Healey Keynotes

Explore the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Healey Library’s newest database, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB), will be a big plus for all who seek biographical information about noteworthy people who are in some way related to the British Isles. These may be people born there, people who moved there, as well as people from former British territories. The Oxford DNB includes not only the expected kings and queens but also poet laureates, Nobel prize winners, important military figures, musicians, artists and the list goes on.  It even includes an entry on the Piltdown Man (supp. fl. 4 million BC), an archaeological hoax. The biographies are substantial and well researched. Many of the biographies include a painting or photograph of the person. No living people are included in the Oxford DNB. 

Looking for 19^th century artists? Women politicians? You can also use the Oxford DNB to help you find people.  You can search by specific criteria such as sex and field of interest.  You can also search by broad themes such as Armed Forces, Arts and Culture, and Politics: British Isles. Or you can choose to browse the Oxford DNB alphabetically, by birth date order or by death date order.

You will find the Oxford DNB an extremely interesting, rich and powerful resource.

Confucius Collection

As part of the Confucius Institute at UMB, the Healey Library has received a new collection of Chinese books. The Confucius Collection will be housed in the Curriculum Resource Center on 5th floor. The books are available for the entire university community and will be primarily used for Chinese language instruction in summer institutes.

The Confucius Institute was founded here in November of 2006 in cooperation with the China's Ministry of Education. It's mission is to "promote understanding of Chinese language and culture in the communities served by the University." UMass Boston is the 7th Confucius Institute in the country and the first in New England. For more information about the establishment of the Institute, see the UMB press release.

Million Book Digital Library surpasses its goal!

Carnegie Mellon University announced that the Million Book Project has over 1.5 million books. The digital library includes books from at least 20 different languages. In fact, there are more books in Chinese than in English.  It also contains rare books and books dating back to 1000 AD. See the project's progress report for more details.

Press release excerpt:

PITTSBURGH— The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books, which range from Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “The Analects of Confucius,” are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon’s dean of libraries.

“Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library,” said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. “This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling,” said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

For more on digital books and libraries, check out the New Yorker article, Future Reading.

Would you curl up with a Kindle?

As the days grow shorter and the weather colder, I like nothing more than to retreat indoors, drink hot chocolate and curl up with a good book. Now there a device which may change the way we read. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, developed a new electronic book. The Kindle has been in the works for three years and was recently released to the public. It costs $399 and is being touted as the ipod for books. Amazon has over 90,000 downloadable titles for $9.99, as well as newspaper subscriptions. There is plenty of hype about the Kindle, including a cover story in Newsweek. However, will it live up to the expectations? And more importantly, can you curl up with it? 

More books online

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC), of which the UMass Boston is a member, will partner with Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a digital library of its members’ materials. According the BLC press release, “The Consortium will offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of public domain materials. Using Internet Archive technology, books from all 19 libraries will be scanned at a cost of just 10 cents per page.” OCA was created to provide public access to a digital collection of the world’s knowledge and the BLC is their first large-scale consortium partner.

In related news, the New York Times reports on the freedom of access to digital collections. See "Libraries shun deals to place books on web".

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year and the Healey Library has over 40 of her books, including:

African Laughter : four visits to Zimbabwe

The Golden Notebook

The Grass is Singing

For a complete list of her books available through the library, look at the Healey catalog.

Read more about Doris Lessing at http://www.dorislessing.org/
Read more about the other Nobel Prize winners at  http://nobelprize.org

Book Launch Celebration

The Friends of the Healey Library and the Joiner Center for the Study of War & Social Consequences are sponsoring a celebration of the publication of the Hanoi Journal, 1967 by Carol McEldowney.  The original journal is in the collection of the Archives and Special Collections Department. Historian Suzanne McCormack and Archivist Elizabeth Mock co-edited the book which is published by the UMass Press.  The book launch celebration will be on October 24^th from 4:00-6:00 on the 5th floor of the library. Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Additionally, the Archives has also created a display on the Hanoi Journal in the lobby of the department with numerous photographs of Carol McEldowney's trip to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War.

These books are never overdue!

The Healey Library has over 25,000 eBooks available through the catalog. Search the catalog and access books through our eBook subscription services as well as individual titles. Some examples of the titles available are:

Advanced Nursing Skills: Principals and Practice written by Molly Courtenay.
from NetLibrary

In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disastersing written by Merrill R. Chapman . 
from books 24x7

Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee.
from Cambridge Collections Online

VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever edited by Jim Craddock.
from Gale Virtual Reference Library

In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean written by Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean
from eBrary

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus by the editors of American heritage dictionary.
from xreferplus

Other sources of free eBooks include:

Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.

Catalog your own books

Cataloging has long been the exclusive realm of librarians, but now LibraryThing has made it easy for anyone to do. Signup for free and you can catalog your own books through Library of Congress or from 78 different libraries from around the world. While cataloging may only appeal to individuals with a library fetish, LibraryThing has many other options. Users can create book lists to share with friends or other users, rate books, write reviews and of course, tag books. The site offers recommendations based on the books on your list and an “UnSuggester” which lists books that won’t interest you. Check out the books I recommended in my last post on the Healey Library page. 

LibraryThing also has links to several book swapping sites and text box for saving BookCrossing numbers. If you haven’t heard of BookCrossing, it is another great site for sharing books. It is defined as “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.” The web site tracts where the books have traveled and readers can add comments.

What's new at the Healey Library?

The Healey Library receives hundreds of new books a month and maintains a searchable list of all new materials. The list below is a small sample of new books and other items recently added to the library's catalog. 

Cluster, D., & Hernandez, R. (2007). The history of Havana. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dick Cluster is a member of the UMB faculty and the Associate Director of University Honors Program. He authored this book in collaboration with a Cuban scholar. Read more about the author and the book in the University Reporter.

Eldredge, N. (2005). Darwin: discovering the tree of life. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Review from Booklist, November 1, 2005

"In anticipation of the bicentennial observance of Charles Darwin's birth in 1809, paleontologist and author Eldredge has organized an exhibition that coincides with the publication of this abundantly illustrated primer on Darwin's life, thought, and legacy." [Read review] Also read the review of the book and the related exhibition in American Scientist.

Kline, D., Burstein, D., De Keijzer, A. J., & Berger, P. (2005). Blog!: how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture. New York: CDS Books.
Review from American Journalism Review, February/March 2006

If you are reading this blog, then you already know what they are. But did you know that there are more than 83.9 million today versus 23.5 million a year ago. From business to politics the influence of blogs should not be underestimated. While the authors briefly examine the history of blogging most of the book is devoted to exploring the blog revolution and "what it says ... about changes in our overall media, culture and society." [Read review]

Mann, S., & Senn, M. (2006). Sally Mann. New York: Gagosian Gallery.
This is a fully illustrated catalog from Sally Mann's 2006 exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery. The large format photographs hauntingly depict Mann's three children as well as selected works from her Battlefields€ series.

Politkovskaya, A. (2005). Putin's Russia: life in a failing democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Review from Russian Life , July/August 2006

Politkovskaya writings take on even more significance since her murder last October. She was an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and the Chechnya war. Her articles exposed the West to the corruption and brutality present in the Russia government. In Putin's Russia, Politkovskaya writes "about crooked business deals, the disgraceful state of the Russian army, terrorism, Vladimir Putin and, well, anything else that infuriates her." [Read review]

Stuart, T. (2007). The Bloodless Revolution: a cultural history of vegetarianism from 1600 to modern times. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Review from The New York Times Book Review, February 25, 2007

Tristram Stuart examines the history of Western vegetarianism from Europeans’ first encounter with Indian vegetarianism to the present. Stuart fills the book with accounts of well-known vegetarians, such as Gandhi and Thoreau, to the unknown. These figures seem to one thing in common, “the mark of dissent.” [Read review]

The Nation. New York, N.Y.: J.H. Richards.
The Nation is now available full-text beginning in 1865.

"The Nation is America's oldest weekly magazine, the flagship of the left and now the country's most widely read journal of opinion. Published to inform the national debate on critical issues of the day, The Nation seeks to enlighten and empower a community of concerned citizens & influential readers."

If you would like to recommend a book to add to future lists, please email me at tina.mullins@umb.edu.