UMD Library Newsletter for the Theatre Department

January, 2006

Welcome back. I hope everyone had a relaxing Winter break.

Library Resource News

DVD and Video list

Many people have expressed an interest in getting a list of all the DVDs and Videos available in the UMD Library. We now have a page on the library website that can give you a list of DVDs and Videos, or just a list of DVDs or just videos, or let you search the DVD/Video collection itself by keyword, subject term, or title word. This is a very handy page, and it's at:
http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/coll/videodvd.htm

Related to that, I have been programming some searches of the library catalog in clickable links. For Theatre, I've created two of these. One is a search of the catalog that brings up all of our DVDs and Videos on Dance, and the other one does a search for all the scholarly journals in Theatre Studies, in print and electronic form. These searches are a substitute for lists that I might create manually.

Catalog search for DVDs and Videos on Dance: http://www.d.umn.edu/~rlitwin/redirect/dance-videos.html

Catalog search for journals in Theatre Studies: http://www.d.umn.edu/~rlitwin/redirect/theatre-journals.html

I can make more of these if it's of interest to any of you.

Google Scholar

Some of you may have heard of Google Scholar. If you've got students whom you have trouble weening off of Google, you might want to direct them, as one option, to Google Scholar, which is Google's answer to a library database. It's not as good as our library databases, for a variety of reasons (especially because it really focuses on sci/tech topics), but there's been a development in the library that makes it more useful to our students who want to use it. We've worked with Google to implement our "Find-It" feature in Google Scholar, which means that students can find references to an article in Google Scholar, click on the link, and get access to the actual article via one of our own subscription databases. So far the feedback on this from early testing, mainly with the Business Dept., has been very positive.

Give it a try. Google scholar is at: http://scholar.google.com/

JSTOR Additions

Some of you may be familiar with JSTOR, which is a database that provides full text of older periodicals, often going back to their first issues, even for journals that started publishing in the 19th Century. The following are some recent additions:

Theatre Journal (Arts & Sciences III Collection) New Content: Vol. 1 - Vol. 47 (1949-1995) Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press ISSN: 0192-2882

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (Arts & Sciences III Collection)
New Content: Vol. 1 - Vol. 21 (1976-1999)
Moving Wall: 5 years
Publisher: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
ISSN: 1520281x

Dance Research Journal (Arts & Sciences III Collection)
New Content: Vol. 1 - Vol. 31 (1969-1999)
Moving Wall: 5 years
Publisher: Congress on Research in Dance
ISSN: 01497677

Dance Chronicle (Arts & Sciences III Collection)
Release Content: Vols. 1 - 20, 1977-1997
Moving Wall: 7 years
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
ISSN: 0147-2526

Of the above, we have access to Theatre Journal and PAJ up to the current issue via other databases to which the library subscribes. To get access, look them up in the E-Journal Locator, at: http://wg5kj6qn2f.search.serialssolutions.com/

A word about Interlibrary Loan

I want to make sure all of the faculty are aware of what you can do with our interlibrary loan (ILL) services. Our library has about a half a million books, a few thousand videos, and access to about 20,000 periodicals, which makes it a medium-sized academic library. Very often, if you are doing some research on something specific, we won't have very much immediately available on your topic. But by using the International Index to the Performing Arts (IIPA) to get abstracts of journal articles, or by using WorldCat to find out about books, you can identify items to order by Interlibrary Loan. For undergraduates, our ILL department generally doesn't look outside of Minitex (a Minnesota network) to fill requests, but for faculty and grad students they will order items from just about any library in the world that is willing to lend it. That means that there is practically no limit to what you can access for your research. This includes not only books but also hard-to-find videos of theatrical productions - sometimes even items of which only one copy exists.

If you would like me to come to your office to show you how to use IIPA or WorldCat and place Interlibrary Loan requests, just let me know.

Instruction Sessions

I've been doing some instruction sessions for Theatre classes, getting the students reoriented to the library and how to find what we have here. It's been going well.

I do want to make sure one thing is well-understood about our instruction sessions. If we schedule a class session in one of the library instruction labs, there is no charge to your department for it. The room is paid for by the library. This may be a change from prior practice - I don't know. But there is no charge to your department if we do an instruction session in the library.

Feel free to contact me if you feel it would be useful to devote some class time to library resources. Among the things I can cover are:

• Library Databases (journal articles, etc., focusing on databases specially selected for your class)
• Library Catalog (including Inter-Library Loan)
• Reference Collection (showing off useful reference books)
• The Stacks (showing them where to go to browse the stacks and what they can find there)

These sessions can improve your students research habits by making them realize the breadth and depth of materials out there that they can use, instead of stopping with Google. As a result, their research is better and they end up approaching their work with a better informed persepective. I want to encourage you to schedule some instruction sessions with me if you think it would be useful.

Acquisitions

There is another deadline coming up for ordering materials: Friday, February 10th. I will be communicating with your department's liaison to the library about the specific dollar amount that should be spent by then.

I should update you on the special collection-development projects for the Theatre department. First of all, the old play collection that was housed in the Library Annex is now gone. It has been discarded. The large project to buy new plays for the library collection is well under way, in that everything we ordered from the major vendors of plays is now in the library. We will have some funds left over that I plan to use to buy harder-to-find anthologies of plays, from places like university presses that publish them piecemeal. However, if you come across plays or anthologies of plays that you want to order this year, I will use funds from that project to do it, which will reserve regular department funds for other things. Finally, there's the smaller project to purchase books, scores and CD's for musical theatre productions, a project that was shared with the Music Department. Those funds have been used and the resources are now in the library ready to be checked out.

I'm getting requests from a number of faculty to be updated when materials they have ordered are available to check out or place on reserve. Creating a good system to do this is one of my top priorities. I'll give you an update through your liaison person as soon as I have something ready. In the meantime, if you have asked me to let you know when a specific item has come in, please contact me to remind me. Soon I hope to share a "recent acquisitions list" for your department.

Some of you may be interested in knowing a little bit more about the acquisitions process. When I receive requests from your department, 90% of the time I pass them along to our acquisitions staff, who place the orders with a vendor. Occasionally I withhold an order. Possible reasons for that might be that we already have it in the library (happens more often than you might think); that it hasn't been published yet (in which case I keep a record of it to order it later); to prioritize remaining funds for other items that support the curriculum more directly (when we're near the end of our fund for the fiscal year); or, on rare occasions, because the item is likely not to be used by anyone other than the requestor. In those cases, I communicate the reason to the liaison or the requestor.

The acquisitions staff work with a number of vendors who specialize in the library market. Discounts from these vendors result in per-unit prices that are usually a bit better than Amazon. We can order out-of-print books from well-established vendors with a good track-record, but the acquisitions department avoids using very small, hard to trace vendors for out-of-print books. We want to use vendors who are reliable, and, most importantly, have a good return policy. This ends up ruling out some sellers that can be found on Amazon's marketplace or via bookfinder.com. Don't let that deter you from requesting out-of-print books, but don't be surprised if our acquisitions department considers an item unavailable that you know you could buy for yourself. It can be a frustrating policy from the point of view of a faculty member, but it saves a lot of pain and frustration (and $) within the library over time.

One thing worth knowing about when you order an item is that it is possible to give a request a "rush" status, which puts it at the top of the pile. One good reason to do this would be if you want to put an item on reserve for a class that starts in a month or two, and you want to make sure it arrives in time. I have not had to ask faculty for justifications for a request for "rush" status, because it hasn't been used much, but if everyone starts giving things a RUSH status then I will have to start asking for justifications.

Items that are very unusual and require originally cataloging by our technical services department are going to take longer to find their way to the shelves. Consider giving such items a "rush" status if you are going to need to access them fairly soon.

Recap

As a reminder, here are some things I've talked about in previous newsletters, that you can feel free to contact me about:

• Linking from WebCT to Library resources
• The Library website's Research Guides for students, by broad subject area
• The library's "Course Guides" service - resource lists for specific courses
• The Ask Us! service, which students can use to get research assistance from home
• Course reserves
• Requests for your syllabi
• RefWorks - web-based citation-management software
• ArtStor

The Theatre Faculty's web page for the library is at: http://www.d.umn.edu/~rlitwin/theatre.html

The library's Research Guide for Theatre and Dance is at: http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/ref/theatre/

Cheers!