Lafayette College Library

Students are urged not to leave their belongings unattended in the Lafayette Libraries. This includes backpacks and bags, in addition to laptops and cell phones. Unattended belongings are an invitation to thieves.

Oxford Reference Online, which features electronic versions of Oxford dictionaries and other reference works in multiple disciplines, has been updated to include four new titles: The Oxford Book of Health Foods, The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, A Dictionary of Creation Myths, and The New Oxford Companion to Law. New editions have also been posted for The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (formerly A Dictionary of Twentieth Century Art).

October 19-23 marks the first international Open Access Week, a chance to learn more about the scholarly open access movement. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. What makes it possible is the Internet and the consent of the author or copyright holder. Momentum for open access in science and scholarship has been growing, as evidenced by open access policies from research funders (such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health) and research producers on college and university campuses (such as Harvard University, MIT, University College London, the University of Kansas, and the University of Liege).

Read more about Open Access Week and the Open Access movement.

Read more about the Lafayette Digital Repository, which is designed to make accessible the scholarly work of Lafayette authors.

British History Online, to which the library subscribes, has just added the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England to the site. The series describes every parliament held between 1275 and 1504; where the rolls survive they have been fully transcribed and translated. Ten monarchs are represented, from Edward I to Henry VII. The text and its translation are available together in a new tabular format, making it easier to consult either version. The Rolls are fully cross-searchable with all British History Online’s other resources for medieval and early modern history, which include the Calendar of Close Rolls, the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, many volumes of the Victoria County History and hundreds more primary and secondary sources.

Access the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.

The library is participating in a 30 day trial to Ebrary's Academic Complete collection of e-books. The collection provides access to more than 43,900 titles spanning 16 academic subject areas. Additional titles are available separately for subscription. The collection also includes a growing selection of maps, journals and reports.

Connect to Ebrary and to more details about this product from the Current Trials page

Please send comments about Ebrary to Amy Abruzzi, Reference Resources Librarian

The American Psychological Association (APA) has just published the sixth edition of their publication manual. It can be found in Skillman's Ref Desk section (behind the reference desk) at the following call number: BF76.7 .P83 2010.

Recognizing the importance of being able to navigate information in this "information age," President Obama has issued a proclamation declaring October National Information Literacy Month. In the proclamation, the President calls upon educational institutions to help Americans not just find, but evaluate, information--whether financial, medical, educational, or technical.

Here is an excerpt from the proclamation: "Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle...coupled with an immense array of online resources have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation."

Read the full proclamation.

Some recent journals that have been added to the JSTOR archive are Dante Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Religion and Literature, College Teaching, Current Directions in Psychological Science, The International History Review, and Social Indicators Research. For a full list of titles recently added to JSTOR's archive, visit the announcements on JSTOR's web site.

Information literacy interviews that have appeared excerpted in Bytes & Books, the newsletter of the Libraries and Information Technology Services, can now be viewed in full online. In these interviews, professors talk about incorporating information literacy into their courses. The latest interview is with Kira Lawrence, Assistant Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences.

Connect to information literacy interviews.

The Lafayette Libraries and the Provost's Office will again this year sponsor Information Literacy Grants for faculty who wish to add an information literacy component to one of their upper level classes. To be eligible, the class must include projects in which students gather, evaluate, and use information; involve collaboration with a librarian; and provide opportunities for students to do at least one of the following:

1. Discover that the information they use exists within a framework
developed to record, store, and access it and that research allows them to
tap into an ongoing conversation among scholars;
2. Critically examine the research process;
3. Explore the economic, social, legal, and ethical issues
surrounding information in today's society.

The application deadline is December 15, 2009. Those who are considering applying should contact Lijuan Xu ASAP (xul@lafayette.edu or extension 5152).