Pause For These Important Messages

Yes, we are all adults here, busy with our work, school, and family obligations…but sometimes we just want to watch TV!

Now, normally it is during the commercial break that we go grab a drink, let the dog out, type one sentence of our paper, check our email…but a unique tool from the Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collection may make you want to watch commercials all day.

AdViews  is a digital collection of hundreds (and eventually thousands) of commercials created or acquired between the 1950s-1980s by the D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles agency.

The value of having these works freely accessible at your fingertips is twofold:

• First, who doesn’t love to watch old commercials, considering how completely out-of-context they feel in modern times?
• Second, perhaps more seriously for academics such as yourselves, vintage advertisements can inform us about the perceived cultural values of a time. They function as a literal snapshot revealing everything from beliefs about fashion, to hygiene, to health, to race and politics.

For example, see the advertisement below for Post’s Size 8 Cereal (also linked here):

Post Size 8 Cereal, AdViews Digital Collection, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University Libraries.

Be sure to connect to AdViews to view the complete digitized collection. You’ll be able to access older ads for everything from the U.S. Air Force , to a most bizarre Space Dust Candy , to good ol’ Virex Antivirus Spray , to name a few.

Whether you need a bit of a distraction, a trip down memory lane, or can bolster your research, we hope you’ll enjoy exploring this unique collection.

Search Smarter, Not Harder

Whew—earning a postgraduate degree is a LOT of work. As a Fielding student, not only are you challenging yourself to grow academically, you are probably doing so while maintaining a career, family, and maybe even some semblance of a personal life.

Image by Nenyaki. View CC license here.

We here in the library recognize that you have a lot going on and we want to help make staying on top of current research as easy as possible.

One simple way to do so is to sign up to have the tables of contents (TOCs) of your favorite scholarly journals sent directly to your inbox.

No more scouring the web once a month in search of the latest articles. No more frustrating late nights trying to remember the names of the journals your professor mentioned last year at summer session.  Just a few clicks of the mouse to check your email and voila!

Image by Marina. View CC license here.

How is this possible? A free service whose name says exactly what it means: JournalTOCs.  Yes, JournalTOCs is “the largest, free collection of scholarly TOCs”!

Drawing TOCs from nearly 25,000 journals, they are bound to be able to provide you with updates regarding your field of study.

Simply sign up for an account, search for the journals you would like to follow, and turn on email alerts.  Then, whenever a new table of contents is released, it comes straight to you!

Journal TOCs makes it easy to discover content; you can browse by subject/publisher, or search for a specific publication of interest.

We hope you will explore JournalTOCs and that it will make the research process (a little) easier.

Get Social…In A Smart Way

No denying it: social media is a great, entertaining way to connect with our friends and family…but sometimes don’t you wish there were a networking site for academics?

A place where you could share your research and follow the research of others in your field?  A site that allows you to track the impact of your research with sophisticated analytics?

Today’s your lucky day!

Academia.edu is a global community of over 15 million academics who want to share what they know and learn from others. (And a little insider tip for you library blog followers—this is a great place to find full-text research papers and other documents!)

Once you visit academia.edu, use the simple search box at the top of the screen to get started.  You can search for people, research topics, or even institutions.

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Use the navigation at the top to choose to view people, documents, journals, and even jobs related to the topic you searched.

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When looking through documents, you can see how many times they’ve been viewed as well as the author’s research interests.

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As librarians, of course, we must note that anyone can post research here: a world-renowned academic might re-post a published paper, or an undergraduate student might post a final essay.  Be sure to view researcher profiles to learn more about the author and their works.

Once you sign up and create a profile, you can really get networking!

Happy searching and sharing!

A trip down (virtual) memory lane

It may not be Throwback Thursday, but let’s take a trip down virtual memory lane.

“How?!” you ask enthusiastically. Why, with the Wayback Machine of course!  Brought to us by the makers of the Internet Archive.

This unique tool saves ‘snapshots’ of webpages at different points in time, from 1996 to just a few months ago. (Although Rocky & Bullwinkle fans will gladly tell you about the original Wayback Machine if you ask them). Simply input a web address in the search bar to browse its history.

Take, for example, this little gem: an image from the Fielding Institute’s website back in May, 1998:

 

We’ve come a long way haven’t we?

If that’s not enough for you, you can use the Wayback Machine to click through old pages of websites, not just the home page, to gain a complete picture of a site’s content at a given point in time.

So, I know what you are thinking: who cares?  Glad you asked!

As our technological capabilities grow, significant pieces of our culture are being created and stored on the web. This also means these objects are more easily lost and destroyed than heartier, more traditional artifacts like stone carvings, and thus require digital preservation efforts to be accessible to future generations.  Present and future academics alike will analyze webpages as artifacts, whether they interpret them as indicators of a society’s values or as works of art.

Practically speaking, the Wayback Machine can also be used to find webpages that may be presently missing, changed, or down.  For example, during the most recent government shutdown, the content of many U.S. Government webpages was inaccessible to users.  However, with the help of the Wayback Machine, adept researchers could still access recent versions of the pages they needed!

Whether you use it for academic research, or as occasional back-up, the Wayback Machine should be in every researcher’s toolbox.