the Church Missionary Society Archive, the Council for World Missions Library, Duke University, the National Archives at Kew, the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand and Yale Divinity Library.

And the Catalog is Working Again!

Hooray! Our Systems Dept. is victorious and the JHU Library Catalog is open for business.

Thank you for your patience.

Database Lists and Research Guides are Back

Monday morning is getting better! As of 10 AM, our database lists and research guides are functioning again. Work on the catalog continues.
For catalog access, you can use WorldCat.

Library Catalog and Databases Down Monday Morning

Well, it’s not a good Monday morning here at MSEL. A server failed this weekend and our Systems people are still working to restore the data. The JHU catalog, the Sheridan Libraries lists of databases, and some of the Sheridan Libraries research guides aren’t accessible.
If you have databases like LexisNexis or Compendex bookmarked, you can still get to them. Or you can go to the Welch Medical Library page or the SAIS Library page and get to most of our databases through their pages. You can also use our multi-database search service JHSearch.
We will let you know when we’ve restored service.
Thank you for your patience!

August ‘08 RefWorks Webinars

Would you like to store all of your citations in one place, and make bibliographies at the click of a button? RefWorks is an online personal database and bibliography creator available to all JHU students, faculty, and staff. If you have a JHED ID, you have an account!

Want to learn how to use it this summer? RefWorks is offering complimentary online training webinars in August covering the following topics:

• RefWorks in 15 Minutes
• RefWorks Fundamentals
• RefWorks Advanced Features
• RefShare (to share citations with others)
• Write-N-Cite III for Windows (a Microsoft Word plug-in for quick citations)

Sessions are free of charge, taught by RefWorks staff, require registration, and have a cap of fifty students.

To register, visit http://www.refworks.com and scroll down to the bottom right hand corner of the page. You should see a list of RefWorks webinars. Click on the title of a webinar that grabs your attention for a course description and to learn when it’s offered.

Webinar times not good for you? A useful RefWorks tutorial - including a forty-five second section on what RefWorks is called Why Bother? - is available at https://www.refworks.com/tutorial/ .

Need personalized help with RefWorks? Contact your librarian. Have questions or want to share about a RefWorks webinar you’ve taken? Please comment.

New Look for EBSCO Databases

If you use Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, or one of the many other library databases that uses the EBSCO search interface, you’re in for a big surprise! EBSCO recently changed the look and feel of their search interface.

New functions include a new results list and the ability to read the abstract when you mouseover the article title. Our list of databases using EBSCO is after the jump…

Continue reading New Look for EBSCO Databases…

Montgomery Library Resource Center Summer Hours

As summer is in full swing, the Montgomery Library Resource Center will observe summer hours through Labor Day. In short, the Libraries’ Rockville, MD location will be closing one hour earlier on weeknights and opening one hour later on Saturday.

Montgomery Library Resource Center Hours
July 1-August 31
Monday through Thursday: Noon - 8 p.m.
Friday: Noon - 5 p.m.
Saturday: 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Questions? Please call, write, or comment. (301) 294-7030 or washrocklibraries@jhu.edu

Syncing with Dropbox

If you’re like me, you’re constantly emailing yourself files, always using flash drives to transfer papers from one computer to another, and perpetually worrying that you’re working on the most up to date file. There are a few ways to deal with this problem:

You can move your entire document creation and storage system online. I know tons of people who are using Google Docs; they feel that if their documents are online then syncing isn’t an issue.

For those of us who want to (or have to) store documents offline and worry about syncing laptops, desktops, office computers and mobile devices, there’s a new tool on the block: Dropbox, a freeware application and web service that backs up and syncs files instantly via the internet to any computer.

Continue reading Syncing with Dropbox…

HUT Magazines

Were you wondering where you’d go for that People magazine fix once the HUT closed?  Don’t worry, you don’t have to wait for your next dentist appointment to get your hands on it.  While the HUT is closed for the next two years, we’ve moved its popular magazine collection (along with some comfortable seating) down to the south end of A-Level in MSEL.  Happy reading!