Featured Collections

The Rockwell Kent collections at St Lawrence University consist of over 100 pieces of correspondence, 15 original prints, dozens of books as well as drawings and ephemera. The collections are housed in Special Collections, Owen D. Young Library and at The Richard F. Brush Art Gallery.

The library’s Kent collection will be on exhibit in the Frank and Anne Piskor Special Collections Reading Room in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery: Rockwell Kent: The Once Most Popular American Artist from October 15 through December 15, 2012.

The libraries subscribe to a new online publication from East View Information Services, Current Digest of the Chinese Press.  The Digest publishes English translations of a selection of articles from a wide cross-section of domestic mass media sources from the People’s Republic of China. Current events topics such as politics, international relations, security, economics, business, public health, environment, education, culture and more are covered.

A year as new as an iPad still in its package, and with new computing devices of every shape and size unwrapped and ready to go, we are pleased to announce OverDrive, a new electronic book collection for the SLU Community. OverDrive includes New York Times bestsellers, contemporary fiction, books by the SLU Writers' Series authors, and a more. You can get started with Overdrive here, an overview of the service can be found here.

St. Lawrence University is a member of an international consortium of over 250 research institutions, the Center for Research Libraries. Located in Chicago, CRL collects and preserves archival documents from developing regions such as Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

CRL currently houses over five million journals, newspapers, government documents, archives and dissertations produced primarily outside of the United States. Faculty and students at member institutions are invited to borrow these materials for three month loan periods, with unlimited renewals.

CRL also offers Collaborative Collection Development. Scholars are encouraged to recommend additions to the collection for Board review. Each member library is also given $2,000 annually for smaller purchases, such as dissertations and individual issues of journals.

Some CRL holdings are not cataloged and will not be found in an online search. A member services liaison who can help to identify materials on your topic is available for consultation.

Please contact Michelle Gillie at ODY with any questions about the Center for Research Libraries.

We now have access to the Aluka database from JSTOR. Aluka "is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa." (From their website.) Currently, Aluka includes these three collections; African Cultural Heritage: Sites and Landscapes, African Plants, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa.

Access to Aluka is via a bibliographic record in ODYsseus or a link in the alphabetic list of databases.  Here is the direct link http://www.aluka.org/ 

The United States Congressional Serial Set is the collection of House and Senate documents and reports that span back to the eighteenth century and represent an extremely important collection of primary documents that cover the complete expanse of American history. This expanse covers our neck of the woods-the North Country and the Adirondacks. Searches conducted on Adirondacks or St. Lawrence Seaway (or River) will bring materials that speak to scientific research and economic assessment, and, in doing so, provide historical view of the region manifest in Congressional politics. For example, a 1934 Survey of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway Power Project includes detailed descriptions of the St. Lawrence, the St. Regis, and the Grasse Rivers, providing researchers with an idea of what those rivers looked like at that point in history. Further, the Serials Set is a great source for visual materials, notably maps. These hand-drawn maps date from the 1950's:

The Serial Set is a simply unique resource for finding primary documents that chronicle our region.
One caveat to note when searching is that the system defaults to a two year limit on searches. One needs to start a search by changing that, but then history is the limit! For questions on the Serial Set contact Public Services staff in the libraries.

JSTOR has announced a broadening of its collection by providing access to 8,200 nineteenth century British pamphlets. These pamphlets provide a collection of primary source documents that speak directly to the major issues and intellectual life of nineteenth century Great Britain.

There are documents by and about Charles Babbage, Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill (to name five).
Pamphlets also include visual arts such as engraving, portraits, and caricatures. JSTOR has plans to increase the collection to 20,000. This represents a significant new library of primary source material applicable to studies in disciplines across the humanities, as well as the history of science.

JSTOR is one of our most useful and used online journal collections, unique in that it provides complete runs of journals, including even nineteenth century material. For more information contact the public service staff in the SLU Libraries.

The World Shakespeare Bibliography is the definitive source for research on Shakespeare, and indexes books, articles, dissertations, book reviews, theatrical productions, and popular materials. The database is made up of 118,000 entries, spanning 1961 to the present, and the materials represent publications in 118 languages. This is a vital tool for research on both Shakespeare as a literary figure, and history of Shakespearian theater, as there is a wealth of materials about productions of Shakespeare staged around the world (as a search on either American Shakespeare Center or Shenandoah Shakespeare will quickly prove...). The World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is linked from the English Resources page.

ICPSR is a major resource for raw data for social science research, and it is one of the world’s foremost institutions for furthering and archiving quantitative research. The ICPSR database contains 511,000 discrete data files, incorporating statistics related to research in demography, psychology, sociology, criminal justice, and basically all the social sciences.  The database includes materials from the United States Government, foreign governments, universities, research organizations, and organizations like Gallup. On the ICPSR web site there is a large database of the work published that used ICPSR data.

Along with the database ICPSR is a research institute that works to facilitate access to quantitative data for the social sciences. They offer a number of programs including a summer institute at Ann Arbor Michigan, and they have developed programs for both scholars and students. If you have questions about these programs or accessing and searching the ICPSR database you can contact Paul Doty (pdoty@stlawu.edu) in ODY, and for questions about using and managing the data you can contact the team at the Quantitative Resource Center.

A digital collection made available to us through the joint efforts of the Center for Research Libraries and The ARTFL Project, Pamphlets and Periodicals of the French Revolution of 1848 consists of more than 100 pamphlets, newspapers, and other materials published in France between 1848 and 1851. Representing the diverse and prolific output of a newly unrestricted French press, these papers are an excellent source of information on politics, culture, and society in France during the 1848 Revolution and the Second Republic. For more information or to search the collection, click here.