Classical Music Library, American History in Video Databases Temporarily Unavailable

Alexander Street Press - - the provider of two Carmichael Library databases - - has reported a temporary outage with their products. This unexpected downtime only affects American History in Video and Classical Music Library. We'll post to our Facebook Page again when we get an update from our database provider.

Introducing Project MUSE

Carmichael Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Project MUSE Standard Collection. Founded as a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, Project MUSE provides access to full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies.

The Standard Collection is an interdisciplinary assortment of high quality, peer reviewed journals designed for institutions offering programs in the humanities and social sciences. The Standard Collection currently contains full text holdings of nearly 350 titles, with new content being added annually.

Examples of titles now held by the Carmichael Library via this Project MUSE collection include:

• Archives of Asian Art
• Cuban Studies
• L'Esprit Créateur
• French Colonial History
• GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
• Information & Culture: A Journal of History
• Journal of Asian American Studies
• Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
• Journal of Sport History
• Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal
• The Lion and the Unicorn
• portal: Libraries and the Academy
• Theatre Topics
• WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Project MUSE is now available via the Carmichael Library web site to members of the UM community. As with our other databases, you'll need to enter your UMID when accessing this database from off-campus locations.

Happy searching!

Carmichael Adds Films on Demand

Adding to a growing collection of online streaming audio and video resources, your campus library has acquired Films on Demand, a multi-disciplinary collection of some 6,000 titles. The Films on Demand collection includes quality video content from over 30 publishers including PBS, Meridian, Cambridge Educational, the BBC, National Geographic and more. In addition to the material already available in this database, about 600 titles are added annually. Most of the videos in the Films on Demand collection are closed-captioned.

To gain access to Films on Demand, students, staff, and faculty may go to the A-Z Databases and Resources List on our website. We'll be posting more details on how to use this new collection in the weeks ahead. In the meantime you find the answers to some questions at the On Demand Help Center. Also, feel free to direct technical questions about this database to me, Jason Cooper.

Happy viewing!

Carmichael Acquires Early English Books Online

Carmichael Library is excited to announce the availability of a new database collection. Early English Books Online (EEBO) provides access to 125,000 works from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. The collection covers many subject areas, including English literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science. EEBO is available on campus and remotely to all current UM students, staff, and faculty. For more information on the extensive coverage in this database, check the publisher's website.

EBSCO Databases Are Up and Running

As of about 5:30 a.m. we can report that the EBSCO databases are again working. Thanks to those who called and wrote to report yesterday's problems. Thanks to you, we were able to report the outage to the Alabama Virtual Library. Although we don't anticipate any further outages today, we ask that you continue to report any problems you may have.

Video: Creating an ARTstor User Account

You may remember our recent email announcement that Carmichael Library has acquired access to the ARTstor database. ARTstor is a nonprofit resource that provides a Digital Library of more than one million  images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences along with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research.

Since subscribing to this great resource we've gotten a couple of questions related to logging in to the database and about creating a user account. Here's a video from the ARTstor team that may help:

You can find answers to some frequently asked questions at the ARTstor help site. Have more questions? Feel free to ask a librarian. Happy searching!

The New England Journal of Medicine

The New England Journal of Medicine has provided free electronic access to their content, back to the first article in the year 1812. According to their website:

"The more recent part of the archive from 1945 through 1989 is presented in an HTML format similar to that used for current issues, with full text, tables and figures, PDFs, and tables of contents. The older archive from 1812 through 1944 contains tables of contents plus PDFs of individual articles. The entire archive is fully searchable. This is possible because every page of the Journal was first scanned, using high-resolution technology to produce PDF files, which were then read, using optical character recognition, to produce the HTML. Tagging and indexing according to specialty were done by computer algorithm and Medline tags as far back as they were available. These processes are not perfect, and readers may find some errors that have been missed, especially in the older content. The entire archive consists of 8498 issues with 486,434 pages and 145,969 articles with 75,649 images.

Click here to have a look at the index.

Classical Music Library Streaming Audio Now in Catalog

We're excited to announce a new service today. The Carmichael catalog is now loaded with records that link to individual streaming audio recordings in Classical Music Library. We now have over 2,700 of these in the catalog and this number will only grow as we get more records from the publisher of this database.


The simplest way to find all of these records is to launch a series search for Classical Music Library, but a better way to find these tracks is to use the "musical sound recordings" limiter with a search. The results include streaming audio from Classical Music Library and items from the Music CD collection housed here in Carmichael.


Another feature that I like is the persistent linking to individual albums within the Classical Music Library database. These links, along with the ability to create playlists, give you the ability to return to the same pieces without having to repeat your searches.

We hope you enjoy this new cataloging service! You may direct any questions or comments to me at cooperjd(at)montevallo.edu or (205) 665-6114. We look forward to getting your feedback.

eRes Update

[Update 8/19 8:35 AM - We're still working to re-establish access to eRes. We'll post here again as soon as this work is completed.]

[Update 8/18 5:20 PM - Off-campus access to databases has now been restored. eRes is still unavailable.]

Our eRes service is currently offline as part of today's server maintenance project. Off-campus access to databases will also be unavailable for a couple of hours as we continue this work. Stay tuned to this blog for updates on all library services.

New Online Resources: Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities

The library has acquired online access to all four of Cabell's Directories of Publishing Opportunities in the fields of business. The four areas covered by the directories are Accounting, Economics & Finance, Management, and Marketing. In addition to the business directories, we still have access to the Educational Psychology & Administration directory.

The online directories are continuously updated and will replace the print versions in our Reference Collection. These resources are accessible via our catalog or databases by name web page. As with all of our subscribed content, access is restricted to the UM community.

Introducing: American History in Video

We're excited to announce our newest database, American History in Video. This collection of streaming video includes commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and documentaries. The collection now includes over 1470 titles, including new documentaries from PBS, equaling approximately 460 hours.


American History in Video is produced by Alexander Street Press, which is also the publisher behind one of my favorite Carmichael databases, Classical Music Library. The Flash player is needed to watch the video in this collection and access is restricted to members of the Montevallo community. Should you have questions about how to use this online collection for research or in the classroom, please contact us.

ACS Publications Access Restored

Thanks to the quick attention of our vendor and the Computer Services department, our access to the ACS Publications database has now been restored. Should you have any problems connecting to databases please contact me, Jason Cooper, at (205) 665-6114 or at cooperjd(at)montevallo.edu.

Problems with ACS Publications Database

We received notification early this morning that there were connectivity issues with the ACS Publications database. It appears that the problem will impact users both on and off campus. We've contacted the publisher regarding the problem, and we'll post here again once our access has been restored. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Electronic Resources Survey

Take a few minutes to complete the survey on Survey Monkey: Click Here to take survey.

This survey will help us in setting priorities for our database subscriptions.

New EBSCOhost 2.0 Interface

You may have noticed some fairly extensive changes to the EBSCOhost Interface. The Alabama Virtual Library hosts both a training session via Flash Player and PowerPoint for the new 2.0 interface. Please see the links below.

Basic Searching for Academic Libraries

(Flash 5:25 min,

PowerPoint 1.35 mb)

If you're interested in learning more about new EBSCO 2.0 features and would like to see a demo, please contact me by phone or email.

GreenFile

EBSCO has made GreenFILE freely accessible via the WWW. GreenFILE is an ecology database that focuses on the relationship between humans and the environment. You can use this resource to find information on environmental topics such as global warming, recycling, and alternative fuel resources.

According to EBSCO's website, GreenFILE includes abstracts and indexes for more than 600 titles and "comprehensive coverage – from volume 1, issue 1 to present – for Bioscience (back to 1964), Conservation Biology (back to 1987), Journal of Ecology (back to 1913) and Journal of Environmental Planning & Management (back to 1948). The total number of records is approximately 295,000, and full text is provided for more than 4,600 records from open access titles."

You can access GreenFile by clicking here and logging in through our proxy server, or you can use the following direct link for easy access:

http://www.greeninfoonline.com

Library Services Restored, May 17th

We've been checking access to the library web site and catalog throughout the day and these services have now been restored. We'll be back in the library Monday morning at 8:00 AM to assist you with all of your research needs.

University Servers Down Tomorrow, May 17th

We have received the following information from Computer Services:

Please be advised that necessary maintenance to the university’s server room electrical system will be performed tomorrow Saturday, May 17th beginning at 6:30 am. At that time, all systems (including email, the Admin system, Banner, web access, internet connectivity, network shares, etc) will be unavailable while this work is performed. Services will be restored as quickly as possible. We estimate that it could take more than 12 hours to complete all tasks, but some services will be restored as soon as they become available. Please direct any questions or concerns to the Help Desk at (205) 665-6520 or via email to helpdesk@montevallo.edu.

This outage will affect the library's catalog and remote database access. We'll be checking the status of the library's servers throughout the day tomorrow and we'll post here when our systems are again available.

New Audio Downloads Now Available

As always, your campus library is busy lining up plenty of quality audio content. If you've followed our blog, you know that Alexander Street Press, the publisher of Classical Music Library, has been making free music downloads available for a while now. The latest of these is Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26. This recording features the Frenchman violin virtuoso Jean-Pierre Wallez in concert with the Luxembourg Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Classical Music Library has been giving away some terrific recordings this year and you can track all of them at the Alexander Street Music blog. Grab your free copy of the Bruch concerto in MP3 or WMA format from the CML free download page. It's available there through next week.

If our downloadable audiobooks are closer to your listening taste, I'd like to recommend a pair of our recent acquisitions. First, Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream, by Dennis Covington is a read that's both harrowing and hilarious. Redneck Riviera is the true story of Covington's bizarre encounters with a lawless band of gun-toting swamp-dwellers in Central Florida who've illegally claimed the two-and-a-half acres of land he inherited from his father.

Second and lastly, I enjoyed The Summer We Got Saved, by Pat Cunningham Devoto. Tab and Tina, relatives of a founder of Ku Klux Klan, are whisked away to an interracial Civil Rights school one summer. There, they befriend both a black polio patient and the biracial daughter of a Yankee and a Civil Rights leader. Can the girls be saved from the racist traditions of their Alabama family?

Gale Databases

The Gale databases seem to be working again, as long as you access these databases through our web site and not through the Alabama Virtual Library (AVL). Please let us know if you are suddenly logged out of our databases, or if you experience any other problems.

Hopefully, we will have the issue with AVL resolved soon, and you can also access the Gale databases through the AVL website.