Collections

This database is far out! The Sixties now at Snell Library

A030502

Chances are that you, your parents, or your grandparents experienced the 60s. Whether you did or didn’t, The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives: 1960-1974 is a fascinating glimpse into the cultural, political, and social upheavals that shook the nation and the world during that tumultuous period. You’ll enjoy exploring the database’s primary source materials, which include oral histories, diaries, letters, and alternative or underground publications. It’s groovy, man!

Neurology: Now full-text online, 1951-present

We’ve expanded our subscription to the journal Neurology. Accessed nearly 1,000 times by Northeastern users in the past year alone, NU faculty, staff, and students now have full-text online access to all Neurology issues from 1951-present. Neurology is the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The journal aims to advance the field of neurology by presenting new basic and clinical research with emphasis on knowledge that will influence the way neurology is practiced. Neurology content includes:
  • Articles
  • Clinical/Scientific notes
  • Views & Reviews (including Medical Hypothesis papers)
  • Issues of Neurological Practice
  • Historical Neurology
  • NeuroImages
  • Humanities
  • WriteClick® Editor’s Choice
  • Position papers from the American Academy of Neurology
  • Resident and Fellow section
  • Patient Page
  • CME Quizzes
  • Podcasts
  • Supplementary data (including video) for specific articles

BPS Desegregation Project: Commencement

Freedom School The following is a series written by archivists, academics, activists, and educators making available primary source material, providing pedagogical support, and furthering the understanding of Boston Public School’s Desegregation history. View all posts The 2014-2015 school year marked the 40th anniversary of Boston Public School (BPS)’s court-ordered school desegregation.  To commemorate this event, BPS is building a multi-grade curricular unit for students to study the city’s school desegregation and “busing” crisis.  Before this unit was created, students learned about integration efforts only through the case study of Little Rock, AK.  Neglecting to address, understand, and own Boston’s own civil rights struggles perpetuates the notion that the Civil Rights Movement targeted injustice and segregation only in the South, when in truth, Boston’s struggles were equally important and difficult. To assist this effort, Northeastern’s University Archives and Special Collections is coordinating a multi-archive scanning project whose goal is to make available archival material that relates to what how and why busing happened in Boston, as well as the after effects it had on the community.  The goal is to create a digital library of material that can be widely disseminated for both curricular and scholarly use. This effort has been made possible by a gift from the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), whose leadership has been essential to this project. This School Desegregation and ”Busing”  Digital Library is a lightweight, nimble project that attempts to lay the technical and descriptive groundwork for cross-institutional collaboration through the technical infrastructure of the DPLA and Digital Commonwealth.  It also serves as the kernel of what all hope becomes a long-standing collaboration between BPS and local archives.   In an ideal world, all 57,000 BPS students visit an archive during their K-12 years.  Realistically, digitizing this material allows teachers unfettered access to a deep pool of primary source material which can inspire students to learn more about the history of their own city and become emerging leaders. The BLC members initiating this effort are University Archives and Special Collections at UMass Boston, the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections, The State Library of Massachusetts’ Special Collections, and Boston College’s John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections.  Additional archival partners include The Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University and the Boston City Archives. Partner institutions are scanning material that illuminate the complexity of state- and city-wide politics, community activism and advocacy, and all parties’ reactions to national and local legislation.  The time frame covered originates with the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), works through the Civil Rights Act (1964), into and past the Morgan v. Hennigan case (1974), and the resulting citywide unrest.  The collection aims to illustrate the reaction of politicians, school staff and administrators, parents and community members to desegregation by busing. To watch the growing collection of items that is Northeastern’s contribution to this effort, please visit the University’s Digital Repository. — Giordana Mecagni is Head of Special Collections and University Archivist at Northeastern University

Snell Stacks are the Tip of the Iceberg

Have you seen these new signs in the stacks?                         We want to remind the Northeastern community that the most recent material on a topic is likely to be found in the Library’s online collections and not on the shelves. Scan the QR codes on the signs or go directly to Scholar OneSearch to be connected with an extensive online collection. Thousands of electronic books and journals are available to faculty, students and staff. As more and more print information resources move online, Snell Library is able to offer to the Northeastern community a rich array of electronic resources including books, journals, primary source materials, multimedia works, and digitized archival collections. All of these are available on a 24/7 basis from any location, including a growing number of mobile devices, and most offer powerful search functionality and immediate access to the full text. The Library’s focused transition from print to electronic collections supports the Northeastern University Global Network and is discussed in the Collection Development Policy (March 2013), which was approved by the Faculty Senate Committee on Library Policies and Operations. And, speaking of online collections, the Library continues to expand the richness of primary source and other materials available to the Northeastern community. We are pleased to announce the recent availability of the following digital Gale Cengage newspaper collections:
  • 17th – 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757 – 1817) represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media.
  • 19th Century British Newspapers contains full runs of influential national and regional newspapers representing different political and cultural segments of British society.
  • 19th Century U.S. Newspapers provides access to primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.
  • Artemis Primary Sources is an integrated research tool that unifies extensive digital archives (including the collections above, the Illustrated London News Historical Archive [1842-2003], and the Times Digital Archive [1785- 2009]) and enables scholars to make new research connections.
Stay tuned to this blog for more announcements of new digital collections and primary source materials.