Collection News - October 2008
Chill and Thrills: The Fred Isaac Mystery Collection
This October, you can scare yourself silly with books from the Fred Isaac Mystery Literature Collection. With more than 1,600 titles dating from the turn of the last century to this year, this collection of crime and detective fiction offers something for every mystery fan, from country-house Christie-ites to hard-boiled Chandler fans.
Isaac, librarian and active member of the Popular Culture Association, collected the novels, short-story collections, magazines, biographies, and other works over a thiry year period. He continues to send new acquisitions to add to his initial gift of 1,530 volumes.
Vice Provost-Academic Affairs Nancy Ellen Talburt described the collection and collector for Books and Letters:
"The Isaac collection of is that of a reader, not a book collector. The focus is on the writers and their works, not first editions, rare books, or complete sets...
"Materials from the early part of the century in the Isaac Collection are fewer but include works featuring important detectives such as G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown and H.C. Bailey's Mr. Fortune and the popular American author, Mary Roberts Rinehart. Similarly, "Golden Age" or "Classic" crime fiction is represented by works of such authors as Dorothy L. Sayers. Margery Allingham, R. Austin Freeman, and Ngaio Marsh and their counterparts in the U.S.A. of the same era, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and S.S. Van Dine.
"The "cozy" mystery form is represented in works form those of Agatha Christie to the contemporary series featuring Colorado caterer and amateur sleuth Goldy Schulz created by Diane Mott Davidson. Contrasting police procedural works are represented by the popular Ed McBain novels and contemporary gritty and dark novels by Ian Rankin and Michael Dibden. Authors of the private eye novel make an appearance, ranging from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to Ross McDonald and John D. MacDonald, as well as the pioneers of the women's hard-boiled novel, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. British Contemporaries such as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James are also represented.
"The Isaac Collection brings to the Library works by a large number of the most significant crime writers on both sides of the Atlantic."
While the majority of items from the Fred Isaac collection are on the open shelves in the Main circulating collection of Mullins Library, a few rare items are housed in Special Collections, and many fragile paperbacks are kept in Compact Storage. Readers can request items from Compact Storage through the ILLiad document delivery system by clicking the Find More! button at the InfoLinks record or by placing a request at the Mullins Library Circulation Desk. Browse the collection titles by searching the subject Fred Isaac Mystery Literature Collection in the library catalog, InfoLinks.
ICPSR Data Archive
The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), established in 1962, maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. The ICPSR archive offers a large number of data sets on social attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, as well as census and other statistical sources.
The University of Arkansas is a member of ICPSR; current students, faculty, and staff any access and download ICPSR data sets. To download data sets and code books, you will need to create a personal account on the ICPSR site with your UARK email address and a password of your choosing.
ICPSR also hosts a number of partner projects and archives, including:
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Child Care and Early Education Research Connections RC promotes high quality research in child care and early education and the use of that research in policy making. Our vision is that children are well cared for and have rich learning experiences, and their families are supported and able to work. Through this Web site, we offer research and data resources for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and others. |
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CrimeStat is a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations, developed by Ned Levine & Associates under the direction of Ned Levine, PhD, that was funded by grants from the National Institute of Justice. The program is Windows-based and interfaces with most desktop GIS programs. The purpose is to provide supplemental statistical tools to aid law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts. CrimeStat is being used by many police departments around the country as well as by criminal justice and other researchers. The new version is 3.0 (CrimeStat III). |
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Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA) HMCA is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest health care philanthropy organization in the United States. HMCA is the official data archive of the Foundation, and is devoted to preserving and making available research data that have significant secondary-analytic value for expanding knowledge on, and ultimately contributing to, improvement of the health of people in the United States. |
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Homicide Research Working Group (HRWG) HRWG, an interdisciplinary and international association of researchers and policy makers, was formed in 1991 to foster communication, coordination, and networking among people involved in the study of homicide. ICPSR maintains the HRWG Web site, which provides information on HRWG news, meetings, membership, and publications. |
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International Archive of Education Data (IAED) IAED is a project formerly sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. The education data stored in this archive are intended to support a wide variety of comparative and longitudinal research through the preservation and sharing of data resources. The archive seeks to serve the needs of academics, policymakers, and researchers in the field of education. |
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Mexican American Trajectories: Family, Geography, and Intermarriage Across a Century This Web site examines family and household relationships of Mexican origin Americans between 1880 and 1990. The research contrasts Mexican Americans to a variety of other immigrant origin groups (the Irish, Italians, Poles, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans) and to blacks and native whites. It assesses the effects of ethnicity on family structure, and especially on the household circumstances of children. |
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Minority Data Resource Center (MDRC) MDRC is a membership-funded archive whose purpose is to provide data resources for the comparative analysis of issues affecting racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States. We offer streamlined access to existing ICPSR data and to newly acquired studies that are relevant to the study of immigration, place of origin, ancestry, ethnicity, and race in the United States. Access to MDRC data is available to anyone at an ICPSR member university or institution. |
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National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) NACDA is funded by the National Institute on Aging. NACDA's mission is to advance research on aging by helping researchers to profit from the under-exploited potential of a broad range of datasets. NACDA acquires and preserves data relevant to gerontological research, processing as needed to promote effective research use, disseminates them to researchers, and facilitates their use. |
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National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) NACJD was established in 1978 under the auspices of ICPSR and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, and currently also receives funding from the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. At present, NACJD holds over 700 data collections relating to criminal justice. NACJD facilitates and encourages criminal justice research through the preservation and sharing of data resources, and through the provision of training in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data. |
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Population and Environment in the U.S. Great Plains This project is a study of the reciprocal relationship between population and environment in the American Great Plains focusing on the relationship between the agricultural land-use and demographic behavior. The researchers have collected county-level data on agriculture, population, and the biophysical environment from between 1870 and the present (for roughly 450 counties), and collaborated on local small-scale studies. Funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the project's county dataset is now based at the University of Michigan, where the principal investigator serves as ICPSR director, and a web-based extraction system will be made publicly available. |
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PreK-3rd Data Resource Center: The First Six Years of Schooling and Beyond The PreK-3rd Data Resource Center is an online resource center designed to expand the knowledge base and provide tools for the access and handling of Prekindergarten through Third Grade longitudinal data. The goal of this project is to inform the Foundation for Child Development's PreK-3rd initiative and build the research field by facilitating the analysis of rich, complex, longitudinal datasets that contain a wide range of variables on the child, family, school, and neighborhood. The Web site disseminates datasets and user guides developed to provide researchers with detailed guidance in creating their own extract datasets. |
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Substance Abuse & Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) SAMHDA is an initiative of the Office of Applied Studies at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The goal of the archive is to provide ready access to substance abuse and mental health research data and to promote the sharing of these data among researchers, academics, policymakers, service providers, and others. |
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Terrorism & Preparedness Data Resource Center (TPDRC) TPDRC archives and distributes data collected by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and researchers about the nature of intra- (domestic) and international terrorism incidents, organizations, perpetrators, and victims; governmental and nongovernmental responses to terror and citizen's attitudes towards terrorism, terror incidents, and the response to terror. |
Take the Knovel University Challenge!
This month, take the Knovel University Challenge. Use the Knovel collection of technical manuals, guides, and handbooks to answer questions and --perhaps - win big! Knovel provides a searchable database of more than 1000 handbooks and reference sources in science and engineering. The University of Arkansas currently subscribes to almost 900 titles focusing on areas such as:
For titles that the Libraries do not currently subscribe to, you will be prompted for a login and password. Remember to check InfoLinks, the online catalog before requesting on ILLiad. |
WorldCat.org Links to Google Books
WorldCat.org users now have an easy, seamless way to view digitized books available in the Google Book Search collection, right on the WorldCat.org Web site.
A Google Preview Button will appear in the record display when the text of a work—either excerpts for in-copyright works or full text for public domain materials—is available online. Visitors can click on the button to access the content within WorldCat.org via an embedded Google viewport.
WorldCat is a union catalog of more than 58 million records on the holdings of over 38,000 libraries in 75 countries representing 400 languages. WorldCat describes items on thousands of subjects and published in any year since about 1000. The items cited are owned by the University Libraries or by libraries around the world. Types of publications include: books, journals, maps, slides, computer datafiles, magazines, musical scores, sound recordings, computer programs, manuscripts, newspapers, videotapes, bibliographies, master's theses, doctoral dissertations, and software.
Google Books is a growing collection of records for both recent and long out-of-print titles. Because a search may retrieve results from the full-text of many books, Google Books is most useful in helping you to identify titles of interest in your research. Results may be in one of four formats:
- Full view: the full text of this title is available to read freely online. These are usually out-of-print titles scanned in Google's collaboration with the University of Michigan, Oxford, Harvard, New York Public, Stanford, and other major research libraries.
- Limited Preview: the publisher has provided a limited number of pages for preview only.
- Snippets: For copyright reasons, the publisher does not allow the full-text view. However, users can see a few lines of context around their hits. This allows one to identify page numbers of potential interest, similar to an index.
- No Preview Available: only the catalog information is available and no full-text has been scanned.
RILM Music Database Moves to Ebsco
The RILM: Abstracts of Music Literature database is now available on the Ebscohost platform. RILM indexes articles, books, conference proceedings, bibliographies, catalogues, dissertations, festchriften, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, ethnographic recordings and videos, reviews and more. Sponsored by the International Musicological Society, the International Association of Music Libraries, and the International Council on Traditional Music, RILM Abstracts documents the music scholarship of some 60 countries with submissions from 60 international RILM Committees.
On the Ebscohost platform, RILM users will enjoy quick links to available full-text as well as links from Oxford Music Online and the Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians and links to the Classical Music Library online recordings.
SciFinder for Mac Update
Scifinder Scholar, the desktop software used to access the Chemical Abstracts database, has released a new version 2007a for Macs. This update corrects previous problems experienced by users of the Leopard operating system. Current students, faculty, and staff can download SciFinder Scholar software through our SciFinder info page, which can only be accessed from computers connected to the UA campus network.
