America Online

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) was launched this week, a resource with great potential for academic research.

There are already over 2 million digital objects from America's libraries, archives and museums in the collection.  It will continue to grow in terms of the quantity of objects in the collection and also the ways these objects can be filtered and presented.

From the site itself:

"The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. "

The use of open data and APIs will mean that the contents and collections can be further harnessed in the future to create new tools and methods of research.  Five related apps are already available from the DPLA site.  One of these allows cross searching of DPLA with Europeana, a similar initiative and portal for digital objects and collections from European libraries and museums.

The site itself has various built-in functionalities allowing the user to view collections by location, chronologically or to explore as exhibitions covering subjects such as the Great Depression and US Activism.

Easter Hours

Library opening hours over the Easter vacation are as follows:

Mon, March 25 : 9am-5pm
Tue, March 26 : 9am-5pm
Wed, March 28 : 9am-1pm
Thu-Tue, Mar 29-Apr 2 : Closed
Wed, April 3 : 9am-5pm
Thu, April 4 : 9am-5pm
Fri, April 5 : 9am-5pm

Chronicling America

History researchers may find the Library of Congress digital collections worth a look, a variety of open access resources offering various types of content covering different aspects of culture and history.

One of particular note is Chronicling America which allows you to search and view over 5.2 million digitised newspaper pages drawn from newspaper titles from 26 US states (3 more are to be added next year).  The collection currently covers 1836-1922.

At first glance we came across an article about Arthur Griffith written by Padraic Colum for the New York Tribune on December 25, 1921 - "The man who taught Erin to find herself".

Have a peek, who knows what you might find!

Open Access Week

This week is Open Access Week, a global event in its sixth year which promotes awareness of and participation in open access initiatives.

When the fancy takes us we like to point out relevant and interesting open access resources here, so for the week that's in it we'll list a couple of our current favourites...

World Digital Library
Created by UNESCO and Library of Congress, WDL is a digital collection and portal for "significant primary materials" from countries and cultures around the world.  Digitised objects vary from a first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to a map of Ireland from Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.  

BambooDIRT
A great one-stop shop for digital tools for researchers and teachers. Not all the resources listed are open access but the majority are, and the site itself is a really quick way of seeing what tools or resources can help you in your line of research or work.  They are neatly categorised into typical research tasks such as

• analyse data
• make a dynamic map
• organise research materials
• annotate resources
• write collaboratively

Clicking on a task opens up a list of what online tools are available for that particular aspect of research, along with brief descriptions and links.  The lists can be further narrowed by cost (including 'free'!) and platform (Windows, Apple etc.) so you can quickly see what you're looking for.

Happy Open Access Week!

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.

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.

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!

Open Library

Last week we posted about our e-book collection reaching 200. These are core texts which we purchase from suppliers to ensure access for large numbers of students. If you've used our e-books you'll know that there are some restrictions on how you can use the titles, both in terms of downloading and viewing them online. These relate to Digital Rights Management, a thorny subject in ebook-land at present.

For copyright-free material (where the author's death occurred more than 70 years ago) the same restrictions generally don't apply and there are some excellent resources which offer full-text access to out-of-copyright titles, such as Project Gutenburg.

Another such site is Open Library, a community project run by the Internet Archive which was created with the aim of providing a single page on the web for every book ever published - as they put it "a lofty but achievable goal".

To date, over 20 million records have been added to their catalogue. Where these titles are copyright-free (currently over 1 million records) they provide full text access, either via their excellent BookReader browser app or various downloadable formats for different devices.

They've also launched a scheme for in-copyright titles called the Lending Library. Libraries contribute digitised versions of books in return for borrowing access for their users to other libraries' e-titles. It's still relatively early days for this scheme (and we're not currently a member!) but it looks an interesting model for libraries and e-books in the future.

Watch this space...

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...

Maths Anyone Khan Do

Staff and students in our Mathematics and Education Departments may be interested in Khan Academy, a web-based collection of maths tutorials, videos and lesson plans aimed at helping learners both in the classroom and at home.

The resource was created by Sal Khan in 2008 and has since mushroomed in both size and popularity to the point where it now contains over 2,100 educational videos which have been viewed over 43 million times.

More recently the site received funding from Bill Gates and Google which has enabled the addition of some excellent interactive tools. These complement the video tutorials by gauging the level of each user and guiding them towards the next stage. They also enable the teacher to see live data on how their class members are progressing, what videos they have watched and what lessons they have completed successfully.

See the video below for an explanation of some of how the site works both for the learner and educator or go to the full website for more information.

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.

JFK Online Archive

Scholars of American history (or anyone with a passing interest) may be interested in a new open access digital resource launched yesterday by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

The online archive of the 35th American president provides immediate access to hundreds of thousands of digital files such as documents, speeches, phone conversations and photographs.

A quick browse found an audio clip of JFK at Dublin Castle during his visit here in 1963, speaking about the importance of education to democracy and paying tribute to Ireland's educational heritage.

See an article in today's Irish Times about the resource here or go straight to the archive itself here.

RIAN Research Portal Launched

RIAN (www.rian.ie), an open access portal for Irish research, was officially launched yesterday by the Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan.

RIAN allows federated searching of the Institutional Repositories of the 7 Irish Universities as well as that of Dublin Institute of Technology, making Irish research material freely accessible both here and internationally, thus increasing the research profiles of individual researchers and their institutions.

The site has been live since July of this year and is already showing extremely high usage rates. It provides enhanced searching and filtering on the contents of the repositories, which are also made available via other search engines such as Google Scholar.

RIAN is the end product of a 3-year project which included the completion of the individual University repositories within its remit. The project was equally funded by the Universities and the Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority. It was initiated and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. As RIAN develops it is intended to extend to other Irish research institutions.

RIAN - A New Open Access Tool

RIAN (www.rian.ie) - is a new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research. It harvests content from the Institutional Repositories of the 7 Irish Universities as well as that of Dublin Institute of Technology. It allows federated searching of all of those repositories and provides enhanced searching and excellent statistics on the contents of the repositories.

This is an important development for promotion of Irish research and the knowledge economy.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

"It is in the national interest to extend access to Irish research output at institutional and sectoral level so as to maximise the long-term strategic impact and thereby help develop a knowledge society."
Professor Ferdinand Von Prondzynski, President, DCU