Monday, November 22, 2010

, Database Trial: Oxford Bibliographies Online


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


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.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Century Farms: A Slice Of History, Threatened

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)



Monday, August 2, 2010

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.

Monday, May 10, 2010

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.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

TSLA's TEVA (Tennessee Virtual Archive) Update

TSLA's redesigned TeVA site now includes 27 digital collections. Six of these collections document various aspects of the Civil War: soldiers, civilian life, maps from the Western Theater, Civil War visual culture, Reconstruction and the African American legacy in Tennessee, and the "Lost Cause" in Southern Memory.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

C-SPAN Archives

C-SPAN Video Library
The C-SPAN Video Library includes over 160,000 hours of coverage of every C-SPAN program since 1987. In addition to C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings, the collection offers video from numerous C-SPAN programs, including America and the Courts, Book TV, Newsmakers, and Washington Journal.