UHD Library Blog

Using Library Resources in Blackboard

Hey Faculty!  Looking for ways to spice up your Blackboard content?  Have you thought about adding videos from Films on Demand or American History in Video?  Or maybe sharing a playlist from Music Online?  Did you know the library has over 83,000 E-books that you can share with your classes?  Not sure where to start?  Well check out the Library’s new guides to using library resources in Blackboard!  Blackboard-Database Guides

If you have any questions always feel free to Ask-a-Librarian !

 

 

Harris County Jail Controversy: Information Sources

Conditions at the Harris County Jail have been in the news recently. Here are some quick links to information sources.

The Houston Chronicle article that started it all on February 18, 2007: "Deaths Behind Bars" (This link will only work for current UHD students, faculty, and staff.)

Findings of a Department of Justice Civil Rights Division investigation: "Harris County Jail Findings Letter," June 24, 2009

"Harris County's Response...," August 24, 2009

Houston Press' current investigation: "Jail Hell," September 8, 2009

For continuing news on this topic, UHD folks should search the Library's database of the full text of the Houston Chronicle.

And for a viewpoint on what it's like to teach in the shadow of the jail, take a look at an article by UHD faculty member, Chuck Jackson:

"What Looms: The University, the Jailhouse, and Pedagogy," Pedagogy, Volume 9, Issue 2, Spring 2009, pp. 315-324.

Raw List of Major New Library Online Resources: 2008-09

Hi! This is Pat Ensor, your friendly Library Director. I was just putting together a list of the major new online resources the Library subscribed to in the last year for a report I'm writing, and I was so excited to see it all together that I had to share it. And if I waited till I had a chance to clean it all up, I'd never get to it.

So here it is, and if you're a UHD student, faculty, or staff member, this is all yours.

• Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text 
• Publishing Opportunities Database
  
• Films On Demand 
• American History in Video             
• JSTOR 19^th Century British Pamphlets + 3 JSTOR journal collections 
• GeoRef 
• Social Work Abstracts 
• Periodical Archives Online (backfiles) – 250+ titles, including Harpers 
• Texas Historical Newspapers Archive, 1829-1922 
• Oxford Scholarship Online 
• Wiley and Blackwell journal backfiles 
• American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, part 1     
• Taylor & Francis Social Sciences & Humanities Collection 
• Music Online
• Oxford African American Studies Center 
• Taylor & Francis SS&H - Backfiles 1-Behavioral Science Online Archive 2-Media, Cultural & Communication Studies Archive – 1915-1996 
• PsycBooks
• Biography Resource Center 
• Dictionary of National Biography Online 
• Safari Tech Current & Business Books Current (already had some tech books – expanded that, plus added business and more users) 
• Journal Citation Reports
  
• Proquest Dissertations & Theses 
• Annual Reviews – all subjects, all years, online 
• ABI/Inform 
• Biological Abstracts 
• Art Full Text 
• Environment Complete 
• Newspaper archives for major newspapers in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Hartford, San Francisco, Dallas, Wall Street Journal 
• Pop Culture Universe 
• National Fire Protection Association Codes
  
• Congressional Quarterly Publications
  
• Hoover’s (Companies) 
• FirstResearch (Industries)
  
• Cell Press journals (4)
• International Security & Counterterrorism Reference Center
• ArtSTOR
  

Most of these resources can be found by going to the Library's list of databases. To check and see if we have your favorite journal now, you can check our list of journals.

And we are going to continue adding materials, so suggest purchases for the new school year now.

Faculty Want More Video? UHD Library Has It

A recent study concluded that "The educational use of video on campus is accelerating rapidly in departments across all disciplines," and that "Faculty, librarians, and administrators expect their use of video in education to grow significantly over the next five years." At the same time, legal barriers are impeding this use.

The UHD Library is aware of these issues, and actively seeks out online sources of streaming audio and video to subscribe to. UHD current faculty, students, and staff now have access to several sources of video in a wide variety of disciplines via Library subscriptions.

• Films on Demand covers the humanities, sciences, business, health and social sciences.
• American History in Video has material of interest not only to history, but also sociology, psychology, political science, and more.
• Music Online has almost 5,000 performance videos.

Such resources generally allow you to make playlists and provide access to specific segments of videos, allowing for more convenient uses in online courses.

Their use in online courses is legal since the Library has subscribed to the databases, as long as the usage is for educational purposes via the type of controlled access provided by Blackboard.

And if you need some help with incorporating these and other Library resources into your online course, contact Dauna Campbell, the Online Instruction and Outreach Librarian. She'll be glad to hear from you!

Oxford Scholarship Online Now Available to UHD

The UHD Library now provides access to Oxford Scholarship Online! Currently, OSO includes access to over 2,700 full-text e-books from Oxford University Press. Top areas include Economics and Finance, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Biology, Business and Management, Classical Studies, History, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Mathematics, Music, Neuroscience, Physics, Psychology and Social Work.

Special features include:

• At least 400 books added per year
• Advanced searching of the full text of included books
• Link directly to individual books and chapters

Take a look at a sampling of included books published in 2009.

• Evolutionary Conservation Genetics
• The Molecular Organography of Plants
• Poverty Dynamics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
• Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature
• Take Me Home: Protecting America's Vulnerable Children and Families
• Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918-1978
• Race and the Politics of Solidarity

Oxford Scholarship Online is available to current UHD students, faculty, and staff from anywhere with Web access. Check it out today!

Films on Demand: Digital Educational Video

UHD library users now have instant access to over 5000 streaming educational videos with Films on Demand: Digital Educational Video.

This web-based video delivery system provides a wide range of streaming video titles in four collections: Business and Economics; Health; Humanities and Social Sciences; and Science, from companies such as Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Cambridge Educational, Shopware, Meridian Education, and several major television networks.

With Films on Demand, you can:

• View videos from any computer with a high-speed Internet connection
• Search for videos by keyword, subject, producer, territory, textbook or K-12 standards
• Create a customized playlist with a stable URL for easy sharing
• Incorporate film segments into presentations, lesson plans, etc., etc.

You can find Films on Demand, along with other streaming media resources, on our Audio & Video page.

Periodicals Archive Online

The library has added backfiles of 550 journals from the social sciences and the humanities in Periodicals Archive Online. The collection offers well-known journals in literature, history, philosophy, religion, and Spanish-language scholarship, as well as general-interest magazines. Noteworthy titles include Bentley's Miscellany (1837-1868), the original publisher of novels by Charles Dickens and stories by Edgar Allen Poe; Commentary (1945-2000); Harper's (1850-1995); Sight and Sound (1932-1995); and The Spectator (1828-2000).

Current News Sources on the Iran Election Crisis

Many of the current news stories about the Iran Election situation are about how the mainstream U. S. media are failing in their coverage. If you want to see real-time information from and about Iran, see sources such as:

• Twitterfall -- Choose #iranelection from the left column.


• PicFog -- Choose iranelection from the left column. Warning: Some images are graphic and may be disturbing.

Of course, you can also go straight to Twitter and look for the Trending Topic #iranelection, but registration is required.

Be aware that a hazard of these real-time, non-media sites is the lack of confirmation and verification. For mainstream media sites that seem to be providing more current coverage and are authoritative, see MSNBC and BBC News.

New Journals in Social Sciences & Humanities

This month the library added more than 900 journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities as part of an ongoing initiative to build strong journal collections in all subjects taught at UHD. We expect to purchase more new journals in the fall, so please send us your recommendations.

Here are some of the new journals purchased this month:

• Applied environmental education and communication
• Art book
• Art history
• Behavioral and brain sciences
• China quarterly
• Contemporary sociology
• Ethnohistory
• Howard journal of criminal justice
• Journal of American studies
• Journal of child psychology and psychiatry
• Journal of cognitive neuroscience
• Journal of ethnicity in criminal justice
• Journal of sport & exercise psychology
• New theatre quarterly
• Pacific historical review (older issues coming soon)
• Political communication
• Psychological medicine
• Public historian (older issues coming soon)
• Self and identity
• Sociological forum
• Southern communication journal
• Studies in conflict and terrorism
• Suicide and life-threatening behavior
• Theatre research international
• Totalitarian movements and political religions
• Women's writing

For more journals purchased as part of our journals initiative, please see the Taylor & Francis Humanities & Social Sciences Library, New Journals in Social Work, National Council of Teachers of English Journals, and ScienceDirect Journals & E-Books.

JSTOR - New Journal Collections

The library has just purchased three new journal collections from JSTOR. As with all JSTOR collections, each one provides backfiles of top scholarly journals beginning with the earliest published issue but excluding current issues published in the past 3-5 years. Arts & Sciences V and Arts & Sciences VIhave 240 journals in the humanities and social sciences, with empahsis on art history, business and finance, economics, education, history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, and political science. The Life Sciences collection has 160 journals in biology, health, and general sciences. Journal titles include:

• Africa Today (1954-2003)
• American Philosophical Quarterly (1964-2003)
• Antioch Review (1941-2005)
• Chaucer Review (1966-2003)
• Contemporary European History (1992-2003)
• Early American Literature (1968-2005)
• Environmental History (1966-2005)
• Film History (1987-2003)
• Financial Analysts Journal (1960-2005)
• Financial Management (1972-2005)
• Journal of Advertising (1972-2003)
• Journal of American Ethnic History (1981-2003)
• Journal of Mammology (1919-2003)
• Journal of Parasitology (1914-2005)
• Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (1970-2003)
• Middle East Journal (1947-2005)
• Oikos (1948-2001)
• PALAIOS (1986-2003)
• Plant Cell (1989-2006)
• Policy Sciences (1970-2005)
• Risk Management (1999-2005)
• Journal of Modern Literature (1970-2003)
• Kenyon Review (1939-2005)
• Latin American Literary Review (1972-2005)
• Science Fiction Studies (1973-2005)
• Wildlife Monographs (1958-2006)