SCOPUS

We now have access to SCOPUS, via UNLOC and the eLibrary Gateway.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database. It covers over 16,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers and over 1200 open access journals.

The subjects covered inlcude: Life Sciences, 3,400 titles; Health Sciences, 5,300 titles (including 100% coverage of Medline titles); Physical Sciences, 5,500 titles; Social Sciences, 2,850 titles.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library has just been launched. Over time, it will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

To see what's available, go to: http://www.wdl.org/en/

Library of Congress on YouTube

The Library of Congress has begun to make its multimedia resources available via YouTube:

"We are starting with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904, scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott)."

To see what's available, go to: http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress

British Periodicals Online: e-journal collection

British Periodicals Online is now available. British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of more than 460 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.

Among the periodicals in included in British Periodicals are titles founded, edited or regularly contributed to by a host of important figures - Walter Bagehot, Aubrey Beardsley, Annie Besant, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frances Power Cobbe, William Cobbett, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Ford Madox Ford, Oliver Goldsmith, Leigh Hunt, Jerome K. Jerome, Samuel Johnson, Sir Roger L'Estrange, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Edward Moore, John Morley, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, W. M. Rossetti, Sir Richard Steele and Tobias Smollett to name but a few. In addition to providing access to the original periodical versions of landmark texts like De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Cobbett's Rural Rides, Bagehot's The English Constitution, Gaskell's North and South and Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the collection offers new ways of exploring the inaccessible, neglected or forgotten writings that formed their original contexts. A wide array of different types of periodical are represented, from magisterial quarterlies and scholarly and professional organs through to coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

Access to this resource is via the eLibrary Gateway.

Google / Bodleian Library: freely available public domain content

Google has announced the completion of their partnership with the Bodleian Library. “The bulk of the available public domain content” from the Bodleian Library is now freely available via Google Book Search, part of the five year book-scanning deal between Google and the Bodleian. Most of the books are from the 19th century. When found, the Bodleian books also offer downloadable PDF versions, meaning printed copies can be made via print-on-demand services such as Lulu.
As yet, the online Bodleian pre-1920 Catalogue does not link to Google Book Search results. So users of the Catalogue will have to open a new browser window and copy and paste to see if a book is on Google Book Search. What exact percentage of the pre-1920 Catalogue is actually available on Google is rather hazy, though. The original goal was to (non-destructively) scan one million books from the Bodleian. But the recent official Google blog post talks rather vaguely of somewhat less than that — “many hundreds of thousands”. Google Book Search is currently said to hold records for about 7 million books, with about 2.5 million of those offering viewable pages.

National Security Archive

An independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, the Archive collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive also serves as a repository of government records on a wide range of topics pertaining to the national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies of the United States.

The Archive obtains its materials through a variety of methods, including the Freedom of Information act, Mandatory Declassification Review, presidential paper collections, congressional records, and court testimony. Archive staff members systematically track U.S. government agencies and federal records repositories for documents that either have never been released before, or that help to shed light on the decision-making process of the U.S. government and provide the historical context underlying those decisions.

To see the range of documents available, go to:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/index.html