Library Briefings

Know Your Faculty Liaison

To improve our support of faculty and students confronting a proliferating and sometimes bewildering array of information resources, the Library has created a new Academic Liaison Services Department. Our Academic Liaison librarians specialize in a wide array of subjects—ranging from cell biology to East Asian studies, theater, and finance—and serve as our primary contacts with departments, programs, and groups of scholars with common needs. They are also the subject specialists who develop the Library's collections. You can contact them to ask about our collections, make a purchase request, or for any of these services:

Discipline-specific research consultation and instruction

Information on topics in scholarly communication, e.g. copyright, fair use, and publisher agreements

You can identify your liaison and find contact information online, or, to identify a librarian who can help with topics or programs not covered on the existing list, contact one of the Library's disciplinary coordinators.

Faculty are encouraged to drop by the Academic Liaison Services Department, which is located on the 2nd floor, east tower of the Main Library. While only a few of the subject specialists have offices on 2East, anyone in the department will be more than happy to answer questions, or to direct you to the appropriate librarian or department.

For general information, email alsdept@northwestern.edu or call Harriet Lightman at 847-491-2920.

Meet Mariann Burright, Our New Scholarly Communications Librarian

True, electronic publishing has brought a whole new world of scholarly resources conveniently to your fingertips. But it's also raised a whole new crop of issues. Have you hesitated before posting content to the Blackboard system, because you suspect the copyright restrictions for online use may not be the same as those for classroom presentation? (You're right.) Have you squinted at the contract a publisher sent you, wondering whether you really have to sign away all those rights? (Maybe you don't.)

"A big part of my job is to increase awareness of these issues, and answer questions about them," says Mariann Burright, who joined NUL's Academic Liaison Services Department as the Scholarly Communications Librarian this past July. Previously, she was a collection management librarian for Life Sciences at the University of Maryland, and at NUL, she's also liaison for Life Sciences and Environmental Studies, and responsible for developing the research collections in those areas.

"Faculty in all the academic disciplines are affected by the mounting tension between their increasing need for access to electronically published content and the increasing legal and economic restrictions on their access to that content," she says, "but it's especially acute in the sciences. So part of this job is also to think about creative ways for scholars to publish as widely and cost-effectively as possible."

Research libraries across the country have increasingly taken on these scholarly communications issues as a logical extension of other intellectual services they provide to faculty. "As librarians, we're purveyors of knowledge, and faculty are the producers of that knowledge," Burright says. "So it makes sense for us to work in partnership to protect the content and the intellectual property rights in a constantly changing electronic publishing environment."

Mariann Burright is available to talk to academic departments, programs, and other groups about copyright and other electronic publishing issues. She can be reached at 847-467-4637 or at m-burright@northwestern.edu. You can also visit the scholarly communications webpage for information on a range of topics including copyright, open access publishing, and digital repositories.

Improved Database Searching on the Home Page

It's now faster and easier to search e-journals and databases through the newly reconfigured search function on the Library's website. The "ER: Electronic Resources" Link combines the best of our previous "Electronic Resources" and "Einstein" search engines, allowing you to:

Save time with Quicksearch, which cross-searches a pre-selected group of databases in your subject field with a minimum of set-up steps.

Customize a personal list of databases that you can cross-search simultaneously. You can store your searches and search results for future use, and arrange for automatic updates when new material appears in your selected sources.

Search for journal citations instantly by plugging them into a link that will instantly tell you whether the full text of the cited article can also be accessed online.

For more information about finding electronic resources, contact your faculty liaison or go to "Ask a Librarian" on our website.

Making the Most of ARTstor

Whether for your own research, or for teaching purposes, you may want to get better acquainted with ARTstor—a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and the social sciences. Northwestern University Library has been a charter member of ARTstor since 2004. Most notably, Northwestern Art History faculty and Academic Technology digitization experts created 75,000 digital images for the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, a pioneering ARTstor collection that documents hundreds of Buddhist cave shrines in Western China.

ARTstor includes a set of tools for viewing, presenting, and managing images for research and teaching purposes. On Thursday, November 6, in conjunction with the Department of Art History, the NUL Art Collection will offer ARTstor training sessions from 10 - 4 pm. Art Collection. Elizabeth Darocha Berenz, ARTstor Public Services Librarian, will do the training. She can be reached at 888-278-0079; email userservices@artstor.org. Sessions are scheduled as follows:

10 a.m. ARTstor Introduction, 2East new Reference classroom (2699)
11 a.m. Teaching with ARTstor, Forum Room, Mitchell Multimedia Center
Noon Lunch
1 p.m. ARTstor for Graduate Students, Forum Room, Mitchell Multimedia Center
2 p.m. ARTstor for Undergraduates, Forum Room, Mitchell Multimedia Center
3 p.m. ARTstor for Administrators/open session, Forum Room, Mitchell Multimedia Center

Easier Arabic Searching

Researchers exploring the Library's Arabic-languages resources can now search the collections using keyboards that feature both roman and Arabic characters. Two public workstations in the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies now have these keyboards, as does the Herskovits reference desk; another is located at workstation #44 in the InfoCommons. In particular, the new keyboards facilitate access to the Herskovits Library's West African manuscript collection, containing more than 5,000 works of poetry, history, theology, Sufism, law, astronomy, numerology, and Arabic grammar from a number of West African countries. Since grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded the cataloging of this unique collection, it has proved an invaluable resource for students and faculty, especially in the University's expanded and developing programs in Middle East studies.

Stay Posted About the Newest Online Resources

The number of online resources you can access via Library subscriptions continues to proliferate. In the past month alone, we've acquired subscriptions to The Journal of Library Metadata, the Economic Self-Reliance Center's ESR Review, Nature Geoscience, Alternative Press Index Archive 1969-1990, The Ben Jonson Journal and Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies.

Would you like to be notified about new e-journals, e-texts, and databases? We have a new blog devoted solely to announcing and describing e-journals, e-books, and databases as we acquire them. Resources are categorized by multiple subject (art & architecture, journalism, medicine, etc. ) and format categories and are fully searchable. The blog lists all e-resources acquired since January 2008.

To receive automatic updates when a new resource is posted, just enter your e-mail address on the blog's home page or sign up for the RSS feed.

New Crop of Nature Journals

Responding to requests by many of the University's science and engineering departments, the Library now subscribes to the following Nature journals:
Nature Geoscience, Nature Physics, and Nature Photonics. In addition, we will have a subscription to Nature Chemistry when it is launched in early 2009. Our subscription access starts with volume 1 of each of these journals (2005 in the case of Nature Physics). Links to the journals are included in NUcat. These subscriptions were financially supported by funding from the University administration and reduced subscription pricing negotiated by the CIC consortium.