Month: September 2019

Giving your sources credit is one of the things that makes scholarly writing different from other kinds of writing. The mechanics of how to do it change from discipline to discipline, and sometimes from journal to journal. Trying to keep all the details clear and build citations and bibliographies can be time-consuming and aggravating. As librarians, we’ve watched researchers’ first encounters with Zotero many times, and we always delight in their expressions of relief.

Here are a few things we enjoy demonstrating:

When you find a source, one click on a browser icon can import all of its bibliographic information, and another two clicks can add it to your document, fully formatted as a Chicago-style footnote:

Heyer, Kristen E. “Bridging the Divide in Contemporary U.S. Catholic Social Ethics.” Theological Studies 66, no. 2 (2005): 401–440. https://doi.org/10.1177/004056390506600208.

With a few more clicks, you can change it–and every other citation and bibliographic entry in your paper–to APA format:

Heyer, K. E. (2005). Bridging the divide in contemporary U.S. Catholic social ethics. Theological Studies, 66(2), 401–440. https://doi.org/10.1177/004056390506600208

You can add the record to a folder to organize it, and/or add it to a group and share that group with anyone from a small collaborative team to just about any arrangement of public or private group.

Continue reading “Why We Love Zotero”

Now showing in the Level 1 Gallery is Print Power! volume 5, an intercollegiate exchange portfolio of 60 persuasive posters co-organized by Art, Art History and Film Department faculty Brian Reeves and University of Southern Maine faculty Damir Porobic. 

Participants were asked to create fifteen or more of their own propaganda poster prints on behalf of, or against ideas, cultural practices, or institutions of their choice. Media ranges from screen prints and hand-carved relief prints, to a laser-cut stencil, and digital offset prints from BC’s own Eagle Print services in Carney Hall.

Continue reading “Print Power! Debuts in the O’Neill Library Level 1 Gallery”

The next time you are in the Bapst Library, check out the new audio tour of the Gargan Hall stained glass windows. Glass artist Earl Edward Sanborn designed the windows based on correspondence with then president, Father James H. Dolan, who established the theme of the curriculum of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. He finished them in 1928. A book about all of the stained glass at BC–Transforming Light: The Stained-Glass Windows of Boston College, by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Gary Wayne Gilbert–is available at the Bapst Library information desk.

In addition to the website with the complete tour, each window has a descriptive sign with a QR code. Just point your phone’s camera at the QR code, and the text and audio about that window will open. Don’t forget your headphones, they will keep you from getting displeased looks from those who are studying nearby!

The idea for this tour started with our planning for Parents Weekend. Rather than offer guided tours which require people to show up at a specific time, we thought a self-guided approach would be logistically easier. Having the tour online also provides the same information to anyone who visits Gargan Hall. So, if students need a distraction from their studies, they can open the tour and learn about the stained glass window next to them, which might picture a whimsical frog or a man seeming to summon lightning.

Much of the information came from existing guides to the Bapst Library windows.  During the summer, those narratives were enhanced (and sometimes corrected) by library staff. The team that worked on this project includes Nina Bogdanovsky, Sonia Ensins, Laurie Mayville, Steve Runge and Scott Britton.

Every semester, the digital scholarship team launches a series of workshops to assist students and faculty with Library resources and tools. This year, as the campus and BC Libraries take a sharper look at social justice issues, our workshops will use race and diversity data (e.g. US Census) to explore the affordances and constraints of tools and strategies for transforming data into narratives and images. Our first two workshops, which take place in September, will provide introductions to digital exhibitions and Geographical Information Services (GIS).  

As the year kicks off, our workshops will focus on acclimating students to the new digital arsenal they have access to. See the table below for quick reference. More detailed descriptions follow.

(NB: SEPTEMBER 12 WORKSHOP WILL BE RESCHEDULED, DATE TBA)

Continue reading “Digital Scholarship Workshops, Fall 2019”

Whether in the business of creating fake or real news, every outlet is constantly looking for its base – a group of people with combined or similar interests who may see objective realities from particular perspectives. This was very much the case with the Boston Pilot. As Irish immigrants arrived in droves in the years leading up to and through the famine and troubles, the burgeoning Irish Catholic working class was struggling to find its way in Boston, much less America. The Boston Pilot served as a beacon for this community, spreading political and social ideas, while also providing a resource for reconnecting families, divided by cross-continental travel.

In 1829, The Jesuit, or, Catholic Sentinel, started publication as a periodical for Irish immigrants, and under the guidance of the Archbishop of Boston, Joseph Fenwick, Jesuit started to find its identity,  eventually changing its name to the Literary and Catholic Sentinel in 1835, before becoming the much more well known Boston Pilot in 1836. Readership rose and fell as the decades brought the paper through the famine, troubles, and American Civil War until the archdiocese took over the paper officially in 1908.

Continue reading “Decades of Historic Boston Newspaper Now Online and Searchable”