Featured Resources

September 11

In support of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, ebrary is offering open access to a collection of relevant eBooks through the month of September. To access the fifteen available titles, visit http://site.ebrary.com/lib/september11/. For more information on ebrary or other eBooks available through the library, visit http://siue.libguides.com/ebooktips.

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Open Access

Open Access Week 2010 has come and gone, but it’s not too late to learn more about Open Access. Rising journal prices and shrinking library budgets in recent years have threatened scholars’ access to valuable research articles and books. Some scholars and publishers have found ways to make their output freely available, thus expanding the audience for their research and writing. Here are just three ways of finding some of these valuable resources

OAIster.

This is a service that harvests metadata from institutional repositories and other Open Access sources. The materials you’ll find won’t be restricted to a single subject or institution, and it will all be freely available. So, you can use this for research on campus, at home, or after you graduate. http://oaister.worldcat.org/

DOAJ

The Directory of Open Access journals is just what it says it is. Over 5,500 journals are listed in the directory, and over 2,300 of those are searchable at the article level. You can find new, regularly publishing journals for a given subject, or you can find articles by keyword searching. http://www.doaj.org/

HathiTrust

This organization has taken institutional repositories to the next level, combining the efforts of dozens of respected institutions. You can search the full text of articles and books, search rich metadata, or browse the many valuable collections. Not everything in HathiTrust is freely available, but there is a large and growing number of Open Access and public domain works here. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/

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Focus on Muse and other Digital Collections
At the beginning of the Fall 2010 semester, Lovejoy Library is proud to make available to the  university community a number of locally-produced digital resources that document the history of SIUE.  For the first time, scanned copies of the Muse, the original campus  yearbook published between 1961 and 1971, are available online.  These student-created publications provide a wealth of visual images and historical information about the "residence centers" at Alton and East St. Louis and the establishment and opening of the Edwardsville campus in 1965.  The Muse yearbook collection is accessible through the Digital Collections & Exhibits" link on the Lovejoy Library website.

Also available on the Digital Collections & Exhibits link is the Mississippi River Festival site.  A remarkable outdoor performing arts festival uniquely conceived as a partnership between a major American symphony orchestra and a public university, the MRF featured the most gifted classical and popular music performers of the 1960s and 1970s.  This multi-faceted resource includes a historical slide show depicting the evolution of the festival, a virtual museum that provides detailed information about every performance at the MRF between 1969 and 1980, an alphabetical list of all performers, and digitized versions of two MRF promotional motion pictures produced by the university.

More virtual resources are available from the University Archives & Special Collections.  Also accessible on the University Archives website is a virtual exhibit featuring numerous photographs of and historical information about the live SIUE cougar mascots, Chimega and Kyna.

Additionally, the University Archives site features a number of digitized motion pictures created by the university in the 1960s and 1970s.  These promotional films are both informational and retrospectively entertaining.

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Women and Social Movements
In honor of Women's History Month, why not check out Women and Social Movements. A mainstay of women’s history scholarship and teaching in universities worldwide, this online collection is edited by Professors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin of SUNY Binghamton. This extensive collection of primary historic documents, books, images, scholarly essays, teaching tools, and book and Web site reviews documents the history of women’s activism in public life, and is one of the most heavily visited resources for women’s studies and for U.S. history on the Web. Organized around document projects written by leading scholars, the collection is a powerful research and classroom tool designed to help users develop the skills needed to analyze primary documents and conduct research. Document projects are organized around interpretive questions, each with 20-50 primary documents that address the question. Some examples are:

• How Did the Ladies Association of Philadelphia Shape New Forms of Women's Activism
  During the American Revolution, 1780-1781?
• How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves During and After the Civil War, 1863-1891?
• How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?
• How and Why Did the Guerrilla Girls Alter the Art Establishment in New York City, 1985-1995?
• How Have Recent Social Movements Shaped Civil Rights Legislation for Women?  The 1994 Violence Against Women Act.