New: increased access to Oxford University Press materials. Includes African American Studies Center and US demographic data on SocialExplorer

The Bodleian Libraries have signed a new agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) to significantly increase reader access to all current OUP online content.

For Americanists this means we now have full access to two more major electronic resources covering the United States: the Oxford African American Studies Center and SocialExplorer, as well as a significant increase in the number of ebooks from both OUP and 14 partner university presses, including Chicago and Yale. Overall, you can now access over 20,000 e-books, plus extra databases; a considerable increase from the amount of content previously accessible, which was selected on a case-by-case basis by subject librarians.

Among the new collections fully available are the Oxford Scholarly Editions, the British Academy Publications and the Oxford Language Dictionaries. The full collections in Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford Handbooks Online and Oxford Bibliographies Online are also accessible. Links to the e-books and databases can be found in SOLO, the Oxford Libraries’ online catalogues, and OxLIP+, the Libraries’ online information platform.

The Oxford African American Studies Center provides a comprehensive collection of scholarship on African American and African history and culture, including over 10,000 articles from major reference works such as the Encyclopedia of African American History and the African American National Biography, as well as hundreds of primary sources, images, maps and data. >Further details.

SocialExplorer provides access to a wealth of demographic data for the United States from 1790 to the present day, presented as easy-to-navigate maps and tables. >Further details.

Read more about the Bodleian’s agreement with OUP on the Bodleian website.

WISER coming up: Getting information to come to you

wiserNext week, Bodleian Libraries will be running a workshop on how to keep up to date with emerging research using RSS feeds, alerting services and other tools:

WISER: Getting information to come to you (Thu 30 Jan 10.30 – 12.00) (wk 2) – Keeping up to date with new research is important but time consuming!  This session will show you how to set up automatic alerts so that you are notified about new articles and other publications and when key web sites are updated.    Participants will have the opportunity to set up RSS feed readers and/or email notifications during the session.

Who is this session for? Postgraduates, researchers and academics.

Presenters:  Jane Rawson and Helen Matthews

Please book your place online.

Keeping up with Bodleian Libraries training opportunities: Why not follow join our mailing list by sending an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/oxwiser or visit the BodWiser blog at http://bodwiser.wordpress.com

Questions? – Please contact usered@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Welcome to our new home!

After a happy six years on Blogger, we have decided to move the VHL blogs to a new home, on the Bodleian Libraries’ own blogging platform. This gives us a more ‘official’ URL and ties us in more closely to other Bodleian blogs like that of the History Faculty Library.

From now on, you can find the VHL blog at http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/vhl and the US Studies Resources blog at http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/us-studies. The links to and from our website, Facebook and Twitter are being updated, so if you get your news from the blog that way you should continue to do so.

If you have subscribed to our blog either via RSS or email you should not need to do anything as we will be updating the settings for our subscription service, Feedburner. You should continue to receive new posts exactly as before, though please do let us know if not so that we can check it’s all working as it should.

SOLO essential maintenance: downtime Tuesday 7th January 6-10am

The SOLO team are planning to install a new service pack for SOLO on Tuesday 7th January 2014. Due to the complexity of the installation, SOLO will be unavailable between 06:00 and 10:00 on that date.

The service pack should fix a number of issues including the following:

  • Inability to email records from SOLO
  • Problems with Chinese script searching
  • No “View all items” button appearing in some cases where a library has six items

As a reminder, if ever SOLO is down you can use COPAC or Mobile Oxford as an alternative way to check our catalogue and find shelfmarks.