There's an ECCO in Here...

The Library has obtained trial access to two excellent research databases from Gale Digital Collections which offer a wealth of resources from the 18th,19th and early 20th centuries.

ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online is an online library of over 136,000 titles and editions (over 155,000 volumes), published between 1701 and 1800. It provides full text searching of more than 26 million pages, giving immediate access to every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during that period, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

It is a diverse collection, encompassing everything from books to sheet music to advertisements, from collections on the French Revolution to numerous editions of the works of Shakespeare. Multiple editions of individual works are offered to enable scholars to make textual comparisons of the works.

Subject areas provided for include English Literature, History, Geography, French, Philosophy, Sociology and Fine Arts.

Alongside ECCO, there is The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926, also from Gale Digital Collections. This contains fully indexed digitised versions of the Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises collections.  It provides over 10 million pages of legal history from America and Britain, making it the world's most comprehensive full-text collection of Anglo-American legal treatises.

The trial access for both of these databases ends on November 25th so make sure to have a look while they're available!  We'd be glad to receive feedback about them or suggestions for other databases you'd like to try out.

Students and staff of St Patrick's College can access these resources from on or off campus by using the links above or via the Trial Databases page on our website.

Be Constructivist!

We've added an open access peer-reviewed e-journal called Constructivist Foundations to our Journals A-Z.  This title may be of interest to our staff and students in Human Development and Early Education.

As the name suggests, it is concerned with discussion of constructivist approaches and philosophies - as the site puts it:

"the idea that mental structures such as cognition and perception are actively built by one's mind rather than passively acquired".  

The journal is published online three times a year and is now in its sixth volume.  Access of full text articles requires you to register with an email address but it is free of charge.

The addition of this open access title to our listings is nicely timed in line with Open Access Week 2011, October 24-30, an international event which works to promote open access as the new model for scholarly research and publishing.

Oct/Nov Opening Hours

Please note that the Library is closed on the following days next week:

Mon, Oct 31 (bank holiday)
Tue, Nov 1 (church holiday)
Fri, Nov 4 (conferrals)
Sat, Nov 5 (conferrals)

On Wed & Thurs, Nov 2 & 3 we open from 9am until10pm as normal.

New Digital Microfilm Readers

Students or staff viewing material on Microfilm or Microfiche can now do so on new digital reader printers.  The new machines (ScanPro 2000's) are situated beside the existing Microfilm readers in the journals section of the Library.

They allow added functionality for the user including the option to save images of the microfilm scans as pdf files.  This should reduce demand for printing, thereby saving the planet and your print credit in one go!

If you do wish to print, the system is the same as printing from any PC on the student network - no need for card readers.

The supplier video below gives a good overview of what they can do:

If you're using one for the first time just ask for assistance at the issue desk and one of our staff members will show you the ropes!

Our thanks to the Taught M.A. Programme Board for funding this purchase.

Library Catalogue

The Catalogue is currently unavailable. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.  The issue is being investigated at present and we hope to have access restored as soon as possible.

 UPDATE: CATALOGUE ACCESS HAS NOW BEEN RESTORED

St Patrick's Confessio

"My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers" 

Last month saw the launch of the St Patrick's Confessio Hypertext Stack Project (www.confessio.ie), an online representation of the 5th century writings of our patron saint.

This open access resource provides facsimiles, transcriptions, commentaries and translations of the oldest surviving texts written in Ireland in any language.  The manuscripts and printed editions can be viewed in original Latin, English, Irish and other languages.  Contextual material such as Muirchú's Latin Life of Saint Patrick, written 200 years after his death are available, as well as more recent pieces written especially for the project.

The site should be useful for students and researchers in relevant areas but also for those with a more general interest (the About section answers the eternal question "where are the snakes?").

The project was conceived and overseen by Dr Anthony Harvey, editor of the Royal Irish Academy Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources with technical support from the DHO.

Even More From J-STOR

There was good news for scholars recently when our friends from J-STOR kindly opened their vault and made almost 500,000 articles from late 19th and early 20th century publications available free of charge. Better than a poke in the eye, as they say.

This open access content is from a corpus of scholarly articles published in the United States before 1923 and outside the US before 1870. You can see a full list of the free titles here, organised by discipline. Why not have a root around their archives and see what's available in your area? You won't even get dust in your eyes, or if you do you need to clean your keyboard...

 The video below gives a quick tutorial of how to tailor your search:

 You can link to J-STOR from the Databases A-Z on our website.

Maths Week - The Art in Maths

To mark Maths Week (Oct 15-22) we are currently showing a collection of images on our information screen  relating to Dr Maurice O'Reilly's forthcoming lecture, The Art in Maths (Oct 21, Earlsfort Terrace).  

In his talk, Maurice will be exploring mathematical interpretations of various works in the Dublin Contemporary art exhibition.  Our slideshow contains a selection of the works he'll be talking about, so why not pay the Library foyer a visit to get a taster of what's in store...

About JURN

Those working in the humanities may find a look at JURN (www.jurn.org) worthwhile when performing article searches.

It uses a Google custom search engine to cross-search resources found on sites such as Intute and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) as well as a large number of individually selected titles. The end result is a federated search tool covering over 4,000 open access titles.  It provides a useful and focused way to broaden your article search beyond those e-titles available through our journal and/or database subscriptions.

Sample titles include Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Tympanum: A Journal of Comparative Literary Studies and Aether: Journal of Media Geography but you can see a full list of titles included here.

Get SmART with SmartHistory

SmartHistory (www.smarthistory.org) is an award-winning "web-book" which uses multimedia content - audio, video, images, text - as an alternative to the traditional textbook for students and teachers of art history.

The resource may be of interest to Education students taking the art elective, and it also features contextual discussions and articles concerning different aspects of english, geography, history and philosophy.

Even if you've only a passing interest in art history, it's worth a look to see how well multimedia can be used in an educational capacity.  The interface provides a number of entry points and navigation tools for the various topics, and offers related links depending on which area or era you find yourself delving into.

The site was started in 2005 by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker and has since grown to include contributions from numerous academics in art history - you can see the full list here.  Check it out!

World Teachers' Day!

World Teachers' Day is celebrated by UNESCO and Education International every year on 5th October (www.5oct.org). This year's theme is Teachers for Gender Equality and promotes gender equality in access to education as well as between male and female teachers.

Today in the Library foyer we have a display with information from UNESCO, the Gender Equality in Education Policy Forum, and Ireland-specific statistics from the 2007 Sé Sí report. We also draw your attention to resources available in the Library that address issues of gender balance and imbalance in the context of education.  

Pop up and have a look!