McCain Library recently subscribed to the Alexander Street Press database American History in Video.  American History in Video provides the largest and richest collection of video available online for the study of American history, with 2,000 hours and more than 5,000 titles to be included on completion. The collection allows students and researchers to analyze historical events, and the presentation of historical events over time, through commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and important documentaries. This release now includes over 1400 titles, equaling approximately 440 hours. Forthcoming are new videos from PBS, WGBH, and California Newsreel, plus additional years of Universal Newsreel.

The resource is accessible on the library’s A-Z Database List.  Off-campus or on a personal laptop, you will be prompted to enter your name and ASC ID number.

Canadian short-story author Alice Munro has emerged victorious from a clash of the world’s literary giants to win the £60,000 ($94,900 U.S.) Man Booker International prize. The 77-year-old writer was picked from a lineup of towering international talent that included V. S. Naipaul, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peter Carey, and Joyce Carol Oates. The prize is granted once every two years in recognition of a living author who has made an outstanding contribution to world literature.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/27/alice-munro-man-booker-international-prize

This week the library relocated 2 short term use computers to stand-up height carrels in the McCain Library lobby.  We moved the display case to the top of the spiral stairs, so now it’s handy to look up a book or DVD right as you enter the building’s main floor.  Enjoy!

The library now has access to three new databases via GALILEO.

Here is some additional information about these resources and their
availability through GALILEO:

ArchiveGrid
Availability: Currently, on site only.

ArchiveGrid provides Online access to nearly a million
descriptions of archival collections owned by thousands of
libraries, museums, historical societies and archives worldwide.
ArchiveGrid is an important destination for searching for historical
documents, personal papers and family histories held in archives.

CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online)
Availability: Currently, on site only.

CAMIO (Catalog of Art Museum Images Online) provides access to
high-quality art images from around the world contributed and described
by leading museums, all rights-cleared for educational use. Every work
in CAMIO is represented by at least one high-resolution image and a
description. Many have additional views of the work, sound, video and
curatorial notes. CAMIO art images span the following categories:

• Photographs
• Prints
• Sculptures
• Paintings
• Decorative arts
• Posters
• Costumes
• Utilitarian objects
• Jewelry

OAIster (pronounced like Oyster)
Availability: On-campus and Remote

OAIster is a union catalog of more than 19 million digital resources
from over 1,000 organizations developed by the University of Michigan
and harvested using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for
Metadata Harvesting). Digital resources in OAIster include items such
as:

• Digitized (i.e., scanned) books and articles
• Born-digital texts
• Audio files (e.g., wav, mp3)
• Images (e.g., tiff, gif)
• Movies (e.g., mp4, quicktime)
• Datasets (e.g., downloadable statistics files)

Q. Where does the rain that falls on the Agnes Scott campus go?
A. It depends.

Main and Rebekah are built on a ridge.  Rain that falls on the north side of the ridge (toward Decatur) eventually ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, via the Chattahoochee River.  Rain that falls on the south side of the ridge (most of the rest of campus) eventually ends up in the Atlantic Ocean.

The founders of Agnes Scott were quite proud of this fact.  In the 1889-1890 “announcement” for Agnes Scott Institute, the section on location begins “The Institute is located on a commanding ridge, the waters from which upon one side find their way to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the other into the Atlantic; the buildings being about 1050 feet above the sea level.”

Check out these links for more information about the Eastern Continental Divide

• http://www.gpsinformation.org/jack/Divide/Divide.html
• http://www.gpsinformation.org/jack/Divide/DivideCommunities.html
• http://home.comcast.net/~glennfrankel/
• http://airbornecombatengineer.typepad.com/decaturdekalb/eastern-subcontinental-di.html

Lake Claire Community ECD Mural Project

–Marianne Bradley, Administrative Coordinator & Archivist, McCain Library, Agnes Scott College

In 2007, McCain Library showcased its collection of Leila Ross Wilburn pattern books in conjunction with the City of Decatur’s Tour of Homes and the MAK Historic District’s Centennial. View the Wilburn pattern books online.

The City of Decatur web site provides this information about Leilia Ross Wilburn

“Leila Ross Wilburn, who attended Agnes Scott, was one of only two women registered as an architect in Atlanta in 1920. Ms. Wilburn designed and built a home in the neighborhood where she lived with her widowed mother and younger siblings. She published several popular planbooks that emphasized her status as a Southerner and a woman. Through these planbooks, she influenced neighborhood design throughout the Southeast during the 1920s.

In 1907 John Mason and Poleman Weekes purchased property that was to become Decatur’s first residential subdivision. The district, known today as the M.A.K. neighborhood is named for its main streets, McDonough, Adams and Kings Highway, and encompasses ten city blocks of varying size. Ms. Wilburn was employed by Mason and Weekes to design many of the homes for the new subdivision.

The MAK neighborhood retains many of the Wilburn-designed homes and offers excellent examples of Craftsman style homes that were popular during the first three decades of the 20th century.”

View Leila Ross Wilburn entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia

View Photos of Wilburn Homes in MAK Historical District

View a Gallery of two Leila Ross Wilburn Homes at AJC.com

Image from "Homes in Good Taste" pattern book by Leila Ross Wilburn

Suggested Reading from the New Georgia Encyclopedia

Jan Jennings, “Leila Ross Wilburn, Plan-Book Architect,” Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (spring-summer 1989): 10-16.
[Agnes Scott community members only]

Gerald Sams, AIA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).

Google News Archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people or ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can also see a historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically generated timeline.

News Archive Search searches across a large collection of historical archives including major newspapers/magazines, news archives and legal archives. Search results include both content that accessible to all users (such as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian) and content that requires a fee (such as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives). In addition to crawling content online, Google has also worked with newspapers to digitize materials via a News Archive Partner Program. Through partnerships with newspapers around the world, the News Archive Partner Program makes unique and previously-unavailable newspaper content searchable and browsable online.

Try it now!

Check out these results for a search on “loch ness” – note that the article from Time Magazine is from 1934!

The library database ARTstor is continually adding new material to its collections. Magnum Photos is no exception.

Screenshot of Magnum Photos in ARTstor

According to an ARTstor press release,

“this first launch of more than 73,000 high-quality photographs of major world events and personalities provides the academic community with access to a selection of Magnum’s iconic images. The ARTstor and Magnum Photos collaboration will showcase a total of 80,000 images by this world-renowned group of documentary photographers. The ARTstor community will now be able to access high-quality photographs from around the world, covering industry, society and people, places of interest, politics, news events, disasters and conflict, from the late 1930s to the present day. From the Spanish Civil War to the Gulf War, from Marilyn Monroe to Paul Newman, from John Updike to Toni Morrison, from Christian Dior to Oscar de la Renta, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the crisis in Chechnya, these images capture wars, celebrities, authors, fashion designers, and defining moments in our shared history.”

Check it out at: http://www.artstor.org/what-is-artstor/w-html/col-magnum.shtml

The library recently added LibGuides, interactive subject and course specific guides. The guides offer suggestions about how and where to start your research. You may leave comments, instant message a librarian, or make a research appointment. So far, we have 22 guides in over 20 subjects, and we’re adding new ones all the time. If you’re looking for help in starting your research, this is the place to go.

Each guide has suggestions for how to find books, articles, and web sites on your topic. They all contain links to citation guides and writing guides for specific subjects. In addition, many guides include short video tutorials about how to use databases or tools like RefWorks.

Check out all the LibGuides at libguides.agnesscott.edu