News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

Two of our popular databases have expanded to include even more information:

Times Digital Archive

Times Digital Archive has added twenty years to its coverage of world events. It now extends from 1785 to 2006 (previous coverage stopped at 1985), covering the tumultuous period at the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st century.

This is a great resource if you need primary sources (i.e. created during the time you’re studying) on just about any subject. View the article as it actually appeared in The Times (London), and print, download or email articles for use in your assignments (or for your own interest!).

Key areas of interest that now have coverage are:

• Geopolitics: the end of the Cold War, and the rise of global terrorism.

  Read: Iron Curtain Torn Open: Berliners Cross the Wall to Freedom, 10 November 1989.

• War: the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Gulf Wars, conflict in Afghanistan, war in the Congo.

  Read: Kuwait Fears Invasion over Iraqi Demands, 2 August 1990.

• Tragedy: Rwandan genocide, the Boxing Day tsunami, Kobe earthquake.

  Read: Ocean Quake, 27 December 2004.

• Politics: encompassing the Thatcher-Major- Blair years in the UK, and the second Reagan administration to the George W Bush presidency in the USA.

  Read: We Played it By the Book, Say Bush Aides, 11 November 2000.

• Sport: including 6 football World Cups and 5 Olympic games; including Ben Johnson’s drug-fuelled win in Seoul in 1988.

  Read: Canada Opposes Letting Johnson Run in Olympics, 23 November 1988.

• And much more…

Oxford Art Online

Oxford Art Online now includes ‘Art of New Zealand’. This update features 33 specially commissioned new and expanded articles on the art of New Zealand, developed under the direction of Leonard Bell of the University of Auckland.

Highlights include biographies of significant figures including Colin McCahon and Shane Cotton. Enjoy!

(To celebrate this extra content, the iconic painting of Cass by Rita Angus will feature on Oxford Art’s homepage until the end of February 2012!)

Gábor Tóth, local history specialist at Wellington City Libraries, talking about resources for genealogy research

Family History Month is underway and it was great to see so many people at our first lunchtime seminar on Tuesday who were interested in finding out more about using library resources to help with their genealogical research.

Our second free Ancestry in August talk this Tuesday (9th August, 12 noon – 1pm at Central Library) will be given by Emerson Vandy, Digital Services Manager of the National Library of  New Zealand.  Emerson will be talking about Papers Past, a popular database run by the National Library, which has opened up a huge new source of source of genealogical information for researching family history in New Zealand.   The collection of digitised newspapers and periodicals covers the years 1839 to 1945 and includes 68 publications from all regions of New Zealand.  You can use and search Papers Past for free on our computers at any of our branch libraries or from anywhere you have internet access.

Papers Past have just published their two-millionth page and to celebrate this landmark they are holding a competition called “Find yourself in the past/Lose yourself in the papers”.  To enter simply search Papers Past for your name and find the most interesting match for your namesake.  All entries go in the draw to win a Kobo e-book reader – click on the competition link for more details.

Interested in researching your family history?
From time to time we’ll be posting genealogy facts and advice here on the News Blog.
For other blog entries on genealogy, click on the tag “genealogy” at the bottom of this post.

Australians and New Zealanders know ANZAC day – 25^th April – as a national day of remembrance to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.

Did you have a relative who took part in WW1? Would you like to read their Military Personnel Record?

Military records can provide amazing details for genealogists, especially ages and places of birth, while they can also expand family histories with information about campaigns, conduct and even physical descriptions of ancestors.

(more…)

Interested in researching your family history?
From time to time we’ll be posting genealogy facts and advice here on the News Blog.  Our first entry is on Birth, Death and Marriage records (BDM), which are a good starting place when researching your family history.  Official registrations in NZ didn’t start until 1848 but there are some earlier records taken from church and place registers dating back to 1840.

Historic BDM Online
New Zealand historic BDMs are now accessible online through the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) website: www.bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz, and the great thing about this site is that it is updated daily.

What is a historic BDM and what information is actually available online?
A BDM qualifies as being historic if it was a

• birth that occurred at least 100 years ago, or a still birth that occurred at least 50 years ago
• marriage (and eventually Civil Unions) that occurred at least 80 years ago
• death that occurred at least 50 years ago or the deceased’s date of birth was at least 80 years ago.

(more…)

Studying a language? Brushing up your French/German/Spanish/Italian for an overseas trip? Oxford Reference Online has bilingual dictionaries available for all of the above – and it’s free to use for library cardholders. (Also included are Irish, Welsh and Latin dictionaries.)

Languages don’t interest you? Oxford Reference Online also includes subject reference resources like science dictionaries, medical dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations, names and places, law, mythology, folklore, psychology – pretty much any kind of dictionary or companion guide you can imagine.

(I think my personal favourite in terms of resources I never expected to encounter, but am chuffed exist, would have to be the Dictionary of Opera Characters, closely followed by the Oxford Companion to the American Musical. Log in and check them out)

As a side note, here’s a selection of other language learning resources you might be interested in:

1. At the library: Language kits – the library has these available to borrow in many different languages and they’re $3 to borrow for 4 weeks. We also hold foreign language novels for adults and picture books for children (here’s an example of the French language children’s ones – replace ‘French’ in the search box with your language of choice to search for these in another language), magazines, grammars, vocabularies, and of course dictionaries that you can borrow. Want something more visual? We have foreign language films with English subtitles you can borrow to brush up on your listening comprehension skills (these are $4 for 1 week). Try our languages subject guide for tips on searching for these on our online catalogue.
2. Also via the library, but this time online: downloadable language learning audiobooks. Try a search on Overdrive Audio in our eLibrary for languages – you’ll be surprised how many language learning audiobooks come up. Easily transferred to your mp3 player of choice.
3. PressDisplay – another database the library subscribes to that cardholders can access for free. PressDisplay gives you instant access to over 1700 newspapers from 92 countries in 48 languages. Want to read Le Monde in French while eating breakfast at home? Now you can – and it will appear on the screen laid out exactly like the print version.
4. BBC Languages – this should be your first stop online. Free audio and video courses, quizzes, and all kinds of excellent resources.
5. Yahoo News/Google News in different languages, e.g. here’s the German language Google News. Change the country code at the end, e.g. .nz for New Zealand, .de for Germany, .fr for France, to get the version you want. Similarly, reading Wikipedia articles in other languages can be a good test of your reading skills in that language as well, and if you know the subject matter of the article, you’re on familiar territory anyway – which can help! Here are all the different language Wikipedias.
6. Browser extensions for language learning. There are a great deal of these for Firefox – have a browse and find one you’d like to try. (You’ll need to scroll down the page for a fuller list of popular language learning add-ons).
7. iPhone apps. We found this article that lists 50 iPhone apps for learning languages, for all you lucky people who happen to have an iPhone. Flash cards!
8. In-person resources in Wellington… For a small fee (not specified on their website), you can get a public membership to Victoria University’s Language Learning Centre at their Kelburn campus. Other paid courses are run at the Goethe Institut – for German, and the Alliance Française for French. And we’re sure there are more – maybe try a search on FeelingGreat.co.nz?
9. Sometimes iffy, but often useful: Google Translate. Will give you a (very!) loose translation, and can be good if you need an idea of what a page in a language you don’t read is saying. Oh, and did you know there’s a Te Reo interface for the Google search engine.
10. Hm, and the World Cinema Showcase is coming up too!

You may be interested to hear that OED Online, aka the Oxford English Dictionary’s website, has had a complete overhaul – the site relaunched in December, and Kim Hill interviewed the Dictionary’s Deputy Editor on National Radio’s Saturday program back in early December. The library subscribes to OED Online so that all cardholders can access it for free either in the library or from home - so log in and have a look around. You can access it here.

Here’s what the Dictionary’s Chief Editor, John Simpson, had to say about the changes:

We’ve tried to tilt the site more towards the English language than towards the dictionary as an end in itself. Search results move from simple lists to visualizations/timelines. [...] There’s also an ‘Aspects of English’ section, a series of descriptive articles on language, past and present. We’ll be adding to this series at regular intervals, but for now how about Robert McCrum on P. G. Wodehouse’s use of English (with links into the OED and elsewhere), Eleanor Maier on the rise of the ‘gate’ suffix, or a brief overview of the English of the Anglo-Saxons by the OED’s Chief Etymologist, Philip Durkin.

Perhaps the most important new feature involves the Historical Thesaurus to the OED, published in book form in 2009. The entire text is now integrated with the OED Online, so that you can follow semantic links throughout the dictionary. Go to the OED’s entry for utopia, for example, and follow the Thesaurus links to the entries for heaven (Old English), Cockaigne (c1305), El Dorado (1596), nonesuch (a1618), Fiddler’s Green (1825), never-never land (1900), the Big Rock Candy Mountain

Looking around online, there seems to be a lot of excitement about the relaunch – Bits, the New York Times’s technology podcast recently interviewed Dr. Simpson as well. 

Related links:

• My Favourite Word - a site where people can contribute their favourite English word. Look some of these up in OED Online! Recent contributions include ’sinople’ and ‘incandescent’.
• Mum’s the word, says the world - via the BBC, from 2004. Mother is the most beautiful word in the English language, according to a survey of non-English speakers.

Just found a nice phrase as well – etymology of the English language described as “the wheel-ruts of modern English”

Check out our Booklists Popular Topic Page for a full monthly list of new fiction, audio books, large print, DVDs and classical CDs – ideas galore for something new to read, watch or listen to!

You can aslo access databases such as Fiction Connection, Literature Resource Centre and  Books and Authors via our MyGateway Books portal.

Find which library has what with the New Zealand Libraries’ Catalogue, available through mygateway.info  Click on either the ‘Books & Authors’ or the ‘New Zealand’ button, scroll down to the description about the Catalogue and click on ‘Start search’.  You’ll also find info about interloaning an item from another library.

Find an item by them in our Classic Catalogue and then click on one of the underlined subjects in blue to find many more authors who write in the same genre.  And for many more reading ideas visit our Fiction Connection database.

Near Central Library this afternoon?  You can catch up on where the United States elections are at via the television on the Ground Floor.  And if you want to know more about the candidates – Biography Resource Center can help you out (you’ll need to enter your library card details first)