Childrens' Literature Initiative

The English Department’s Centre for Children’s Literature and Culture and the Cregan Library in St. Patrick’s College Drumcondra welcome an exciting new development in children’s books. Pádraic Whyte of Trinity College Dublin and Keith O’Sullivan of the Church of Ireland College of Education have been awarded significant funding from the Irish Research Council to establish a catalogue of children’s books in Dublin over the next two years. The Cregan Library’s important  collection of both literary and pedagogical texts will be included in the overview of children’s books.

Establishing a central catalogue of children’s books held in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Trinity College, National Library of Ireland, Church of Ireland College of Education, and Pearse Street Library will provide an invaluable tool for the future. Researchers, educationalists, and librarians will be interested to learn that from this catalogue of approximately 40,000 texts (English language at this stage), 1,000 of both literary and educational interest will be selected so that images and digitized versions might be created. In addition, a seminar on the project for May 2015 as well as an edited volume of essays will accompany this major undertaking.

Orla Nic Aodha, Head Librarian of the Cregan Library and Julie Anne Stevens, Director of the Centre for Children’s Literature, have encouraged interest in Cregan Library’s children’s books by compiling
information about its holdings. They believe that the project will offer significant potential for Irish and international researchers in different areas of children’s literature, childhood studies and education, and library studies.

1913 Lockout Display

To commemorate the centenary of the Dublin Lockout of 1913, Strumpet City by James Plunkett has been chosen for the One City One Book campaign.

We have on display in the Library a number of related books on the Dublin Lockout and the social and political conditions which led up to this historic event.

For more information on the book and a list of events running throughout April see the One City One Book website: http://dublinonecityonebook.ie/

Cambridge E-books Trial

We have obtained trial access for one month to Cambridge's complete online collection of e-books.

Cambridge Books Online contains thousands of e-books titles in the humanities, social sciences and education.

Chapters can be downloaded in pdf format and titles are indexed in such a way that they are easily discovered through commonly used search tools such as Google Scholar.

While the trial is live, why not dive straight in to http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ and browse or search your own areas of interest.

If you want to check a particular title or search for a term you can start right away by typing your terms in below:

• 
• Widget Search Keyword
• 

This trial is obtained for the purpose of assessment for any future purchase.  We'd be glad to hear from staff or students about how relevant these collections are to you or your department.

Remember to check our Trial Databases page on our website to see what is currently available in addition to our existing resources.

Banned Books Exhibition

This week is banned books week and we are joining the American Library Association in celebrating the freedom to read. Our headline quotation by Jo Godwin is:

“A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone”. 

Come see our display of once-banned titles that help make our library great!

One College, One Book

In conjunction with the English Department, the Library is delighted to present inaugural John McGahern Writer-in-Residence Claire Keegan in conversation with Dr. Noreen Doody, Head of English here in St Patrick's College.  

The event will take place next Tuesday, 24th April at 6pm in D210 and forms part of the One College One Book initiative encouraging staff and students of St. Patrick’s College to read Foster by Claire Keegan.

All staff and students are invited to attend including those from our linked campuses.

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.

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.

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!

Go to Harvard For Free...

We like to point our users to open access resources on the web that might be of use for your study or research. One such recommendation is Academic Earth (academicearth.org), an excellent site containing (mostly) free access to courses and lectures recorded by professors from institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and other colleges.

You can watch an individual video or, if you're feeling ambitious, a full series of lectures on a single course. Topics vary from the philosophy of death to the American novel since 1945.

In total there are over 1,500 video hosted on the site, searchable by subject, university or instructor. Why not have a look to see what they have in your area of study or work? At least it's not hard to sneak out of the lecture halfway through...

Happy Bloomsday!

Some of the celebrations for Bloomsday 2011 have taken an unusually digital slant on Joyce's great novel. David Molloy in the Irish Times reports how computer programmer Rory McCann has taken up Leopold Bloom's challenge to “cross Dublin without passing a pub”. Stranger still is the Ulysses meets Twitter experiment which is posting the entirety of Ulysses in 140-character tweets throughout today. You can follow the blasphemy here!

Alternatively you could keep it traditional and take a look at our selection of titles about Ulysses or even the thing itself available on our shelves.

Colum McCann wins IMPAC Award

The winner of the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced last night and went to Irish author Colum McCann for his novel Let the Great World Spin.

The prize for the IMPAC award is €100,000, the largest for a single novel published in English. It is also unique in that the shortlist is drawn from nominations received from public libraries around the globe, with the winner then chosen by the IMPAC judging panel. As well as being selected by the judging panel, McCann's novel also received the highest number of nominations from the participating libraries this year.

The first half of the novel is framed by a real event in New York in August 1974 when Frenchman Philip Petit performed a tightrope walk between the twin towers. The judging panel remarked of the novel

"In the opening pages of Let The Great World Spin, the people of New York City stand breathless and overwhelmed as a great artist dazzles them in a realm that seemed impossible until that moment; Colum McCann does the same thing in this novel, leaving the reader just as stunned as the New Yorkers, just as moved and just as grateful."

The book is in stock in the library so if you'd like to be stunned, moved and grateful, check it out today from our literature section here!

New English Literature Articles

43 new articles on different aspects of English literature have been added to Literary Encyclopedia, including 3 by Irish-based authors:

• Anne Enright by Heather Ingman (TCD)
• Maeve Brennan by Dolores McLoughlin (TCD)
• Rawi Hage by Rita Sakr (UCD)

Other new additions include articles on J.M. Coetzee's debut novel Dusklands, Toni Morrison's Beloved and an excellent piece on Antrim poet Samuel Thomson (1766-1816), known as the "Bard of Cangranny" and described by author Jennifer Orr as a figure of "unique significance".

Literary Encyclopedia is an online collection of specially commissioned articles written by university teachers and academics around the world and relating to authors, works and themes of English Literature.

The full list of new articles can be seen here and the database is also accessible via the database A-Z on our website.

IMPAC/Orange Nominees

The nominees for this year's International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award were announced today and included three novels by Irish writers. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, Brooklyn by Colm Toibín and Love and Summer by William Trevor are all on the shortlist, the largest Irish contingent since the award was founded in 1994.

Other titles shortlisted include The Vagrants by Chinese writer Yiyun Li and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver's novel, set in 1930s Mexico, includes depictions of seminal artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera who are subject of a new exhibition in the IMMA which opened last week.

The IMPAC award, managed by Dublin City Public Libraries, is voted for by libraries in over 100 cities across the globe. You can see the full shortlist and the libraries that nominated them here.

There was further Irish success in the nominations for the Orange Prize for Fiction announced today, with Dublin-born writer Emma Donoghue's novel Room among the shortlisted titles.

An IAR to the Ground...

Irish Archives Resource (www.iar.ie) is a new web portal which allows cross-searching of some noteworthy online archives. The portal harvests content from 16 prominent repositories with material ranging from the 17th Century up to the present.

The searchable records and objects include contents of 11 County and 3 City archives as well as the Guinness Archive, Irish Film Archive and Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

You can limit your search either to a single repository or to 'Collection Types' with options including Literary Papers, Theatre, Folklore, Trade Unions and Archives of Private Clubs and Societies.

The project was part-funded by the Heritage council and should be useful to researchers in a wide range of areas.

New Literature Resource

Staff and students of the English Department should try out Literary Encyclopedia, a new online database we have obtained access to.

This resource is a unique collection of specially commissioned articles written by university teachers and academics around the world and relating to authors, works, and themes of English literature.

Use the left-hand navigation bar to browse or search the collection by author, work or topic. Alternatively the 'bookshelves' tool provides clusters of articles based on time period, literary movement, or theme.

You can also create an individual account using your @mail.dcu.ie or @spd.dcu.ie email address. This allows you to create your own custom bookshelves for easy retrieval at a later date.

Check it out by clicking on the links above or from the databases a-z on our website.

Booker Booker On The Shelf...

"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…"

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, is now available for loan in the main lending section of the Library.

Notable as the first comic novel to win the prize, it was described by Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges as "very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize."

The other shortlisted titles for this year's prize are also available from the Library, including Room by Irish author Emma Donoghue. Check them out!

Even more to Muse over...

Project MUSE is expanding its online archives of over 80 journals titles. Over half of the titles involved will have their complete archive available and the increased content is being made available at no additional cost.

Some of the titles already expanded to the level of a complete archive are:

• Children's Literature (1972-)
  
• Children's Literature Association Quarterly(1976-)
  
• The Emily Dickinson Journal (1992-)
  
• The Henry James Review (1979-)
• Journal of Early Christian Studies (1993-)
• Journal of Women's History (1989-)
• Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology (1994-)
  

Other titles currently being expanded include:

• a/b: Autobiography Studies
• Civil War History
• Eighteenth Century Fiction
• Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
• Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
• Journal of Narrative Theory
• Nabokov Studies
• Nineteenth Century French Studies
• Philip Roth Studies
• Philosophy and Literature
• Philosophy of Music Education Review
• Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

You can browse Project Muse's complete journals collection here. If you are accessing the resource from off-campus you should link to it via the databases page on the Library website.

Project Muse is available to us through the IReL initiative.

British Periodicals Trial

The Library has acquired trial access to Proquest's British Periodicals Databases. You will require a password to access this resource which can be obtained from our Information Desk.

This resource contains digital reproductions of journals dating from the 17th century up to the 1930's and includes articles authored by Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, to name but a few.

The Collection is divided into Periodicals I (covering mainly literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences) and Periodicals II (covering literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture).

Our trial access is available until March 12th. You can always see what we have on trial on the trial databases section of our website, and we welcome suggestions for new resources from staff or students.

Check out Chekhov

This Friday sees the 150th anniversary of the birth of Anton Chekhov. To mark the occasion, at the entrance to the main Library we currently have a display of items written by or about him.

All items displayed are available for loan so why not pick one up and familiarise yourself with one of the true greats of literature and drama.