Libraries & Digital Learning

Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Category: HomePageNews

Trinity Launches New Digital Repository

February 10, 2025 /

The Trinity Library recently announced the new Digital Repository, a site in JSTOR which houses and provides access to scholarly and creative works by Trinity College community members and digitized materials from the College Archives and Watkinson Library Special Collections. As part of the launch, library staff members Christina Bleyer, Amy Harrell, and Amanda Matava held an informational session on January 23 during Common Hour for faculty, staff and students to show the new site, demonstrate its functionality, and answer questions.  

Trinity’s Digital Repository was initiated in 2011 to collect faculty and student scholarly and creative works such as papers, publications, and theses. Over time, it grew to include digitized textual materials from the Watkinson Library Special Collections, College Archives like the Tripod, Ivy, Bulletins and Catalogues. The new Repository totals 77,000 items, and old URLs have been redirected to the new site. Items are also indexed in Google for discoverability. 

The Repository can be accessed in several ways:  

The decision to change platforms was considered for some time due to cost, functionality, and open access considerations, but put on hold until a suitable replacement could be found. JSTOR offers a more modern, intuitive experience and can support multiple formats including text, audio, video, and images. This has consolidated Trinity’s digital collections to one platform instead of multiple. The new repository is also a digital asset management system with a preservation component, so hosted materials and their metadata are monitored and stored in perpetuity.  Continue reading

Popular magazines in Trinity’s database collections

November 6, 2024 /

For those who remember, and might miss, the shelves of popular magazines sold by the checkout counter at the grocery store, or rows upon rows at brick-and-mortar bookstores like Barnes and Noble, we can see many of them again through our popular magazine databases.

The magazines are all digitized and searchable, with downloadable PDFs that, while not the glossy paper of the printed originals, bring out the vibrant colors, images, and advertisements of a physical magazine.

Some of our magazine databases include:

  • EBSCO Magazine Archives with access to titles including Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, The Atlantic. Coverage for these titles usually begin at the first issue published.
  • Women’s Magazine Archive with access to titles like Cosmopolitan, Essence, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day and more. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to the early 21st century.
  • Vogue Magazine Archive with the full issues of the American version of Vogue from 1892 to the present.
  • Jet Magazine Archive with issues from 1951 to 2014.
  • Rolling Stone Archive with issues from 1967 to the present.

All of our magazine databases are listed on our Library Databases A-Z list.

Check out the list to start your research into social, cultural, economic and literary history as told through these popular magazines!

 

Color Our Collections 2024 – Calling all creators!

October 22, 2024 /

#ColorOurCollections is an initiative from the New York Academy of Medicine to transform library, museum, and archival collections into free coloring pages. Trinity College Library & Information Technology Services participates in this initiative by publishing an annual coloring book featuring a mix of scans of our archival material and student-submitted artwork. Our digital repository hosts PDF versions of our previous coloring books.

Our theme this year is Touch Grass: Experience the Natural World. In honor of the library’s new seed library and our status as an arboretum, we’re celebrating the natural world at Trinity and beyond. This can include depictions of flora, fauna, landscapes, or any other part of nature.

Feeling inspired? All Trinity students are invited to participate by submitting their original artwork for inclusion in this year’s coloring books. See the guidelines below for details. If you have any questions, please direct them to trinitywellness@trincoll.edu.

Submit your artwork to trinitywellness@trincoll.edu under the following guidelines: Black & White, PNG or TIFF image, 300-400 ppi, 8.5 x 11 inches. Traditional or digital art is welcome, if it meets the requirements and correct file format. Images larger than 30 cannot be sent via email but can be shared via OneDrive.

We’re also hosting an event called Pumpkins and Pencils tomorrow, October 23, from 4:15-5:15pm in room 182 of the library. Drop by for a chance to work on your coloring book submissions and enjoy some sweet treats!

Pumpkins & Pencils, October 23, 4:15-5:15, LITS 182. Enjoy pumpkin treats while you work on coloring book submissions!

To enter the contest, be sure to submit your artwork in coloring book style to trinitywellness@trincoll.edu by NOVEMBER 15, 2024.

Bantam Research Roost

September 30, 2024 /

Our research & instruction librarians are flying the coop and setting up temporary roosts around campus to bring research support right to you!

Our Bantam Research Roost program, which debuted during the spring 2024 semester and has returned this fall, is a traveling librarian initiative designed to increase the library’s visibility and accessibility on campus, fostering a more inclusive environment and supporting student academic success. Whether you’re a student working on an assignment or a faculty member seeking new resources, the Bantam Research Roost brings the library’s expertise directly to you, making it easier than ever to tap into our wealth of resources and expertise, wherever you are on campus.

Once a week, throughout the semester, our research librarians and peer research assistants will visit a different campus location between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.  Stop by our table to get answers to research questions and learn about exciting resources, services, and events in the library.

Our friendly librarians can help you at any stage in your research, whether that’s brainstorming or focusing research topics or questions, finding relevant sources, evaluating sources, or citing and managing your sources.  Faculty are also invited to begin a conversation about how we can support your courses through instruction sessions or assist with your own research needs.

As an added incentive the first student to speak with us each week will receive a $5 Peter B’s gift card (while supplies last)!  We will have additional goodies including stickers and (usually) candy for everyone to enjoy when you visit our roost.

The Research Roost schedule can be found on the Campus Calendar and our location will be posted as a story on our Instagram account (@trincoll_library) each week.

Lastly, remember our friendly and knowledgeable librarians and peer research assistants are available to help you with your research beyond the roost.  You can make an appointment to meet with us at a time that is convenient for you or send us an email.  We are always happy to chat and help you find the answers you need.

Image of first Bantam Research Roost table.

Research & Instruction Librarians, Rosie (left) and Susan (right) sit at the Bantam Research Roost table in Mather during its launch in the spring 2024 semester.

Image of outdoor Bantam Research Roost table

Peer Research Assistant, Alex Golz sits at the Bantam Research Roost table on the Long Walk during the second roost of the fall 2024 semester.

New E-Resource Selection: What Makes the Cut?

September 12, 2024 /

The bulk of the library’s collection budget goes towards purchasing perpetual access or maintaining subscription to e-resources of many varieties.  But how do librarians decide which new resources to add?  There are three main factors that drive our electronic resource acquisition: enhancing the existing collection, proactive selection of resources that relate to Trinity’s unique scholarship needs, and responses to requests of students and faculty for research support.

Streaming video resources are in high demand and when librarians learned that a new set of videos was being offered as an add on to the PBS Video Collection the library already owned we jumped at the opportunity.  Experience told us these videos would be well used and a preview of the title list showed they were logical compliments to the videos already in the collection.  In addition, this collection is often the only place where PBS releases some videos for streaming, so we knew there would be exclusive content unavailable anywhere else.  All these factors told us that the purchase would be a direct enhancement to the library’s existing streaming video offerings.

PolicyMap was a statistical database the library considered in the past, but declined due to content overlap with similar resources like Social Explorer.  But when a representative reached out with exciting updates on unique new datasets relevant to urban studies, climate studies, and environmental justice studies, among others, librarians thought it prudent to request a trial to take another look.  This new data clearly supported the research needs of several disciplines and this combined with PolicyMap’s more user-friendly interface compared to our other statistical databases convinced the librarians this would be a worthwhile subscription.

It can be said that the most valuable resource helping librarians identify new electronic resources to purchase is the Trinity community itself.  This is how librarians learn about some truly unique specialty resources like Human Relations Area Files: World Cultures, an ethnographic database with information on all aspects of cultural and social life for a wide variety of cultures and ethnic groups.  Similarly, it was due to a faculty member’s report that librarians learned a previously open access journal incredibly important to ethnographic theory in anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, was placed behind a paywall and a subscription was duly purchased.  Just as librarians are an irreplaceable resource for students and faculty research projects, students and faculty are also invaluable partners in helping librarians identify relevant and useful resources that fulfill our collection development goal of supporting current scholarship.

Students Studying

All things news and newspapers from Trinity’s library databases

September 4, 2024 /

Would you like free access to the daily online version of the New York Times and Washington Post, or perhaps the Los Angeles Times from 1900 or Japan Times from 1875?

Check out all of our news content from around the United States and the world.

We have access to early newspapers from the 17th and 18th centuries up to, and including, the present day!

Current Trinity students, faculty and staff may also activate a free subscription, or access, current content from these major newspapers via the following links:

  • Financial Times. Click the “Join now” button to set up your access through Trinity’s group subscription.
  • New York Times.  Create an account using your institutional email and then login with your new nytimes.com credentials. Faculty and staff must re-register every four years. Students have access until graduation. Once an account is created, access is via https://www.nytimes.com/.
  • Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com). Site license to the website WSJ.com. Individual registration is required. Once you’ve has activated a WSJ account, you may sign into the account from anywhere by visiting WSJ.com directly or downloading the WSJ app. Faculty & staff must refresh activation yearly; students must provide year of graduation.
  • Washington Post. No registration is required. Provides last 5 years of content.  

 

Experiencing IDEAL

August 9, 2024 /

On July 15-18, 2024, Rose Beranis and Benny Bauer attended the IDEAL Conference (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Libraries & Archives) in Toronto, and it was fantastic! With over 200 speakers and presenters covering a broad range of topics, the sessions and workshops were so engaging that it was a challenge to decide which ones to attend due to the overlaps. To help choose your sessions, you could sort by “Track,” of which they had several areas of focus: Accessibility, Antioppression, Archives, Centering Marginalized Experiences, Collections, Community, Data Management, Leadership, Strategic Planning and Policymaking, Sustainable Practices. It was great to see how much DEI is woven through all aspects of our work as librarians.  

The keynote speaker was particularly inspiring, setting a powerful tone for the entire conference. The workshops were so popular that they had to make room for additional seating so folks wouldn’t be turned away due to lack of space. Other than great sessions, the conference also offered lots of opportunities to network. During meals, break times, and community group meet-ups, we had chances to meet new colleagues and reconnect with familiar faces, including old coworkers we didn’t expect to run into and Dr. Kawanna Bright, who is part of the Oberlin DEI Audit Pilot project that we’re actively working on! It was a joy to connect with so many librarians and archivists across the US and Canada.

The first night also included the IDEALfest, which was incredible. There was great food, zine-making, button making, a photo booth, Plinko, coloring, an ice cream bar, a live band playing 80s music, and a drag story hour! Rose even won the first raffle prize awarded at IDEALfest. It was quite the shindig.  

Overall, this conference was the most diverse one we have ever attended, in content and in attendance (and had a sensory bar, which we will recommend for all future functions). We hope to attend more like it! 

 

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