RefWorks down for maintenance

Technical support at RefWorks is performing maintenance on the Johns Hopkins RefWorks database.  RefWorks will be unavailable Saturday, November 21 starting at 1:30 am EST until 4:30 am.  All RefWorks account holders should be sleeping or otherwise enjoying their night without being in their RefWorks databases.

No (dust) jacket required

The Betty and Edgar Sweren Student Book Collecting Contest recognizes the love of books and the delight in shaping a thoughtful and focused book collection. All undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a degree program at Johns Hopkins are invited to enter the contest. Entries will be judged according to the coherency of the items in the collection and the extent to which the collection reflects the student’s stated goals and interests.

Students should submit a 2-3 page essay, detailing the purpose of the collection, how it was started, and how it was assembled over time. This description should also highlight the items of greatest interest within the collection, as well as any plans for the collection’s future development. Along with this written description, students should include a bibliography of 20 or more items (maximum of 50) and a “wish list” of up to ten items that they would like to add to their collection.

The contest will feature separate divisions for undergraduate and graduate students. In each division, the first place contestant will be awarded $1,000, while the second and third place entries will receive $500 and $250, respectively. In addition, the winning entries will be displayed on M-Level of the Eisenhower Library and will be eligible to enter the 2010 National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.

Submissions must be received by February 12, 2010. See here for a more detailed description of the contest. Last year, sophomore undergraduate student Shrivats Iyer and fourth-year graduate student Sarah Richardson were awarded first place for their collections.

Travelogue: George Peabody Library

If architectural beauty and historic research collections are important to you, then you should visit the George Peabody Library. The collection was started in 1860 as part of the Peabody Institute and is a Victorian research library with over 300,000 volumes.

Notable collection strengths are archaeology, British art and architecture, British and American history, biography, English and American literature, Romance languages and literature, history of science, and exploration and travel.

To learn more about the library, register for the Spring course “Reading Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Library” meeting at the Peabody Thursdays 2-4:20.

The George Peabody Library is open to readers Tuesday – Friday, 9 am – 5 pm. Its collection does not circulate. They are located at 17 E. Mount Vernon Place.

‘Tis the Season!

The season of literary prizes is upon us. And that favorite end-of-the-year activity - Top 10 Book Lists. We should all have lots to be thankful for: good books to read, and great gifts to buy.

The Nobel prize in literature was announced in October, and did not fail to astonish many with its choice, Herta Mueller. Following quickly on its heels was the Man Booker Prize in England, always a much-anticipated award. This year’s winner?  Hilary Mantel’s historical novel- Wolf Hall. The Booker shortlist is always a good source for a good read.

In this country, the National Book awards will be announced this Wednesday, November 18. The short lists for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama are impressive.

What about books in foreign languages? In France, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot are the 2 biggies. This year’s winners: Marie NDiaye (Trois femmes puissants) for the Goncourt, and Frédéric Beigbeder (Un roman français, on order ) for the Renaudot. In Germany, the Buchner prize is tops. And in Spain, it’s the Cervantes, which will be announced in the coming weeks. Italy’s top literary dog wins the Premio Strega this year - Tiziano Scarpa, for his novel Stabat mater (also on order).

Stay tuned for those end-of-the year lists!

Travelogue: Friedheim Library

The Arthur Friedheim Library is the music library of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins, and its primary purpose is to support the curriculum of the Peabody Conservatory. The Friedheim Library contains about 130,000 items including individually cataloged books and periodicals about music, musical scores and sound recordings, manuscripts, rare books, and microfilms. It houses performance materials for individuals and for groups up to nine players, scores for ensembles of whatever size, and research materials that support graduate level music study. The Peabody Archives located on the second level of the library houses the papers of the Peabody Institute, some of its founders and faculty, and other area performing groups.

The Friedheim Library serves the faculty and students of the Peabody Conservatory, the Peabody Preparatory Division, and all other divisions of the Johns Hopkins University. The library is located on the plaza level of the New Building in the northeast corner of the Peabody campus. Entrance is through the main entrance to Peabody at 17 East Mt. Vernon Place. The security guard will direct you to the Friedheim Library. Identification is required.

Nobel Winners and JHU Scientists Support Open Access

On November 10th the Alliance for Taxpayer Access released a letter from 41 Nobel laureates to the U.S. Congress. The letter was written by the scientists in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act. This act would require other Federal agencies to develop public access policies similar to the NIH Public Access Policy. The NIH policy requires that journal articles describing research supported by NIH funds be made freely available in PubMed Central within one year of their publication.

Four of the letter’s signers are associated with Johns Hopkins University. They are:

• Peter Agre, Chemistry, 2003
• Andrew Fire, Medicine, 2006
• Carol Greider, Medicine, 2009
• David Hubel, Medicine, 1981

Please see the Scholarly Communications website for more information about Open Access.

Have You Heard About Our Press?

The Johns Hopkins University Press is the oldest university press in the United States, founded in 1878. Within a few years, they were publishing the American Journal of Mathematics and the American Journal of Philology. These journals are still being published today.

Not content with print publicatons, the Johns Hopkins University Press is leading the charge into online publishing. Have you ever used journals that are part of Project Muse? You can thank our press for that. They also publish several online reference works including the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Read about their upcoming events and newest publications in their newsletter, InPress.

Picture This: A Research Guide for Visual Information

Do you need an illustration of an artwork for a class presentation? A diagram of a chemical compound? A photograph of an historical figure? An illustration of a shark’s anatomy? More and more people across many disciplines find that they need visual information for their coursework. But, as many of you know, good images can be hard to track down.

The Eisenhower Library is once again trying to make your academic life a little easier with its new Finding Images Research Guide. In addition to helpful links to digital image databases and reliable Internet image resources across many fields of study, the guide also gives tips on how to use bibliographic databases for image searching and how to cite, save, and present images as part of your scholarly endeavors. So, if image is everything to you, please check out this new guide.

Travelogue: John Work Garrett Library

While the Rare Books and Manuscripts department of MSEL has many wonderful books, there are other Hopkins libraries that also house older and rare works.

The John Work Garrett Library at the Evergreen Museum and Library contains 30,000 volumes that cover a wide variety of topics. Their natural history collection includes several important ornithological works, like the Audubon ‘double elephant folio’ edition of Birds of North America. There is a strong collection of 16^th- and 17^th- century English literature and history featuring works by Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and Spenser. Other important collections focus on architectural history and American colonial travel and history.

The JHU Catalog includes the books at Garrett Library; you’ll see the collection location of Garrett Library - Library Room. You need to make an appointment to use the collection (call 410-516-8348). Tours of the Evergreen Museum and Library are offered, but you can’t touch the books on the tour.

Claude Levi-Strauss dies at 100

Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the last icons of 20th century French intellectual life, died over the weekend at the age of 100. He was considered and will be remembered as the father of modern anthropology. He was most acclaimed for his study of primitive mythology and for founding the theoretical school known as structural anthropology. In his structuralist approach to understand human mind and society, Lévi-Strauss sought to discover the common denominator of human thought and mental structure across different types of cultures and societies. His rich and multifaceted anthropological research had profound impact in diverse fields such as linguistics, psychology, religion, and history.

During his long and prolific career, Lévi-Strauss authored many literary and anthropological classics including Tristes Tropiques, Structural Anthropology, Totemism and The Savage Mind.  His study of the Brazilian Indians was published in Tristes Tropiques, which is both a memoir of his early life in Brazil and an iconic ethnography of the indigenous Amazonian tribes. His massive Mythologiques appeared in four volumes: The Raw and the Cooked (1964), From Honey to Ashes (1966), The Origin of Table Manners (1978), and The Naked Man (1981). The Johns Hopkins University libraries have all of the above titles: please feel free to check them out and enjoy some of the greatest books of the 20th century!

(Photo Source: AccuNet/AP Multimedia Archive)