Using E-book Databases to Research Women’s History

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone!

You can find a programme of events sponsored by the Student Union, engage with inspiring stories from the Lincoln International Business School, or read a book about women’s lives, past and present from the library.

March is Women’s History Month and the library will be celebrating with a series of posts on using our resources to study women’s history. We would love to hear your comments and questions about the posts: please tweet us @GCWLibrary, email us at library@lincoln.ac.uk, or tell us your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the post.

This first post will cover the books and chapters you can find using our e-book databases. You can access some of our ebooks via our the ‘find books’ search on our main page: just select ‘electronic resource’ to focus on e-books.

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What is digital literacy?

The common saying ‘two heads are better than one’ perfectly sums up the purpose of a conference. Sharing ideas and best practice helps both listeners and audience. On 18 January 2019, I found this to be very true in practice went to the Mercian Staff Development Group event ‘Focus on Digital Literacy’ at the University of Coventry Library. The event helped me gain a better understanding of digital literacy and in this post I want to answer the question ‘What is digital literacy?’ based on what I learned from speakers at the event.

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Book Arts event – make a book!

Would you like to make a book?

 Japanese stab binding is a traditional technique originally used to bind pen and ink drawings. 

 Learn more about making books and have a go at binding your own book in this free, enjoyable workshop for staff and students. Suitable for all abilities.

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Black History in Lincolnshire

This is the fourth and final in series of four posts about using library collections for the study of black history, literature and culture, in Britain and abroad. We would love to hear your comments and questions about the posts: please tweet us @GCWLibrary, email us at library@lincoln.ac.uk, or tell us your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the post. 

We hope you have had a wonderful, inspiring, and educational Black History Month! Our final post in this series will offer some suggestions for online databases and library resources for researching Black history in the county of Lincolnshire. This post will come in two parts: in the first part, I will discuss researching Black history in Lincolnshire. In the second part of the post, I will point you towards local collections, archives, and online projects which may help in your investigation of local Black history.

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Studying Black British Poetry

This is the third in a series of four posts about using library collections for the study of black history, literature and culture, in Britain and abroad. We would love to hear your comments and questions about the posts: please tweet us @GCWLibrary, email us at library@lincoln.ac.uk, or tell us your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the post.

If you have been on the ground floor of the library in recent weeks, you may have seen the Library Snippets platform just opposite the enquires desk. Each week of October, the plinth has been hosting recordings of answers to commonly asked questions about the library, as well as poems by Black poets, accompanied by a transcript. We hope you have enjoyed the chance to stop and read or listen to these works.

If you would like to know how to find out more about the poems and poets, read on! This post will discuss how library resources can be used to study the lives and works of black British poets. In the first half, I will discuss how to find the work of a particular poet. In the second half of the post, I will discuss how to find scholarship, secondary readings, and references works about particular poets.

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Black History in Early Printed Books, Part 2

This is part two of the second in a series of four posts about using library collections for the study of black history, literature and culture, in Britain and abroad. We would love to hear your comments and questions about the posts: please tweet us @GCWLibrary, email us at library@lincoln.ac.uk, or tell us your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the post.

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Black History and the Early Days of Printing, Part 1

This is part one of the second in a series of four posts about using library collections for the study of black history, literature and culture, in Britain and abroad. We would love to hear your comments and questions about the posts: please tweet us @GCWLibrary, email us at library@lincoln.ac.uk, or tell us your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the post.

Evidence of the lives of black people in Renaissance and early modern Europe appears in almost all kinds of texts, documents, and images surviving from these periods. For political, racial, and historical reasons this material has often been overlooked or treated as atypical and isolated.[1] This pair of post will focus on one kind of material: early printed books, by which I mean books printed between around 1450 and 1700.[2]  The first part of this post will give a brief overview of our databases of early printed books and how to search them. In the second part, I’ll discuss some of the authors and issues in black history that these databases can be used to investigate.

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Black Musicians in the John Johnson Collection: the Bohee Brothers by Hope Williard (Part 3: the Bohee Brothers)

The Nineteenth Century Entertainment section of the John Johnson collection is a rich resource for examining the history and cultures of all different kinds of performance in nineteenth-century Britain. One of the types of performance feature in this collection is the minstrel show. These performances, in which white performers blackened their faces and sang British audiences ‘a distorted and appropriated form of black music’, had been popular in Britain since the 1830s.[1] The blackface minstrel appeared on Victorian Christmas cards, and music from minstrel shows was regularly performed in Victorian drawing rooms—examples of both can be found in the John Johnson collection.

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