Tozzer Library Blog

Tozzer Library adds approximately 5,000 items annually (the collection now numbers about 265,000 books and bound journal volumes).  From all of them we regularly select a few and highlight them on our Selected New Acquisitions web page.

See http://www.hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/tozzer/acquisitions/

You will currently find new books by graduates Rita Wright (PhD 1984), James L. Fitzsimmons (PhD 2002), Fred Wendorf (PhD 1953) and others on the page.  Books written or edited by faculty members Richard Wrangham, Dan Lieberman and Bill Fash are also there.

Check the Notable New Acquisitions page regularly to see what’s new; books that have been added to the list most recently are at the top.  Links on the page will take you to either the HOLLIS record or to Amazon.com should you wish to purchase a copy for yourself.

We note another recently-published book, by Jonathan Friedlaender (PhD 1969), entitled From Anthropometry to Genomics: Reflections of a Pacific Researcher.  In a brief review in the May, 2010, issue of Anthropology News, Virginia Vitzthum writes, “It’s both a fascinating account of the rapid transformation of anthropological genetics during the final decades of the twentieth century and a charming personal history by one of the field’s leading contributors.”  See http://jfriedla.wordpress.com for more information and a slide-show.

Welcome to the inaugural posting on Tozzer Library’s blog.  We plan to post items which we hope will be of interest concerning the library’s collections and services, with an emphasis on interesting materials in the collection both new and old.  And we think there is no better place to start than by announcing a new website devoted to exploring the ins and outs of using Anthropological Literature, Tozzer Library’s database of bibliographic citations in anthropology.

Using the Anthropological Literature E-Resource

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=anthrolit

has been developed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the database and provide some strategies for maximizing your search results.  It was developed by Helen Quigley (quigley@fas.harvard.edu), Assistant Editor/Indexer of AL, and Susan Berstler (berstler@fas.harvard.edu), Tozzer Library’s Information Technology Coordinator.

Anthropological Literature (AL) was born when the first Librarian of the Peabody Museum Library, Roland B. Dixon, began interfiling author, title and subject cards for articles appearing in the journals received by the library into the card catalog in the early 20^th century.  AL’s evolution since then might be described as a classic progression in discovery tools for research in anthropology as these cards were first reproduced in a book catalog (85 volumes), then in microformat (1122 microfiche) and printed quarterly periodicals, briefly on CD ROMS and, now, in a comprehensive digital electronic database.  If you would like to know more about the history of Anthropological Literature, see the Wikipedia article about AL at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropological_Literature.

We invite you to mine the riches of Tozzer Library, one of the oldest and largest anthropology libraries in the world,  by learning how to get the most out of your search of Anthropological Literature via Using the Anthropological Literature E-Resource at http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=anthrolit