Tag: History

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Love reading? Browse through BrowZine…

Not sure which journal article you’re looking for? Do it the ‘old school’ way and browse through your favourite journals using BrowZine without having to trek to the library or newsagents to flick through the magazines.

BrowZine is a publisher-neutral reading and discovery platform for eJournals. You can browse complete issues, set up a personal bookshelf of your favourite titles and receive notifications when new issues are released.

Library Search and browsing eJournals via BrowZine

You can do this on your PC via Library Search or perhaps you prefer using your smartphone? Access BrowZine via the University App or download the BrowZine App from the Apple Store or Play Store.

Access BrowZine via the Newcastle University App

Set up your personal account using your University email address and BrowZine will always recognise you as a member of Newcastle University and give you access to the full-text articles it contains.

BrowZine Subject Areas

BrowZine Arts and Humanities

Get browsing!

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Where could maps take you?

Sniffer dog in high vis detecting a gas leak

So when does an Animal Science student need to use EDINA Digimap and GIS software?  The answer is not all do, but you never know where your dissertation project may take you, and what software may help your research or your presentation or visualisation of results.

Grace’s dissertation took her to Sunderland to road test the country’s first gas sniffer dog.  Collaborating with an Earth Science student to help her use the mapping products and with training from the geosciences team in using GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) accurate to 2cm, she plotted the gas leaks and successful finds by her faithful four legged co-worker.  The team demonstrated that a dog’s nose is as good conventional gas detection equipment, and could be very helpful with difficult to trace gas leaks.

Sniffer dog in high vis finds gas leak
Sniffer dog, image used with permission from Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences.
Digimap illustrating gas leaks detected
Map created by student using EDINA Digimap https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/ and used with permission by Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences.

With many thanks to Dr Catherine Douglas, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, for providing this content.

See what is available to you on the Maps Guide and take up opportunities to collaborate or share good practice with other disciplines. You never know where it might lead!

Please note: EDINA Digimap requires registration before use.

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Are you using the best information to make your point?

With the huge volume of information available and the speed with which you can find something on just about any topic with a simple search, it can be difficult to be sure that you are using the best quality information for your task. Your tutors will often give advice such as recommending that you use academic or peer-reviewed journal articles, and it can be tempting to stick to ‘safe’ types of information such as books.

But depending on your assignment topic, you will need to explore a breadth of different information types, including many that will be online. So how do you know which ones to you?

You will need to consider many issues, including authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency and coverage within an information source. This will help you make decisions about the quality of the information, its reliability and what role it could play within your thinking.

You will evaluate information all the time without thinking about it. It doesn’t need to be a conscious or difficult task. Our Six Questions video will help give you some ideas for the types of questions to keep in mind to make your own judgement.

You may also sometimes decide to include a piece of information, even though it may not be from a credible source or its impartiality is questionable, because it illustrates the point you are trying to make. Being aware of your reservations about a reference allows you to be more confident in your judgment.

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New resource in focus: Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (Romantics Poetry)

We have recently added a new module, Romantics Poetry, to our Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) collection.

OSEO enables you to explore old works in new ways. It brings together authoritative editions of major works, so you can explore variations between editions, annotations and extensive notes side by side with the texts, or you can just read the texts on their own.

The new module means we now have access to 272 Oxford editions, containing 344 works, including poetry, prose, drama, essays and correspondence, in the following categories: Romantics Prose; Romantics Poetry; 18th Century Drama; 18th Century Prose.

You can browse by work, edition or author, or search in highly specific ways (e.g. just search within notes or stage directions) to pinpoint exactly what you want. The editions are individually catalogued on Library Search, but we’d recommend searching for works and editions via the OSEO interface itself.

Various export and personalisation options are available.

If you haven’t used OSEO before, we’d strongly recommend watching this introductory video, so you can understand the potential of this resource and how to use it.

Have you used Oxford Scholarly Editions Online? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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New resource in focus: Race Relations in America

Continuing our series of blogposts exploring our brand new humanities e-resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to Race Relations in America. This is a collection of primary source material covering Civil Rights in the USA from 1943-1970.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The sources come from the records of the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries in New Orleans, and comprise many different types of material, including pamphlets, audio recordings, survey data, photographs and speeches. These sources are supplemented by secondary materials such as contextual essays, maps and thematic guides to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search options. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme. If you just want to view images or listen to audio, click the relevant buttons on the top menu.

Have you used Race Relations in America? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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New resource in focus: African American Communities

Continuing our series of blogposts exploring our brand new humanities e-resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to African American Communities. Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and North Carolina, this collection presents multiple aspects of the African American community in the 19th and 20th centuries, through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, correspondence, official records and oral histories.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The primary sources include many different record types, including pamphlets, images (including 360 degree view), official records and oral histories. These sources are supplemented by contextual essays to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search options. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme. If you just want to view images, click Image Gallery.

Have you used African American Communities? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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EndNote

What is EndNote?

The official blurb on EndNote is that it is “…the industry standard software tool for publishing and managing bibliographies, citations and references.”

Have you drifted off yet? Don’t – read on!

EndNote takes a little getting used to and we recommend you familiarise yourself with it at the start of your research process. But as Library Staff, we wouldn’t spend a significant amount of time demonstrating and training our academic staff and students on what EndNote is, and how to use it, if we didn’t think it was valuable. It will save you a huge amount of time in terms of writing up your assignments.

Essentially, you can use EndNote to create and organise a personal library of resources relevant to your research. You can import references from Library Search, and a huge range of databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore and Business Source Complete. You can ask EndNote to locate the full-text PDFs of the resources you are going to use in your research, and you can annotate them as you wish too. Did you know you can instruct Google Scholar to import references into EndNote? No? Try it. Finally, if you already have materials stored in your home folder (H:\) then you can attach them to a manually-created reference within EndNote, bringing all your research together in one place.

In addition to organising your references (and this is the clever bit) you can then get EndNote to ‘talk’ to your word processing software, e.g. Microsoft Word, and insert the citations into your work for you in your chosen referencing style, e.g. Harvard at Newcastle, Vancouver, APA or MLA. If you don’t want to do that, then EndNote will also allow you to create an independent bibliography of your references, saving you an awful lot of typing.

Using EndNote

Intrigued? You should be. Take a look at our EndNote Guide. It contains all the introductory information you need, step-by-step workbooks to train yourself on the use of EndNote (the Desktop and Online versions), videos, useful FAQs, and contacts for help, should you need it.

Finally, Newcastle University provides support for EndNote but it is not compulsory to use. You may prefer Mendeley, Zotero, RefWorks or another piece of bibliographic management software. That’s fine, whatever makes your referencing lives easier. Go on, give them a try.

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When is a website not a website?

A common mistake made in referencing is grouping all sources found online under the category and reference type of a website. Your aim should be to reference the information you have in front of you rather than where it was sourced. Simply grouping items found online as a website would be the equivalent of referencing a book by the publisher details rather than the author and title.

For example, a government publication found online would be referenced like this in Chicago.

United Kingdom. Department for Education. Cloud computing: how schools can move services to the cloud. London: The Stationary Office, 2016. Accessed: February 01, 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cloud-computing-how-schools-can-move-services-to-the-cloud. 

An electronic journal article might appear like this in APA.

Gillum, J. (2012). Dyscalculia: Issues for practice in education psychology.  Educational Psychology in Practice, 28(3), 287-297. doi:10.1080/02667363.2012.684344

While a video posted on the Tate website would look something like this in Harvard.

TateShots (2016) Grayson Perry: think like an artist. Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/grayson-perry-think-artist-tateshots (Accessed: 27 November 2018). 

Identifying the type of information you are using as well as the source, are essential skills of evaluation and developing a critical approach to information. In many cases, you will be unconsciously using your judgment to assess the value of information for your purpose. So when you are using any source of information, ask yourself what it is you are looking at, what details are recorded about it, and whether it measures up as a quality piece of information.

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New resource in focus: Literary Print Culture

A bookbinder’s workshop, with the finished products in a domestic scene over on the right. Date: 1875

Continuing our series of blog posts exploring our brand new resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to Literary Print Culture: the Stationers’ Company Archive. This is one of the most important resources for understanding the workings of the early book trade, the printing and publishing community, the establishment of legal requirements for copyright provisions, and the history of bookbinding. Explore extremely rare documents dating from the 16th to 21st century in this invaluable resource of research material.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The primary sources include many different record types, relating to finance, membership, court, trade and charity. More recent sources include photographs and oral histories. These sources are supplemented by contextual essays and other commentary to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search buttons. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme.

For some of the documents in the archive, you can now use handwritten text recognition to enable you to search the handwritten items effectively. Split screen viewing enables you to view a document and its index simultaneously.

Have you used Literary Print Culture? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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Cambridge Histories Online: what’s new?

We subscribe to Cambridge Histories Online, the internationally renowned book series which first started in 1902.  We have access to over 360 volumes online, covering many different subject areas in depth, including history, music, language and literature.

We have recently bought access to several new volumes (in some cases, multiple volumes) which cover the following topics:

Ireland

Moral Philosophy

Intellectual History of Byzantium

Judaism

Communism

Modernism

Slavery

All the Cambridge Histories are individually catalogued and searchable via Library Search, or if you prefer, you can browse them all together on the Cambridge Histories platform.