OttoBib

Many of you may already be familiar with OttoBib but we’ll pass along the info anyway. What is OttoBib? It’s a quick way to generate an APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, or BibTex citation for books (not articles) that you need to include in a bibliography. All you have to do is type in the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), wait for the citation to appear, PROOF IT, and then cut and paste it into your bibliography.

Don’t know what an ISBN is? No problem. It’s the 10-digit (or 13-digit for books published after January 2007) number found on top of the barcode on the back of the book. You won’t find it on any book published before 1966 and you may not find it on some books between 1966 and 1974. If the dust jacket is missing from the book, you can usually locate the ISBN on a page preceding the table of contents.

Free trial databases for Women’s History Month

Nash Library has access to three women’s history databases through March 31, 2007. The databases are:

British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries includes 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries from nearly 500 individuals writing from 1500 to 1900. The uses for the collection will be many and varied. For historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy, and others, British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries will prove a dramatic new resource. These diaries bring us much more than the personal. They provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves. We can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. We can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends.

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries includes some 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, including more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. The collection brings the personal experiences of some 1,325 women to researchers, students, and general readers. The collection is drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright.

Women and Social Movements contains the following resources:

• 72 document projects that interpret and present documents, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each document project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question. Altogether these document projects provide more than 2,100documents, approximately 800 images, and over 700 links to other websites.
• More than 28,000 pages of documents pertaining to Women and Social Movements.
• A dictionary of social movements and organizations.
• A chronology of U.S. Women’s History.
• Teaching Tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website’s document projects.
• Quarterly news from the archives about U.S. Women’s History.

Free trial databases for Black History Month

Be sure to check out the free trial databases for Black History Month. The databases are:

Black Drama contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. James Vernon Hatch, the playwright, historian, and curator of the landmark Hatch-Billops Collection of black drama, is the project’s editorial advisor. More than a quarter of the collection will consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Femi Euba, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

Black Women Writers brings together the many voices of women from more than 20 countries in Africa, North America, Europe and the Caribbean. Writers include Nikki Giovanni, Maryse Conde, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Margaret Walker, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rosa Guy, Olive Senior, Tsitsi Dangaremba, among others.

Black Thought and Culture contains 989 sources with 947 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. The collection begins with the works of Frederick Douglass and is targeted to include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Mary McLeod Bethune, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Bunche, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis,Thurgood Marshall, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson and many others. When complete, the collection will include the first-ever complete full run of the Black Panther newspaper.

We look forward to your comments about these databases. Be sure to visit them before February 28, 2007.

Lost and found at Nash Library

Have you lost something important and can’t think where else to look? If you spend a lot of time in Nash Library, be sure to ask at the Circulation Desk. Whenever we find something without an owner, we put it in Lost and Found here in the Library. Typical items include cell phones, jump drives, CDs, notebooks, workbooks, textbooks, gloves, hats, and student IDs. We always send Student IDs to Student Services but we keep the other items in case you come calling for it. Be sure to ask us if you’ve lost something.

Items in Lost and Found as of February 3, 2007 include a cell phone, a jump drive, a CD that accompanies a textbook, a course workbook, an umbrella, three notebooks, a pair of gloves, and a couple of hats. If you think you belong to any of these items, come check it out. You will be asked to describe any item you attempt to claim.

Why is my article printing as a blank page?

You’ve found just the article you’ve been looking for. Excitedly, you click the print icon and bolt to the front desk. As the workstudy pulls the still-warm sheet out of the print tray you see…

…one page of nothing!

So what went wrong?

Most scholarly articles are in the portable document format (or pdf) and don’t work like normal web pages. A special plugin lets you view them in your web browser; this plugin has its own printing button which you must use:

If you try to use the browser’s print button, you will not get the article, you will waste paper. There are other ways of printing from within the plugin as well, but this is the easiest.

Happy printing!