What’s New

OhioLINK Awarded NEH Grant to Build Creative Humanities Scholarship Tools

OhioLINK’s award-winning Digital Resource Commons (DRC) will soon add new tools to encourage creative scholarship within the state’s historical collections, thanks to a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funds will be used to host three “design and build” workshops, each bringing together humanities researchers, librarians and software developers to create applications that will make it easier to combine historical collections in new ways.

“Imagine scholars being able to combine, create timelines, and add information or annotations across the Kent State Shootings Oral History collections, digitized student newspaper collections, and relevant oral histories to trace the history of the reception and reporting of the shootings,” explains OhioLINK Executive Director John Magill.

“This is an exciting opportunity to get humanities scholars directly involved in designing tools to access the digital collections in the DRC in ways that they, the end users, find most compelling and useful,” says Bowling Green State University Librarian Gwen Evans, who helped devise and write the grant.

The DRC is OhioLINK’s nationally recognized digital platform for saving, discovering and sharing Ohio’s unique, historical and scholarly materials. Currently, more than 20 academic institutions and a number of non-profit organizations have more than half a million items in the free repository, including collections as varied as historic maps of Akron, Mayan archaeology, photographs of the Wright Brothers’ first flight, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center collection, and the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. In 2011, the DRC was honored with the American Library Association Award for Cutting Edge Technology Services because of its innovative use of Amazon’s cloud computing environment. Explore it at drc.ohiolink.edu.

Elsevier Backfiles Now Available for Search in OhioLINK's EJC

Ohio’s college students and researchers can now use OhioLINK's Electronic Journal Center (EJC) to search in more than 3.4 million historic articles from Elsevier, a highly regarded publisher in the fields of science and engineering with titles including “The Lancet” and “Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine.” This brings the total number of articles available in the EJC to nearly 21 million.

OhioLINK purchased these backfiles in December 2010, but until now they were only available for search on the Elsevier website.

The addition of these files was made possible by funds from both the Ohio Board of Regents and contributions from all OhioLINK member institutions.

ETD Center passes the 35,000 Milestone

In December 2011 Ohio State University approved dissertation number 35,001 for publication in the OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center: "The Impact of Rejection Sensitivity and Interpersonal Aggression on Social Network Characteristics in Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder Features" by Sophie Anna Lazarus.

The first dissertation was deposited in the ETD on June 1, 2000. In 2011 over 5,000 papers were deposited into the ETD.

The OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center is a free online database of graduate theses and dissertations and undergraduate honors theses from students at participating Ohio colleges and universities. Any OhioLINK member institution may join and submit theses and dissertations to the database. A list of participating institutions is available.

The ETD Center currently contains more than 35,000 theses and dissertations, which are accessible to anyone worldwide. The full-text is available for 90% of the included documents. For more information about the OhioLINK ETD Center, see the FAQ.