New Resources
Periodicals Archive Online
ProQuest and JISC Collections have made a collection of 80 journal titles, taken from ProQuest’s Periodicals Archive Online, available to universities and colleges in the UK. Researchers, teaching staff and students can have free access to more than 100 years of content and 288,006 articles covering the arts, humanities and social sciences. Titles include Early American Literature, English Literature in Transition – 1880–1920, Shakespeare Studies and Modern Fiction Studies. The articles contained in the collection encompass the full backfile of each journal, with content dating from 1891 through 2000.
To gain access to Periodicals Archive Online, your institution will need to complete a licence agreement.
For further information, please go to www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/pao or contact your subject librarian.
BBC Motion Gallery
If you want a step-up from YouTube or Google Video into the world of professional motion pictures to share with your students, then you might be interested in another major collection being made available through JISC and the BBC Motion Gallery. The collection spans 70 years contains more than 20,000 clips. The JISC Collections licence for this resource allows staff and students to search for, download, edit and use footage in student assignments and projects, showreels, résumés, competition entries, presentations, course packs, Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and deposit footage in learning and teaching repositories such as JORUM.
www.bbcmotiongallery.com/Customer/index.aspx
www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/bbcmotion
Cambridge Companions Online
Cambridge Companions Online is the electronic version of the Cambridge Companions series, covering literature, philosophy, classics, religion and cultural studies. Over 270 titles are included, which provide introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. Specially commissioned essays, which are designed for student readers, enhance and complement the book series.
Subscriptions are available for the complete collection or either of the two sub-collections: a) literature and classics and b) philosophy, religion and culture. You may also upgrade your subscription to include Shakespeare Survey Online. This is the online version of Shakespeare Survey, a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production.
www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/cco
New Books
Podcasting for Learning in Universities by Gilly Salmon and Palitha Edirisingha (eds) Publisher: OUP, 2008
Moodle Teaching Techniques: Creative Ways to Use Moodle for Constructing Learning Solutions by William H. Rice IV Publisher: Packt, 2007
Tools
Bookmark your favourite page on the
English Subject Centre website – it’s easy!
Some of you may have noticed the bookmarking and sharing widget that now appears at the bottom of every page on the English Subject Centre website. Mouse over the word ‘Share’ and a drop-down window will reveal a list of many of the most popular social bookmarking tools (eg Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Facebook). Select your favourite tool, add any other info (tags, descriptions etc and the page is saved for you! If you are new to social bookmarking, Google the term and you will find many resources. Educause have a ‘7 things you should know about’ factsheet (go to their 2005 tab).
www.educause.edu/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutSeries/7495
SMSPOLL
Ever wanted to run a poll and get the results quickly but haven’t had the time, money or technology to set it up? This web-based system could be the answer. Your audience votes by sending an SMS to a local phone number and the results are updated in real-time, eg in your PowerPoint presentation or on your website. There is a free option that limits your votes to 25/poll, otherwise a range of options are available at reasonable rates.
www.smspoll.net/
vozMe
Why not have a go with this extremely easy to use, free, web-based text-to-speech converter? Simply pull up the vozMe website into your web browser and type or paste text into the box. When you have finished you select ‘create MP3 and your text is converted into a downloadable sound file. There are also a set of widgets on the website that can be inserted into webpages.
http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en
Focus On …
MyIntute
As many of you know, Intute is the free, online service providing access to quality, peer-reviewed web resources for use in your classrooms or research, but did you know about the personalised services offered through MyIntute? By creating an account on the website you can save your custom searches, build up your own selection of resources (and their descriptions) to circulate to students or embed in a course web page, tag your resources with your own keywords … or create a ‘reading list’ for your students which is exportable as HTML or Javascript (the latter providing automatic updates). It is also possible to take RSS feeds of relevant resources for your students that you might like to display in your course VLE (current feeds include: English, comparative literature, manuscript studies, communications, media and culture.) Many of these feeds might also be useful on a staff intranet area. Intute-Lite is also an easy way to create an Intute search box for your web pages.
MyIntute www.intute.ac.uk/myintute/index.php
Intute: arts & humanities www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
What is a Tiny URL?
The URLs that you see on this page, and throughout the Newsletter, were generated by a free utility which takes long URLs and resizes them for you. Access the utility yourself at http://tinyurl.co.uk
• You may need to consult your humanities librarian about access to some of the resources mentioned in this area
• Where possible, I try to recommend software that is
open source, free-of-charge, copyright cleared, shareware or freeware
• All URLs on this page were last accessed in July 2008
