Library News

NU Professor Highlights Latin American Jewish Art and Poetry

Northeastern Spanish and Latin American literature professor Stephen Sadow worked with his Argentinian colleagues to create a collection of fourteen “artist’s books” that feature poems and artwork of the Jewish communities in Latin America. Sadow selected 14 poems, and then assigned each one to a Jewish artist from Latin America. The artists were asked to create a unique piece of artwork to match their interpretation of the poem they were assigned. The poems focus on a range of themes: Jewish identity, mysticism, Old Testament themes, the Holocaust, and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community in Argentina, among others. In addition to this poetry compilation, Sadow also recently completed an “open source” anthology that features the work of 13 Latin American Jewish poets from the 1960s to the present. This anthology, and many of his other works, can be found in IRis, Northeastern University Libraries’ digital archive! For more information read the recent NU News article on Professor Sadow’s work.

RSS Feed Available for NU-Authored Articles

I’ve created an RSS feed for anyone who would like to be alerted when new scholarly articles are published by NU-affiliated authors. It pulls information from Web of Science, which includes not only the Science Citation Index but also the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. In total, Web of Science indexes over 10,000 journals, including open-access titles. For current NU faculty, students, and staff: Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice. ⇒ Using this version of the feed will allow you to click through to view more details about an article within Web of Science even if you’re off-campus. (You’ll be prompted to enter your myNEU username and password from off campus.) For alumni and members of the public: Click here to add the feed to your RSS reader of choice. ⇒ This feed still provides complete bibliographic citations for new articles, but if you’re off-campus, you will be unable to access further information, such as the abstracts, via Web of Science. Note: Google Chrome requires a plugin/extension in order to handle RSS feeds correctly, however, Internet Explorer and Firefox are two browsers that work well. Please let me know if you have any difficulties with this feed.

LibX Available for Firefox 5.0

Once again, Firefox has been updated, and Northeastern’s LibX for the library, the browser plugin that lets you drag and drop searches, right-click to log in to an ejournal, and find citations in our collections, is now compatible with it. If you haven’t upgraded to Firefox 5, your upgrade should automatically include the new LibX edition for Northeastern. If you’ve already upgraded and you don’t have the plugin, go to our LibX page to get links and information to install the latest edition. If you don’t know what Northeastern’s LibX plugin is, or what it can do, see our earlier post with information and examples.

Snell Leaders at New Orleans ALA Conference

We at Snell would like to wish our fellow staff members good luck as they head to the 2011 American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans this week. The conference will begin today and be held through June 28th and is one of the largest events for the library community. More than 25,000 librarians, educators, authors, publishers, literacy experts, illustrators and the leading suppliers to the market attend to discuss ways to improve the libraries. Maria Carpenter, Director of Advancement and Marketing at NU Libraries, will present on a fundraising toolkit for librarians she co-developed to help library staff and supporters understand how annual funds, special gifts (such as memorials and tributes), major gifts, and planned giving work. Maria is also an author of Diversity Standards: Cultural Competency for Academic Libraries, a standards and guidelines document for the Association of College & Research Libraries which will be introduced at the conference. Also from Snell Library, Amanda Rust and Annie DeVane will present a poster on their recent research for the Library’s new Drupal-based website. The aim of the survey was to determine what sort of staffing would be necessary for a large, heavily-customized Drupal Web site, and the results, therefore, give a brief overview of the current citizens of the Drupal library community. Karen Merguerian and Diann Smothers were also co-authors on this poster. You can view the poster and full survey results here: http://www.lib.neu.edu/ALADrupalPoster2011/ For more information on the ALA conference that will take place this coming week, check out the website http://www.alaannual.org/content/conference-overview

Introducing Mideastwire

Mideastwire provides daily English-language summaries of key political, cultural, economic, and opinion pieces produced by the media in 22 Arab countries, Iran, and the Arab Diaspora. Although this resource is particularly relevant for faculty and students in Political Science, International Affairs, Journalism, and International Business, it will be of interest to anyone following current developments in the Middle East and Arab world. Automatic delivery of a daily briefing is available through RSS feed or e-mail. To enable e-mail delivery of the daily briefing, send a blank e-mail message to info@mideastwire.com. Please note that there are currently some difficulties with delivery to Gmail accounts; Gmail users, please see the following FAQ: http://0-www.mideastwire.com.ilsprod.lib.neu.edu/faq.php. A link to RSS feeds is available on the home page of Mideastwire. Additional features include:
  • Links from each translated article to the original news piece which offers users the look and feel of the original news source. Additionally, readers fluent in the language of publication may view the original.
  • Five year archive for issue tracking.
  • Basic and advanced searching of the article archive.
  • Access to the Mideastwire blog.
  • Links to related websites.
  • Alumni access.
Mideastwire enhances international news coverage already provided through other library resources, including EIU.com, Press Display, Access World News, and Lexis/Nexis Academic.