E-Journals - Inside and Out

Lynn C. Westney

SDI stands for the Selective Dissemination of Information in the field of Library and Information Science. The editor of this column on E-Journals has been a practicing academic reference librarian since 1983. Lynn C. Westney is an Associate Professor and a Reference Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In this column she selectively disseminates international information on the contents of freely accessible (no subscription required), e-journals, e-newsletters, and other e-publications. On occasion, relevant Web sites are included.

The Journal of the Association for History and Computing, JAHC, has as its focus the applications of computer and other electronic technologies into the historical profession which is interdisciplinary in several areas. The applications of new technologies, particularly within academe, have been the focus of research by scholars in many disciplines, especially in all aspects of education, history, library and information science, and philosophy. These applications are interdisciplinary rather than discipline-specific.

Historians must be open and receptive to the ideas presented in other journals and in other fields. Thus, an additional purpose of this column is to present to the readers of JAHC, the issues, controversies, and trends which are impacting interdisciplinary research within history and computing and allied disciplines as evidenced within current electronic publications.

Professor Westney brings to our attention a diversity of global e-publications of interest to historians and scholars from other disciplines by providing a brief descriptive and evaluative annotation of each publication she has chosen for inclusion. Through highlighting individual articles this effort serves as an introductory vehicle for the selective dissemination of information for the members of AAHC, JAHC, and others who visit our Web site.

Commentary and queries concerning this column should be addressed to:

E-Journals and Electronic Publications

Entries are listed in alphabetical order by e-title.

ARCHway http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html

The archaeology journal holdings of over 20 UK university, museum, and private libraries have been united to create one searchable resource. To search across the entire resource, click on the journal locator button. To browse the A-Z list of over 2,000 titles, click on the A-Z list button. Citations to articles and abstracts are provided free of charge, although full-text of the articles is not provided.

Australian Law Librarianhttp://www.allg.asn.au/current_all.htm#current_issue

Vol. 12, No. 3,

Rejoyce Dublin 2004: Revived Copyrights and Public Exhibitions, by Matthew Rimmer.

This article considers the impact of the copyright term extension upon public exhibitions in libraries and cultural institutions focusing upon the legal action taken by the Joyce Estate to prevent the staging of Rejoyce Dublin 2004:, a festival celebrating the centenary of Bloomsday. It evaluates the emergency legislation rushed through by the Irish Parliament, the Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2004 (Ireland) to safeguard the celebrations. Copyright law needs to be revised to promote the interests of libraries and other cultural institutions.

The Blanket: A Journal of Protest and Dissent http://lark.phoblacht.net/index.html

Since Winter 2002 The Blanket has been publishing twice a week as a commitment to freedom of speech. Its purpose is to facilitate analysis, debate and discussion, to resist censorship, and to create the space for a diversity of views. Book reviews, letters, and opinion pieces make up the majority of content. All articles are freely available and downloadable. The entire text of the first issue (Winter 2002) is downloadable in PDF format and is a large file (1.5MB).

D-LIB Magazine

E-Books: Challenges and Opportunities, by John Cox, Deputy Librarian, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.

E-books are commonly perceived as offering great potential for learner support but also as struggling to compete with print due to poor on-screen presentation, restrictive licencing and limited range of titles offered. The experience of a group of Irish university libraries shows that, with the right combination of product and subjects, e-books can thrive among students and faculty, while librarians can create more dynamic, relevant and flexible collections than for print.

The Irish e-books project has yielded encouraging results for academic libraries, at least in technology and business subjects. Where content matches need, e-books can support the academic mission effectively, saving time and adding value as a collective online reference resource rather than a set of individual titles. There is a definite synergy with e-learning. For libraries they require considerable staffing input but open up possibilities for dynamic and cost-effective collection management. New products, technologies and opportunities continue to emerge and the future for e-books looks bright, especially if easier on-screen reading and more flexible, customer-oriented, licencing can be realized.

Irish Architect Magazine

Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy-Section C

The Academy was founded in 1786 to promote the study of Science, Polite Literature and Antiquities. The Proceedings, comprising papers presented to the Academy, are correspondingly divided into three sections, A, B and C. Section C deals with Archaeology Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature and related subjects. Latest issue: Volume 104 (2004). All articles in Proceedings C, , volume 103C, 2003, back to volume 98C, 1998, are available in full text as PDF files.

Richard Bingham, a naval and military commander in Kerry in 1580 and later governor of Connacht 1584-96, was a prime mover in the production of nine Irish regional maps, all based on original observation. Six of these maps survive, depicting, respectively, the Dingle peninsula, most of County Mayo, the routes leading from Ulster to the battlefield of Ardnaree, the town of Galway, the county of Sligo, and finally the whole province of Connacht.

This paper describes in detail and discusses the regional variation of weights and measures of major food commodities (potatoes, oats, oatmeal, wheat, barley, rye, butter and milk) in early nineteenth-century Ireland. It builds upon the exposition by Wakefield and Bourke of weights and measures in Ireland before the Great Famine. New sources examined include estate records, market reports in regional and local newspapers, archives of the Irish Folklore Commission in the Department of Irish Folklore, and Ordnance Survey memoirs. The government's attempts to standardise weights and measures in Ireland are discussed with reference to the wider international movements towards quantitative standardisation.

Searc's Web Guide to Irish Journals

This site links users to specific journals. Although the journals are not freely available online, i.e., without a subscription, users can link to the journals' individual homepages. Contents of current issues are posted and the table of contents of back issues are available for perusal. In effect, this serves as an index to the journals' contents. However, to access the articles, users will have to subscribe to the journals or locate the print versions of the articles in other libraries. As most of these journals are not indexed by the major indexing and abstracting services, this will serve as a partial substitute for identifying published articles about Ireland and the Irish as well as serving as a vehicle for the selective dissemination of information.

Waterford County Library: The River of Knowledge

Anthologia Hibernica

These are extracts of Waterford interest and should be of particular interest to genealogists.

Ardmore Journal

The following are examples of the variety of topics addressed in this journal.

The Wreck Of The Nellie Fleming, by James T. Quain.

Joan Jameson & Norah McGuinness - Two Painters In Ardmore, by Molly Keane.

The Ardmore Regatta, by Siobhan Lincoln.

Journal of the Waterford and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society

Early printing in Waterford, by James Buckley.

Old records of the Corporation of Waterford, by W.A. Sargent.

Waterford, an Account of the taking of, in 1642, by James Buckley.

IRISH NEWSPAPERS

Irish Independent Newspaper Online

Limerick Leader

NEWSHOUND: Links to daily newspaper articles about Northern Ireland

Entries are listed in alphabetical order by e-title.

Entries are listed in alphabetical order by e-title.

Interdisciplinary E-Journals and Electronic Publications

Entries are listed in alphabetical order by e-title.

Ariadne http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/

Ariadne is targeted at information science professionals in academia and interested people in and beyond the higher education community. Its main geographic focus is the UK, but it is widely read internationally. Information service developments and information networking issues worldwide are its major focus. Ariadne is published quarterly by UKOLN at the University of Bath. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/

Outlines the planned changes to the ISBN standard and its impact on the information community and the book trade.

Describes the development of a database of archive, library and museum collections in Bath (UK). The City of Bath is a world heritage site with many rich sources of information relating to cultural, historical and local studies. It is also a respected centre for education with major HE and FE library collections. Participants include the American Museum in Britain, Bath Abbey Archives, Bath Central Public Library, Bath Record Office, City of Bath College, King Edward's School, and The Roman Baths.

Cornucopia is a searchable database of collections held by cultural heritage institutions throughout the UK. It is developed and managed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and was initially established in response to the Government's Treasures in Trust report which called for a way to recognize the richness and diversity of these collections. Describes the latest phase of Cornucopia development and the opportunities this is opening up for the future.

The Cornucopia system is used by another project, Cecilia, a database of over 1,800 collection descriptions of music materials held in some 600 museums, libraries and archives in the UK and Ireland. Cecilia offers an overview of the national music resource enabling all kinds of users to identify, locate and assess materials.

Cornucopia is a fully searchable online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries. It allows those institutions to record and maintain collections descriptions and details in a unique shared national resource. Cornucopia allows the public to browse, collect, and compare information on different objects and collections held cross the country, using a fast and efficient system of categorisation and retrieval. They can save descriptions in a personalised collections repository and print, save, or email information. A Web services search option permits the concurrent search of Cornucopia with Cecilia (an innovative database of music collections) and Google, giving users as comprehensive insight as possible into the collections held across museums, libraries and archives.

D-Lib Magazine is a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues.

Vol 10, No. 12, December 2004

More than 35,000 posters were created as part of the WPA project, but today only approximately 2,000 of that number still exist. The Library of Congress has the largest collection of existing WPA posters. By the People, For the People collection consists of 908 of them. The posters in this collection were created for various government programs, including those related to health and safety, culture, art, theater, music, travel, education, and community activities.

This Web site provides much more than a collection of poster images. It sets the collection within a historical context, describing the purposes, processes, outcomes and legacy of the Federal Arts Project. The Library of Congress collection By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 is located at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/wpahome.html

E-Books: Challenges and Opportunities, by John Cox, Deputy Librarian, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.

E-books are commonly perceived as offering great potential for learner support but also as struggling to compete with print due to poor on-screen presentation, restrictive licencing and limited range of titles offered. The experience of a group of Irish university libraries shows that, with the right combination of product and subjects, e-books can thrive among students and faculty, while librarians can create more dynamic, relevant and flexible collections than for print.

The Irish e-books project has yielded encouraging results for academic libraries, at least in technology and business subjects. Where content matches need, e-books can support the academic mission effectively, saving time and adding value as a collective online reference resource rather than a set of individual titles. There is a definite synergy with e-learning. For libraries they require considerable staffing input but open up possibilities for dynamic and cost-effective collection management. New products, technologies and opportunities continue to emerge, however, and the future for e-books looks bright, especially if easier on-screen reading and more flexible, customer-oriented, licencing can be realized.

Indiana University alumnus, Charles W. Cushman, in began taking black and white photographs when he worked for the Indiana Daily Student newspaper, but his true life's work consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides, dating from 1938, only two years after Kodachrome was introduced, to 1969. A talented amateur photographer, Mr. Cushman's images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The value of Mr. Cushman's remarkable collection is enhanced by his meticulous record keeping; he recorded detailed descriptions for each image in small notebooks and on the cardboard slide mounts.

Vol. 10, No. 9, September 2004

OYEZ provides a wealth of information about the Supreme Court, but arguably its most valuable offering is access to the complete collection of audio files of Supreme Court cases from 1990 to date. OYEZ is an ongoing project that has as its mission "to create a complete and authoritative archive of Supreme Court audio covering the entire span from October 1955 through the most recent release."

http://www.oyez.org

E-STREAMS is a collaborative venture between H. Robert Malinowsky of the University of Illinois at Chicago and YBP Library Services. E-STREAMS is free of charge and is available only in electronic form. Current issues and a full archive of E-STREAMS are maintained on the e-streams.com Web site. http://www.e-streams.com/

The following recent reviews should of interest to historians:

Vol. 7, No. 12, December 2004.

47 Down: The 1922 Argonaut Gold Mine Disaster, by O. Henry Mace. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2004. Review #3790.

This is a suspense-filled account of the 1922 Argonaut Mining disaster, which trapped 47 men below the surface. Mace not only provides a vivid description of the disaster itself, but also provides readers with insight into the mining industry in the 1920s. While Mace provides technical details of the disaster itselfhow it occurred, the various steps taken in the rescue operation and the final outcomehe also provides a portrait of the people involved, such as Ruth Finney, a female journalist who reported on the disaster.

Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn, by Lucio Russo, translated by Silvio Levy. New York, NY: Springer Verlag, 2004. Review #3816.

An excellent translation (from the original 1996 Italian text) refers to the coalescing of centuries of divergent theoretical models and practical technological applications of mathematics, physics, chemistry, optics, engineering, architecture and mechanics during the Hellenistic period of the third and second centuries B.C. Russo opens

Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Robert E. Krebs. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 2004. Review #3817.

The second contribution to Greenwood Press' innovative series, Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions and Discoveries through the Ages, presents unusual material that has often been neglected or omitted in previously published philosophical and historical works dealing with these periods. From the fall of Rome to the Age of Enlightenment (about 500 to 1600 C.E.), a wealth of little known but important facts are presented which characterize and elucidate an epoch lasting well over a century.

Vol. 7, No. 11, November, 2004

Great Plague: The Story of London's Most Deadly Year, by A. Lloyd Moote, Dorothy C. Moote. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Review #3726.

Based on personal accounts found in letters, diaries and parish accounts, the authors provide an engrossing and well-researched account of an important historical event.

Vol. 7, No. 10, October, 2004

U. S. Forest Service: A History, centennial edition by Harold K. Steen, new preface by Harold K. Steen. Seattle, WA: Forest History Society/University of Washington Press, 2004. Review #3618.

Issued to commemorate the centennial of the Forest Service in 2005, this volume is a new edition of this standard history of this agency of the United States government, identical to the first issued in 1976 and subsequently reprinted in 1991 by the University of Washington Press. The years of agency activity between 1976 and the twenty- first century are ably summarized by the original author in the new preface to this edition.

Vol. 7, No. 9, September 2004

Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, by Owen Gingerich. New York, NY: Walker and Co., 2004. Review #3509.

Copernicus was the first scientist to suggest that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe. Owen Gingerich, the Smithsonian professor emeritus of astronomy and the history of science at Harvard, presents the story of how an intensely technical sixteenth-century treatise launched a revolution even more profound than the Reformation and how the extant original copies have evolved into million-dollar cultural icons. Gingerich is the foremost scholar of Copenicus' greatest written work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex.

World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS, by Mary Ellen Snodgrass. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2003. Review #3578.

Material is extracted from both personal and public documents. Sources include personal diaries, summaries of projects from missionary groups and religious houses, city health statistics, and published findings of scientific experimentations and clinical trials. The author also lists electronic databases that are invaluable to world epidemics research.

The text in this encyclopedia is arranged chronologically by either estimated time spans or exact dates of epidemics. An exhaustive index lists names, tribes, historical events, diseases, medicines, etc. and gives dates for each entry. Appendix A provides a table which lists individual diseases, dates and places of early outbreaks of the disease, and the manner of outbreak or spread of the disease. Appendix B lists historical publications of diseases arranged alphabetically by title.

RLG DigiNews http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=12081

RLG DigiNews is a bimonthly Web-based newsletter intended to focus on issues of particular interest and value to managers of digital initiatives with a preservation component; providing filtered guidance and pointers to relevant projects to improve awareness of evolving practices in image conversion and digital preservation; and announcements of publications (in any form) that will help staff attain a deeper understanding of digital issues. Produced by staff in the Department of Research, Cornell University Library, in consultation with RLG, it is published six times a year.

Ephemeral Cities, by Erich Kesse, Digital Library Center, University of Florida

Ephemeral Cities is a historical digital atlas project, currently under construction, using a geographic information system (GIS) as a map interface for access to digital library content and as a tool for understanding local and state history. Based on historic fire insurance maps created by the Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau, the atlas integrates documents, ephemera, maps, museum objects, and photographs to populate a rich, geo-temporal mosaic. Funded in part by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, this prototype project focuses on three key Florida cities: Gainesville in northern Florida, the site of the state's largest university; Tampa in central Florida, the west coast hub of commerce and finance; and Key West in southern Florida, an island rich with Bahamian and Cuban influences. The time span is 18841903.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/toc.htm by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Version 56: 12/24/2004

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB) was first published on October 25, 1996. This selective bibliography presents over 2,275 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet.

The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list—see second URL)

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):

Table of Contents

An article about this bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/bailey.html