Humanities

The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is the first-ever color facsimile of the Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript (National Library of Wales Peniarth 392 D). This digital edition, edited by Estelle Stubbs of the University of Sheffield, also includes transcriptions, collations with the other crucial early manuscript of the Tales (the Ellesmere Chaucer in the Huntington Library), complete descriptions, and analytical discussions in order to give a full set of materials for studying this important manuscript.

Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals

Press release 
Baghdad, Jun 20, 2012 

The Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research of Iraq is pleased to announce the launch of the new service "Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals" (IASJ).

IASJ is one platform where all scholarly journals published by the Iraqi universities and research institutions are indexed and discovered. All journals in IASJ are peer-reviewed and open access.

The main aim of IASJ is to improve the online discoverability and visibility of and access to the published scholarly research of iraqi academics. IASJ will help Iraqi authors to disseminate their research globally.

At the moment IASJ is launched in a Beta version with only 71 journals published by 18 institutions. The service will be further developed and will cover all journals, more than 200 journals publisher by 40 academic institutions in Iraq.

IASJ is developed and hosted by SemperTool, a company specialized in building digital library products. All content of IASJ will be included in the Iraqi Virtual Library System IVSL and it's discovery systemLibHub provided by SemperTool.

214 Academic peer-reviewed journals 37 institutions 56128 articles

The Twayne’s Author Series ebooks provide in-depth critical introductions to the lives and works of the major writers of the world, including close analysis of key works. These full-text ebooks present insightful and original commentary on the history and influence of literary movements. Each book included in the Twayne’s Author Series is downloadable by chapter, in pdf format.
 

1,118 ebooks, dates vary

Published by the MLA, James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide offers information about reference sources for doing research in all areas of literary studies. The electronic edition of the Guide, based on the fifth print edition, allows you to look up materials in WorldCat, Google Books, and your library’s online catalog. Use the personalization feature to save searches and individual entries and to write notes about them for later reference. Since the initial release of the electronic edition in 2009, the author has revised the Guide twice a year. The online Guide, which will continue to be updated and revised regularly, now includes over 1,000 entries; refers to nearly 1,700 additional books, articles, and electronic resources in annotations; and cites more than 700 reviews.

Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema explores the pivotal era in entertainment history when previously static images came to life and moved for the first time. The database features printed ephemera, programmes, sheet music, cigarette cards, postcards, games, toys and other merchandise from the pre- and early-cinematic years. The printed books in this collection range from technical magic lantern manuals to children's shadow play whilst the periodicals range from the scientific to early celebrity gossip. Moving Pictures has been digitized in colour and is entirely full-text searchable.

Subjects include: 

• Early visual entertainment such as shadow play, optical illusions, metamorphic pictures and protean views.
• Panoramas and dioramas
• Optical or philosophical toys
• Peepshows
• Magic lanterns and image projection
• Pioneers of cinema: Thomas Alva Edison, the Lumière Brothers, Eadweard Muybridge
• Early inventions such as the cinematograph, phonograph, and zoopraxiscope
• Emerging film industry
• The first film stars
• Original film footage from 1894-1926

The database also features a virtual exhibition entitled Optical Delights which showcases a selection of the most interesting optical entertainment artifacts and even some video clips of the devices in action!

This material is sourced from the Bill Douglas Centre; a unique treasure trove of pre- and early -cinematic memorabilia based at Exeter University, and the BFI National Archive.

 

 

"Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family allows students and researchers to immerse themselves in the values and behaviors of Americans of the past. The collection provides a window into American social history by bringing together the instructional, prescriptive, behavioral, and etiquette literature that defined standards of personal conduct for millions of Americans and reflected the prevailing social mores across the twentieth century. When complete, the collection will contain 150,000 pages of fully searchable handbooks, manuals, textbooks, etiquette guides, self-help books, instructional pamphlets, and how-to books that illustrate both how Americans actually behaved and how they felt they ought to behave."

Includes texts from over 700 sources.

 

 

Parker Library on the Web is a digitized collection of Medieval manuscripts originally collected by Matthew Parker (1504-1575) and donated to Corpus Christi College Cambridge in 1574. Parker's collection is especially focused on materials relating to Anglo-Saxon England as he was interested in discovering evidence of an English-speaking church independent of Rome.

North American Theatre Online is a comprehensive reference work covering all aspects of the Canadian and American Theatre. It includes some 40,000 pages of major reference materials, together with records to approximately 30,000 plays, 57,000 people, 5,400 theatres, 22,000 productions, and 2,500 production companies. Each year more than 20,000 new records will be added. The collection also includes approximately 10,500 images, playbills, postcards, scrapbooks and other resources.