Database News, May 2006
Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture Now Available
May is Arkansas Heritage Month and we can't think of a better way to celebrate than the release of the new Encyclopedia of Arkansas online. At http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/ you will find a free, authoritative guide to the events, people, places, land, and literature of our state. Begun four years ago and funded by a 1.28 million from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Encyclopedia is hosted by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock. UA's own Head of Special Collections, Tom Dillard, and Manuscripts and Archives Librarian, Tim Nutt, serve as Editor-in-Chief and Special Projects Editor, respectively.
Articles have been contributed by more than 100 authors from around the state and treat topics as diverse as Jim Bowie, Bear Bryant, Dale Bumpers, Black Oak Arkansas, and Buffalo National River. You can browse entries alphabetically, by time period, or by ethnicity or search by keywords or other criteria. The media galleries, offering photos, video, audio, maps, and more, are full of sounds and images from our past. You'll want to come back every day to see what happened in Arkansas history for that date.
On launch, the Encyclopedia offers hundreds of articles on many different fields, but work continues on the many topics still not completely documented. If you would like to be involved, view the list of topics needing authors and contact the Encyclopedia editors today.
Another way to learn and share your knowledge of the 25th state is to join our Arkansas History Discussion Group. This discussion list is designed to allow you to find opinions, background, ideas, contacts, and suggestions about Arkansas history.
New Edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics Online
The 86th edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics has just been uploaded. This new edition offers:
- faster and more advanced searching features
- faster table load times
- seven new tables on
- Vapor Pressure of the Metallic Elements
- Electrical Conductivity of Aqueous Solutions
- Proton Affinities
- Electron Inelastic Mean Free Paths
- Selected Properties of Semiconductor Solid Solutions
- Vapor Pressures (Solvent Activities) for Binary Polymer Solutions
- Density of Sulfuric Acid
- new help files
The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is a key reference resource for the beginning student, the bench scientist, and the engineering professional in the field. It offers broad coverage of data used in the physical sciences and engineering, with both interactive and PDF tables on topics such as physical constants, weights and measures, conversion tables, material properties, and much more.
EBooks added to Engineering Village
The Libraries have added a new collection of electronic books for the fields of electronics and electrical engineering. These "Referex" titles can be accessed through Engineering Village 2, the platform also used for the Compendex and INSPEC databases. Titles in this collection include:
- Analog Circuit Design
- Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists
- Electrical Engineer's Reference Book
- Essential Java for Scientists and Engineers
- Fiber Optic Cabling
- High Frequency and Microwave Engineering
- Linux for Embedded and Real-Time Applications
- Neural and Fuzzy Logic Control of Drives and Power Systems
- Practical Handbook of Photovoltaics
- Single and Multi-Chip Microcontroller Interfacing
Users can browse the 120 titles or search within the text for specific terms or keywords.
Please note that the Libraries currently do not have access to the other two Referex collections, on mechanical and chemical engineering.
Medieval, Ancient Databases Now Available
No, it's not an oxymoron.
The Libraries have recently added two important databases for the study of the classical and medieval worlds.
L'Année Philologique offers more than 400,000 citations to journal articles, books, book collections, book reviews, dissertations, conference proceedings, and other publications about the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. L'Année is comprehensive in scope, indexing works in many languages. It covers literature, languages, archaeology, history, economy, philosophy, art, religion, and all other aspects of the ancient Mediterranean.
The International Medieval Bibliography indexes books, articles, book chapters, and other publications on the European Middle Ages, covering Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in the period 400-1500. The database includes more than 300,000 articles drawn from 4500 periodicals and 5000 miscellany volumes such as conference proceedings, essay collections, festschriften and exhibition catalogs.
Taken together, these two databases provide researchers unparalleled access to scholarship about the ancient and medieval worlds.
Your Words in WorldCat
Have an opinion? Want to share the news about your favorite author or film? Need to unleash the acerbic critic inside? Now, WorldCat allows you to share your comments with, well, --the world.
With more than 60 million records representing holdings in more than 35 thousand libraries worldwide, WorldCat is the monster union catalog. If a library has it, you can just about always find it in WorldCat.
Now, when searching in WorldCat, you can click the "Add/View Comments" button to contribute your notes, reviews, or tables of contents to the WorldCat record. So, if you think that Hindi translation of Harry Potter is just not quite up to snuff or you want to add your personal sighting to The Grail Bird : Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, be our guest.
