ARTstor Trial (much more than "Art")

Walker Library has trial access to the ARTstor digital collection until June 10, 2011. ARTstor is a "Digital Library offers more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes." The Subject Guides list major collections in ARTstor for such fields as African and African American Studies, Architecture and the Built Environment, Design, Decorative Arts, Fashion and Costume, the History of Medicine, Medieval Studies, Photography, and Women's Studies.

Database trial: Images of America: A History of American Life in Images and Texts

See the Database Trials page for access to the following databases for a limited time: 

Images of America: A History of American Life in Images and Texts is a unique new resource cultivated from Arcadia Publishing's award-winning series of local history books. At completion, it will include over 1 million historical images and texts, celebrating the places and faces that give America its spirit and life. All of the images and texts have been indexed to provide an unprecedented level of access into the contents, enabling users to explore the depth of a town's history or to compare the histories of various towns, cultures, ethnic groups, architectural features, and more. 

Guide to Reference is a selective guide to the best reference sources, organized by academic discipline. An editorial team of reference librarians and subject experts have selected and annotated some 16,000 entries, both print and web-based, free and subscription.  This subscription database, published by the American Library Association, is updated on an ongoing basis.

, Database Trial: Oxford Bibliographies Online

Trial access to Oxford Bibliographies Online is available to MTSU students and faculty:

http://library.mtsu.edu/userservices/eresources/trials.php 

Students in particular need this type of resource guide more than ever. A small but growing number of fields are covered so far: Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, Buddhism, Classics, Islamic Studies, Philosophy, and Renaissance and Reformation. Each of these broad topics is broken down into subtopics (e.g., Africa and the Atlantic World). This collection of bibliographies has the potential to be an online version of high quality bibliographies like  American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (R 016.9 Am3g, 1995). 

One nice feature of Oxford Bibliographies Online is that every annotated reference to a book includes a link to WorldCat, which in turn indicates which libraries (MTSU and others) own the book.

Century Farms: A Slice Of History, Threatened 

This National Public Radio segment features several of Tennessee's "Century Farms." The Tennessee Century Farms site (MTSU Center for Historic Preservation) includes brief histories of century farms, including the Tennessee farms that are featured in the NPR segment:

Masengill Farm (Sullivan County)

Still Hollow Farm (Greene County)

Database Trials: British Women's Letters & Diaries, Jazz, The Romantic Era,...

See the Database Trials page for access to the following Alexander Street Press collections until August 31.

Jazz Music Library
Jazz Music Library is the largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres. The current release includes 5,040 albums/60,322 tracks and it continues to grow.

Romantic Era Redefined
This collection contains canonical and previously unrecognized writers from Britain, the British Empire, and North America. It currently contains over 90,000 pages.

Alexander Street Literature
A comprehensive, cross-searchable package of collections covering literatures of place, race, and gender. Today, Alexander Street Literature features 8 collections, currently containing over 503,561 pages in the following literature collections: Black Short Fiction and Folklore; Black Women Writers; Caribbean Literature; Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; Latin American Women Writers; Latino Literature; Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; South and Southeast Asian Literature.

British and Irish Women's Letters & Diaries
The immediate experiences of approximately 500 women are revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection now includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years. Each source has been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.

Now Online: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (Newberry Library) presents in maps and text complete data about the creation and all subsequent changes (dated to the day) in the size, shape, and location of every county in the fifty United States and the District of Columbia. It also includes non-county areas, unsuccessful authorizations for new counties, changes in county names and organization, and the temporary attachments of non-county areas and unorganized counties to fully functioning counties.

Researchers can use the Atlas as a resource for seeking records, to interpret and display of county-based historical data (e.g., returns of elections and censuses), or for working on state and local history projects.

New Walker Library Exhibit: Books and Children in the 19th Century

Books and Children in the 19th Century: A small portrait

This exhibit presents books which demonstrate different ways children (and the adults around them) engaged with books in the 19th century. Drop by Special Collections (4th floor, Walker Library) over the summer to view the exhibit.