In celebration of their 40th Anniversary, BC Studies has created audio recordings of forty of the most influential articles published in the journal to-date.

Articles of anthropological interest include:

• Invention of Anthropology in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C. by Julie Cruikshank
  BC Studies #95, Anthropology and History in the Courts (Autumn 1992), pgs: 25-42. (download mp3)

• The Pivotal Role of the Northwest Coast in the History of Americanist Anthropology by Regna Darnell
  BC Studies #125/126, Ethnographic Eyes (Spring/Summer 2000), pgs: 33-52. (download mp3)

• “That’s My Dinner on Display” : A First Nations Reflection on Museum Culture by Gloria Jean Frank
  BC Studies #125/126, Ethnographic Eyes (Spring/Summer 2000), pgs: 163-78. (download mp3)

There are many more – see the full list of 40 here. If you’d prefer to read the articles, check out our print and online options to read the journal BC Studies here.

UBC Library is running a trial of the eLibrary eBook platform. You can access the trial here: http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=1484

This trial provides access to eBrary’s Academic Complete collection, which includes 37,000 books across 20 subject areas, including 100s of titles in Anthropology and Archaeology.

Some sample titles of interest include:

• Archaeology of Difference : Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania edited by RobinTorrence, and Anne Clarke (2000)
  Using case studies from Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Micronesia, the contributors all share a concern with tracking the processes of contact between indigenous peoples and outsiders, primarily Europeans, across the varied physical and cultural landscapes of the region.
• Cine-Ethnography by Jean Rouch with Steven Feld (2003)
  One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music.
• Medicine as Culture : Illness, Disease and the Body in Western Societies by Deborah Lupton (2003)
  Provides a broad overview of the way medicine is experienced, perceived and socially constructed in western societies.
• Kinship and Behavior in Primates by Bernard Chapais and Carol Berman (2004)
  A fundamental reference for students and professionals interested in primate behavior, ecology and evolution.

The trial ends 17 December, 2008. Please send your feedback to Library Electronic Resources Help.

Did you know that we have online access to most North American Ph.D dissertations published post-1997? We do, through a database called Proquest Dissertations and Theses. You can access the database from the list of indexes and databases off the library home page (under the eresources tab, in the blue menu bar at the top).

Thanks to a handy search widget that ProQuest has created, you can give it a try right now from here. Just type your keywords into the box below:

function proQuestSearchGo(){
var url=”http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=305&FT=1&DBId=15119&SQ=”;
var searchInputEl = document.getElementById(“proQuestSearchInput”);
document.location=url + encodeURIComponent(searchInputEl.value);
}

function handleKeyPress(e,form){
var key=e.keyCode || e.which;
if (key==13){
proQuestSearchGo();
}
}

 

Enter your search terms:

I’ve added the widget to the Anthropology Subject Guide, in the section on theses and dissertations. Just look for the ProQuest search box, and enter your search terms.

(Remember that if you’re off-campus, you’ll need to authenticate using VPN or the proxy so that the database knows you’re from UBC – Contact me if you need help.)

If you’re looking for high-resolution images to use in a (non-commercial) anthropology presentation or paper, you’ll want to check out ARTstor. ARTstor is a digital library of roughly 550,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social science.

Here’s a brief sample of collections of interest to anthropologists:

Photographs of Mayan Excavations – Images from the Carnegie Institution of Washington
(from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University)

“The Carnegie Institution sponsored archaeological excavations of Mayan sites in Mexico and Central America from 1913 to 1957. Carnegie researchers embarked on annual expeditions to the Yucatan peninsula, from the lowlands of Peten to the highlands of Guatemala, conducting archaeological reconnaissance, excavation, and restoration at sites such as Uaxactun, Copán, Pedras Negras, Yaxchilan, Coba, Quiriguá, Tayasal, Kaminaljuyu, and Chichen Itza. Many of the buildings, monuments, and artifacts recorded in these photographs no longer exist, or are so physically damaged or inaccessible as to be unavailable to most researchers.”

Native American Art and Culture collection
(National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution)

“This collection has two components. The first consists of more than 10,000 high res images made from historic photographs richly documenting Native American subjects. These digital images have been made from glass plate negatives collected by or produced under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) beginning in the late 19th century.

The second component of this collection consists of images of approximately 2,000 Plains Indian ledger drawings. Plains Indian ledger drawings, mostly produced in the middle to late decades of the 19th century, represent an important indigenous artistic tradition. These drawings on paper, often done on the pages of ruled ledger books acquired through trade, continue a long tradition of painting on buffalo hides and other available media.”

… And there’s so much more. Remember to truncate your search term (e.g. ceremon* or ritual*) in order to retrieve terms with variant endings. For more precise searches, search for a phrase in quotation marks (“…”), or use the Advanced Search feature to limit your searches by date or geography to locate a specific world culture.

You can access ARTstor from the information page here: http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=1076

The semester is well under way, and research paper deadlines are quickly approaching. Are you looking for a time-saving tool that can help you track research, save your citations, and even format your bibliography in American Anthropological Association style?

RefWorks, an online citation management tool, can do all those things and more. If you’d like to see how RefWorks can help you with your research process, come to a library workshop on RefWorks this Thursday:

In this hands-on workshop you will create your own personal database in RefWorks, learn how to add references, and use these references when writing a paper, automatically formatting your footnotes and bibliography in the citation style of your choice. The focus is on indexes, databases, and citation styles used by scholars in the Arts.

WHERE and WHEN?
Thursday, September 27
12:00-2:00 pm
Koerner Library : Room 217 (show me a map)
Sign up here.

RefWorks is sponsored by the UBC Library, and available free-of-charge to current UBC faculty, staff, and students.

UBC Library subscribes to hundreds of online resources to support research across the disciplines at UBC. There are several databases that Anthropologists and Archaeologists might choose, depending on the area of focus. The main database for the discipline is Anthropology Plus. Web Of Science’s Social Science Citation Index is strong in archaeology. Graduate students love the fulltext of dissertations available through Proquest Theses and Dissertations.

Until now, there was no way to search all three of these at once. Now you can! Introducing MetaLib, a new search tool that enables you to search multiple databases simultaneously.

If you’re interested in exploring this tool, come to a library session Introducing MetaLib this Wednesday, September 26 from 1-2pm in Koerner 217. In this session, we’ll give you an overview of MetaLib and show you how you can use it to search across a set of pre-defined databases in a broad area like Newspapers, select databases from a specific specific subject area such as Anthropology and Archaeology, or create your own set of databases to search.

Register for the session here, and try out MetaLib beforehand here.

On May 2nd, the RefWorks research tool will be migrating to a Canadian server in response to concerns over privacy of data housed on US servers. (For more information, see this article at University Affairs.)

As a result of the migration, RefWorks users please note the following:

1. RefWorks will be unavailable for most of May 2nd.

2. AFTER May 2nd, log-in access to RefWorks accounts will be from a new URL. If you access RefWorks from a ‘bookmark’ or ‘favourite’, please change your bookmark to this link:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info

If you access RefWorks from a library webpage, you do not need to make any changes as the links will be changed by the RefWorks administrators.

If you use the RefWorks tools Write-N-Cite, RefGrabit, or RefShare, please read on:
3. Write-N-Cite users will need to download and install the new version of Write-N-Cite from:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info/Refworks/WNCDownload.asp.

4. RefGrabIt users will need to download and install the new version of RefGrabIt from:
http://refworks.scholarsportal.info/Refworks/BookMarklet.asp.

5. RefShare webpages will still be available, but have new URLs. The new URLS will be available when you log-in to your account after May 2nd. If you currently link to RefShare webpages, their URLs will need to be updated.

If you have questions about the account move, please contact me. For help with RefWorks or RefShare, you can also visit the UBC Library RefWorks website.

Hoping to explore the world from the comfort of home? UBC Library now has online access to the Oxford Companion to World Exploration.

This book examines the lives and expeditions of heroic and influential explorers including Lewis and Clark, Ferdinand Magellan, Cheng Ho, Hernan Cortes, Ibn Battuta, Vitus Bering, and Christopher Columbus. National expeditions, including Portuguese, British, French, Chinese, Dutch, and Spanish are covered, as are navigational and marine sciences, such as navigational techniques, ocean currents and winds, longitude, cartography, and aerial surveys. The temporal scope ranges ranges from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Byzantium, China, Polynesia, and Rome, through to modern space exploration.

Sample entries:
– Mary and Louis Leakey
– Archaeology and “Discoveries” Sites
– Arctic, with 3 sub-entries on Early Knowledge; Nineteenth-Century Images; and Russian Arctic
– Central and South America, with 6 sub-entries on Colonies and Empires; Conquests and Colonization; Scientific Inquiry; Trade and Trade Goods; Trade Routes; and Utopian Quests
– Medical Aspects of Exploration

The website for Archaeology Magazine is well worth a look. Jam-packed with informative features, the site includes extras not found in the journal such as an “Interactive Digs” section with frequently updated field notes, Q&A with archaeologists, personal journals, plus the latest archaeological headlines, updated every weekday.

UBC Library subscribes to Archaeology in print and online.

Empire Online is a new resource that features original documents relating to Empire Studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world. Essays and documents are grouped in five thematic sections:

Section I: Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969
Section II: Empire Writing & the Literature of Empire
Section III: The Visible Empire
Section IV: Religion & Empire
Section V: Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism c1607-2007

Each section includes thematic essays by leading scholars in the field. The essays relate directly to the source material covered by the online publication with 30-50 links per essay to documentary evidence.

Browsing is available by Name, Topics, or Places. For a sample, have a look at what’s available under:
Name: Rhodes or Gandhi
Topic: Maori Culture or Treatment of Twins
Place: Vancouver Island or Korea

(Note: As this is a resource licensed by UBC Library for UBC students, faculty, and staff, you’ll need to access it either on campus or off campus through the VPN. Setup instructions are here.)