Wednesday, February 29, 2012

In Charge in the Evening!

Nancy Lewis
The James A. Cannavino Library is pleased to announce the arrival of our newest staff member: Nancy L Lewis.

Nancy's title is Library Evening Operations Manager.  Working Sunday-Thursday 4:30pm-12mid, she provides full-service library support for issues with Circulation, Reference, and the library building.

Most excitingly for us, she has a strong background in Reference Librarianship.  Her newly created African American History Research Pathfinder demonstrates her skills with technology, and her knowledge of library resources. Nancy will look to strengthen our support for faculty and researchers outside normal business hours.  We hope instructors for evening classes especially will get to know her as a colleague and partner.

Please introduce yourself to Nancy next time you're here in the evening and let her know how she can help with classes, assignments, research support or anything else in the library world.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

New African American History Library Research Guide

Check out the Library’s newest Research Pathfinder: “African American History.” The Pathfinder highlights not just books, ebooks and articles, but images, videos and other less-frequented resources that may stimulate interest or support research.

 It also links to “Historical African American Newspapers Available Online” a related guide listing of over 65 newspapers of interest for African American History - organized alphabetically, chronologically and geographically.  This list - already one of the most comprehensive on the internet - is dynamic and growing.  More entries will be added as we uncover them.

Research Pathfinders guide students to library resources targeted at either a specific topic or a Marist course.   Faculty can request a Pathfinder for a specific course and research assignment or discipline specific subject, e.g. “Advertising” or “Painters of Florence”.  Click here for some recent examples.  Contact your Library liaison for more information on having one created for you, or call the Reference Desk x3292, or email us via Ask A Librarian

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Who is Lowell Thomas? Get to Know the Man Behind the Building!



Join in the fun and become part of the Archives and Special Collections’ social media campaign to learn about Lowell Thomas. You can now follow Lowell Thomas’s exploits on Twitter @LowellJThomas, FaceBook, or the Archives and Special Collections’ website.

It is an interesting time to consider the historical memory of Lowell Thomas. He is in transition from being remembered as a celebrity to a historical figure. Thomas died in 1981, and as his fans follow him they are being replaced by researchers attempting to document his remarkable career as a journalist, entrepreneur, and adventurer.

Thomas was a pioneer journalist and developed into one of the foremost radio broadcasters during the golden age of radio. Today little is recalled of his ground breaking work as a commentator or as a world traveler. In the early 1920s he launched his career presenting lectures concerning his travels in the Middle East. A three-month stint in England turned into a 5 year world tour. During this time over 4 million people came to experience the multi-media extravaganza entitled The Lowell Thomas Travelogues. In recalling his travels and encounters in Arabia, Thomas made T.E. Lawrence known worldwide as Lawrence of Arabia and established himself as one of the great public speakers of his day. In the 1930s Thomas continued his pioneer work in the broadcasting industry. He was the first person to air a simulcast and he became the voice of Fox Movitone Newsreels. In the 1950s he co-created Cinerama and his movie “This Is Cinerama” broke every known record for income and total audience when it showed on Broadway in New York City in 1952. Later that decade he founded Capital Cities, a major broadcasting group which is now part of the Walt Disney Company. He created his very popular High Adventure television series in the 1960s, and continued his world travels. In 1977 Thomas retired from his radio news program, which had been on the air for 46 continuous years. Later that year he published Good Evening Everybody, the first volume of his autobiography, and just one of the over 50 books he authored. Thomas returned to radio in 1978. National Public Radio aired his series “The Best Years” until just before his death on August 29, 1981.

Follow @LowellJThomas on twitter today to experience it for yourself!

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Quick Tips for African American History Month



Most instructors are, of course, already aware of many resources in their disciplines that are appropriate to this national period of reflection. The Library of Congress's Historic American Newspapers and the Oxford African American Studies Center are just two of hundreds of possible examples.  But here are a couple quick, less well-known tips for finding material within libraries' peculiar system of organization.

In Marist's Collections

The phrase "African Americans" is a powerful tool in the Advanced Search section of the library catalog. Most materials can be retrieved using this term, then narrowed by factors such as medium: print, video or digital - or discipline: history, literature, politics, economics, anthropology, etc.  The search below retrieves 113 audiovisual materials by or about African Americans. (By the way, our MLK Day post includes some extraordinary a/v links, just in case you missed it.)
(Click on images to enlarge)
Biology of Race
"Race and biology" as a library catalog keyword search is effective in a collection of our size (as would be "eugenics" or "phrenology"), but can be overly broad in larger databases.

In Academic Search Elite for example "race and biology" yields useful results, but with some unhelpful outliers). To clean this up, go to Advanced Search (an option in almost any database), and limit your search to Subject Terms.

More Help Available
Obviously, these tips are short and general. Give a call (x3292) for quick, more specific help, or contact your liaison or Ask A Librarian for a detailed consultation.