Boston College Libraries Newsletter

New Testament Abstracts, 1956-84, now online for the first time

The recent digitization and online release of the first thirty years of New Testament Abstracts into the public domain represents a partnership of several agencies at BC, as well as the longstanding commitment on the Libraries’ part, to collect and share the academic heritage and Catholic mission of Boston College.

Contributing unique content to the global library of online information is an ongoing activity and priority of the Boston College Libraries. So, when Dean Thomas D. Stegman, S.J., of the School of Theology and Ministry (STM), proposed a collaboration to digitize and make openly available roughly 30 years of New Testament Abstracts (NTA) content, University Librarian Tom Wall was pleased to confirm the partnership.

New Testament Abstracts (NTA) has been a premier scholarly publication for study of the New Testament and related fields for more than 60 years. Originally a product of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (WJST), the publication moved with the WJST to Boston College in 2008, upon the founding of the University’s School of Theology and Ministry (STM). Since then, the BC Libraries have benefited greatly from this partnership, particularly the Theology and Ministry Library (TML), which is the annual recipient of hundreds of donated books and journal titles courtesy of NTA.

Happy Open Access Month!

BC Libraries is celebrating Open Access Week for the whole month of October with displays in the O’Neill Library lobby that emphasize equity of access.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.

International Open Access Week is from October 21-27 this year. Every year, the coordinating organization, SPARC, chooses a different theme on which to focus. The theme for 2019 is, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge.”

Why We Love Zotero

The open-source citation manager Zotero can help organize and streamline your research. Here’s how.

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.

Print Power! Debuts in the O’Neill Library Level 1 Gallery

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.

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.

Gargan Hall Stained Glass Audio Tour

Library staff has created a self-guided audio tour of the stained glass windows in Bapst Library’s Gargan Hall.

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.