Library Liaison
September, 1999 In This Issue ...
Hewlett Grant by Ann Schaffner
About To Be Shelved by Anthony Vaver and Mark Alpert
The Web Of Science: The Citation Indexes Transformed by Ann Frenkel
New In Judaica by Charles Cutter
The Science Library Adds Two Milestone Databases by Sally Wyman
EXHIBIT: The People's Attorney: the Life of Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941
HEWLETT GRANT

Ann Schaffner
Associate University Librarian

Brandeis has been awarded a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to strengthen interdisciplinary teaching in our general education program and to help students to evaluate information sources more critically. The Hewlett Foundation will provide $150,000 of support over a three-year period along with matching support from the University.

The grant will support a series of faculty workshops designed to stimulate discussion on campus of interdisciplinary teaching issues. Plans are being finalized for an initial workshop for this academic year focusing on interdisciplinary thinking and its importance to undergraduate education. Subsequent workshops will focus on teaching specific topics or issues across the disciplines.

Funding will also support innovative faculty projects which are both interdisciplinary and teach students to question information from a variety of sources. With the growth of the Internet and students' familiarity with Internet resources, it has become more important and more difficult than ever before to teach students to evaluate different information sources. A popular magazine and a scholarly journal may appear quite similar to the uninitiated when presented on the WorldWide Web. A Web page produced by a high school student may appear as professionally-produced and reliable as one produced by a university professor. The primary use of the Web is to sell products and ideas. How can we teach our students to look behind the surface and evaluate the quality of the information? Who is the author? What are his or her qualifications? Is this an academic study or a piece of propaganda? What is the methodology used? What are the sources? These questions are more important than ever and difficult enough to teach within the context of one discipline. As we move into interdisciplinary areas, it becomes even more difficult, since evidence and methods vary from discipline to discipline.

In our existing library instruction programs for first-year and more advanced students we touch on these issues. With the help of the Hewlett Foundation Grant we will be able to do much more. It will enable us to work collaboratively with faculty, computing professionals, and consultants to build new course components to address these issues in much more depth.

We are currently seeking proposals from faculty for interdisciplinary teaching projects for the current year. Proposals should be submitted to the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, MS 120 by November 1. Proposals for the evaluation of information sources will be part of the next phase of the project.

The project is under the general direction of Dr. Irv Epstein, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. For further information on the project, please contact Ann C. Schaffner, Associate University Librarian for Research, Instruction and Planning, Project Coordinator (ext. 64720, email: Schaffner) or Elaine Wong, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences (ext. 63470, email: EWong). ]

ABOUT TO BE SHELVED

Anthony Vaver    Humanities Librarian
Mark Alpert    Social Sciences Librarian

q Alessa Johns, ed. Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment. Routledge, 1999.

The essays in this edited collection examine 18th-century Europe's increased fascination and vulnerability to natural catastrophe resulting from the global expansion of commerce and colonialism.

q Olivia Michell, Robert J. Myers and Howard Young, eds. Prospects for Social Security Reform. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Why does social security face problems? What types of reforms should policymakers and interested lay people support, and on what grounds? This book offers a road map for those seeking to understand these questions and to evaluate their answers.

q Roy Douglas. Taxation in Britain Since 1660. St. Martin's Press, 1999.

This historical look at taxation patterns in Britain shows that rises in taxation have often been followed by war.

q Jeanne Spurlock, ed. Black Psychiatrists and American Psychiatry. American Psychiatric Association, 1999.

The contributors to this collection document early and contemporary pioneers and their contributions to modern psychiatry.

q Steven M. Gelber. Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. Columbia University Press, 1999.

A scholarly history of two categories of hobbies, collecting and crafts.

q Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton, eds. Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity, 1300-2000. Sutton Publishing, 1999.

This collection of essays together give a detailed overview of the techniques, languages, media, and uses of propaganda from the early-modern period up to the present.

q Jared N. Day. Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890-1943. Columbia University Press, 1999.

Day argues that tenement landlords had a role as central as politicians, architects, developers, and city planners in the design and shape of urban landscapes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

q M.J. McNamee and S.J. Parry, eds. Ethics and Sport. E & FN Spon, 1998.

These essays provide a systematic treatment of the ethics of sport from diverse philosophical perspectives. ]

THE WEB OF SCIENCE: THE CITATION INDEXES TRANSFORMED

Ann Frenkel
Reference Librarian/Technology Coordinator

Have you ever wanted to track down every author who has cited one of your early articles? Remember those enduring (and frustrating) volumes: the Science Citation Index; the Social Sciences Citation Index; and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index? They have always made possible a uniquely useful bibliographic search-- the cited reference search, allowing one to use a given work as if it were a subject term to find more recent articles that have cited the given work. This search frequently finds relevant articles that cannot be retrieved through more traditional subject/author searches.

For years, scholars have used these three print resources to navigate and retrieve a comprehensive list of literature within their disciplines. Unfortunately, this searching has involved a time-consuming crawl through a morass of annual volumes, including the euphoniously named "Permuterm Subject Index." Even the most earnest librarian would shy away from referring students to these indexes--unless necessary-- because they are so confusing to use.

So we are very pleased to announce that Brandeis University Libraries have acquired the Web of Science which gives Web access to these three citation indexes, simultaneously. This is essentially a multidisciplinary online index to journal literature of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, covering 8,100 titles across 55 major disciplines.

The Web of Science indexes journal articles, book reviews, books, conferences, congresses, corrections, editorials, notes, letters, and symposia. We currently have Web coverage back to 1989. You still may need the print volumes for earlier years; in print we have Science Citation Index from 1955 (also on CD-ROM at the Science Library from 1982-1988), Social Sciences Citation Index from 1969 and Arts and Humanities Citation Index from 1977.

The unique features of the Web of Science allow searchers to create Boolean searches, to navigate forward and backward through the research literature using links made possible only with citation information, to locate an unlimited number of items which share one or more cited references, and link to original article information when a cited reference of interest is found (if the original articles are indexed in the database.) One of the nice features is the ability to search for articles written by authors from a specific institution and/or geographic place. Because each citation gives the author's affiliation and address, this is an excellent way to get contact information. The Web of Science also allows cited reference searches on secondary, as well as primary authors, and new data is added weekly.

Look for the Web of Science on the "Databases" page under "Resources and Tools" on the Brandeis University Libraries homepage (www.library.brandeis.edu). ]

NEW IN JUDAICA

Charles Cutter
Judaica Librarian and University Archivist

Brandeis University, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives have agreed to establish the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at Brandeis University. The center will house primary source material pertaining to the American Jewish experience, as well as American Jewish periodicals. To-date the Library has acquired microfilm copies of the following: The Minutes of the Jewish Chautauqua Society (1907-39), an educational and interfaith organization established in Philadelphia by Henry Berkowitz in 1893; the correspondence of Jacob Schiff, the American Jewish philanthropist and communal leader; as well as the archive of Louis Marshall, the American jurist and communal leader.

In addition, the Library has also acquired the following significant microform collections:

The Confidential U. S. State Department Central Files: Palestine-Israel shed light on such issues as the partition of Palestine, and its economy, social and religious life.

The acquisition of Slavic Judaica in the Yivo Library, a collection of 350 books and pamphlets, further strengthens the Library's growing collection in this subject area to support the study of East European Jewish history.

Poalei Zion, a socialist oriented Zionist organization, emerged in Russia in 1890. Its goal was to create a Jewish national state. Their archive sheds light on various issues of social history, the emigration to Palestine, and the activities of various Jewish parties and organizations.

Testaments to the Holocaust is a collection of rare historical pamphlets and serials, eyewitness accounts, photographs, and propaganda material from the collection of the Wiener Library. The Library, established in 1933 by Alfred Wiener, a leading figure in the Central-Verein Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens, documents, among other things, Jewish life under the Nazi regime. ]

THE SCIENCE LIBRARY ADDS TWO MILESTONE DATABASES

Sally Wyman
Head, Gerstenzang Science Library

As the summer began, two much anticipated additions were made to the Science Library's roster of electronic resources.

Science Citation Index has long been recognized as one of the most useful indexes to the journal literature of the sciences, both for its interdisciplinary nature and its citation searching capability. Both of these features are present in an enhanced version of Science Citation Index, now available at the Science Library and across campus as part of the Web of Science database. Web of Science provides access to Science Citation Index Enhanced, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Science Citation Index Enhanced, as the new name indicates, reflects the addition of some 2,200 more journals to its coverage, boosting the total to nearly 6,000. In addition, whereas the earlier Science Citation Index product provided access to subject information based solely on the presence of terms in the titles, this new version provides access to title, abstract and keyword terms, making it a more reliable search tool. Citation searching will continue to be one of the most common reasons for searching this database. The new "Look Up" feature requires the user to select from a small array of possible citations to match against, alleviating some of the common difficulties with incorrect citations in the database. The ability to search the component databases simultaneously or separately adds to the interdisciplinary nature of this tool. Earlier years of Science Citation (1982 - 1988) remain available for access in the Science Library on Workstation PAS 16.

Chemists and biochemists across the country are rejoicing at the new user-friendly electronic access to the Chemical Abstracts database, 1967 -, found in SciFinder Scholar. Through a Boston Library Consortium joint purchase agreement, Brandeis, too, now provides access to SciFinder Scholar in the Science Library. SciFinder Scholar is uniquely suited to the needs of chemists by providing searching for substances by compound name (including up to 50 synonyms for a given compound), molecular formula, Chemical Abstracts registry number, or patent number. With the drawing module, a structure or substructure can be drawn and searched for compound or reaction information. (The September upgrade to SciFinder Version 3.0 provides significant enhancements to reaction searching.) Subject, author, and other search methods are also available. SciFinder Scholar makes the Chemical Abstracts database accessible to a wider range of users for which its vast resources are well-suited, including biologists and physicists working at the interface of their disciplines with chemistry. SciFinder Scholar will be the topic of the Science Library Brownbag Talk on Wednesday, Nov. 10th. ]

EXHIBIT:
The People's Attorney: the Life of Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941

During the fall of 1999, the Brandeis University Libraries' Special Collections Department wishes to offer the University community an exhibition from one of its most treasured collections, the personal papers of Louis D. Brandeis. Complementing the records of Brandeis' life kept at the University of Louisville and the Harvard Law School, this collection preserves a unique perspective not only on the history of Brandeis' many and significant public roles, but also on the character of his private life. In cooperation with the Robert D. Farber University Archives, we invite you to enjoy this retrospective of the man after whom this university is named. The exhibition is divided into five categories showcasing the various stages of Brandeis' life: Youth, the Boston Career, Zionism, Family Life, and the Brandeis Legacy. On display are many photographs, documents, and personal articles from the Justice's life.

The exhibit items are but a portion of the Brandeis papers held in Special Collections. The complete collection houses personal correspondence of the Justice and his family, many publications authored by or concerning Brandeis, financial documents, a photograph collection, newsclippings, and a variety of additional materials concerning his life and work. The collection as a whole is informative not only about the details of Brandeis' life, but also offers a wealth of material on American legal history in general, Boston municipal history, the Progressive and Zionist movements, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the foundation and early years of Brandeis University. The collection may be viewed by appointment. Inquiries should be directed to the Special Collections Department (781-736-4682).

The exhibit will open after Labor Day and will run throughout the semester until December. The Farber Archives exhibit space is on the second floor of the Goldfarb Library and is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ]