Alice in Wonderland and more added to Cinema Image Gallery

We are delighted to announce that from today, Cinema Image Gallery subscribers can access more than 5,200 brand-new images from movies and television shows as diverse as Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, City Island, Shutter Island, and Jersey Shore. 

In all, more than 350 new films and shows have been added, with a total of more than 2,200 new images between them. We have also added images to movies and shows already in the database, including Book of Eli and the Star Trek movies.

Don't forget that Cinema Image Gallery also links to your catalog's video collection, making it more easily accessible by your patrons. It's also an ideal resource for summer art projects, quizzes, costume party ideas, and pure entertainment for your library's patrons.

If you don't already subscribe to Cinema Image Gallery, click here to find out how to get a free trial.

 

Kite Activities for Summer with Omnifile

If you're looking for summer activity projects for primary grade children, check out "Let's Go Fly a Kite," an article from the March/April issue of Instructor, available in full text on Omnifile. In this article, the writer suggests a number of activities that help with art skills, basic geography, and math, as well as providing a good starting point for discussing Chinese culture, an opportunity for shared learning, and a chance for kids to have fun.

The article "Kite Explorations," in the September 2006 edition of Science and Children, also offers recommendations for books that can be used to harness children's excitement about kites and connect that excitement to investigations relating to wind, technology, and the design of experiments.

You can find the full text of these articles, as well as many more ideas for summer activities for children of all ages, in Omnifile. 

You can also find many more pictures of kites and other flying machines in Art Museum Image Gallery.

Dissertations added to Omnifile

We have greatly expanded Omnifile's academic range by including abstracts and indexing to over 18,000 dissertations in the field of art. These will be included in Omnifile to begin with and then rolled out to the Art Full Text database. Patrons can also access the full text of any of these dissertations using the OpenURL link on each one.

We will be updating these dissertations on a monthly basis and will add more subjects as time goes on.

We hope that your patrons find this new feature of Omnifile useful, and that it will help with their research.

New resource: Links to full-text public-domain books and other materials

Our Essay & General Literature Retrospective, Short Story Index Retrospective and Book Review Digest Retrospective databases now feature links to the full text of public-domain books and other materials available through the HathiTrust digital library.

HathiTrust is an inter-institutional repository of digitized books, which currently "houses" more than 4.6 million volumes, approximately 15 percent of which are public domain works. 

H.W. Wilson Director of Product Management Ron Miller says, "Wilson's precise and granular indexing provides valuable discovery of individual stories and essays from the public domain books available through the Hathi Trust repository. Using Wilson's analytical indexing adds a new level of search and retrieval precision not found elsewhere."

You'll find some 3,700 links to full-text works on Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982; Short Story Index Retrospective: 1915-1983 features more than 1,330 links; and Essay & General Literature Retrospective: 1900-1984 features more than 3,320 links to full-text materials.

We hope these additional resources prove useful for your library and its patrons.

Happy Star Wars Day

The enduring appeal of the original Star Wars trilogy is summed up very well in an article from Scientific American, February 1998, which reviews a Star Wars exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington. D.C.

The article highlights George Lucas's genius in creating a universe that featured "gleaming metal and overfriendly machines", but was also "ancient and battered, filled with characters drawn more from the imagery of medieval romance than from science fiction". The strange creatures with which Lucas populated this universe were also more "familiar from a trip to the zoo", all of which "remind us that what we are seeing is really not so implausible".

This article is available in full in Readers' Guide Full Text Select, and a range of images from the Star Wars movies can be found in Cinema Image Gallery.

May the Fourth be With You.

New podcasts!

As promised in an earlier post, we have now added podcasts to our science databases. These podcasts, which take in a variety of subjects from black holes to bats and global warming to science in education, are also available to Omnifile and Readers' Guide database subscribers.

You'll find 198 podcasts on Applied Science Full Text, 276 on General Science Full Text, and 221 on Biological and Agricultural Index Plus, from such reliable sources as the Museum of Science, Boston and Earthsky.

Whether your patrons are interested in ocean currents, meteorites, or advances in making energy from waste, they are sure to find something to catch their ear among these excellent podcasts.

Art Museum Image Gallery adds historical political cartoons

Art Museum Image Gallery subscribers can now access a total of 571 high-quality images of political cartoon prints from the Library of Congress's American Cartoon Print Filing Series.

This series of images covers the years 1766-1876, taking in a range of topics from pre-revolutionary America through the presidency of Chester A. Arthur. The prevailing theme of the collection is the growth and development of the political process and its role in the governance of the United States. It takes in some of the great events in U.S. history, such as Secession, the Civil War, and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, as well as presidential elections, political scandals and gaffes, and more.

The Library of Congress suggests that the prints in this collection

"were used to advance political candidacies, attack individuals and ethnic groups, cast aspersions, promote ideas, and to introduce symbols, such as the eagle as a national emblem... and Uncle Sam... to a growing population, both literate and illiterate."

Images depict

• numerous national and regional issues, including slavery, Reconstruction, U.S. economic and monetary policy, and more
• Abolitionism and Anti-Abolitionism
• stereotyping of ethnic groups such as Irish-Americans and African Americans, including text mimicking speech patterns
• the Bank of the United States
• the Catholic Church
• the Constitution of the United States
• Jack Downing (the original symbol of the American people)
• political campaign symbols
• tarrifs

This collection promises to be invaluable for researchers in media studies, American studies, U.S. history, political studies, graphic design, art, and art history.

It features etchings, engravings, lithographs, and wood engravings by artists and publishers such as

• James S. Baillie
• H. Bucholzer
• John Childs
• Edward Williams Clay
• Currier & Ives
• Nathaniel Currier
• John L. Magee
• Louis Maurer
• Henry R. Robinson

Like all the other images in Art Museum Image Gallery, the images in this collection are rights-cleared for educational use, so you can use them freely in lessons, presentations, or projects in the classroom.

For more information or to sign up for a free trial of Art Museum Image Gallery, visit our website.