Christmas closing

Our Christmas closed period will run from 5pm on Wednesday 23rd December, until 9am on Monday 4th January.

We wish all our readers a very happy Christmas and New Year!

New electronic resources: Congressional Serial Set, Confidential Print North America, Colonial State Papers

An early Christmas present! Thanks to a generous donation in support of the VHL, we have been able to purchase three major electronic resources for the University community. They are US Congressional Serial Set 1817-1994 (incl. American State Papers); Confidential Print North America 1824-1961 and Colonial State Papers. The availability of those resources is an impressive addition to Oxford’s holdings of resources for US studies and will transform many a researcher’s work.

The U.S. Congressional Serial Set 1817-1994 is a rich collection of primary source material detailing all aspects of American history. Its contents come not only from the U.S. Congress, but also include House and Senate Documents, House and Senate Report and more. Content for 1980-1994 will be added early January.

A demonstration of this resource will be scheduled for Hilary Term. Look out for further announcements.

Confidential Print North America 1824-1961 gives full-text access to a selection of The National Archives’ Colonial Office and Foreign Office papers, reports, dispatches, weekly summaries, etc. The collection covers a broad sweep of history from 1824-1961, taking in the USA, Canada and the Caribbean.

Colonial State Papers provides access to thousands of papers concerning English activities in the American, Canadian, and West Indian colonies between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Also included is a digitised version of The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574-1739.

A demonstration of this resource will be scheduled for Hilary Term. Look out for further announcements.

All are now available on OxLIP+. Use your SSO for remote access.

OxLIP+ downtime tonight

OxLIP+ will be down for approximately one hour from 10pm tonight for reindexing as part of essential maintenance. The articles & databases sampler in SOLO will also be unavailable during this period.

The rest of SOLO will still be available, including the links to databases and e-journals.

New books for November

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

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.

WISER coming up

Coming up next week:

WISER: Theses and Dissertations
Friday 6th November, 12.30-1.3opm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
This session offers guidance on finding theses, both those held in Oxford and those held in other institutions in the UK and abroad. It will demonstrate how to exploit the main sources of information: SOLO, Index to Theses (UK & Ireland), Dissertations and Theses (international), EThOS and ORA.
Jayne Plant.

Please note the previously advertised session on e-books on Monday 2nd November has been cancelled. A rescheduled date will be advertised shortly.

To view the full WISER programme please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/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.

For more information about the WISER programme please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk.

WISER coming up

Next week there are two WISER sessions running on OxLIP+, the libraries' gateway to electronic resources:

WISER Social Science: OxLIP+ Electronic Resources
Monday 26 October, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, Banbury Road
Gillian Beattie and Craig Finlay

WISER Humanities: OxLIP+ Electronic Resources
Friday 30 October, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, Banbury Road
Angela Carritt

OxLIP+ provides access to Oxford University's extensive collection of databases, electronic reference works, e-journals and e-books. These sessions will give you an introduction to effective searching and the range of resources which are available.

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. Individual assistance is also available on request direct from your subject librarian. Please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians for contact details. For more information about WISER, please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk.

Information Fair for History graduates

Wednesday, week 3 (28th October), 14.00-16.00
Exam Schools, High St

All graduates are encouraged to drop in on this fair, which is conceived as a gateway to the University's information resources. Oxford is fortunate in having rich library and archival holdings and electronic resources. Discover where they are!

Sources for medieval, early modern & modern, British, European, African, Indian, Commonwealth and US history will all be addressed, as will History of Science & Medicine and History of Art and Visual Resources.

Library experts and academic historians will have stalls where they will demonstrate and talk to you about information resources; Oxford colleges and some of their archivists will also be represented.

OUCS will talk about IT for historians. Learn about keeping up-to-date as well as the Oxford Research Archive (ORA).

There will also be information about further training courses.

Update: Trial access to US Congressional Serial Set and American State Papers

Further to the announcement a couple of weeks ago about trial access to the Congressional Serial Set, we are now also running a second trial to the same content via a different provider. Both trials will run until 30 November.

• US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980, + American State Papers (Readex)
• US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1969, + American State Papers (Lexis Nexis)

They can both be accessed via OxLIP+. The Lexis Nexis version requires an additional password; follow the instructions in the legend on OxLIP+.

This resource provides comprehensive, full-text access to over 337,000 Congressional and Executive branch documents and reports published in over 13,000 volumes of the US Congressional Serial Set. However, search options vary significantly between the two providers. Please let Isabel Holowaty (isabel.holowaty@ouls.ox.ac.uk) or Jane Rawson (jane.rawson@ouls.ox.ac.uk) know your feedback and preferences, preferably by 9 November.

WISER coming up: SOLO

Next week the library service will be running two WISER sessions on SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), covering how to search for and retrieve printed and electronic books and journals in the Oxford system and how to personalise SOLO so that it works for you!

WISER Social Sciences: SOLO
Monday 19 October, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
How to search for printed and electronic books and journals
Angela Carritt

WISER Humanities: SOLO
Friday 23 October, 12.30-1.30pm, OUCS, 13 Banbury Road
Learn how to search for both physical and electronic books and journals in Oxford University and beyond.
Jayne Plant and Kate Petherbridge

The WISER programme, delivered by subject librarians, aims to help you make the most efficient and effective use of online and printed resources. 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.

Individual assistance is also available on request direct from your subject librarian. Please see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians for contact details.

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

Mobile Oxford

The University has just launched a mobile service that, among other things, lets you search OLIS and, using GPS (if you have it), will tell you the nearest library to you that has the book you are looking for.

For more information see: http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2009/091012.html. Mobile Oxford can be accessed at: http://m.ox.ac.uk.

Library tour for new graduates

I'll be running an induction tour of the VHL for new graduate students in American History tomorrow afternoon (13th October) at 3pm. Any new graduates in US studies for Politics or Literature would be welcome to come along too!

Trial access to US Serial Set and American State Papers

We are pleased to announce that we have trial access to the online US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 and the American State Papers, 1789-1838, available until November 13th.

The US Serial Set is a rich collection of primary source material detailing all aspects of American history. This resource is invaluable to the research of US political, social, cultural, military, and ethnic history, as well as international relations, explorations, genealogy, commerce, industrial development, and more. Its contents come not only from the US Congress, but also include key Executive Department publications. Beginning with volume 1 in the first session of the 15th Congress (1817), the Readex US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1980 contains all publications from the 15th through to the 96th Congresses. American State Papers, 1789-1838 - which contains every legislative and executive document of the 1st through to the 14th Congresses and more - both complements the US Congressional Serial Set and is cross-searchable with it.

Upon completion, the database will contain nearly 14,000 volumes and more than 12 million pages from the original 350,000 publications, along with 52,000 maps and thousands of illustrations and statistical tables.

Both are available via OxLIP+, and can also be accessed directly from: http://infoweb.newsbank.com/. The trial ends on 13th November. Please email isabel.holowaty@ouls.ox.ac.uk or jane.rawson@ouls.ox.ac.uk with your feedback.

New electronic resource: The Making of Modern Law

News of a new electronic resource available via SOLO:

The Making of Modern Law comprises over 21,000 works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on British Commonwealth and American law. It covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature, some very rare. The monographs and materials in legal treatises include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches. The collection covers domestic and international law, legal history, business and economics, politics and government, national defence, criminology, religion, education, labour and social welfare, and military justice.

WISER Michaelmas 2009

The full programme of WISER (Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources) sessions for Michaelmas term is now available on the OULS website. The workshops are free and take place at lunchtimes (12.30-1.30pm) at OUCS on Banbury Road. This term sessions include:

• SOLO
• OxLIP+ Electronic Resources
• Ebooks
• Theses & Dissertations
• Keeping up-to-date
• Getting information to come to you
  
• Finding journal articles
• News resources for research
  
• Citation searching with Web of Knowledge
• Strategies for conducting research on the internet

WISER Humanities | WISER Social Sciences

If you would like further information, contact usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk.

Term time opening

From Monday 5th October, the library will revert to term-time opening hours - Monday-Friday, 9am-7pm.

New books for September

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

Changes to photocopying and printing coming soon

OULS photocopying and printing facilities will soon be changing. In January new services such as scan to email will be available and the way you pay will also be changing. We suggest you do not put too much credit on existing photocopy cards this term, and if you need to buy a new one, please note these now only cost 50p for the initial credit (ie, there is no longer any charge on the card itself).

Keep an eye out for new information over the next few months that will explain the changes in more detail!

New photocopier

Our photocopier is due to be replaced with a new one at some point tomorrow. We hope that the replacement will be quick, but there may be a short period when copying will not be possible as they take the old one out and get the new one set up.

US genealogical research: Social Security Death Index 1937- available

For those interested in genealogical research in the US, Footnote.com (working in co-operation with NARA) has made freely available a database of over 80 million profile pages of people found in the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). You can access:

• Deceased individuals with social security numbers whose deaths were reported to the Social Security Administration (1937- current)
• Birth date
• Death date
• Last known residence
• Member-added information, like maps, pictures, documents, sources, facts and more

It is updated weekly. To access it directly, go to http://go.footnote.com/ssdi.

REMINDER: OLIS unavailable this weekend

A reminder that OLIS will be unavailable from 5pm tonight for up to two days while essential server maintenance is carried out. SOLO will remain available throughout, but it will not be possible to check library holdings, place stack requests, or renew or reserve books during this time.

OLIS unavailable: 18-20 September

News from OULS:

OLIS (www.lib.ox.ac.uk/olis), Oxford University’s online library catalogue, will be unavailable from 5pm on Friday 18 September – Sunday 20 September inclusive (estimated timing) while the server is fitted with a new and faster disk array.

SOLO (http://solo.ouls.ox.ac.uk) will be available throughout. Please note however that it will not be possible to check library holdings, place stack requests or reservations or to access patron records during the downtime.

Where libraries use self-issue systems, these will also be unavailable.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this essential upgrade.

New books for August

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

Apologies for missing June and July - the automated lists were never received. If anyone would like to see them then please do let me know and I will see if I can get them.

Summer Bank Holiday

A reminder that the library will be closed on Monday 31st August for the summer bank holiday. We will be open 9am-5pm as usual for the rest of the week.

TRIAL: Index to the New York Times Historical Archive

We currently have trial access to the electronic Index (1851-1993) to the New York Times Historical Archive. Until 20 September, the Index can be searched as part of our NYT Historical Archive subscription. Specifically the trial is to help decide whether the online index can satisfactorily replace the printed version held at the VHL.

Search fields exclusive to the Index are:

• Subject
• Company/organisation
• Person ("Abbreviations are sometimes used in the NYT Index. If you don't find a person using their entire name, try using their last name.")
• Location ("When searching for older information, consider using historical terminology (for example, 'Austria-Hungary'.)

These fields can only be searched in the Advanced Search > More search options. Please note that you cannot browse the hierarchical index, only search it by keywords/phrase. From the results list, select Citations to view which index terms have been assigned to the article.

Access to the trial is via New York Times Historical Archive in OxLIP+/SOLO. Any feedback received by 25 September will be gratefully received and noted.

Reference section reorganisation update

Our summer project to reorganise the ground floor reference section is nearly complete. This morning, all volumes of the Congressional Record from 1918 to 1982 (the latest we have) have been brought up from the stacks and are now available on the open shelves along the left-hand wall of the ground floor (where the old Bibliographies section was). This should make them easier to access and browse (and save us time and effort fetching them up from the stack!). The indexes to the entire run, including the volumes still in the stack, are also on the ground floor, interfiled where appropriate.

The centre shelving units on the ground floor now house the new, slimmed-down reference section. We have moved a lot of out-of-date or more specialised material upstairs, to be shelved alongside other books on the same subjects. Certain large runs of titles have gone down to the stack where online versions exist - this includes the Monthly Catalog post-1976, America: History and Life, the Declassified Documents Reference System, and the bibliographies to the Evans collection. These are of course still accessible via stack request.

Two things remain to do before the project is over. Guides to microfilm collections held by the library are currently on a trolley awaiting shelving in a dedicated space (please ask staff if you need one and can't find it!), and the microcards of the Evans collection will also be moved down into the stack in due course.

Foreign Office Confidential Prints - new searchable database

Our colleagues over in Official Papers in the Bodleian have created a searchable online database of the Foreign Office Confidential Prints. From the 1820s papers of significance began to be distributed to officials in the Foreign Office, Cabinet and other departments as Confidential Prints. The practice grew until the 1850s when nearly every important dispatch or telegram was routinely printed. The Confidential Prints vary in format from a single page to a substantial volume, many have maps (we have over 700) and diagrams. The documents are numbered 1-10,600 (1827-1914) in roughly order of printing.

For the historian this is an incredible set of primary source documents. They are a window to Britain’s colonial past covering subjects such as slavery, railways, expeditions, diplomatic relations and war, from Abyssinia to Zanzibar. For Americanists, a search on 'United States' brings back nearly 800 records.

The index, ‘List of Confidential Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs’ (No. 10330, covers no.1-10,000) has been transcribed into a database. The index was arranged alphabetically by country, and the documents listed roughly in date order.

You can:

• search for documents with maps by entering map in the subject box
• search by jurisdiction, date and document number
• do a keyword search in the subject box
• email results in a spreadsheet format.

We do not have a complete set of documents at Oxford, so the search will return

• whether we have the document or not
• how many pages it has
• whether it has any illustrations or maps.

Records for 10,001-10,600 are in the process of being added to the database.

The collection is kept in the Official Papers reading room but is not on open shelf. Staff will be happy to fetch documents on request.

Digital National Security Archive - content update

New on DNSA (via OxLIP+)

The History of the National Security Agency: 1945 to Present

The intensely secretive National Security Agency (NSA) is the United States' national eavesdropping organization -- the largest and most powerful branch of the U.S. intelligence community. It now may also be the most controversial, due to the warrantless domestic eavesdropping programs that the Agency has engaged in since the events of September 11, 2001. This document collection sketches the history of the publicity-shy organization's
evolution, as it grew from a series of squabbling military cryptologic units on the verge of bankruptcy after the end of World War II, into the massive and immensely powerful intelligence empire of today -- with an annual budget of more than $8 billion and a workforce of more than 60,000 soldiers and civilians.

The thousands of documents comprising this set include dozens of newly declassified NSA internal histories and in-house journal articles. These provide, for the first time, a detailed insight into the Agency's operational successes and failures, and reveal the significant impact that
intelligence originating from NSA has had, both on government policy making and on battlefield decisions by military commanders -- for better or for worse. Several hundred formerly Top Secret Codeword intelligence reports and memoranda included in the set were derived partially or in their entirety from Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) originating from the NSA, while several
hundred other declassified documents discuss the Agency's organizational structure, intelligence collection and analytic operations, personnel and budgetary data, foreign liaison relationships, and sundry other operational matters. A number of formerly Top Secret Codeword assessments, carried out by more than a dozen outside study groups and Blue Ribbon panels (which were
chartered to examine NSA's operations and capabilities) are highlights of the collection. They provide a unique and rich source of information about the Agency's strengths and weaknesses throughout its more than 60 year history.

The U.S. Intelligence Community after 9/11

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community has been the focus of extraordinary public and policy attention, and the subject of significant changes aimed at enhancing the government's ability to protect national security. Some of these changes would have occurred as the result of a natural evolutionary process - that is, due to new ideas and technological opportunities. But others, such as the creation of the office of the director of national intelligence, are direct consequences of 9/11 and the questions that arose surrounding the community's performance prior to the attacks. The U.S. Intelligence Community after 9/11 will include all relevant documentation concerning the organizational changes made since 9/11, as well as information about intelligence activities that have occurred since the attacks -- including material on collection, counterintelligence, and analysis. A particular feature of the set is its inclusion of the results of all official Congressional and executive branch inquiries into, and assessments of, Intelligence Community performance regarding 9/11, the war in Iraq, and
other similar issues of major public concern.

Exhibition: Global Lincoln 1 July - 25 September 2009

To accompany the Global Lincoln conference at the Rothermere American Institute, an exhibition at the Vere Harmsworth Library will display rare publications illustrating how Lincoln was perceived abroad and influenced views of individuals as well as nations. Drawing on the rich historical collections of the Bodleian Library and Vere Harmsworth Library, the selection of materials will include examples from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Japan and more.

Special opening: Saturday 4th July

To tie in with the Global Lincoln conference being held in the Rothermere American Institute this weekend, the library will be open on Saturday 4th July from 2pm-5pm.

Summer Opening Hours

From Monday 29th June we will change to our summer opening hours, so will be open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm only. Please note that we are closed on Saturdays from now on.

Printing and photocopying survey

A message from OULS:

As part of a review of the Oxford University Library Service's printing and copying facilities, we have put together a questionnaire and would be grateful if you could spare some time to fill it in and provide some feedback.

The survey closes midnight Sunday June 21st, after which there will be a prize draw for an MP3 player and USB sticks.

Please find the link to the survey on the OULS webpage, or go directly to it here.

WISER this week

Coming up this week...


WISER: Online resources for Historians

Monday 15 June, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will give an overview of the range of electronic resources which are available for all historical periods. They are typically bibliographical databases, collections of primary source materials, electronic alternatives to journals and/or books or research aids for
biographical or reference research. The use of full-text searchable text opens up new avenues of research for historians.

Book now
Isabel Holowaty


WISER: Gadgets and widgets

Tuesday 16 June 2009, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will look at some tools that can help you organise yourself on the web, including social bookmarking services like delicious.com, bibliophile sites like LibraryThing and My WorldCat, and customised start pages.

Book now
Jane Rawson and Emma Cragg


WISER: Keeping Up to Date

Friday 19 June 2009, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will show you ways of using electronic bibliographic resources to keep up with the literature in your field by creating personal research / interest profiles and making your own
current awareness service.

Book now
Kate Petherbridge and Gillian Pritchard


Please note that the full program for the current term is now available
at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009
and http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/rsl/training/wiser_science

Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more effective. Please note that individual
assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

New US history sources guides available

Following reader requests, the US History Sources guide has been updated and split into two parts. There are now guides for pre-1945 (pale yellow) and post-1945 (dark yellow) US history, available in the library or online from our website.

WISER coming up

Coming up next week...

WISER: Sources for US History
Monday 8 June, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will introduce key information sources for the study of colonial America and history of the US. Starting with useful finding tools to locate relevant material, examples of source materials will then be shown. These include archival, microform, printed and online collections as well as useful web portals. There will be time for a brief hands-on at the end.
Book now
Isabel Holowaty

WISER on Maps and Mapping
Monday 8 June, 12.30-1.30, RSL
Many areas of research use spatial data and digital mapping is an ideal way to present it. This presentation will cover both web based resources (online map collections etc) and the digital mapping facilities available in the Bodleian. Please note this session will take place in the Abbot's Kitchen (IT training room) at the RSL. There is no need to book.
Nick Millea

WISER: Manuscripts
Tuesday 9 June 2009, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will give an introductory overview of the rich heritage collections preserved in the Bodleian. This session will also help readers to locate relevant material and describe the procedures for access and getting assistance.
Book now
Michael Webb

WISER: Information Sources for African Studies
Friday 12 June 2009, 12.30-1.30, OUCS
This session will introduce key information sources for African Studies. You will be shown useful finding tools to locate relevant material via SOLO and how to search them, as well as important portals and gateways to libraries and archives of online primary texts. There will be time for a brief hands-on at the end.
Book now
Sarah Rhodes and Lucy McCann

The full program for the current term is now available at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009 and http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/rsl/training/wiser_sciencehttp://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/rsl/training/wiser_science

Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more effective. Individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

Reminder: Reference section reorganisation

A couple of months ago I posted on the blog about our proposed reorganisation of the ground floor reference section over the summer, with a view to making post-1920 volumes of the Congressional Record (currently in the stack) available on the open shelves. We will be starting to move books from the reference and bibliographies sections upstairs or down to the stack in the next couple of weeks, so this is your last chance to let us know if you have any objections to any of the proposed moves. As a reminder:

• Green dots indicate that a book will be moved upstairs to the main collection
  
• Yellow dots indicate that a book will be moved to the stack
  
• Pink dots indicate a book that will be kept on the ground floor as part of a research enquiry collection
  
• No dot means the book will stay as part of the new reference collection.
  
• Where all the volumes in a set or on that shelf will be moved together, only the first volume in the set/shelf has been dotted.

If you think that a book should remain in the reference section and not be moved, please mark a cross on the spine dot and we will take this into consideration. We have erred on the side of dotting more books rather than fewer, so not everything will necessarily end up moving.

Thanks for your help!

New books for May

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

WISER coming up

UPDATE: This session has now been cancelled.

WISER: Google Project
Friday 5 June 2009
The Library Services are working with Google to attempt the mass digitization of our entire holdings of out-of-copyright C19th material. This presentation will set our experiences and the outputs of the project in the context of Oxford's ambitions to provide a digital library service for the global community of readers.
Book now
Michael Popham

The full program for the current term is now available at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009

Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

WISER coming up

WISER: ORA - Oxford University Research Archive
Tuesday 26 May 2009, 12.30-13.30, OUCS
ORA is a highly visible online archive of publications and other digital materials produced by Oxford researchers. You will explore this growing collection and find out how researchers can deposit items. Discover the advantages of using ORA for preserving and accessing Oxford research.
Book now
Sally Rumsey

Google Scholar - pros and cons
Wednesday 27 May 2009, 12.30-1.30, RSL Training Room
Google Scholar offers a very convenient method of retrieving article citations and often the accompanying full text, and is growing in popularity. This session offers tips on using it effectively and extending your search to other sources should Scholar's coverage prove inadequate for your purposes. You do not have to book a place to attend a session.
Roger Mills

WISER: Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Friday 29 May 2009, 12.30-13.30, OUCS
In this hands-on session, you will discover how the images and full text are created, how authoritative they are, and how to: search more effectively, including within a text, manipulate and print the images and full text and use alternative interfaces to get the most out of the content.
Book now
Pip Willcox and Judith Siefring

The full program for the current term is now available at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009 and http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/rsl/training/wiser_science.

Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more effective. Please note that individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. (See http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians). Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

The Annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in Arts and Letters at the RAI, 21st May 2009

The Annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters will be given this year by Christopher Bigsby, Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Professor Bigsby has published numerous books on aspects of English and American culture, including the acclaimed Arthur Miller: the Definitive Biography.

The title of the lecture will be “Arthur Miller: Un-American”. It will take place at the RAI on Thursday, May 21st 2009 at 5pm, and be followed by a wine reception.

Places are free but must be reserved. Please contact Lucy Dugmore, Academic Programme Administrator, to make a reservation, by email at academic.programme@rai.ox.ac.uk or by telephone on 01865 282 711.

WISER coming up

WISER: Locating research funding
Tuesday 12 May 2009
In this session we will outline the support offered by Research Services including our subscription to ResearchResearch.com, an excellent source of research funding information available to all University members. We will also discuss other ways of identifying funding opportunities.
Claudia Kozeny and Glenn Swafford, Research Services
Book now

WISER: Bibliometrics: the black art of citation rankings
Friday 15 May2009
Mystified by metrics? Anxious about impact factors? Happy with your h-index? The next research assessment exercise is likely to place heavy emphasis on the use of these measures, so it's worth getting a grip on them now. This session will endeavour to explain how they work, how they are interpreted and how reliable they are.
Roger Mills
Book now

The full program for the current term is now available for booking at http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009

Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more effective. Please note that individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians.
(See http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians)

Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

VHL on Twitter

It was probably only ever a matter of time, given my enthusiasm for shiny new web things, but the VHL is now on Twitter. At the moment we'll just be using it to push out our newsfeed and link back to the blog, but if you use Twitter and like to get your updates that way, please follow us! Our username is @vhllib.

New books for April

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

May Bank Holiday opening

Just to confirm that the library will be open on both Bank Holidays in May, 9am-7pm as usual. Please note however that there will be no deliveries of stack requests from the Bodleian.

WISER: Coming up

WISER: Key Search Tools
Tuesday 5 May 2009, 12.30pm - 1.30pm
This session will give you an overview of the key search tools provided by the Library services including SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries' Online), OxLIP+ (our gateway to electronic resources) and OU e-Journals.
Book now
Angela Carritt and Kate Petherbridge

WISER: Managing your references.
Friday, 8 May 2009, 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Keeping track of your references and formatting them correctly for inclusion in your thesis or published work can be a chore. Reference management software makes it easy and is well worth investigating. This introductory session gives an overview of how it works and the pros and cons of different products, including RefWorks and EndNote.
Book now
Roger Mills and Ljilja Ristic

The full program for the current term is now available for booking at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009

Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more effective. Please note that individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. (See http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/libraries/subjects/librarians) Please email usered@ouls.ox.ac.uk if you need more information about the WISER sessions.

WISER sessions this term

The programme for WISER sessions (Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources) during Trinity Term is now available on the web at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/trinity2009.

Saturday opening in Trinity Term

Now we are into Trinity Term, a reminder that the library will be open on Saturday mornings (9am-1pm) from 25th April to 20th June.

Reference section reorganisation

We are embarking on a project to rearrange the ground floor of the library over the next few months, and need your help to finalise what will move where.

Currently the ground floor has reference books in the centre shelves, and bibliographies along the left-hand wall. Once our reorganisation is complete, the centre shelves will contain a smaller and more focused reference section, and the left-hand wall will be used to house post-1920 volumes of the Congressional Record, which are currently in the stack. Guides to microfilm collections held in the library will be shelved separately by the microform cabinets.

The books in the reference and bibliographies sections have been marked with coloured dots on the spines, according to where we suggest they might go in order to make space for the Congressional Record. Please take a look at the collections, and if you disagree with our assessment, mark the dot with a cross. We will then consider those titles more carefully. Please note that we have erred on the side of dotting more books rather than fewer, so not everything dotted will necessarily move!

Dotting guide:

• Green dots indicate that a book will be moved upstairs to the main collection
• Yellow dots indicate that a book will be moved to the stack
• Pink dots indicate a book that will be kept on the ground floor as part of a research enquiry collection
• No dot means the book will stay as part of the new reference collection.
• Where all the volumes in a set or on that shelf will be moved together, only the first volume in the set/shelf has been dotted.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please get in touch via any of the usual methods!

Easter closing

The library will be closed Friday 10th - Monday 13th April inclusive for Easter. We will be open 9am-7pm as usual throughout the rest of the vacation.

New books for March

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

Reserved desks for DPhils

Starting from today, a number of the study carrels on the first floor of the library will be reserved for specific users. This has been requested by the RAI graduate community and fits with the aims of the RAI to provide more dedicated workspace for graduates. Other readers are welcome to sit at the desks if they are not in use, but should be prepared to move if the named user turns up.

We will monitor how this works closely once we get into Trinity Term as use of the library increases. We do not want to disadvantage library users, but also do want to provide as good a service as possible to the RAI/US Studies community.

New books for February

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

Search SOLO from our website/blog

We now have the facility to search SOLO/OLIS, OxLIP+ and e-journals from a search box on both our webpage (under the picture on the front page) and in the sidebar of the blog. So if you're on our website or the blog and want to check on a reference or access electronic resources, you can do so directly!

Happy Birthday, Abe!

To celebrate Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial on 12 February 2009, the VHL is running a small exhibition. Exhibits include an account of the day of his birth (in a blizzard as well as a log cabin), two early 20th century treatises questioning his lineage and parentage (no, he does not descend from the Linkhorns), an illustration of a patent he was given for "A contrivance for Lifting a Boat over Shoals" and a reproduction of the earliest known photograph of Lincoln (a 37-year old Congressman).

Some Lincoln curiosities:
1. Lincoln was the first president to be born outside the original thirteen colonies.
2. Lincoln shares his birthday with a certain Mr Charles Darwin.
3. He is the tallest president at 6 feet 4 inches. Obama is believed to be 6 feet 2 inches.
4. Lincoln is the only president to be issued with a patent. On 22 May 1849, he received Patent 6469 ("A Contrivance for Lifting a Boat over Shoals"). In the end, his invention was never manufactured.

Some Lincoln soundbites:
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
"Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."
"And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."

The Exhibition will run until 31 July 2009.

Kissinger Telephone Conversations now available

Transcripts and audio clips of Kissinger's telephone conversations are now available as part of the Digital National Security Archive (via OxLIP+). To search or browse this collection alone, tick the relevant box on the 'documents' page (link on the left hand side). If you scroll down this screen there is also an option to restrict your search/browse to audio clips only.

Related to this, the Miller Centre of Public Affairs makes freely available a selection of more transcripts and recordings of telephone calls and speeches for Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. See http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu.

No Bodleian deliveries today (Friday 6th Feb)

Due to the severe weather, the Bodleian van will not be making deliveries to other libraries today. This means that no stack requests will arrive in the VHL. If you need to see stack material today (and haven't yet put in a request), you will need to go to a Central Bodleian reading room. Stack requests from the VHL stack are not affected!

WISER coming up: Google Scholar

WISER: Google Scholar - pros and cons
Friday 13th February 2009 (4)
Google Scholar offers a very convenient method of retrieving article citations and often the accompanying full text, and is growing in popularity. This session offers tips on using it effectively and extending your search to other sources should Scholar's coverage prove inadequate for your purposes.
Sue Bird and Roger Mills
Book at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TZWM

Full WISER programme and more information at www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/wiser.

New books for January

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

Watch the Inauguration at the RAI

The RAI will be hosting a party to mark (and watch) the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States tomorrow from 4.30pm in seminar room 2. Wine and soft drinks will be provided. The President will take the oath of office at 12 noon EST (5pm GMT).

Image from Wikimedia Commons

WISER sessions this term

The programme of WISER training sessions this term is now available online at: http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser/humanities. Attending these workshops, delivered by subject librarians, will give you an excellent opportunity to gain understanding of the specialist information resources available. These sessions will save you time and make your searches more efficient. Please note that individual assistance is also available on request direct from subject librarians. The workshops are free and will usually take place each lunchtime, 12.30-1.30 at Oxford University Computing Services or the Radcliffe Science Library.

New resource: Lyndon B. Johnson telephone conversations

The library has just acquired a set of recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson's telephone conversations from May 1968 to January 1969. The full set of 30+ CDs provides over 600 hours of phone conversations, and printed transcripts are also available. It will take us a while to get these catalogued, but they are available for use - please just ask at the desk. They can be listened to on the PC in the group study room, or, if you have headphones, on your own laptop or another library PC.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

New Year, new loan policies, and new books for December

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year! We have a couple of new things related to loans to announce for 2009.

1. Fines: For all our registered borrowers (RAI Fellows, academics and graduate students in US Studies), we are introducing fines on overdue loans at a rate of 20p per day from now on.
2. Staff Desk Collection: We will now be issuing books from the staff desk collection as short loans for two hours at a time. The books will still be confined to the library, and will be able to be renewed for further two hour periods provided no-one else has reserved them. This should help improve access to these in-demand titles. If you are not already a registered borrower at the VHL and would like to use the staff desk collection, please bring your card to the desk in the library to register. Once you have done this you will be able to check books out from the staff desk collection and place reservations. Please note that if you are not otherwise entitled to borrow, registering for the staff desk loans system will not entitle you to take out any other books.

And finally, the list of new books received in the library in December is now available on our website and LibraryThing page.