New Resource Trial: Screen Studies

Screen Studies logo

The Library is trialling Screen Studies from Monday 9th October until Friday 8th December.

Screen Studies is a dynamic digital platform designed to support moving-image studies. It offers a broad range of content including books, screenplays, overview articles and learning resources from Bloomsbury, Faber & Faber, the British Film Institute, Focal Press and Auteur (LUP). Screen Studies covers cinema, its history and the surrounding context from 1850 to the present day.

Screen Studies introduction video

Access Screen Studies here by signing-in with your institutional credentials (off-campus) or access the database via Library Search (on-campus).

Please get in touch to let us know your feedback, either by replying below or by contacting us at libliaison@ncl.ac.uk.

Resource Trial: Naxos Library

Naxos Music Library

Calling all music lovers! We are currently trialling six Naxos Library products:

Naxos Music Library is the most comprehensive collection of classical music available online. Currently, it offers over 2,831,415 tracks of fine recorded music.

Naxos Music Library Jazz is a comprehensive collection of Jazz music available online. Over 28,952 albums (272,292 tracks) are available and new albums are added weekly.

A wide range of content, from legendary historical performances to contemporary world music. Recordings of over 32,000 artists are represented.

Naxos Works Database is your trusted resource for information about vocal, chamber and orchestral works. Use the database to find details about composers and their works, instrumentations, durations, publishers and work introductions.

Naxos Video Library is a performing arts video library with over 4362 operas, ballets, documentaries, concerts, masterclasses, competition and musical tour videos as well as footage taken from recording sessions. 

Featuring a comprehensive collection of classic audiobooks and high quality independent publisher productions.

Naxos provide training videos on using the collections on their YouTube channel.

Newcastle University staff and students can access the sign-in information via this Word document. The trial runs until 31st October 2023.

NB Trial now extended to 10th of November.

To help us evaluate it, please email us your feedback, or leave a reply on this blog.

Resource in Focus: OUP Law Trove

An image of the OUP Law Trove logo.

OUP Law Trove has become part of Newcastle Law School life. For any new students joining us this year, what is it? Well, it’s a collection of e-books you will need to support your learning in the core modules of your degree programme.

This Oxford University Press e-book resource contains most of the essential, recommended and background reading titles you will find listed in your Newcastle Law School module handbooks. You can also find these on the Law Library shelves, and having these books available online too can be really convenient to you as a student.

If you’re asking yourself if you need to buy your course texts for 2023/24 then we can’t answer that question for you. The answer really 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? (We’ll answer that for you! We can’t provide a copy of every single book to every single student even if we wanted to.) We do advise you to try OUP Law Trove to 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.

OUP Law Trove is mobile responsive, catering for those students with mobile devices. You can also use a Campus PC, or borrow a laptop from one of the libraries to access this resource.

An image of the OUP Law Trove homepage: https://www.oxfordlawtrove.com/

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

An image showing the Sign in via your Institution login option for OUP Law Trove.

Further guidance on logging in is provided by OUP in this video (1:05 mins):

Searching
From the OUP Law Trove home page you can immediately select to view those titles included in our subscription.

An image of the OUP Law Trove home page, with the option of displaying all books included in Newcastle University's subscription highlighted.

You can search OUP Law Trove by subject by using the browse option from the home page, or search by term for any author, title or keyword.

An image of the OUP Law Trove homepage with the Subject and Search options highlighted.

NB The results retrieved from either search will include all chapters and books related to your subject or search term, in alphabetical order.

Using the options in the left hand menu, you can narrow your choices by searching for a term within your results, by selecting the format of the results you want to see, or the availability (it makes sense to select those that are unlocked or free if you have not selected to view those titles included in our subscription) and updating your search.

An image of the refine or narrow your choices options within OUP Law Trove, i.e. by term, book or chapter, or availability (available or free).

Further guidance on accessing and navigating books within Law Trove is provided by OUP in these videos (2:28 mins and 2:41 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 or Create’ button on the top menu bar and follow the instructions to set up your profile.

An image of the OUP Law Trove homepage with the Personal Profile option highlighted,

Once active you can access your saved content, searches and annotations quickly and easily.

An image of the OUP Law Trove homepage with the Personal Profile option highlighted,

Further information on the benefits of creating and using the Personal Profiles feature is provided by OUP in this video (1:54 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 Newcastle University Campus ID & password to gain access to the materials.

An image of OUP Law Trove which indicates the availability of DOI: links for both books and chapters.

Tips
Search OUP Law Trove directly for your resources if you can. Library Search and your module 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 great employability and 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 Academic Skills Team.

An image of book covers covering employability and academic skills.

Finally, scroll to the bottom of the contents page of a book to see if there are additional resources available:

An image of an example of external/additional resources available on the OUP website.

Further information on the online resources, including multiple choice questions (MCQs), is provided by OUP in this video (1:47 mins):

We think you will find OUP Law Trove 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.

AM Modules – Empire Online and Church Missionary Society Periodicals 1 & 2

After a trial of several AM (Adam Matthews) Collections modules earlier in 2023, the Library has acquired two new resources – Empire Online, and Church Missionary Society Periodicals 1 & 2.

Church Missionary Society Periodicals digitises publications from the CMS, South American Missionary Society and Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, encompassing issues from 1816-2009. Thousands of pages with detailed metadata enable new research opportunities in the fields of missiology and world Christianity, as well as a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounter.

The documents include reports on missionary work, serialised journals and letters, birth, marriage, and death announcements, fiscal reports and reflections on worship, making them an extremely rich source. 

You can access the Church Missionary Society Periodicals 1 & 2 via Library Search here.

Empire Online is an interactive collection of primary source documents sourced from leading archives around the world. Material in the collection spans five centuries, charting the story of the rise and fall of empires; from the explorations of Columbus, Captain Cook, and others, right through to de-colonisation in the second half of the twentieth century and debates over American Imperialism.

The wealth of documents spans five centuries and includes manuscripts, rare printed materials, letterbooks, periodicals, diaries, photographs and more.

Material in Empire Online has been sourced from a wide range of reputable institutions, with a particularly strong core of documents and images from the British Library. However, the focus is not only on the British Empire; there are a number of documents and secondary resources which relate the story of the Empire from the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German points of view, as well as that of indigenous peoples from Africa, India and North America.

You can access the Empire Online database via Library Search here.

For both databases, you could start by heading to the Introduction tab for an overview on the collection, a handy tour of the website and its key features, and information on copyright:

Empire Online Introduction
Empire Online Introduction

The Documents tab allows you to browse through the full range of documents available in the collections, and includes handy filters to narrow your results Document Type (Empire Online only), Library (Empire Online only), Title (CMS Periodicals only), and Issue Date (CMS Periodicals only).

Church Missionary Society Periodicals Documents
Church Missionary Society Periodicals Documents

Additionally, the Advanced Search is available and allows researchers to build more complex searches:

Empire Online Advanced Search
Empire Online Advanced Search

Empire Online offers an option to view the sources in a chronological format, and the CMS Periodicals offers an option to view the sources on a map format:

CMS Periodicals Maps
CMS Periodicals Maps
Empire Online Chronology
Empire Online Chronology

Both databases offer extensive support, search tips and advice under the Help tab.

Please get in touch if you need any more support using the databases, but we hope that they will be of interest to your research!

Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions

In the library we love these short guides from OUP who provide a variety of great concise books on lots of different topics.

We’ve recently updated this collection so it includes to most recent publications from OUP published in 2022 and 2023.

This series offers concise introductions to a diverse range of subjects—from artificial intelligence to folk music to medical ethics—in 35,000 words or less.

Each one of these big little books provides intelligent and serious introductions written by experts who combine facts, analysis, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make even the most challenging topics highly readable.

On our catalogue, Library Search you can search by keywords like in the screenshot below so “very short introduction” and browse through or add in Oxford to add in results for that publisher. Re-sort your results to “newest” if you’d like to browse through the latest ones added to our collection.

Or visit the OUP Very Short Introductions website directly and then filter using the subject categories. OUP have arranged the titles under headings such as Medicine and Health, Arts and Humanities, Law, Social Sciences

if you are accessing off campus then once you’re on the OUP site please click “sign in” (on the left hand menu and select Newcastle University from the list to enter your Campus ID and password.)

Oxford University Press also have a podcast you can subscribe to about titles and topics in this collection.

Free training on Business Resources on Bureau Van Djik products

The University subscribes to a variety of different company databases from Bureau Van Djik such as FAME, Orbis Europe and Orbis Asia Paciific.

The provider is offering some free online training which can booked directly with them. For sessions related to the subscriptions we have the dates are :

Orbis on the 12th of June at 1.30pm (London time) Book here

FAME on the 13th of June at 10am (London Time) Book here

We have additional help materials on our resource guide if you want to learn more about these databases.

Books added to the Library by students in SAPL (Semester Three 2021/22)

Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.

Further information about Recommend a book.

In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 21 requests from 13 students (8 PGR,  1 PGT and 4 UGT) in SAPL totalling just over £1600.

A History of the Middle East (5th edition)

Advancements in the Philosophy of Design

Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural

Colloquial Amharic

Glitterworlds The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing

Global Water Ethics: Towards a Global Ethics Charter

Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism

Heritage, Gentrification and Resistance in the Neoliberal City

Resisting AI An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe

Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in three Great Ancient Cultures

The Architecture of Waste: Design for a Circular Economy

The Dissertation A Guide for Architecture Students

The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941 (Routledge/BIPS Persian Studies Series)

The Planet After Geoengineering

The Transformation of Addis Ababa: A Multiform African City

The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism

Towards a Cultural Political Economy Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy

War Diaries: Design After the Destruction of Art and Architecture

Ways of Walking: Essays

Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis

Books added to the Library by students in GPS (Semester Three 2021/22)

Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.

Further information about Recommend a book.

In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 32 requests from 12 students (11 PGR,  1 PGT and 0 UGT) in GPS totalling just over £2300.

A womanist pastoral theology against intimate and cultural violence

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges

All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work

Being feminist, being christian: Essays from academia

Capital and Ideology

China orders the world : normative soft power and foreign policy

China’s Rise and Rethinking International Relations Theory

China’s War in Korea Strategic Culture and Geopolitics

Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique

Dirty Work: Essential jobs and the hidden toll of inequality

Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1980

Essentials of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Ethical Value Networks in International Trade: social justice, sustainability and provenance in the Global South

Gynecologic Ultrasound, An Issue of Ultrasound Clinics

Home

How China Sees the World Insights From China’s International Relations Scholars

Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Leviathan on a Leash: A Theory of State Responsibility

Race, Culture, and Gender: Black Female Experiences of Violence and Abuse

Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion

Reimagining Theologies of Marriage in Contexts of Domestic Violence: When Salvation Is Survival

Resilient life: the art of living dangerously

Securing the Belt and Road Initiative Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments

Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches

The Disability Bioethics Reader

The Dynamics of Russia’s Geopolitics: Remaking the Global Order

The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality, and Gender

The Populism Interviews: A Dialogue with Leading Experts

The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture, 2022

The Woman’s Bible 

Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939-1945

Resources for English Literature

Philip Robinson Library

We’ve got a wide range of specialist information resources for English literature students. We know it can be rather overwhelming knowing where to start, so this blog post gives you a whistle stop tour of what you can find.

Library Search and your reading lists are great starting points for finding books, journals and other resources for your modules, but we’ve highlighted below some more specialised resources which you’ll want to explore.

Interdisciplinary academic research databases

Interdisciplinary bibliographic databases, such as Scopus or JSTOR are a great starting point after Library Search, as they enable you to discover secondary literature, irrespective of the subject area, and have really helpful features to help you focus your search. This can be useful if your topic covers more than one subject area, or if you’re trying to scope your topic broadly. Content includes journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and reviews.

Specialist English literature research databases

Literature Online (LION) is an indispensable database for researching English literature. It comprises three main sections:

  • literary criticism: search articles from over 400 journals, together with the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
  • primary texts:  350,000 works of poetry, prose and drama from the 8th century to the present
  • reference: encylopedias, topic overviews and author biographies
Screenshot of the Literature Online homepage, showing the basic search options.
LION search screen

You can search all of these information types at once with the All button selected, or focus on a particular section by choosing the appropriate button. 

If you haven’t used LION before, or would like a refresher, a good way to get an insight into the content, and different ways to search, is to try out the sample searches in this LION guide (Links to an external site.).

Film and Television Literature Index

If you’re researching a film or television studies topic, including literary adapations, then you may find Film and Television Literature Index to be useful. It includes articles from academic journals and film magazines, and coverage is focused on film and television theory, writing, production  and reviews.  

Digitised archives

Screen shot of a verse manuscript from Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape.
Romanticism: Life, Literature, Landscape

There is a vast range of digitised literary archives available, and it would be impossible to list every one, but we have picked out some major resources on the English Literature subject guide, in the General literary resources > archives section. These include:

Literary Print Culture

Perdita Manuscripts

Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape

Click on the links above for blog posts giving more information about these fascinating archives.

We also have a fascinating range of historic and contemporary literary archives in our own Special Collections section: please browse the web site by subject to find out more and read here for how to consult items and get further advice.

Literary texts: historic book collections online

Oxford World’s Classics

As well as the many individual literary print and e-books in our collections, we also have access to several major online collections of literary texts from different historical periods, which feature in-depth contextual information, facsimile images of the original texts, and sophisticated search and analytical features.

From Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), we have access to almost every book published in English from the fifteenth to nineteenth century, complemented by other specialist collections, such as Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

ECCO screenshot

Our blog post gives an overview of five of the major collections. You can find all the individual books from these collections on Library Search, but we recommend searching and browsing the databases themselves (for example, EEBO) to get the best searching and viewing experience.

Audiovisual resources: Box of Broadcasts and Drama Online

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) contains over two million programmes from over 75 television and radio channels. Coverage mostly dates from 2007 to the present day.  It’s a great resource for finding literary adaptations on television, film and radio, together with documentaries about writers, and arts review broadcasts. Find out how to get the best out of BoB via our BoB blog post.

Drama Online screenshot

The Library has purchased various collections from the Drama Online database, which comprises the text of over 3,000 plays, from ancient Greek drama to contemporary works, together with contextual works relating to drama theory and practice. We have also recently bought several video collections, featuring films of major theatrical productions from the National Theatre, Globe and Royal Shakespeare Company.

Read more about this exciting platform and the very latest content on our blog post.

English Literature Subject Guide

This posting is just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area. To access them and find out more, visit your Subject Guide and explore the databases and other subject specific resources which we’ve curated for English literature.

There are also subject guides for related subject areas which you may find useful, including English language and linguistics, and Film Studies.

Our Resource Guides point to different types of information, such as newspapers, images and statistics.

Resources for Language and Linguistics

Book and notebook on a desk with a book shelf in the background.

The Library has lots of great collections and resources, so when it comes to finding wider reading for your topic or beginning research for your assignment or dissertation it might all seem a bit overwhelming.  Library Search can be a great place to start looking for information but there are many other resources you might want to try. To help you get the best out of our resources we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful online databases and collections for the study of Language and Linguistics.

Let’s dive in!

Scopus

Scopus is a large, interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature, providing an index of articles, book chapters, conference papers and trade publications. 

One of the main advantages of using Scopus is that it provides a lot of useful information about the articles it indexes. This includes full reference lists for articles and cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research.  You can also set up citation alerts, so you can be informed of new, relevant material automatically.

Video guide to expanding your search results in Scopus.

Scopus includes other smart tools that can help you track and visualise the research in your area, including author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results, a journal analyser, and author identifier tools. You’ll find tutorials and advice on using these features in the Scopus support centre and on their YouTube Channel.

JSTOR

JSTOR provides access to full-text materials including scholarly journals, books and book chapters in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It has basic and advanced search options that allow you to search by topic keyword, author, subject area, title or publisher.

Take a look at our Get more out of JSTOR blog post to find tips for advanced searching on this database.

Screenshot showing the JSTOR homepage

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts is an excellent resource for those interested in the nature and use of language.  The database focuses on academic resources for the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.

LLBA has the added advantage of including a specialised linguistics thesaurus, which you can use in advanced search to refine and focus your search. The thesaurus provides a searchable list of all the subject terms used in the database and highlights links between broader, narrower and related terms, helping you to select all of the keywords relevant to your topic.

Screen shot showing the thesaurus in LLBA.

ProQuest provide a helpful and detailed guide to LLBA which includes search tips for basic and advanced search as well as some sample searches you can work through to familiarise yourself with the database. 

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics is a comprehensive online reference work covering 27 key areas of the field, including Language Learning and Teaching, Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Assessment and Testing, Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Discourse and Technology and Language.  You’ll also find over 200 entries on the philosophy and history of applied linguistics and biographies of key applied linguists.

You can browse the Encyclopedia by topic or look for keywords using simple or advanced searches.

Accents and Dialects

Accents and Dialects is a searchable database of English accent recordings from the British Library Sound Archive.  Recordings include early spoken word snippets from the 1890s onwards, Opie’s collection of children’s songs and games, an evolving English word bank, and a survey of English dialects.  Each recording includes a detailed description, and some include additional linguistic descriptions too.   Most recordings can be downloaded for academic use.

You can browse the database by project, county, or date.  You can also use the search box on the top right of the page to look for specific keywords, including dialects or places.

Screen shot of the Accents and Dialects homepage.

The British Library have also developed an interactive timeline showing the evolution of the English language from the 11th Century to the present day.  This requires Adobe Flash to view.

The Cambridge History of the English Language

The Cambridge History of the English Language is a six-volume work providing an authoritative account of the history of English; from Old English through to modern variations in Britain and overseas. Each volume gives a chronological overview of the data, links to scholarship in the area and considers the impact of current and developing linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data.

You can access volumes individually on Library Search or sign in via institutional login at the link above to browse all volumes together.

Historic Newspapers

The Library provides access to several million digitised pages of historic newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century.  We have all UK broadsheet archives online (e.g. The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph) as well as titles which are strong in arts and culture coverage, such as the Times Literary Supplement.

If you want to search across a range of historic new sources, start with Gale Primary Sources, as this gives access to all our British newspaper archives, except The Guardian and The Observer. Gale also has a useful tool called term frequency that allows you to track the history of particular words and phrases.

Screen shot from Gale showing term frequency for Fake News.

You’ll find an overview of all our News resources on our Newspaper Guide.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

Box of Broadcasts allows you to access TV and radio broadcasts from over 65 channels, including most of the UK’s Freeview network, all BBC TV and radio content from 2007, and several foreign language channels. It’s a great resource for finding documentaries or critical opinions.

You can view archived programmes, create clips and playlists, and see transcripts to help with citation and translation. You can also search other user’s public playlists to see curated lists around topics similar to your own. There are lots of helpful tutorial videos on the BoB website.

Unfortunately, Box of Broadcasts is not available outside the UK.

English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide

This list was just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area, to access these and to find out more visit the English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide and explore the journals, databases and subject specific resources we’ve curated for students interested in this field of study. 

There are also subject guides for specific languages which may be useful for you to explore, including Chinese and Japanese studies, German studies, French studies, Italian studies, and Spanish and Latin American studies.