Monthly Archives: October 2012

Now Available: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is offered by a consortium of 12 major US and UK botanical and natural history libraries with a collection of 46,000-plus titles and 90,000-plus volumes. The biodiversity-related items range in date from 1450 to the present. The collection is patron driven; patrons may request items to be scanned into the digital library. This feature is particularly helpful for scholars who cannot physically travel to view rare documents. The scans are high quality, but some images are slightly crooked or off-center. However, this does not significantly affect the documents’ readability. The download options are extremely helpful: individual pages, PDF, OCR, images, bibliographic information, or all options.

Users may browse by Titles, Authors, Subjects, Map, and Year, and limit by language and contributing institution. Searching can be slightly puzzling to the untrained eye. A simple keyword search returns just a few of the possible results, and one must click through the results to get to the content. This is not a problem for experienced searchers, but undergraduates may have some difficulty deciphering the first results. A variety of search options enhance browsing of the thousands of freely available documents. One such feature permits the creation of a full bibliography with links to the full text. One may easily link to an entire bibliography using a specific URL, with the addition of a genus and species or family name. This option streamlines the search process, allowing researchers to easily determine the usefulness of BHL to their own research. The site has a rich infrastructure encompassing wikis, blog content, developer tools, tutorials, and more. This growing online library for the modern scholar would be an especially compelling addition to a library’s discovery service. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates; graduate students. — J. Clemons, College of Wooster

Now Available: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy features articles from international experts across the discipline of philosophy. Topics include Anglo-American, ethical and political, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, continental and contemporary philosophy. REP Online will be updated in a number of different ways, with new, revised and updated articles; refreshed bibliographies; introduction of more interdisciplinary subject guides; subject reviews and research news, and links to other philosophy web resources. The database features over 2000 original articles from over 1300 leading international experts across the discipline of philosophy. The summary provides a rapid orientation at the beginning of every in-depth article and the Encyclopedia is specially designed to meet the needs of all levels of researchers.

Trial Database: ProQuest Newsstand

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ProQuest Newsstand provides exclusive access to 85 full-text international and national newspapers from the world-leading news and information provider, Gannett. Core titles include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Guardian, El Norte, Jerusalem Post, and South China Morning Post. An additional 7 U.S. military titles will be available on a non-exclusive basis. ProQuest Newsstand’s detailed indexing helps researchers quickly find the news they need; covers complete bibliographic information along with subjects, companies, people, products, and geographic areas.

This OSU Trial runs through 10/31/2012.

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