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:

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• Widget Search Keyword
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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.

Mapping Your History

Historical maps are increasingly available in digital format these days but they are often difficult to find, tucked away in various locations on the web.

Old Maps Online is a new portal for web-based historical maps which aims to make that task a whole lot easier.

The interface allows you to browse and search old maps by panning and zooming across a world map.  A search bar and a date slider allow further narrowing of your search.  Alternatively the 'magnifying glass' icon allows you to highlight a particular area on the map (so you can just search for maps available of Ireland, for example).

Whatever search method you use, the results update accordingly in the right sidebar, which provides links to the maps in their hosting site or institution.

At present the maps contained are drawn from five different digital resources:

• A Vision of Britain through Time, Historical Map Library
• British Library, Map Library
• Cartography Associates, the David Rumsey Map Collection
• Moravian Library, Czech Republic
• National Library of Scotland, Maps of Scotland

It was created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project in University of Portsmouth and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland with funding from JISC and will continue to add further digital map collections through 2012.

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.

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.

Eneclann Display

We currently have a selection of Eneclann digital publications on display at the entrance to the main library. These titles are in CD-ROM format and contain digitised versions of various 18th, 19th and early 20th century works.

Titles available include:

• 1798 Rebellion, Claimants and Surrenders
• Pigot's Commercial Dictionary
• Slater's Commercial Directory
• Thom's Almanac & Directory
• The Dublin Almanac
• Confederation of Kilkenny
• Census Reports of Co. Dublin and Ireland
• and lots more...

Print editions of many of these titles are also in the Library and all of the CD-Rom versions are available to borrow as main lending items.

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...

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.

Ask About Ireland...

AskAboutIreland.ie is a free open access resource that could be useful for those studying in Education, English, History or Geography.

A couple of areas of particular relevance to St. Pat's are:

Learning Zone - online activities and games for primary school students

Griffith's Valuation - a digitised version of 19th Century land valuations

Excellent articles on Irish history, myth and culture can be found by browsing through the Reading Room - things like Ghost Stories of Dublin, Cúchalainn's wooing of Emer or the Seven Septs of Laois. There's an article on Irish Authors by Dr. Derek Hand from our English Department.

The site is an initiative of public libraries, museums and archives in Ireland to digitally preserve our cultural resources. It was founded in 2008 and resources are still being added to it as they become available in digital form.

The project is managed by An Comhairle Leabharlanna and supported by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government with funding from the Information Society Fund.

Good News for Genealogists!

Those teaching or studying Geography and History in the College, (as well as any amateur genealogists among us) may be interested to know that the complete 1911 Census is now available and fully searchable online at the National Archives of Ireland website.

The 1911 Census is one of only two censuses for which complete household record forms exist. The other is 1901 which the National Archives are currently digitising and which, when complete, will be made available in the same way.

The Census can be searched or browsed by townland/street and also by names of families or individuals. The records link directly to high quality images of the original forms and contextual material.

In the Library we also hold microfiche records of the following censuses: 1813, 1821, 1831, 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911. These are all held behind the Issue Desk and can be viewed and printed from on our Microform Reader/Printers.

For more information on any of this material please ask at our Information Desk.