Netflix for Textbooks?!

The New York Times recently ran an article about textbooks for rent. Companies such as BookRenter.com and Chegg.com offer textbook rental with free return shipping much like Netflix and dvds.

The Tulane University libraries do not purchase many of the textbooks used in classes since textbooks are often updated every year, especially in the sciences.

Longue Vue and the Sterns (from Special Collections)

Longue Vue House and Gardens, a local National Historic Landmark, was originally the home of Edgar and Edith Stern, prominent philanthropists during the twentieth century. Although damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the grounds and building have been restored and the estate continues to serve as an educational and cultural resource for the community and visitors.

As part of an NHPRC grant for archival processing, Lisa Lewis, archivist at Longue Vue, was required to submit a MARC record to OCLC representing their historical collection. As they are not members, she requested a partnership with Tulane’s Special Collections for this purpose. We collaborated with her to create and contribute the record to the WorldCat database, entitled Longue Vue House and Gardens historic collection.

Within Tulane’s manuscript holdings, we have related material in the Edgar B. Stern collection (Manuscripts Collection 235), which includes further Stern family documents, as well business records of Lehman, Stern, and Co. and subsidiary cotton merchants in New Orleans, dating back to the nineteenth century. This collection includes a range of massive handwritten ledger books, up to 59 cm.

For more recent information and artifacts about Longue Vue, there are several folders in the Louisiana CollectionVertical File with brochures through 2009, invitations, mailed promotional material, calendars, newsletters, auction programs and other printed ephemeral material. This resource is built through cumulative contributions from our friends in the community. The 2007 post card featured as an illustration was donated to the Louisiana Collection for the vertical file by art scholar and author, Jessie Poesch.

Caption: mailed post card publicizing the July 14, 2007, Annual Ice Cream Day at Longue Vue. For details of the upcoming Ice Cream Day scheduled for Sat., July 11, 2009, 10:00 am to noon, click here.

originally posted on the Manuscripts at Tulane University blog.

LibX toolbar updated for Firefox 3.5

The Tulane University edition of the LibX toolbar has been updated to support the new Firefox 3.5

LibX is a browser plugin for Firefox that provides direct access to the library's resources such as the library catalog, Tulane's ejournals list, the Tulane website, and Worldcat (the global catalog of library collections that lets you find what you want in a library near you).

MetaLib now live in beta testing for searching multiple databases

MetaLib, a suite of tools for searching across multiple databases, as well as for database discovery, is now live in beta testing. It is linked from the front page of the Howard-Tilton website as “NEW Database & Article Finder.” It is located at http://metalib.tulane.edu . Please go ahead and try it out. If you have any observations or questions, feel free to contact Paul St-Pierre at pstpierr@tulane.edu.

Over the course of the summer, we will be gathering feedback from users, making modifications to enhance usability and aesthetics, integrating it with the library’s web sites, and creating instructional materials. We hope that this will become a valuable new tool to enhance our students' and faculty's ability to locate research materials.

Selected Manuscripts Finding Aids now online

We are excited to announce that a selected group of our Manuscripts finding aids are now online. The finding aids are currently in a PDF format, and users will need a PDF reader to download and use them. Patrons can also search for keywords in most of the finding aids.

This is just a small sample of the more than 1,000 manuscripts collections we hold, and we are planning to add more. If you wish to see a finding aid that isn't on the page, please contact us, and we will be happy to make it available if resources allow.

Many of our noted collections now have their finding aids available online for the first time, including the papers of John Kennedy Toole, Rudolph Matas, Charles Colcock Jones, and Natalie Scott. We also have organizational records from the Christian Women's Exchange, First German Lutheran Church, Council of Social Agencies, and the Orleans Parish Medical Society.

Many thanks to Neal Schexnider for his assistance with getting these online.

originally posted on the Manuscripts at Tulane University blog.

new interface for SilverPlatter databases

The interface is the same as Ovid’s Medline.

SilverPlatter non-medical databases include:

Bibliography of the History of Art 1990-December 2007
Books@Ovid
FIAF Affiliates Publications 1966 to 2007
Film/TV Documentation Collections
International Index to Film Periodicals 1972 to current
International Index to TV Periodicals 1979 to 2006
International Repertory of the Literature of Art 1975-1989
Journals@Ovid Full Text
List of Periodicals Indexed
NASW Clinical Register 14th Edition
Repertoire d'Art et d'Archeologie 1973-1989
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1836 to current
Social Work Abstracts 1977 to current
Treasures from the Film Archives
Tulane Full Text Journals