Robert Goldwater Library blog

Tips on web tools for anthropology

Rex at Savage Minds has re-posted a very helpful (if unattributed) blog post with suggestions on "how to use commonly available and completely free tools on the Internet in order to keep up to date with the latest literature in anthropology." He offers to updated it regularly if there is sufficient interest from the readership.

The focus of the original post is Pacific Islands research, and the choices may reflect that. Here's what's covered:

• Table of Contents Alerting
• Get an email account
• Subscribe to American Anthropologist and other American Anthropological Society journals
• Subscribe to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
• Subscribe to new book alerts at University of California Press
• Sign up to your other favorite publishers

Even if you already do all this, you might want to skip down to the "Final Thoughts" entry, where the unintended consequences of Total Information Awareness are addressed.

Blog now offers access to e-journal content

The library scientists here at goldwaterlibrary.org are constantly experimenting with new ways to make our library's contents more accessible. Here's one we hope will catch on with our readers.

Starting today a new feature appears in the blog's sidebar. Four links appear under the heading Online Journal Contents. Each covers a different segment of the library's collection scope. Click on a link and you will get a constantly updating list of articles from academic journals that are available electronically.

The ten most recent articles appear on the first page. Click "Read More ..." at the bottom of the page and a new page will appear. As you continue through the pages successively older articles will appear.

For now this list is limited to those titles published electronically for which the Museum has a subscription and that have RSS feeds. As new RSS feeds become available those titles will be added to the mix.

If you already aggregate feeds into a feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, you can use these four feeds to add links to individual journals, or feeds from these four links themselves. (For the time being this seems to work best in Google Reader, but we're working on a solution to that.)

Access to the full-text version
Citations and abstracts for each article should be available to everyone. However access to the full-text of the articles is limited.

Those reading the blog from within the Metropolitan Museum or by proxy from another computer should have access to the full text. (Please let us know if it isn't.) Likewise those accessing the blog from an institution (college or university or museum, for instance) that also subscribes to a specific journal, everything should be accessible. Of course, your institution's subscriptions may vary; all the titles may not be available.

Every experiment needs its guinea pigs. Please let us know (goldwater.library (at) metmuseum.org) what your experience is with these journal feeds: what works and particularly what doesn't work. In the meantime we'll continue to tinker with it to make it better.

Online journal contents: Pacific

The following list contains articles recently published in electronic journals on Pacific studies. To access the full-text of the articles you must be at an institution with subscriptions to the journals (including within the Metropolitan Museum) or access WATSONLINE remotely (read how here).

Online journal contents: Americas

The following list contains articles recently published in electronic journals on native and Precolumbian Americas. To access the full-text of the articles you must be at an institution with subscriptions to the journals (including within the Metropolitan Museum) or access WATSONLINE remotely (read how here).

Online journal contents: Africa

The following list contains articles recently published in electronic journals on African studies. To access the full-text of the articles you must be at an institution with subscriptions to the journals (including within the Metropolitan Museum) or access WATSONLINE remotely (read how here).

Online journal contents: anthropology & archaeology

The following list contains articles recently published in electronic journals on anthropology, ethnology, archaeology and museums. To access the full-text of the articles you must be at an institution with subscriptions to the journals (including within the Metropolitan Museum) or access WATSONLINE remotely (read how here).

Archaeology in Mexico (article alert)

An Aztec stone slab found at Templo Mayor in Mexico City depicts Tlaltecuhtli, god of the earth, as a squatting clawed figure that drinks blood. AP (Source:    Anthropology and Archaeology)

The Practice of Archaeology in Mexico: Institutional Obligations and Scientific Results
Edited by Nelly M. Robles García

SAA Archaeological Record, vol. 7, no. 5 (November 2007), pp. 9-43. (Note: The most recent issues of this title are not freely available electronically.)

CONTENTS:

• The Practice of Archaeology in Mexico: Institutional Obligations and Scientific Results
• Good Colleagues, Good Neighbors
• Law and the Practice of Archaeology in Mexico
• The State Control on Archaeology in Mexico
• The Archaeological Registry in Mexico
• Salvage and Rescue Archaeology in Mexico
• Management and Conservation of Archaeological Sites
• The Relevance of Ethics in the Archaeology of Mexico as Pertaining to its Northern Neighbors
• Archaeological Curatorship and Material Analysis at INAH
• Directing Archaeological Projects in Mexico: Experiences over Three Decades

Wari / Inca tocapu (article alert)

Neue Erkenntnisse zum Tocapu-Symbolsystem am Beispiel eines Männerhemdes der Inkazeit in der Altamerika-Sammlung des Linden Museum / Christiane Clados
(A Key Checkerboard Pattern Tunic of the Linden-Museum Stuttgart: First Steps in Breaking the Tocapu Code?)

Tribus: Jahrbuch des Linden-Museums, Band 56 (2007), pp. 71-106.

Left: unku con tocapu de "llave" / Foto: Yukata Yoshii
[source]

"The tocapu symbol system of Wari and Inca cultures belongs to the most impressive aspects of material culture of prehispanic South America. Although progress has been done in the past years the meaning and function of the tocapus remains unclear. This chapter presents new results about tocapus by analyzing a fragment of an Inca key checkerboard pattern tunic of the Linden Museum Stuttgart (Linden-Museum Stuttgart, Germany, 1167.771) which up to now has never been discussed in former publications ... It is a Quompi weaving.

"Consistent with the results of the iconographic analysis the author suggests an interpretation of the Inca key checkerboard pattern tunic of the Linden Museum in relation to representations of (mythical) serpents." -- Excerpted from Abstract

Critical interventions, a new journal of African art history

The Goldwater Library has just received issue no. 1 of the newly published Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. [Click here for library holdings]

Founding editor Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie and co-editor John Peffer offer up an introductory essay that puts the new journal in context. As they describe it in their "About the Journal" entry on the web site,

Critical Interventions, is a peer-reviewed journal of advanced research and writing on African art history and visual culture. Our mission is to provide a forum for cutting-edge scholarship in African art history and for sustained analysis of issues of urgent concern for the discipline that foregrounds both the history of Africa’s modernity and the historiography of African Art History. The journal proposes a critical intervention at a moment of great contradiction, when there are diminishing opportunities for new and in-depth scholarly research on African arts but also a parallel rise in interest in Africa’s modernity among scholars and students. We believe that studies grounded in research in Africa and based on deep knowledge of historical and contemporary experiences of African art and visual culture can illuminate the fields of modern and contemporary art history in ways that are otherwise invisible to specialists in contemporary art in general.

Subscriptions provides two issues per year, access to the full online version of the journal, and a newsletter. [Contact info] At this writing it is unclear whether, how and to what extent the journal will be available electronically. The web site suggests it can be made available by email. Only the introductory essay in number 1 is available on the web, and this at no charge.