Collection News, June-July 2008

• Scitopia: Search Across the Sciences
• Mintel: Marketing Data Galore
• Art and Music Online
• History Databases Move to Ebsco
• Sample Civil War Databases

 

Scitopia is a new search engine that retrieves scientific and technical publications such as journal articles, technical reports, conference proceedings, government documents, and patents from a variety of publishers. Scitopia is a joint effort of 15 scholarly societies, including:

• Acoustical Society of America
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Institute of Physics
• American Physical Society
• American Society of Civil Engineers
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• American Vacuum Society
• The Electrochemical Society
• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Institute of Physics Publishing
• Optical Society of America
• Professional Engineering Publishing
• The Royal Society
• Society of Automotive Engineers
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
• SPIE

Scitopia currently indexes more than 3 million documents published over a 150-year period.

Scitopia is a developing resource that offers limited tools for managing citations or alerts. There is some overlap between Google Scholar and Scitopia and users of Scitopia will miss citations from ACS (the American Chemical Society) and other important sci-tech publishers who are not participating at this time. However, Scitopia provides a clean and easy-to-use interface and even sorts results into groups for articles, government documents, and patents. Try it out and send in your feedback; you can help develop this intriguing new tool.

 

The Libraries have recently added a subscription to the Mintel Reports Academic Edition. Mintel is an industry leader in providing detailed market intelligence reports on consumer products and attitudes, technology, and services. Now, University of Arkansas students can access the same comprehensive analysis used by marketing staff in top corporations worldwide.

Mintel provides detailed reports on marketing, advertising, product category trends, and consumer attitudes, as well as financial and company data, including recent mergers and acquisitions. Many reports from this London-based firm are for UK data; the following categories are covered for US markets:

• beauty and personal
• drink
• technology
• food and foodservice
• health and wellbeing
• household
• lifestyles
• apparel
• travel

Each user must create a personal login and password; once your personal account has been created, you can develop a custom home page with reports and news on your market areas of interest. A special "Hot Topics" section covers the lifestyle beat with frequently-updated articles on fads and fashions.

Whether you need market data on sunless tanners, trends in adventure tourism, or the health benefits of tango...Mintel can help!

This month, the trusty Grove Dictionaries have found themselves spiffy new digs on revamped and expanded Web sites.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is now part of Oxford Music Online, a gateway to several different music reference sources including:

• The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th Edition
• New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 2nd edition
• New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition
• The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd edition
• The Oxford Companion to Music, rev. edition

The Grove Dictionary of Art has become the core of Oxford Art Online, a reference portal for art, architecture, and design that includes:

• The Oxford Companion to Western Art, 2001
• Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 1998
• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, 2003

Both sites offer many new features, including:

• thousands of illustrations
• timelines
• thematic guides
• citation tools for generating citations in MLA, APA, and other formats, as well a a mechanism to export citations to RefWorks personal bibliographic management software

Oxford Music Online has special features such as more than 500 audio clips, links to the Classical Music Library and RILM databases, and external links to the Dictionary of National Biography and American National Biography. Oxford Art Online offers more than 5500 illustrations, architectural and site plans, photographs and portraits.

Jump in and explore these new portals for art and music; they each yield hours of fund just browsing from entry to entry. Betcha can't look up just one.

May must be moving month since the ABC Clio databases, Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life have also packed up their bags and moved to the popular Ebsco platform.

America: History and Life indexes and abstracts articles, books, book reviews, and dissertations on U.S.and Canadian history while Historical Abstracts covers world history outside the U.S. from 1450 to the present. The databases offer several unique features for historians, including the ability to limit by time period or decade covered and detailed abstracts that often describe the nature and extent of source materials used.

On the Ebsco platform, these two databases can be searched simultaneously (perfect for foreign relations topics) as well as together with other Ebsco databases such as the MLA International Bibliography (literature and folklore topics) and Academic Search Premier (multidisciplinary coverage). Users will also enjoy the quick links to available full-text articles in other Ebsco sources.

 

 

Alexander Street Press has made its suite of Civil War databases freely available until June 30th.

This large collection of source documents and images includes:

 

 

 

 

• Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines: Important and Rare Periodicals from Confederate, Union, Abolitionist, and British Presses
  • 65,000 pages drawn from 49 periodicals, including 15 campaign newspapers, most of them illustrated—3,720 issues published from 1860 to 1865. 
    
    
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
  • ore than 400 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs, to provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war. Includes 100,000 pages of re-keyed and indexed text, including 4,000 facsimile pages of previously unpublished manuscript material.
    
    
• The American Civil War Research Database
  • indexed, searchable information on 4.3 million soldiers and thousands of battles, together with 16,000 photographs. It contains all of the more than 4,600 known regimental rosters, 3,461 regimental chronicles, and 1,010 officer profiles.
    
    
• Images of the American Civil War: Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera
  • 70,000 contemporaneous photographs, including nearly 30,000 wartime recruiting posters, envelopes, and ephemera.

 

Alexander Street Press offers a number of unique databases of texts and images which have been indexed beyond the usual author and title for criteria such as place, thematic concepts, characters in fiction and film, ethnic group, type of interchange, and even natural phenomena. Some Alexander Street databases owned by the Libraries include Black Thought and Culture, Early Encounters in North America, and American Film Scripts Online.