Resource in focus: Loeb Classical Library Online

Containing over 520 volumes of Latin and Greek poetry, drama, oratory, history, philosophy and more, the Loeb Classical Library is a key resource for those studying the ancient Greek and Roman world. The side-by-side layout of the ancient text and English translation makes the literature accessible to readers and can be especially helpful to those new to the study of ancient Greek or Latin.

The online Library presents tools that allow readers to explore the texts at various levels, via browsing, searching, annotating, and sharing content. The online works include the same content, page, and volume numbers as their print counterparts so you can easily switch between the two or share ideas related to certain passages or pages.

Loeb volumes

For each volume in the Library, you’ll find an introductory page containing useful information on the author, some details of the Loeb edition, a bibliographic reference for the text as well as a table of contents that you can use to navigate through the online work. You can access this page at any time by clicking on the LCL number located above the right hand page.

Screenshot showing the left and right hand pages from a Loeb edition of Plato's Phaedo.

In the text itself, the left (verso) page contains the original Greek/Latin language, while the right (recto) presents the English translation. Tools along the bottom of the page allow you to hide either the left or right pages as needed. The tool bar also includes options for searching within the work or printing sections of the text. Further options to bookmark pages, highlight and annotate text, and organise or share your annotations with others, are also available in the toolbar but require you to create a free My Loeb account.

Browsing the Library

The browse option allows you to scan the Loeb Library by author name, Greek or Latin works, and Loeb volume number.

When browsing Greek or Latin works, you’re given further filter options so you can narrow your search by author, form (poetry or prose), time period, and genre/subject. These options can be particularly useful if you are interested in certain themes presented in the ancient world across specific time periods.

Screenshot showing the Loeb 'Browse' page for Greek Works.

Searching the Library

The search box at the top right of the page allows you to do a quick search for titles, authors, keywords or phrases.

Alternatively, advanced search allows you to be more specific, searching for terms within introductions, bibliographies, or indexes. You can also limit your search to verso or recto to focus on the Greek/Latin text or the English translations. All search boxes provide you with a Greek keyboard to simplify searching for keywords in the original language.

As within browse, the search results allow you to filter records further by language, author, period, or genre. If you’ve searched for a specific keyword, clicking on ‘Show results within’ allows you to browse instances of the word appearing within a text from the results page.

Screenshot showing the 'Show results within' option in the results page on Loeb.

Find out more

For more help, visit the Using the Library link at the top right of the Loeb Library page. Here you’ll find further advice on using tools within My Loeb, how to search and how to cite volumes from the Library.

You can find out more about key features and take a quick visual tour of the digital Library via the Loeb Classical Library website.

15th February 202127th May 2022

Resource in focus: Bibliography of British and Irish History

The Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) is a database of over 600,000 records about British and Irish history from 55BC to the present day. It indexes publications from the early 1900s to the present, including journal articles, books, book chapters and theses, making it an indispensable resource for finding secondary literature. It’s updated three times a year, and is curated by historians, so it’s a very high quality, well-organised database.

Searching

You can search it in various ways, including by subject, author, place and date. Choose Advanced search to get the full range of options, including browsing a subject ‘tree’ (or index) to help you select appropriate search terms, and broaden or narrow your search.

Finding the full text

Your records will link to the full text article at Newcastle University Library if we have access to it. Just click to display the details of a record, and the full text links will be at the bottom of the record in an external links section.

If we don’t have access to the full text of an article, there won’t be an external links section. Please note that if the item you want is a book or book chapter, BBIH won’t link to it automatically, so you’ll need to search for the book separately in Library Search.

You can export records in various ways to create your own bibliography: just click on Export at the top of the screen to see the options.

Need more help?

BBIH has recently released a really helpful set of short videos and guides, aimed at first and second year students; students doing a dissertation or thesis, and lecturers.

Get the latest news about BBIH, including content updates and features, via its blog.

9th December 202027th May 2022

Watch Christmas Films on Box of Broadcasts

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Everywhere you go
Take a look at the Christmas watch list, there’s plenty to watch, not miss
With Elf, Die Hard, and A Christmas Carol show…

Staff and students of Christmas past have selected some Christmas films to complement the Law in Literature collection. These are films to watch for fun and not with a specific law focus (although Miracle on 34^th Street is there for your courtroom drama fix).

The ‘Law in Literature Newcastle University – Christmas Watch List‘ is available on Box of Broadcasts. Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is a FREE TV, film and radio streaming database that can be accessed through Library Search (University ID required, UK access only). Read more about BoB, including a review of a Law student’s film recommendation.

Take a look at the list of festive films, look at the other Law in Literature playlists, or search for films to complement your studies, and enjoy the well-deserved Christmas break!

21st November 202031st May 2022

Resource in Focus: Fortune Magazine archive

We have recently subscribed to Fortune Magazine Archive – an extensive cover-to-cover collection of the long-running business magazine dating from its very first issue in February 1930 through December 2000.

Subjects Covered in this magazine:

American business
International business
Economics
Industry
Technology

Published monthly by Time Inc., Fortune Magazine sought to provide news and analysis of both American and, later, international business, economics, technology, and industry. Each issue featured vivid color illustrations and photographs, as well as high-quality feature articles, published at a time when most business magazines were merely black and white compendiums of statistics and figures.

Articles and cover pages are fully indexed and advertisements are individually identified, ensuring researchers and readers can quickly and accurately locate the information they seek. Fortune Magazine Archive is valuable to researchers of 20^th-Century current events, politics and culture, as well as those interested in the history of business, advertising, and popular culture.

20th November 202031st May 2022

Get more out of JSTOR!

JSTOR is one of our most popular academic databases, and you may be one of the many people who uses it regularly. It provides access to thousands of journal titles, books and other resources.

We subscribe to many of its collections, giving us access to thousands of journal backruns, spanning many decades and subject areas, together with 6,500 Open Access books (all catalogued on Library Search), and over 1.3 million images, videos and audio files, via Artstor Public Collections.

STOP PRESS! We now have access to an additional 59,000 JSTOR ebooks. Read all about it!

But are you getting the best out of JSTOR? Read on to find some tips and features you might not know about…..

Advanced search

JSTOR is a very large, multidisciplinary database, so a simple keyword search won’t usually be the most effective way to search it. Click on Advanced Search to get more options which will give you better control over your search: for example, just searching in certain fields (e.g. author or abstract) or limiting your search by date, resource type, language or subject area.

Text analyser

This exciting new feature enables you to drag and drop a document, and JSTOR will then process your document’s text to find the most significant topics and recommend other documents within its database. Try it out!

Workspace

Using Workspace, you can save, organise, and share your sources, including non-JSTOR content. You can also add notes and generate citations in many popular formats. You need to create an account on JSTOR in order to use this feature.

Text mining

Data for Research (DfR) provides datasets of JSTOR content for use in research and teaching. Data available through the service include metadata, n-grams, and word counts for most articles and book chapters, and for all research reports and pamphlets. Datasets are produced at no cost to researchers, and may include data for up to 25,000 documents.

Further help

You can get more help with JSTOR by clicking on Support at any time, or visit their specialised library guides for a more in-depth focus on particular topics. For the very latest JSTOR developments, tips and features, follow @jstor on Twitter.

12th November 202031st May 2022

Resource in Focus: Scopus

Have you ever found yourself asking any of the questions below?….

Where can I find relevant, high quality information for my research?
How can I track who has cited an article since it’s publication, as well as looking back on the references it used?
How can I follow an academics work?
Who can I collaborate with in my research?
Which journal should I submit my paper to?
Where can I find information to support my research funding application?

…..If you have, then why not take a look at Scopus and use it as your starting point? You can access it through Library Search or through your subject guide in the ‘Journals and Databases’ section.

Whatever subject you are studying, Scopus is one of the databases that you need to get to know. It is a large multi-disciplinary abstract and citation database of peer reviewed literature. It contains over 69 million records, including journal articles (from 22,000 titles), conference papers, books (20,000 new book details added every year) and book chapters. However, it doesn’t just have a list of results for you to wade through, but it has a series of smart tools which help you track and visualise the research as well. You can search for documents, sources, authors and institutions and compare and contrast them using a variety of different tools.

If you are wondering if Scopus is for you, then check out the video below. And if you are already a user of Scopus, then why not listen to one of their webinars to get the best out of the resource or check out the Scopus blog for tips and tricks. Happy exploring!

https://youtu.be/-VE3ADZvoUY

See Scopus basic search in action.

https://youtu.be/qCu-obYMFsE

Scopus is an excellent resource to use to help you expand your search by focusing on specific authors and cited reference searching.

30th October 202027th May 2022

Digital Scholar Lab: find out more, and book your training slot

The Library has purchased Gale’s Digital Scholar Lab: a digital humanities platform with potential uses for students, researchers and module leaders, whatever your previous experience. It enables you to:

create and clean customised content sets, using our Gale Primary Sources collections (which include a wide range of historic newspaper, periodical and book archives)
analyse and interrogate the data, using the Lab’s text analysis and visualisation tools
manage and share content sets with others.

For those who regularly use digital techniques or methods, you can use the Lab to dramatically reduce the time needed to compile, curate and clean datasets, either using Gale data or locally held data, which can be uploaded into the Lab.

For those interested in teaching using the Lab, it contains a comprehensive Learning Centre that you can use to introduce students to basic and advanced concepts, with worked examples that can form the basis of a lesson plan.

Finally, for those new to digital humanities, and intimidated by thoughts of coding, the Lab provides a way to produce sophisticated, analytical research that requires no coding skill and allows you to make discoveries in archives that would otherwise be impossible.

To help you find out more about Digital Scholar Lab, representatives from Gale will be running two online training sessions for Newcastle University staff and students via Zoom on:

Monday November 16th, 14.00-15.30 and repeated on
Thursday November 19th, 10.00-11.30

The session will introduce you to Digital Scholar Lab, and its interface and workflows. It will cover text mining in general, search queries, curating and managing datasets, using analysis tools, and reviewing results. There will be plenty of opportunities for questions.

Any Newcastle University staff and students are welcome: you don’t need any previous knowledge of Digital Scholar Lab. However, if you have previously used Digital Scholar Lab, you may also find the session useful as a refresher, and to find out about recent enhancements.

To book your place on one of the sessions, please fill in our booking form.

If you are interested in more bespoke training (for example, for a specific cohort of students, or at a more advanced level), please contact Lucy Keating, and we’ll discuss with Gale representatives.

29th October 202031st May 2022

British Online Archives: new collections now available

The Library has purchased access to several new collections in the British Online Archives series:

BBC Handbooks, Annual Reports and Accounts, 1927-2002

This collection contains handbooks, annual reports and accounts published by the BBC between 1927 and 2002. It also includes a review of each year’s public service broadcasting, with detailed schedules, audience research, performance and objective tables, commentaries, and editorials. A great opportunity to examine the social and cultural forces that shaped Britain in the 20^th century.

British Officers’ Diaries from World War One

These diaries reveal what life was like for the average British soldier in the Battle of the Somme and later battles of Ypres. The battles of Loos, Arras, Vimy Ridge, and Bethune are also covered. The letters home will have been censored by the army: how much was removed depended on the censor. Tactical information and details of military training often remain, as the main concern was morale.

British Union of Fascists: Newspapers and Secret Files 1933-1951

This collection charts the rise and fall of fascism in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, with a particular focus on Oswald Mosley’s blackshirt movement.

The bulk of the documents are official BUF publications, including Fascist Week¸ The Blackshirt, The East London Pioneer, and Action. In addition, there are hundreds of Government documents relating to Mosley’s internment during the Second World War, including Cabinet Office, Home Office and Prime Ministerial papers.

Paris Peace Conference and Beyond, 1919-1939

This collection contains archival material relating to this tumultuous period in European and world history. The documents cover the treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon, Sèvres, Lausanne, and Locarno, as well as the foundation of the League of Nations. Most of the files are drawn from the UK National Archives, while the British Library provided the personal papers of Lord Robert Cecil and Sir Arthur Balfour.

These new resources add to the Parliamentary Labour Party Papers 1968-1994 collection, which we had previously purchased.

6th October 202031st May 2022

Resource in focus: OUP Law Trove

This Oxford University Press resource contains most of the essential, recommended and background reading titles you would normally find listed in your Newcastle Law School module handbooks and on the Law Library shelves.

If you’re asking if you need to buy your course texts for 2020/21 then we can’t answer that question for you, as the answer depends on you. Ask yourself: can you work with e-books? Do you prefer to have your own copy of a book so you can fold pages, write notes in the margins or use a highlighter to annotate the text (*librarians across the world gasp in horror!*). Can the University Library provide a copy of the book you need to use via the Click+Collect service? We certainly can’t provide a copy of every book to every single student even when we want to. We do advise you to try OUP Law Trove and see how easy it is to access, and how versatile it can be (including annotating the text!). It may just save you spending money on books where you don’t need to.

Read on, or you can take a tour of the resource before diving in. OUP have released a YouTube playlist for you to watch to make the most of OUP Law Trove too.

An image of the OUP Law Trove home screen.

Logging in
You can access OUP Law Trove directly via Library Search (log in with your Campus ID and password), via your Reading Lists in your Canvas modules, and directly too. You can go to OUP Law Trove and use the ‘Sign in via your institution’ option in the left-hand login box on the homepage, and follow the instructions.

An image of the direct sign-in option on OUP Law Trove's homescreen,

Further guidance on logging in is provided by OUP in this video (1:26 mins):

Searching
You can search OUP Law Trove by author, title or keyword. You can narrow your search to those titles available to us alone by selecting Show titles in my subscription (left-hand menu). Select those that are unlocked or free.

You can further narrow your results by refining by subject using the options available in the left-hand menu.

A screenshot showing a composite of different search types in OUP Law Trove.

Further guidance on navigating and searching is provided by OUP in this video (2:55 mins):

Personalisation
You can create a Personal Profile to experience the full functionality of OUP Law Trove, including bookmarking and annotating (without writing on your books!). Click the ‘Sign in’ button on the top menu bar and follow the instructions.

Further information on the benefits of creating and using the Personal Profiles features is provided by OUP in this video (0:58 mins):

Reading Lists and Handouts
You may find your module teaching staff are using the DOI: for a specific book or chapter from your Reading List or module handout. What’s a DOI? A Digital Object Identifier. It’s a ‘permalink’ (permanent link) to the specific materials you need to read and looks like a weblink (which it is, essentially). If it doesn’t directly link to OUP Law Trove then add https://dx.doi.org/ to create the full DOI link. You will still be asked to login using your Campus ID & password to gain access to the materials.

An image showing the DOI for a Law Trove book and book chapter.

Tips
Search OUP Law Trove directly for your resources if you can. Library Search and your Reading Lists are linking to most of the books, and some of the chapters available, but not all. You may find more resources by performing a keyword search; the results could show a useful chapter in another book that you would never have thought to search in.

You have access to some good study skills information in OUP Law Trove too. Whether you are wondering what academic writing actually is, how to write a case note, how to prepare for a moot or dealing with an exam, there are materials in Trove to assist you alongside the Academic Skills Kit made available to you by the University, the University Library and the Writing Development Centre.

Further information on the online resources, including MCQs, is provided by OUP in this video (2:12 mins):

We think you will find this resource very useful in supporting your studies at Newcastle Law School. If you have any feedback or questions, please leave a comment or contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk.

17th August 202031st May 2022

New resource: Westlaw Edge UK

Westlaw Edge UK. Is this a new resource? Possibly not by definition, but it is most certainly a significant enhancement within the existing Westlaw UK service.

https://youtu.be/K2hiP_AsLag

Westlaw Edge UK (not to be confused with the Microsoft Edge browser) is available via the Law Subject Guide and Library Search within Westlaw UK. Once logged in with your Newcastle University Campus ID and password you will find the tools available to help you keep currently aware and able to anticipate change – skills which are incredibly important to develop as a law student to be carried into your legal career.

These tools include:

An image showing the Westlaw Edge UK tools to enable current awareness.

With inclusion of an interactive precedent map within Case Analytics to easily locate relevant cases…

An image of the precedent map associated with Donoghue v Stevenson (snail in a bottle case).

…and the UK-EU Divergence Tracker to assist with analysing the legal implications of Brexit, it’s even easier to carry out effective and efficient legal research.

https://youtu.be/RIo7_d54VDY

You can go beyond search results lists with AI-suggested relevant research and resources tailored to your needs. Skynet hasn’t got a look in. Go on, don’t be slow. Lose yourself in Westlaw Edge UK and get ahead.

A photo of a snail in a glass bottle. Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash.