What’s New at Schaffer Library

Oxford updates the Dictionary of National Biography with a special focus on gardeners and engineers of everyday life. This update includes entries on 87 men and women who died before 2000, plus 20 New ‘reference groups.’

NEW BIOGRAPHIES
• Gardeners—national profession and pastime
This month brings you 30 biographies of men and women who shaped the history of British gardening.
Many made their name cultivating and promoting now popular plants, including the ‘daffodil king’ Peter Barr and Henry Eckford, ‘father of the sweet pea.’ There’s also Christopher Leyland who gave his name to the rapid-growing, conifer, Leylandii—now a controversial feature of domestic gardens but originally an ideal plant for Leyland’s Northumberland estate.

• Engineers of everyday life
You’ll also find ten inventors and pioneers of modern forms of domestic and public sanitation. Household names include Thomas Twyford and John Shanks, together with George Jennings, whose public conveniences for the Great Exhibition gave rise to the term ’spend a penny.’ They are joined by figures associated with public health, including James Simpson —inventor of water filtration beds—and Jesse Dawes, the pioneer of modern refuse collection and salvage—in which Britain once led the world.

• Preservers of nature
In Darwin’s anniversary year, the Oxford DNB looks at those who enabled flora and fauna to be studied before photography. New subjects include taxidermists Rowland Ward and Walter Potter —creator of anthropomorphic tableaux—and botanical artist, Lilian Snelling.

GROUPS IN HISTORY
As well as biographies, this update adds 20 new groups in Themes.

TOPICAL LIVES FROM THE OXFORD DNB
Further biographies are available in the complete Oxford DNB now available—free, online, and at home—via your public library or daily with our Life of the Day service and bi-monthly podcast.

See May 2009 Update for further details.

From EBSCO:

We are pleased to announce that EBSCO Publishing, in collaboration with the ATLA, has enhanced the Scripture Authority File functionality available on ATLA Religion Database, ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials and ATLASerials Religion Collection via EBSCOhost.

Previously, ATLA Religion Database, ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials and ATLASerials Religion Collection via EBSCOhost included a flat scripture authority file that displayed scripture references in alphabetical order and required users to search for exact scripture references indexed in a given citation.

With the new authority file, users can browse the books of the bible in canonical order and drill down to the chapter, then verse level. Selecting an entry at the book, chapter, or verse level will execute a search for all records indexed with that book, chapter or verse.

With the new scripture authority file, EBSCO has added an expanded scripture reference searching for records indexed with a scripture range.  For example, if a user selects Acts in the new scripture authority and drills down through Chapter 1 and elects to search Verse 5, they will return records indexed with Acts 1:5, as well as records indexed with Acts 1:1-11 or Acts 1:1-15:35.

Check out ATLA Religion Database now.

228 Full-Text Journals
This latest release sees the addition of three new titles to Literature Online’s library of full-text journals; Carlyle Studies Annual, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies and Tolstoy Studies Journal. This release also sees the withdrawal of one full-text journal; Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, at the request of the publishers. The addition of these journals brings the total number of titles up to 243. Further titles will be added in forthcoming releases, increasing still further Literature Online’s coverage of contemporary scholarship in the fields of literary and cultural studies.
See Information Centre: What’s New? for complete update information.

Special Collections in Schaffer Library will be closed beginning June 15, 2009 for renovations to the space to improve the climate control system. 

During the closure we will not be able to retrieve materials or to answer research questions as the collections will be in storage.  A reopening date is not known at this time.  We will notify everyone when we are ready to reopen.

For immediate questions phone (388-6620, 388-6616) or email (specialcollections@union.edu) and we’ll try to help.

One of the library servers is experiencing technical difficulties and is currently off-line.  This will affect the display within the online catalog, access to many of our databases and indexes, as well as to the Union College Postcard Collection.

Try ConnectNY or Worldcat for easy catalog access. You can get call numbers and locate items in Schaffer Library or order material via Interlibrary Loan.

Links to Databases listed under “Any Topic” will work - including EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Wilson, Web of Science, Project Muse, and  JSTOR.

Please see a Reference Librarian for assistance with connecting to other resources. We apologize for this inconvenience and will hopefully be fully operational in a few days.