No new posts for the next 2 weeks

Just wanted to let everyone know that I'll be taking a hiatus for the next 2 weeks. The American Library Association is holding their annual conference this week and next week I'm putting the finishing touches on an article about concept mapping in library instruction. So check back for new posts starting July 4th.

Gateway to Information on Developing Countries

The Development Gateway (DG) was started by the World Bank in 2001 and is a repository of qualitative and quantitative data on all major issues surrounding core developing countries. All developing countries are analyzed and have a profile that includes data sets and links to full-text articles from news agencies and reports from NGOs. Some of the topics covered include AIDS, Business climate, Environment, Foreign investment, Information & Communication Technologies, Gender, Governance, Healthcare, Nutrition, Poverty, Technology, Trade, Water Resource Mgt., and Youth. Each topic has subtopics called "Key Issues" that further narrow your search. For example under "HIV/AIDS" the key issues are Education, Treatment, Prevention, Vulnerable Groups, Policies, Funding, Drugs, & Societal Impact. The issues alone are worth a visit to this website because they allow you to narrow a research topic that might initially be too broad (i.e. AIDS in Africa becomes the Societal Impact of AIDS in Kenya).

Here is a sample of the types of materials found at DG:

Strengthening HIV/AIDS Programs For Women: Lessons For U.S. Policy From Zambia and Kenya ( CSIS Task Force Report). by Janet Fleischman

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has published a report in May 2005, based on a field trip to Zambia and Kenya in February 2005 by Task Force Members who analyzed the performance of the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) after it completed its first full year of funding in January 2005. The report takes a look at one of the critical dimensions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic - the disproportionate impact on women and girls. One of the key challenges is that larger social and economic factors affect women and girls' vulnerability to HIV infection and complicate their illness when infected.

The link takes you to a 28 page report that includes a history of the program, statistics on HIV/AIDS in Zambia and Kenya, citations to additional statistical reports, real-life examples of the program's efforts, evaluation of the program's effectiveness, and recommendations for improvement.

Indigenous Knowledge

The Canadian government's Department of Canadian Heritage has posted a set of discussion papers on the Relationship between Indigenous Knowledge and Artistic Expression, Intellectual and Cultural Properties, and Languages and Culture, at http://www.traditions.gc.ca/docs/docs_disc_e.cfm

Google Scholar and Cited by: a word of warning

Ok the google scholar rant continues. Don't get me wrong I like google, I use google all the time but I use it in conjunction with other "traditional" library resources. So here is my advice on using google scholar to see who has cited someone-use Citation Indexes as well. Citation indexes have been a staple in academic libraries for over fifty years. Google did not invent it, they haven't even perfected it yet. Publishers like ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) have.

Here's how it works. You want to know who has cited an anthropologist's work, let's use Ana Mariella Bacigalupo as an example. You know that google scholar will not only give you a list of works by her but also give links to those who have cited her. So using google scholar you find that 3 people have cited her book "La Voz del Kultrun en la Modernidad: Tradición y Cambio en La Terapéutica de Siete Machi Mapuche" so you click the link "cited by 3" and get a list. Link 1 takes you to a paper she wrote where she mentions the book, link 2 takes you to a master's thesis, and link 3 takes you to another master's thesis. None of these links gives you any indication of the impact or discussion generated by her book.

The Citation Index search is much more robust, scholarly. You go to the database Web of Science, which the library pays for access to. You select "cited reference search" (there are other advanced options at the bottom of that page but I'll skip those). In the "author" textbox you enter the her last name space her first initial followed by an asterisk (Bacigalupo A*). The asterisk is because there may be a lot of scholars with the same last name so the asterisk pulls up those scholars using first and middle initials. This first search pulls up way too many A Bacigalupo's so you go back and add the middle initial (Bacigalupo AM*). Stay with me it will be worth it! On the second page is her book listed as VOZ KULTRUN MODERNID, right before the title we see that it was cited 6 times. Put a check mark next to the record for her book and click "Finish Search". A list of articles that have cited her book appear. I won't go over each one but the journals that these articles appear in are Journal of Anthropological Research, Homme, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of the American Academy of Religion , American Ethnologist, and Identities-Global Studies in Culture and Power. Much more scholarly than the google list and they will be able to put her book into the context of the anthropological debate.

Again always check with your subject specialist librarian, we have some mad skills that can just bust a stale search wide open.

Google Scholar and full-text articles: a word of warning

Google scholar "enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." I'm going to say it-yeah right! When it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Let the research beware. Not every top-tiered journal in the field of anthropology is picked up by google, nor are you guaranteed access to the full-text of the article, even if your library has a subscription.

Why? you ask. Well if you are not using your university as your internet provider the publishers of these scholarly journals do not show your computer as affiliated with the university's subscription. You may already have free access if you came to the journal through your library's website but the google link will take you through the "back door", requiring you to pay for access to the full text.

What do you do? Save the citation, go to the library's homepage and run a search in the catalog. The library will have a link through their paid subscription to the journal in question. For those at UB there is another way to get full text. Go to the library's homepage, under "find Journal Articles" click Electronic Journals, enter the name of the journal in which the article appears. If the library has an online subscription a link will appear with the name of the database it appears in and the year's covered. Click the link, this gets you into the electronic version of the journal, from there you need to run a search to find the article by either title or author.

Don't rely solely on google scholar to provide access to full-text or even present you with all the articles, books, papers, etc. written by a particular anthropologist. The library pays a lot of money to get you access to research databases and other electronic products that google can not get you into. Also remember that (EECK!) not everything is available online, there are still some high-end academic research materials out there that work only "in print". If you need additional help always see a subject specialist librarian, they can sit down with you and go over some of the more advanced research tools available to you through the library's subscriptions.

Focus on the Field: Paleopathology

Paleopathology is the field of science that deals with the study of malformations in the bones that may have been caused by disease or injury, and these malformations are often referred to as paleopathologies. There are basically two causes of malformations: trauma (injury) and disease. More information...

Paleopathology societies:
Paleoanthropology Society (they have links to various excavations, reports, & programs)
Society for Medical Anthropology (has a nice Academic Resources section)

Paleopathology Research Websites:
Paleopathology Research Lab of Virginia Commonwealth University
South Dakota Paleopathology Database
Paleopathology Case Studies (VCU)

Paleopathology or tangential journals:
International Journal of Osteoarchaeology (UB subscribes)
American Journal of Physical Anthropology (UB subscribes)
Human Biology (UB subscribes)

Paleopathology Books:
Books to purchase on paleopathology, osteology, and forensic anthropology

The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology
Lockwood book collection: call number R134.8 .A93 1998

The archaeology of disease
Lockwood book collection: call number R134.8 .R62 1995

The bioarchaeology of tuberculosis : a global view on a reemerging disease
Health Science Library: call number WF 11.1 R643b 2003

Counting the dead : the epidemiology of skeletal populations
Lockwood Book collection: call number R134.8 .W35 1994

For additional books run a subject search in the catalog using the term paleopathology. For articles run a similar search in databases like BIOSIS Previews, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, JSTOR, and AnthroSource.

How can blogging help my research?

While it might sometimes feel like chasing your own tail, blogging can be a useful way to stay abreast of current research in your chosen field. Bloggers often highlight articles they've read, field work or research they've conducted, new books they've reviewed, or discussions on current theories. All of this exposes you to the wealth of information available both online and in print. You can find these blogs by using search engines like google and phrasal searching, most search engines will accept quotation marks around the terms (i.e. "anthropology blogs"). The following are a list of anthropology blogs that you might want to bookmark and return to often.

AllAfrica is not a blog so much as it is an aggregator, pulling stories and blog postings about Africa from over 300 Internet sources.

Antropologi.info is not just a blog of anthropology. It also contains topical links to other, anthropology related websites.

Crooked Timber maintains a listing of academic related blogs that are browsable by subject.

Fieldnotes covers a host of subtopics within social and cultural anthropology including First Nations, Food, Linguistic anthropology, and Ethnography.

Global Voices Online "is an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard."

Language Log deals with language issues and some linguistic anthropology posts of note.

The Old Revolution is a blog that has been around for awhile and covers general anthropology and cultural theory.

Safe Space (I love the name) covers research on East Timor, anthropology, women's health, breastfeeding, and health disparities.

Savage Minds is a group blog started by four anthropologists and covers a wide range of anthropology issues.

Pantherum Leo et Pantherum Tigris et Ursum: Oh My!

Those researching or teaching physical anthropology may want to check out the following websites.

PrimateLit is a free database that provides an interface searchable by keywords, title, author, journal name, year, taxonomic category, common name, and geographic region. They also include separate links to recent books & journal articles in primate science.

Animal Diversity Web is an astounding project from the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. It is an online database of animal natural history, distribution, classification, and conservation biology and includes images, sounds, specimens, and 3-d renditions.

Introduction to Indigenous Peoples

Those of teaching introductory courses or taking introductory courses on cultural or social anthropology may want to check out the following websites.

Peoples of the World Foundation offers encyclopedic like intros to populations from around the world. Under the "Peoples" section one can search by language, country, or name.

Experience Rich Anthropology. From 1996-1999 a consortium of UK universities created a clearinghouse of existing field data (field notes, film (streamed), photographs, and other types of data) suitable for incorporation into courses. A little rough around the edges but good content.

Aboriginal Studies WWW Virtual Library is an in-depth bibliography of websites organized by topics like aboriginal art, history, and relations.

American Museum Congo Expedition 1909-1915 is a digital exhibit that includes full-text of some rare materials including biographies of the scientists, anthropology reports, zoology reports, watercolors of flora & fauna, primate photographs, and maps.

The National Parks Service Archeology & Ethnography Program provides links to articles on public policy & U.S. law concerning the discovery & protection of Native American sites and cultures.

AnthroSource in 5?

I received some emails about the idea of RSS feeds and AnthroSource yesterday. One gave me a link to a great piece by Alex Golub (aka Rex) and an article on the information needs of anthropologists at First Monday. It got me to thinking that although innovators and early adopters have been blogging and grabbing anthropology citations, articles, and news for a long time, with a host of emerging technologies, many of us are just getting our feet wet. Technology is evolving and allowing us to do great things to cull, organize, and customize the world of information, so if you haven't tried any of the things mentioned in Rex's blog-give it a shot, after all you can't break the Internet (yet).

As for open source, portals, and customization, these have been the lament of librarians for years. We'd like to see the scholarly world open and free, where ideas are exchanged and explored by everyone but corporate publishers have pushed out the smaller university presses and driven up the price of journals, books, and online databases. I don't know if AnthroSource can do all that folks want it to do right away. I believe it will take the voice of the anthropology community and persistence to get AnthroSource where many of us want it to go. I hope I'm wrong but I'm guessing it would take a few years.

Here are some books on open source, scholarly communication, and intellectual freedom that you might want to check out. A subject search of the term open source will work in our catalog and give you more to choose from.

Protecting the virtual commons : self-organizing open source and free software communities and innovative intellectual property regimes
LAW General Collection
call number K564.C6 W46 2003

The hacker ethic, and the spirit of the information age
LOCKWOOD Book Collection
QA76.9 .M65 H56 2001

The economics of technology sharing: open source and beyond
Access through Internet in NBER Working paper series no.10956

The simple economics of open source
NBER

Open source software : risks, benefits & practical realities in the corporate environment
LAW General Collection
KF3024.C6 O64 2004

RSS Anyone?

I recently spoke with a colleague who is/was on the AAA Anthrosource advisory committee about the possibility of getting RSS feeds for Anthrosource journals. I pointed out that it would be a great marketing tool and a service to the anthropology/archaeology community. He's going to pass the suggestion along, I'll keep everyone posted.

Buddy can you spare a dime? Funding graduate & post-graduate work

Here are a couple of fellowships and grants that may not be on your funding radar.

Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC)
http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)
http://www.acls.org/fel-comp.htm

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
http://www.wennergren.org/

NSF: Cultural Anthropology grant
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5388&org=BCS&from=home

You may want to also try a print resource called Foundation Grants to Individuals located in the Lockwood Library Reference Collection, call number LB2336 .F6 (2003 edition). It is chock full of grants and awards given out by individuals, corporations, organizations, societies, and government organizations.

BookTV Online

BookTV has a number of interviews from a host of authors available for download on their website BookTV.org. Take a look at a January 2005 interview with international correspondent Robert Kaplan.

Interested in seeing if the University Libraries have any of his books? Search our catalog by author using Kaplan, Robert D.

Streaming to a Desktop Near You

If you're looking for a video to show in class or a clip to add to a presentation try searching the Internet. The number of sites with streaming video grows daily and is difficult to track but here are a couple of websites that Google may not pick up.

The Archaeology Channel

Visual Anthropology.net

FolkStreams (American folklore films)

Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies lecture series


For more sources check out the "Videos on the Internet" guide at Anthropology: Subject Guides

Capt. John Smith Admits the Truth-Gosnold did it!

Bartholomew Gosnold might have been the founding father of what we now know as the United States, though his name and place in history have been buried in the passage of time and the importance that the swaggering adventurer John Smith attached to himself.

Two years after stumbling across a grave site holding the bones of a middle-aged man of high rank, archaeologists at the Jamestown settlement are about to learn whether the skeletal remains are Gosnold's. Early next month, they will travel to Britain in search of the answer.

The Church of England has agreed, for the first time in its history, to allow excavation under the floor of a hamlet church where Gosnold's sister is buried, to extract a piece of her remains for DNA analysis. The scientists also might go to a second church, where Gosnold's niece is buried, and descend to the burial vaults to obtain another DNA sample, though permission is pending.

From the Washington Post, May 9, 2005. Read more

Book donation

Lockwood library recently received approximately 2600 volumes from retired anthropologist/archaeologist Maria Kucserik. It is a diverse collection covering gender, religion, the Near East, Egypt, and Northern Europe. Over the next few weeks we'll be going through the collection and adding what items we don't already own. The remainder will be donated to Brandon Lundy's project with the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisa in Guinea-Bissau and the UUAW. Thus far we have added 100 unique or highly circulating titles to our collection.

If you are interested in donating books to the Lockwood collection please contact me at cat2@buffalo.edu.

Dr. Tedlock's new book

Congratulations to Dr. Barbara Tedlock on the release of her latest book, The Woman in the Shaman's Body, available through RandomHouse Books.

National Anthropological Archives & Human Studies Film Archives

The National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives collect and preserve historical and contemporary anthropological materials that document the world's cultures and the history of the discipline. Their collections represent the four fields of anthropology – ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology – and include manuscripts, fieldnotes, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars. More information

Essay Competition

How will AnthroSource Transform Anthropological Scholarship?

For the first time in its 103 year history, the AAA’s complete legacy of periodical publications is becoming available in a single digital resource, accessible to anthropological researchers around the world. Electronic publishing is revolutionizing scholarly practices and communication, the results of which we are only just beginning to imagine. What will be the effects on our own discipline?

The AnthroSource Steering Committee challenges users and would-be users of AnthroSource to consider the current and future impact of this new resource on the scholarly enterprise. Using concrete examples from your own research, the Committee solicits essays on how electronic access to the entire collection of AAA research affects your own ability to formulate questions, the kinds of questions you pose, how your research proceeds, and the kinds of answers and analysis you are able to obtain compared with how you’ve worked in the past. In addition, the Committee would like to know what implications this new resource has for your future subjects and methodologies, as well as the ways you might disseminate the results and insights of your work. Finally, papers should consider how the digital medium might be improved to accommodate your particular research needs.

Submissions will be reviewed by the 10-member AnthroSource Steering Committee for creativity, innovative use of resources available through AnthroSource, and clear demonstration of impact and needs. The first prize paper will be awarded $500, second and third prizes will earn $250 each. Winning papers will be published in future issues of the Anthropology News and made available electronically on AnthroSource (http://www.aaanet.org). In addition, authors will be invited to participate on the 2005 Annual Meeting Scientific panel, “ Transforming Anthropological Scholarship in the Digital Age: AnthroSource as an Agent of Change.” Manuscripts should not exceed 1,500 words, and must be received by 5:00 pm EST on August 1, 2005. Winners will be announced by October 1.

Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit, and articles that take advantage of the electronic medium are particularly welcomed.

Submit complete manuscripts electronically to Alison Pryor (apryor@aaanet.org). Please address questions to AnthroSource Steering Committee member Leslie Chan (chan@utsc.utoronto.ca).