Category: Databases

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Resource in focus: ACM Digital Library

ACM Digital Library is a full-text, online collection of all publications by the Association of Computing Machinary, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters and books. Publications run from 1936 to present day, with 2,807,672 publications and 576,689 of these available for download.

Top topics include:

  • Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural language processing.
  • Networks and Communications.
  • Society and the Computing Profession
  • Human Computer Interaction.
  • Data science.
  • Applied computing.
  • Security and Privacy.
  • Hardware, Power and Energy.
  • …plus much more.

Though the topics are primarily computing, it would definetly be a collection worth having a look at if you are in Electrical Engineering or studying/researching an interdiciplinary topic which contained elements of computer science.

ACM have just recently updated it’s interface and search function (thanks goodness!), making it much easier to search and discover a range of invaluable resources.

You can now browse by topic or type (book, journal etc.), search by simple keyword or use its advanced search:

Loving their ‘Search tips’ on the right hand side in Advanced Search – wish all databases had this. Would help us all so much!

So, go and explore ACM – a definite ‘must’ for all Computing students. You can either find the ACM eJournal collection in your Computing Subject Guide (under Journals and Databases/eJournal Collections) or you can search for ‘ACM Digital Library’ in Library Search. Remember, if you find anything that doesn’t have full text, first check Google Scholar, then if still no luck you can request an interlibrary loan. If you need further help with any Computing or Engineering resources, please feel free to make an appointment with your Librarian.

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Resource in focus: Frantext

Frantext is a French language corpus, and a useful research tool for French linguistics.

It contains the full text of 5,400 French language texts, mainly published between the 16th and 21st centuries (though there are some earlier works). 90% of the texts are literary (including novels, poetry and memoirs) with the rest being mainly technical in nature. It aims to represent the diversity of written French, and contains 256 million words.

Once you have accessed Frantext, click on Frantext intégral to access the full corpus, or Frantext démonstration to access a selection of 40 texts and explore how it works.

Menu bar
Top level menu

On the top menu, choose Corpus to view different corpora (for example, Old French) or create your own corpus: intégral will search the entire corpus.

Select Recherche to search for a word, or series of words (note the different search options in the sub-menu):

Recherche sub menu

Select Liste de mots to view or create a word list (for example, days of the week).

For more information about recent enhancements to Frantext, choose nouvelles fonctionalités from the home page.

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Resource in Focus: Passport – looking for market research information

One of the major resources we have for students, researchers and staff within the Business School is Passport. This is particularly good if you’re looking for information on Market Research which can be anything from consumer preferences and buying habits, companies and their products and market share.

We’ve got a great Market Research guide which highlights the different products we have access to. There are also different ways to learn more about the platform such as their help guide.

Screenshot of Market Research webpage

The company who provide Passport, Euromonitor have a great YouTube channel where they upload short videos which covers information on sectors, trends and hot topics. These are created by data analysts who work closely with that sector and collate the data which feature in the reports and charts.

We think this is great way to quickly identify developing markets, flourishing segments and areas for predicted growth and trends. So if you have been asked to pick or research a growth area or identify a gap in the market to launch a new and viable product you might to browse through their channel.

If you click to display by videos and ensure you’ve got them displayed by newest first you’ll see some trends videos so for 2020 so you’ll get a good idea of consumer trends, top cities to watch, industry and economic trends.

Euromonitor have also curated their videos under a section on their channel called “playlists” So if you’ve been asked to look at a specific market you might want to browse through playlists and see what videos they have.

They are short, snappy and give you enough insight which might spark an idea or help you decide on a product or market. Watching the consumer trends video I’ve just learnt that in 2021 we will be seeking more reusable packaging, using social media to be directed to buy products, using multifunctional homes and working from home more and using our mobiles more than ever to navigate our lives.

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Resource in focus: Historic Digimap

Who doesn’t like maps?

Historic Digimap is an online map and data delivery service, available to all staff and students of Newcastle University. It delivers access to historical Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain dating from 1846-1996 across various scales, including 1:25,000 and 1:10,650.

If you are a first time user of Digimap then you will need to complete a brief registration form and agree to the license agreements for each collection, but that takes seconds and then you’re ready to go!

Viewing historic maps (3:36 min)

If you want to ‘roam’ through the ages in an area, then you can use the timeline tool to see how the landscape has developed through the years, or view two maps side-by-side to compare and contrast your findings. Imagine looking at the Newcastle University Campus and seeing what used to be on the site before buildings such as the Henry Daysh Building, Stephenson Building and Philip Robinson Library graced us with their facilities!

Once you have your area of interest, the Roam service will allow you to view, annotate and print the map in PDF format. Data Download will allow you to download OS data for use in GIS/CAD (if you wish!).

The full scope of what Historic Digimap (and the other collections available to you including Ordnance Survey, Geology, Marine, Environment, Aerial, Lidar and Improvement Service) are covered in EDINA’s comprehensive Help service:

(Improvement Services is an organisation dedicated to the improvement of local government services in Scotland. This data collection comprises of 37 local authority datasets, such as planning applications, green belts and school catchment areas. A wealth of information, who’d have thought.)

Go on, give it a try! But please do read EDINA’s Digimap FAQs on what you are permitted to do with the data you use, to ensure you comply with the educational use licence.

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Resource in Focus: Times Literary Supplement Archive

Screenshot of TLS banner

We have access to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) archive from 1902-2014.

The archive brings you the full content of this world-renowned weekly literary and arts publication, dating back to its first issue. For over a century, the TLS has published reviews, features, debates and original works from across the arts world, not to mention its legendary letters page!

Many of the world’s most notable writers and thinkers have contributed to the TLS over the decades, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Noam Chomsky, Virginia Woolf, Bertolt Brecht and Umberto Eco. Until 1974, contributions published in the TLS were often anonymous, but the digital archive now reveals the identity of all contributors.

To find out more about the TLS, click Research Tools to read a selection of essays about different periods of its history.

Menu screenshot

You can browse the TLS by date to find a specific issue, or search in various ways (choose Advanced Search to see all options, including searching by contributor, book title, or document type.)

Additional search features on the home page include Term Frequency, to trace how often a word, phrase or person has featured in the TLS over the years, and Topic Finder, to explore and visualise connections between topics.

Screenshot of topic finder
Topic finder

As the TLS archive is published by the company Gale, you can cross-search it with any of the other Gale archives to which we have access, via Gale Primary Sources.

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Resource in focus: Jacoby Online

Brill’s Jacoby Online is an important resource for Classical Studies and Ancient History. It comprises five separate works, based on the original multi-volume work by the German classicist, Felix Jacoby (1876-1959). The ‘Jacoby’ was a critical edition of over 800 Greek historians whose works had been lost, but were preserved incompletely in fragments. Jacoby collected, annotated and commented on the fragments, but was unable to complete the huge project in his lifetime.

The five components of Jacoby Online are:

  • Felix Jacoby’s original multi-volume work, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker: Parts I-III.
  • Brill’s New Jacoby (BNJ): a revised English edition of the above.
  • Brill’s New Jacoby – Second Edition (BNJ2): a revised and enlarged edition of Brill’s New Jacoby.
  • Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Part IV: Biography and Antiquarian Literature: a continuation of Felix Jacoby’s work, adding many new historians and texts.
  • Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker Part V: Geography (FGrH V), a continuation of Felix Jacoby’s work, adding many new historians and texts.

It includes expert critical commentaries on the texts and fragments, together with brief biographies of all the historians. The project is still ongoing, and Jacoby Online is updated twice a year: the latest updates have added 1.2 million words.

Example entry from Jacoby Online

You can browse each of the five component works by historian name, historian number or publication date, and you can search for words or phrases, or historians. You can search any of the five component works individually, or across all of them at once. Greek original texts and translations are included, and you can search in English or Ancient Greek.

More detailed help is available on the database.

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Resource in focus: Electronic Enlightenment

How did social networking operate before the internet? Explore Electronic Enlightenment to find out!

Electronic Enlightenment is a valuable resource for anybody studying or researching the long eighteenth century. It is an archive of digitised correspondence, comprising nearly 80,000 letters sent between 10,000 individuals, written from the 17th to mid 19th centuries. Its geographic scope covers Europe, the Americas and Asia, and it encompasses a cross-section of society, including philosophers, scholars, shopkeepers, servants and diplomats.

The letters are supplemented with contextual information, including annotations and biographical notes, plus teaching aids such as lesson plans and discussion ideas (choose about ee on the home page). Annual updates ensure the content keeps growing.

You can search or browse Electronic Enlightenment in various ways (e.g. by name, occupation, date or place).

Want to learn more? Choose take a guided tour from the home page to get an overview of content and how to search/browse.

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Drama Online: what’s new?

Photo of a theatre
Image by David Mark from Pixabay

The Library has subscribed to Drama Online for several years.  This resource contains the text of over 2,200 international plays, from ancient to contemporary, together with contextual resources. It’s likely to be of interest to anyone studying literature, languages (ancient to modern), film studies and media.

We’ve recently upgraded our subscription to include the 2018/19 top-ups of the Nick Hern Books collection and the Core Collection (featuring plays published by Bloomsbury and Faber), giving us access to an additional 150 plays.

All the plays are individually catalogued and searchable via Library Search, or you can search/browse them all in various ways on the Drama Online site.

For example, using the options at the top of the screen, you can browse by title, author, genre and time period, or if you click Find Plays on the home page, you can add in other search filters, such as number of roles or scenes. Select Context and Criticism for access to a wide range of e-books about drama.

When viewing a play text, click Play Tools to analyse the speaking parts and appearances of different characters throughout the play.

Finally, follow @dramaonlinelib for news and features about this fantastic resource!

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New resource: Irish Newspaper Archives

Following a successful trial, the Library now has access to the Irish Newspaper Archives: a fascinating resource for any aspect of Irish studies.

It provides access to the archives of national and local Irish newspapers from the 1700s to the present day. Major national titles such as the Irish Examiner, Irish Independent and Sunday Independent are included, together with a wide range of regional titles, such as the Meath Chronicle, Kerryman, Connacht Tribune and Ulster Herald.

The archive is updated daily with the latest editions of current titles, and it also includes significant newspapers which are no longer published, such as the Freeman’s Journal and The Nation.

Title pages of Irish newspapers
A selection of title pages from the archive.

You can search and refine your results in various ways, or choose browse to look through individual newspapers by date. Various save and export options are available, and there are some short help videos on the archive’s home page to give you some tips (note, these don’t have sound). Follow Irish News on Twitter for interesting highlights from the archive.

Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback on the trial.

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Music is forever…

Rock's Backpages logo.

Overdosed on Christmas carols? Or want to know more about the voices behind that ‘Fairytale of New York’ song you’ve heard so much during the last few weeks!? You need Rock’s Backpages.

Rock’s Backpages is an online library of music journalism: 40,000 classic articles and 600 audio interviews pop’s finest writers, spanning over 60 years across all pop genres.

You can read articles on Slade, Bjork, Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Ed Sheeran, Stormzy, our own Maximo Park, Queen, Lamb of God, 50 Cent or 5 Seconds of Summer. Perhaps you are researching jazz, country or folk? There’s something here for you.

Access the Library to easily browse by artist, genre or publication:

An image of the Rock's Backpages Library search screen.

Follow @rocksbackpages on Twitter for news of recently released articles or features on artists and their music, listen to the weekly podcast which highlights the latest additions or sign up to receive their newsletter.

An image of a guitar pick.