WISER coming up next week

WISER: Strategies for conducting research on the internet
Monday 30 November, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
This session will introduce you to a variety of strategies and tools for effective web searching, and methods for evaluating the vast range of resources available.
Penny Schenk and Angela Carritt.
Click here to book.

To view the full WISER programme for this term, please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser, or to receive a weekly email listing WISER sessions please send an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. Alternatively to receive WISER updates by RSS feed please subscribe to http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ulib/usered-events-wiser/rss10.xml.

Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk for more information about WISER.

US Elections Campaigns Archive: Exhibition and Event

Starting today, there is an exhibition in the library of selected material from the Philip & Rosamund Davies US Election Campaigns Archive. This archive has been donated to the library over many years by Professor Philip Davies, and includes all sorts of ephemera and memorabilia from American election campaigns of all levels. Material on display now includes buttons from the 19th century to the present, leaflets, bumper stickers, commemorative plates, and some more unusal items like a Reagan cigar, a book of matches, rain bonnets, a cap, mug, Obama doll, a 1976 edition of Playboy and a 1952 bar of soap!

The exhibition has been set up to accompany the forthcoming visit of Professor Davies to the RAI. He will be speaking about the archive, and what campaign material can tell us about elections in the US and the wider political climate, this Thursday at 4.30pm. All welcome to come along to hear about this fascinating collection.

WISER coming up

Coming up next week:

WISER Humanities: Citation searching with Web of Knowledge
Friday 27 November 12.30 -1.30.
A powerful way to use the ISI's multidisciplinary citation indexes, e.g. Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It allows you to discover what research influenced a certain work by scanning its bibliography as well as assess the impact of a certain work or author by finding articles that have cited them.
Isabel Holowaty and ShonaMcLean
Click here to book

To view the full WISER programme for this term, please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser, or to receive a weekly email listing WISER sessions please send an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. Alternatively to receive WISER updates by RSS feed please subscribe to http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ulib/usered-events-wiser/rss10.xml.

Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk for more information about WISER.

Special seminars in US politics at the RAI

(posted on behalf of the RAI)

The Rothermere American Institute is holding three special seminars in US politics during seventh week:

Senator Russ Feingold: The Politics of Healthcare Reform
Tuesday 24th November, 11.30-12.30

Professor Philip Davies (The Eccles Centre, British Library), with materials from the Philip & Rosamund Davies US Elections Archive of campaign memorabilia
Thursday 26th November, 16.30-17.15

Professor Byron Shafer (University of Wisconsin, Madison): The American Public Mind
Thursday 26th November, 17.15-19.00

Professor Shafer will also be speaking at the American History Research Seminar on Wednesday 25th November, 16.00-18.00, on The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Post-War American South.

All welcome.

WISER coming up

Next week the library service will be running the following WISER sessions:

WISER Social Sciences: News resources for your research
Monday 16 November, 12.30-1.30, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
Introduction to key news sources including Lexis Nexis, Factiva, Times Digital Archive and The New York Times.
Gillian Beattie

WISER Humanities: Finding journal articles for your research
Friday 20 November, 12.30-1.30, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
An introduction to searching for journal articles using bibliographic databases for the humanities, such as MLA Bibliography, ATLA Religion database, Historical Abstracts and others, and how to locate them using Oxford's ejournal collections.
Isabel Holowaty and Elizabeth Crowley

To view the full WISER programme please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser, or to receive a weekly email listing WISER sessions please send an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. Alternatively to receive WISER updates by RSS feed please subscribe to http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ulib/usered-events-wiser/rss10.xml. Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk for more information about WISER.

WISER coming up: Keeping up-to-date

Next week the library service will be running WISER sessions on how to keep up-to-date with all the latest publications and research.

WISER Social Science: Keeping up-to-date
Monday 9 November, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
This session will show you how to set up alerts to journals, databases and websites, so that you receive notifications when new content is added. Participants will have the opportunity to set up feed readers and/or email notifications during the session.
Jane Rawson and Emma Cragg.
Click here to book

WISER Humanities: Keeping up-to-date
Friday 13 November, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
Make your own current awareness service. Discover ways of using electronic bibliographic resources to keep up with literature in your field by creating personal research/interest profiles.
Johanneke Sytsema and Kate Petherbridge
Click here to book

To view the full WISER programme for this term, please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser, or to receive a weekly email listing WISER sessions please send an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk. Alternatively to receive WISER updates by RSS feed please subscribe to http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ulib/usered-events-wiser/rss10.xml.

Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk for more information about WISER.

New resource: Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports 1974-1996

Oxford now has access to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports 1974-1996. This is a JISC purchase giving UK HE and FE institutions free access until at least 2014.

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Report has been the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence for nearly 70 years. The original mission of the FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe, and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. FBIS Daily Reports 1974-1996 constitutes a unique archive of transcripts of foreign broadcasts and news that provides insight into the second half of the 20th century; many of these materials are firsthand reports of events as they happened.

FBIS Daily Reports 1974-1996 consist of translated broadcasts, news agency transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements from nations around the globe. These media sources were monitored in their languages of origin, translated into English, and issued by an agency of the US government. Access is to the following collections:

• Middle East and North Africa, 1974-1987
• Near East and South Asia, 1987-1996
• South Asia, 1980-1987
• Sub-Saharan Africa, 1974-1980, and Africa, 1987-1996
• Eastern Europe, 1974-1996

The FBIS Daily Reports series:

• provides unique perspectives on international affairs in the Middle and Near East, Africa and Eastern Europe as events unfolded from 1974-1996. Many of those events are in some ways the predecessors, if not the outright causes both near term and long term, of what is happening today in these regions today.
• contains significant, critical material unavailable from any other source. The newspaper, short-wave, radio, and television broadcast texts in many cases exist nowhere else but in the English transcription or translation of those broadcasts which have vanished into the airways.
• shows what the US government knew from the open source intelligence and when they knew it.
• shows what the world thought of the U.S. and its democratic allies, “the West,” in often harsh and critical assessments.
• offers name and subject-search ability in an instant. Many of those same searches are almost impossible or exceedingly tedious and labour intensive in hardcopy or microfiche of the Daily Reports.
• includes not only the 42,000 Daily Reports themselves but also their Supplements and, to the extent they can be obtained, the Daily Report Annexes, which were “for official use only” and NOT part of the Federal Depository Library distribution program.

There are currently no plans to acquire the earlier FBIS reports (1941-1974).

Access is available via OxLIP+.

New in the library: AKS collection 2009

Each year, the American Association of Rhodes Scholars kindly gives the library a sum of money to purchase a number of books to add to the Adeloytte-Kiefer-Smith (AKS) collection. These books are displayed on the shelves next to the new accessions, just inside the entrance to the library, for a year before being shelved upstairs with the rest of our holdings. The AKS books often include titles that we might not normally purchase - books of more general or popular interest. If you want to browse this year's acquisitions without coming into the library, you can click here for a list of this year's titles.

New books for October

The list of new books received in the library in October is now available on our website and LibraryThing page.