Many students come to the library asking for books containing reproductions of art. Did you know that you can access 30,000 digital images of paintings, sculpture and architecture online via the library’s Saskia Art Images Collection? Included are images from many important collections, the Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Uffizi, and the Louvre, as well as images from archaeological sites in Greece, Italy, Turkey and Egypt. Even if you don’t need images of art for a course, it may just make you happy to look at your favorite paintings. I love this Monet of a Paris railway station.

The database has several useful features, such as the ability to download high-resolution images and to save selected images using the “My Favorites” feature. Favorites can also be saved to your computer as a web page containing thumbnails with links to the high-resolution images. Check out Saskia Art Images and other interesting subject-specific databases on the library’s web page, Databases Listed Alphabetically.

With the end of the term and school year quickly approaching make sure to start your research for your papers, speeches and presentations early.  As a student at North Central you have access to Oesterle Library’s great collection of books, videos, magazine, newspapers and journals.  You also have access to books in the collections of 76 other college and research libraries throughout the state of Illinois, including places like the University of Illinois, through the I-Share catalog.

If you still can’t find the book you are looking for, or if it’s an article that you are unable to find in Oesterle Library’s collection, you are still in luck.  WorldCat provides a listing of and a way for Oesterle Library to order books and articles that are not available from I-Share libraries.  Be sure to check out our guides to getting books and articles from other libraries or contact the library staff for more information.

Remember, you can have access to almost any resource you need with Oesterle Library’s help if you start gathering your research early enough.  Some resources can take up to a week to receive.

On April 28th 2009, Jazz Music Library was updated with 1,955 albums.  This brings the database to 18,922 tracks including artists from the past to musicians performing and recording today. This comprehensive collection of online jazz music includes thousands of artists, ensembles, albums, and genres and can be accessed through Music Online.

The online collection can be browsed by album titles, recording date, song titles, and more. Registered users can also create playlists containing whole videos, tracks, segments, etc.  Playlists can be used as lists of personal favorites, class viewing/listening assignments, or as a teaching resource for in-class use.

Music Online is the new interface for three music databases that provide access to streaming audio, video, reference information and musical scores.  Via Music Online you can search the contents of the American Song, Classical Music Library, and Contemporary World Music databases all at the same time.

Music Online offers many searching options. Browse by musical genre, instrument, cultural group, and more.  Or type in searches for composer, classical work title, author, publisher, and limit your search by date, genre, language, or many other options.

Register as a user on the site and you can create personalized playlists containing whole videos, tracks, segments (clips) and/or other items in the database. Playlists can be annotated, edited, copied, shared, and all playlists contain their own unique static URL. To try out Music Online, visit Oesterle Library’s Music Resources page.

Hungry for the news? Both online and in print, Oesterle Library can connect you with a great assortment of news sources. For online news, start at Oesterle’s web page and use the “Find Articles” drop-down menu. In Lexis-Nexis, you can search within a huge number of news publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Daily Herald, as well as articles from the Associated Press and transcripts from the major TV networks’ newscasts.  Looking for the Chicago Tribune? Our Chicago Tribune databases allow you to search either the current issues of this paper (1986-present) or the historical file, containing issues from 1849-1985. To keep up with the happenings in Washington D.C., try CQ Weekly, an online magazine covering politics, government and commerce. If you are “old school” when it comes to your news consumption, relax in the comfort of Oesterle Library’s Periodicals Room, where you will find the current issues of many news sources including Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, the Daily Herald and the Naperville Sun.

The celebration of Christmas and the birth of the Christ child begins more than a week before December 25th in Mexico with Las Posadas.  Mexican friends and families gather together on each of the nine nights before Christmas and act out the journey Mary and Joseph made to Bethlehem.  They walk together from house to house, singing songs and asking for a place to rest, but the travelers are turned away from each door as Mary and Joseph were.  At the end of each evening’s journey, a festival is held with dancing and delicious food as well as a pinata for the children.

 Smithsonian Global Sound, one of the streaming music databases at Oesterle Library includes a selection of carols that are sung during the Las Posadas.  More information about the holiday may be found by searching Academic Search Premier.

Election day is less than a week away, and many North Central College students and staff members have already made a decision. If you’re still not sure who to vote for, though, don’t despair! Oesterle Library has a resource that can help!

CQ Weekly includes a browseable list of topics, which allows users to discover how members of Congress, including Barack Obama and John McCain, voted on each presented in the Senate. World News Digest from Facts.com features an in-depth guide to the 2008 Presidential election. Each of these resources may be accessed from Oesterle Library’s home page.

Of course, all of the major news outlets are attempting to present the facts, too, and I invite you to add a comment below with a link to your favorite. I’ll start by suggesting National Public Radio’s coverage of the events.

The list of electronic journals available to Oesterle Library patrons through the Wiley Interscience platform has exponentially grown with Wiley’s acquisition of the Blackwell Synergy electronic journal platform this summer. Oesterle Library patrons now have access to 1,190 electronic journals on the Wiley platform, covering topics across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences and including all titles from Blackwell’s popular Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) collections.

Wiley Interscience will launch a redesigned website in early 2009, integrating features from both the Blackwell Synergy and current Wiley Interscience sites. Oesterle Library’s Wiley Interscience holdings can be browsed from the “Browse Journal Holdings” link on the Articles page of the library’s website. Patrons can also visit Wiley Interscience’s website directly at the following URL:https://login.libproxy.noctrl.edu/login?url=http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/.

(contents of this post submitted by Krystle Noelle, former Library Services Student Assistant)

Available at Oesterle Library, EBSCOhost’s Newspaper Source is a database that provides access to full-text articles found in 375 regional and national newspapers. Newspaper Source also includes transcripts from radio and television programs, such as National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Searches in Newspaper Source can be narrowed to a specific time frame and publication, saving a researcher from the hassle of digging through stacks of newspapers. Also available as an option is the ability to see a full-text PDF of the article, complete with the photographs that were published with the article.

Newspaper Source can be accessed through Oesterle Library’s website at https://login.libproxy.noctrl.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=nfh

(submitted by Chelsea Bohner, Library Services Student Assistant)

Biological Abstracts (BA) is a database that allows students to browse references from over 4000 life science and biomedical journals. The database contains over 10 million archival records dating back to 2002, with thousands of citations added each year. In addition to the bibliographic reference, 90% of search results also contain an abstract written by the author of the article. This allows students to view the topic of the article, as well as the conclusions drawn from the research.

Biological abstracts will be replacing BasicBIOSIS , the life sciences database previously offered at Oesterle Library. BA boasts more articles from a larger variety of disciplines. While BasicBIOSIS offered mostly articles published in English popular science journals, BA offers a much larger selection of research based journals from around the globe.

In addition to Biological Abstracts, Oesterle Library also offers access to such databases as Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and MEDLINE for students looking for articles in the life sciences field.