Library News
National Library Week Collection Spotlight: American Periodicals
Posted on April 8th, 2021
April 4-10, 2021, was National Library Week across the USA! National Library Week is a time to celebrate our nation’s libraries and library workers’ contributions, and promote library use and support.
The theme for National Library Week 2021 was “Welcome to Your Library.”
During the pandemic, library workers continue to exceed their communities’ demands and adapt resources and services to meet their users’ needs during these challenging times. Whether people visit in person or virtually, libraries offer endless opportunities to transform lives through education and lifelong learning. During National Library Week, staff posted news items about some of the many information resources Booth Library offers our community beyond 4 walls. These resources are featured below.
American Periodicals
If you’re researching topics from U.S. history, check out Booth Library’s American Periodicals collection for digitized images of American magazines and journals from colonial times through the early 20th century.
Looking for examples of 19th-century magazine ads, political and social commentary, editorial cartoons, recipes, or articles written during and about the Civil War or Reconstruction? You can search in American Periodicals to find what you need. Use the Document Type limiter to narrow down your search by type of item.
This primary source database includes early American short stories including some written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, general interest magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Vanity Fair, children’s publications, and many more. Because the PDF page images are taken from the original periodicals, the original typefaces, graphics, and layouts can be viewed.
American Periodicals can be cross-searched with any of Booth Library’s other databases on the ProQuest platform, such as British Periodicals, Early English Books Online, and the historical Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, and New York Times.
Need help with searching American Periodicals? Please ask a librarian.
The Keep
Scholarly Communications Librarian Todd Bruns oversees the institutional repository at EIU, The Keep. Many people know The Keep as the repository of open access archive of the scholarship, creative output and administrative records of Eastern Illinois University. Since its adoption, more than 2.5 million documents have been downloaded around the world from The Keep.
What most people don’t know is that The Keep is also a publishing platform. EIU currently hosts the publication of six peer-reviewed journals.
The Keep serves as conference and event site platform which allows a fully functioning submission, review and publishing space for physical and virtual conferences.
The Keep is also a valuable platform to feature EIU’s wonderful faculty. The Selected Works pages within The Keep create a powerful and versatile website for faculty to maintain a record of their scholarly output. Selected Works Galleries can be organized by department or expertise and embedded within external sites.
Perhaps best of all, participating in The Keep means that our university’s scholarly and creative output is optimized for discovery by scholars, students and prospective students around the world in Google, Digital Commons Network, and all major search engines.
Gale eBooks
For anyone looking for a good starting point for their research, Gale eBooks includes over 450 encyclopedias, guidebooks, and other reference sources on a variety of subjects: the arts, business, education, literature, politics, science and medicine, and more.
This searchable and browsable electronic collection is accessible to EIU users from on and off campus.
Search through Gale eBooks to get background information on your research paper topic. If you haven’t picked out a topic yet, browse through the Table of Contents of any book to find possible subjects to write about.
If you have questions about using Gale eBooks, please ask a librarian.
Govinfo
Govinfo, a free service of the U.S. Government Publishing Office, provides access to publications from all three branches of the U.S. Government. Find it online at www.govinfo.gov.
Use Govinfo to locate the text of COVID relief bills and other recent pieces of legislation, find the budget of the U.S. Government, search for laws within the U.S. Code, browse the official Public Papers of the Presidents, investigate the Federal Register, and read articles on timely topics such as Women’s History Month and the history of the Peace Corps. And lots more. You can search among the hundreds of thousands of publications in Govinfo and browse by category.
Booth Library is a federal depository library, and our staff can help you locate government information and answer questions about using Govinfo.
