Why Should I Go Looking in IRis?

"Tires to Fit," by Flickr user Bob Aubuchon

If I was applying to go to college, and was hearing over and over about how important research is at major universities, I might wonder what exactly that means. Research can be something of an abstraction to a high school student—most of the social and lab science taught in classes is done straight out of textbooks, two or three times removed from the original research that they’re based on. Northeastern has great opportunities for grad and undergrad students to be involved in research, with faculty and independently. IRis contains research done here at NU, and can show a prospective student both what she or he could be working on, and the kinds of research that are being done on campus that make NU unique. For example, I’ve gone through just now and seen a capstone project in mechanical engineering about turning tires into fuel. This seems like a really interesting project: the method is laid out for breaking down old tires, pulverising them into particles, and the economic model for generating fuel this way. IRis is free and open to the public, and is therefore a great way for the university to show off to prospective students. It can also be appealing to new students to see how their work could be published and permanently archived.

Jazz Music Library is a Hot Sensation

The Library has just added Alexander Street Press’ Jazz Music Library collection of 4,974 albums and 60,553 tracks to our media streaming repertoire. Sample its many artists and genres and set up your own play list. Listen to Deval Patrick’s father Pat play sax on “Come Rain or Shine” or hear Ella Fitzgerald sing “720 in the Books.” Enjoy!

New Faculty Author Works

Like many universities, Northeastern has the benefit of having among its faculty a number of published professors. Northeastern University Libraries is celebrating this year’s group of published works with a book cover display on the first floor of Snell. On the reverse of the sign are pamphlets with more information about the authors and books, which we encourage you to pick up and pass on. The hard work that went into these pieces truly deserves our recognition.

New resource, Ageline, fills a niche

Interested in the future of Medicaid? Intergenerational issues? The health and psychology of aging? Newly available from the Libraries is a search tool called Ageline. Ageline is produced by AARP and is now one of the Libraries’ best resources for coverage of social gerontology. Particularly timely at this historic moment– in which we are witnessing the passage of the new Health Care Reform law– it covers public policy and the delivery of health care for the population aged 50+.  A truly interdisciplinary database, it will prove useful to students of psychology, behavioral sciences, human services, geriatric nursing, anthropology, sociology, and business, as well as others. An example of an article I found here (which happened to be full text, thanks to the Libraries’ subscription to the journal Social Science and Medicine) is “The influence of national policy change on subnational policymaking: Medicaid nursing facility reimbursement in the American states.” Those who are interested in Ageline might also want to check out the Geriatrics and Gerontology subject guide and Human Services subject guide. For more information about Ageline and other library resources and how to effectively search and make use of them, please contact a subject librarian or request research assistance.

What Kind of Work is in IRis?

IRis is a digital archive that collects, manages, preserves, and shares the intellectual output and historical record of Northeastern University. It is a service of the University Libraries. To answer the question posed in my post title–one type of work that is in IRis are academic dissertations.  I studied English in college, and it’s still one of my big interests, so I took a look at the English Language and Literature materials that are listed in IRis. Today, I’d like to highlight the dissertation of Nichole DeWall of Northeastern’s English Department. Her 2008 dissertation is entitled ‘A Plague ‘O Both Your Houses’: Shakespeare and Early Modern Plague Writing, and as the title suggests, it concerns itself with the intersection of Shakespeare’s drama with the plague experience in the early modern era, and it particularly focuses on Romeo and Juliet and Coriolanus. Nichole’s dissertation is 205 pages, and as it’s in IRis, it’s indexed by Google, and easily shared with the world.  I really liked her initial list of questions, and I want to quote them here:
Moreover, my inquiry seeks to understand what kind of cultural and psychical work Shakespeare’s plays performed, both for himself and for his audience members. What was it about the plague experience that compelled Shakespeare to return to it in his works, despite how devastating it was to his creative and financial prospects to remind people of the disease? And what compelled his audience members to venture into the playhouses, despite the fact that these sites were thought to be uniquely capable of spreading the plague? How did the plays provide for Shakespeare and his audiences a language to know the unknowable, or communicate the unspeakable? How do we begin to think about literature in a way that recognizes the demands of trauma, yet still preserves, to some extent, the artist’s ability to make actively make aesthetic choices? These questions emerged as the ones most at stake as I moved within this project. In an attempt to understand the scope and nature of this particular traumatic event—the early modern bubonic plague—I worked with a sample of over 300 archival plague texts.”
You can read all of Nichole DeWall’s dissertation here.  After reading, I was a bit curious, and it looks like Nichole, after successfully earning her doctorate, is now an assistant professor of English at McKendree University in Illinois.