Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers, and welcome back to Harvard readers who’ve returned for the start of term!

Just a reminder of the many things I can help you with as a librarian:

• Reference & Research

Having trouble finding an article?  Need some help locating information or doing research?  Confused by the Library of Congress classification scheme?  I can help!

• Bibliographic Instruction

If you’re curious to learn about all of the resources available to you at Harvard, or if you want to learn how to search with greater skill and efficiency, I can show you how. Get out of that Model T Ford research mode in which you’ve been driving and step into the Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 research mode with a bibliographic instruction session.  Or, if you’d like to get started on your own, check out my Bibliographic Instruction page.

• Research Tools

Let me tell you about tools like LibX, RefWorks, EndNote, and Zotero, which will make your research life much easier.  Also check out Writing Resources and Secondary Sources in Philosophy.

• Web site Set-up and Design

Looking to set up a personal Web page?  Need help with course iSites?  I’m happy to provide support

• Collection Development

Are there books and other items that you think belong in the Robbins collection?  Stop by, and we’ll discuss.

• Course Reserves

Would you like to put materials out on reserve in Robbins for a philosophy course?  Drop me a line, and I’ll arrange for them to be placed on the reserve shelf.

• Navigating the HUL labyrinth

Confused about how the Harvard University Library (HUL) system is organized?  Not sure which library to go to look for information?  I can help guide you through the maze.

All these things, and much more.  So, drop by Emerson Hall 211, send me an e-mail, or give me a call, and we’ll set up some time to chat.  I’m looking forward to working with you in the coming academic year!

*For those who may be too young to get the reference in the title of this post, all your questions will be answered here.

Good morning, readers!

There have been some additions and updates to the philosophy journals available on JSTOR:

• Synthese, 1936-2005.  You can also access the same range of back issues via SpringerLink.
• The full run of The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic is now available, with no moving wall.
• Linguistics & Philosophy, 1977-2005, and its predecessor, Foundations of Language, 1965-1975.
• Erkenntnis, 1975-2005, along with The Journal of Unified Science (Erkenntnis), 1939-1940, Erkenntnis, 1930-1937, and Annalen der Philosophie und philosophischen Kritik, 1925-1929.

Enjoy!

Good morning, readers!

I discovered last week that there have been some big changes to the database, POIESIS:

• Name change: while the HOLLIS record still reads “POIESIS,” the database is now called “Philosophy Online.”
• New layout: the old frame layout, which was confusing and difficult to navigate, has been replaced by a simpler, cleaner page without frames.
• New organization scheme: journals are listed alphabetically.  The first list contains journals to which Harvard subscribes; the second, other journals which are included in the database, but to which Harvard does not currently subscribe.  This is a big improvement over the previous version, where it was difficult to see to which journals we had access.
• Better viewing of/printing off articles: for those journals to which we subscribe, you will now be able to view the complete article in HTML format, and print them off without getting an error message.  In a few cases — emphasis on the word, “few” — PDF versions are available.  This a major improvement over the previous version of this database, in which most of the articles were offered in a basically unreadable, unprintable format.  However… the formatting of the HTML is still not perfect.  My hope is that this will improve in the future, along with the addition of more PDF versions of the articles.

So, basically, we’ve gone from a basically unusable database to generally usable one, though it still has a few kinks in it.

Please let me know if you have other comments or feedback about the new version of POIESIS.  I’m curious to hear them.

Good morning, readers!

I received an announcement yesterday about the launch of PhilPapers.org, a new “virtual environment for philosophical research.”  Here’s the text:

PhilPapers

http://philpapers.org

I’m pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  PhilPapers has been developed at the ANU Centre for Consciousness by David Bourget and me, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and  books in philosophy, concentrating especially although not exclusively on items that are available online.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to http://philpapers.org and try it yourself.  A casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on. However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you’ll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

At the moment, the PhilPapers database includes entries for 188,000 articles (typically via publication information and/or links, with full papers stored elsewhere).  The database has been compiled mainly through automatically harvesting many Internet sources.  It includes entries for (i) 124,000 journal articles harvested from the websites of more than 200 philosophical journals, (ii) 33,000 books harvested from the Library of Congress database, (iii) 18,000 books and articles from the MindPapers database, (iv) 7000 papers harvested from more than 1000 personal websites, (v) 5000 papers harvested from Internet archives, (vi) 1300 historical e-texts from the Episteme Links database, and (vii) a few hundred user submissions.  About 95% of the articles are available online (via links to journal sites, personal sites, archives, and so on), while about 17% of the books are available online (typically via a Google Books preview).  The database itself is growing fast.  For example, the addition of books has just started and is still in progress (so far we have only added books published after 1970).

A key feature of PhilPapers is a fine-grained category system for philosophical areas.  The system is an extension of the MindPapers category system, and now has about 3000 categories under five main clusters with 6-8 main areas each.  Of course the category system is still very tentative and is subject to ongoing refinement.  To date, there has been only very partial categorization of papers, through limited automatic and manual classification, and through inheriting categories from MindPapers. However, we have developed a number of categorization tools (e.g., a “categorize” link under each paper) that users can use to classify entries themselves.  Our hope is that over time, in a Wiki-like way, this will lead to every entry being categorized in 1-3 categories, with resulting dynamic bibliographies for all sorts of areas of philosophy.  If you have relevant expertise, please contribute by categorizing papers.  The PhilPapers site has much more information under the “help” menu.

Discussion forums are another key feature of PhilPapers.  These are devoted to discussing the papers and books in PhilPapers, as well as to discussing other philosophical and professional issues.  By clicking “Discuss” under a paper or book, you will be given the opportunity either to create a discussion forum for that item, or to contribute to an ongoing discussion.  Each such forum will be included in turn in encompassing forums for associated areas of philosophy, where these encompassing forums can also include other discussion threads, not associated with papers and books.  There are also forums for general philosophical discussion, for discussion of professional issues, and for discussion of PhilPapers itself.  These forums are something of a grand experiment, but we encourage users to use them, in the hope that these might become a central locus for discussion among philosophers.

PhilPapers is primarily intended for professional philosophers and graduate students, although anyone interested in the field is welcome to use it.  Non-professionals are subject to some restrictions in contributing articles (contributions are possible, but they won’t be included in the default “professional authors only” filter for listing entries), and in contributing to the discussion forums (for which they are subject to a daily posting limit).  We hope that this arrangement strikes a reasonable balance between keeping the site accessible to all, and maintaining a high quality that will maximize the value of the site to researchers in the field.

PhilPapers has been through a month or so of beta testing with a limited number of users, who have uncovered various bugs and other issues, but there are certainly many problems that remain.  For now, the site remains in “beta” mode, and we encourage all users to report any bugs that they encounter, via the bug report link at the top of every page, or through the bug report forum.  (So far we’ve mainly optimized the site for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer, and there may be problems with other browsers.)  There are also numerous glitches in the database, especially for articles harvested from personal websites.  In these cases, we encourage users who know the correct information to correct the entries themselves, using the “edit” link under each entry.  We’ll monitor edits, but we hope that the editing functionality will lead to a self-correcting system over time.  (Users might start by correcting any errors in the listings for their own articles.)  More generally, we encourage you to give feedback and suggestions in the forums dedicated to discussion of PhilPapers.

Finally, I should say that this site is largely a product of the programming and design genius of David Bourget, who had the idea for the project in the first place and who has done most of the hard work. He has done this in the middle of writing his Ph.D. thesis and having articles published in Nous, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness.  (My own role has mainly been limited to designing the category system and to endless discussion.)  A major role has also been played by Wolfgang Schwarz, who designed the system for harvesting papers from individuals’ websites, and who has contributed some very useful Javascript features to the site.

–David Chalmers.

Good morning, readers!

During the first week of term, I’m going to revisit some of my earlier posts, to remind you of some useful tools for philosophical research.  Today, I’ll be looking at databases.  All of the following can be located and accessed via HOLLIS, using your Harvard ID and PIN.  I will organize the list according to the classification scheme that I outlined last year.

Citation Databases

• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (and a note about an update.)
• Philosopher’s Index

Full-Text Archival Databases

• JSTOR (and a note about an update.)
  

Full-Text Current Databases

• POIESIS (and an update.)
  
• Project MUSE (and a note about an update.)
• Social Science Research (which includes the Humanities Research Network and the Philosophy Research Network)
• Science Direct
• Wiley Interscience (which includes the former Blackwell materials)

Hybrid Databases

• Academic Search Premier (and a note about an update.)

This list makes no claims to be exclusive or exhaustive.  These databases are merely the ones that you will most commonly use when doing philosophical research.  Depending on your area(s) of interest and study, you may want to consider other, more specialized databases as well, e.g., LexisNexis Academic, PubMed, or the Science Citation Index.  If so, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to direct you to them, and show you how to use them.

Good afternoon, readers!

To let you know: Academic Search Premier has a new search interface.  The new look is much cleaner and less confusing than the version about which I described last summer.   The content of the search interface remains largely the same, with the addition of being able to search for cited references.

Please take a look at this new interface and let me know what you think of it.  Academic Search Premier is one of my favorite databases to use when doing philosophical research, and I’m hoping that the new interface will encourage others to use it more often.

Good afternoon, all!

This morning, I was asked a question about accessing Philosophy Compass, formerly published by Blackwell, but now part of Wiley-Interscience.

If you are at Harvard, all you will need is your PIN and ID to access the Philosophy Compass.  If you search “philosophy compass” in HOLLIS, setting the search parameters to “title,” you’ll turn up the record, which lists the URL for the database.

However, you will not be able to access the articles at the present time.  As former Blackwell content, the Philosophy Compass is part of the migration of that content over to the Wiley-Interscience platform that began about two weeks ago.  Unfortunately, the migration of the content did not go as smoothly as planned, and there are a number of items that are currently unavailable, the Philosophy Compass being one of them.

I do not know when this will be available again.  Wiley is moving as quickly as possible to migrate the content and make it available — no small feat when over 1.6 million articles are involved.  I will keep checking back to see if the Philosophy Compass is available, and will let you know.  I will also let you know about some of the features of the new platform.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions about this.

Update 14 July 2008: Access to Philosophy Compass has been restored.  You are now able to download articles without being charged.

Good afternoon, readers!

As announced last week, the database, Synergy, will no longer be available after tomorrow, 27 June 2008.  All content will be moved over to Wiley Interscience, and will be again available on 1 July 2008. You should be able to access the electronic versions of the relevant journals via HOLLIS then.

Please plan your research accordingly!

Last year, I wrote a post about the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), along with one about the Philosophy Research Network. These are great places to find current research, papers, and works-in-progress in a variety of fields, including philosophy, and I have found these sites to be very useful.

Readers who are curious about the SSRN might find this article by Noam Cohen from the New York Times about the SSRN to be of interest. Here is the introduction:

FIRST came the Amazon book rankings, and word leaked out that perhaps some vaunted writers spent more time than you would think checking how popular they were, hour by hour. Then newspapers started tracking the most popular articles on their sites and journalists, it was said, spent more time than you would think watching their rankings, hour by hour.

But would you believe that academics could become caught up in such petty, vain competition? Of course, you say. Still, short of hanging out in the stacks at the library and peeking over shoulders, the pursuit of that particular vanity had to wait for the Internet, and the creation of the Social Science Research Network, an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading.

Not surprisingly, there are some big questions raised by the SSRN about quality control and the worth of the materials posted therein:

The research network raises the same big questions about what is lost and what is gained by removing the barriers to being heard in the public square. Is music distributed on MySpace, without benefit of a record label’s guiding hand, better or worse? Is journalism helped by the wide reach of bloggers, or hurt as professionalism disappears? Is it good that research that has not been reviewed by peers can be found so easily and looks just the same as gold-star approved work?

Do readers have an opinion on this subject? What do they think of the quality of the materials on the SSRN?
A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.

Good morning, readers!I’ve just received word that Blackwell’s Synergy database will no longer be available after 30 June 2008:

As part of the merger of Blackwell Publishing with John Wiley and Sons, we will combine all Wiley-Blackwell’s online products onto a single online platform.  From the Wiley-Blackwell site:

As a first step, we will be moving all Blackwell Synergy journal content and access rights onto Wiley InterScience as of June 30, 2008, at which point Synergy will cease to be available. As a second step, we will be launching a next-generation online service in 2009 that will include the best features of both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience and which will introduce innovative new functionality and capabilities.

From the e-mail I received this morning:

As of Monday, June 30th 2008, all Blackwell journal content—including all full-text HTML and PDF versions of articles from current issues, backfiles, and issues published online before print—will be incorporated into Wiley InterScience.

We plan to close Blackwell Synergy at the end of business (Pacific Standard Time) on Friday June 27th and we anticipate that the migration will be completed by Monday June 30th. Over the weekend of June 28th and 29th, there will be a period when both Blackwell Synergy and Wiley InterScience will be unavailable while we transition and re-index data.

We will still have access to all of the journals — the only change is that they will be on a different platform with a different interface.  Once the move has been made, I will review the new platform and write a post about it.

In the interim, please let me know if you have any questions.