Update on rebuilding the JB Chifley Library collection - August 2022

Recent acquisition highlights

Monographs

• 1,392 print books and 1,886 electronic books individually selected - many of these titles focus on philosophy and history – the two largest collections that were impacted by flooding.
• Brill Book Archive Part 1 includes 3,904 e-book titles published between 2000 and 2006, across disciplines such as Asian studies, biblical studies, classical studies, history, language & linguistics, literature and cultural studies, Middle East and Islamic studies, philosophy, religious studies, theology, international law, social sciences, and biology.
• Gregorii Nysseni Opera Online is now available on Brills new platform, Scholarly Editions – This is the ‘edition maior’, the ultimate online critical text edition of Gregory of Nyssa's works based on all available known manuscripts, introduced with a complete discussion of the textual transmission and accompanied by extensive annotations on the biblical, classical and patristic sources, and indices. It consists of 60 texts originating from 17 hardback volumes, totalling over 3,000 pages.
• Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia book series – this collection includes seminal works on patristic and medieval authors and subjects instrumental to research on the inheritance of Christianity before 1500 AD.
• Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science. Texts and Studies Online – this series provides an outlet for the results of research on the rich literature of Islamic philosophy, theology and science and on the history of ideas in early Islam. It includes text editions, annotated translations, collaborative volumes, handbooks, and studies of individual concept, of the lives and thought of individual historical figures.
• Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies Online – formerly the Nag Hammadi Studies Series, which includes the complete Coptic Gnostic ‎Library. This series - a world leader in its field - publishes research monographs and tools on a ‎broad range of topics in the fields of Gnostic and Manichaean studies.
• Philosophy of History and Culture Online – this series presents original works broadly concerned with philosophical treatments of the ideas of culture and history, culturally and historically embodied entities, and with interpretive strategies pertinent to their understanding. The series is aimed at readers interested in the philosophy of the arts, cross-cultural phenomena, and the interpretation of literary, historical, legal and religious texts.
• Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters Online – a peer-reviewed book series dealing with the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, primarily from the perspective of philosophical and theological questions and the history of their treatment.
• Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions Online – a peer-reviewed book series of monographs and text editions on subjects from the high Middle Ages through the Reformation era. Emphasising the inter-relations and potential for mutual interpretation of three normative areas of specialisation, Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Studies, constitutes a core aspect of its program. The series pays equal attention to political, cultural and religious history.
• Studies in the History of Christian Traditions Online – a peer-reviewed book series intended to encourage the study of continuities and discontinuities in the history of Christian thought through monographs dealing with single authors, movements and ideas.
• The Medieval Mediterranean Online – this series includes scholarly monographs and article collections, as well as editions and translations of primary sources, encompassing any aspect of the history of the Medieval Mediterranean. The vast majority of the books in the series are in the English language, although works in French or German are also included.
• Taylor & Francis eBook Archives – this collection comprises of 6,269 digital rights management (DRM) free titles. It includes two archives: the Humanities & Social Science (HSS) archive with 6,056 titles, and the Science Technology Engineering Medical Mathematics (STEMM) archive with 213 titles.

Reference works

• Encyclopedia of Early Christianity – this new edition nearly doubles the original 3-volume edition in size. It includes fifty-two previously unpublished entries (approximately half a million words) in addition to the entries from the two separately published supplementary volumes. The project now is comprised by more than 225 entries, two and a half million words.
• Encyclopedia of Judaism Online – this work offers an authoritative, comprehensive, and systematic presentation of the current state of scholarship on fundamental issues of Judaism, both past and present. While heavy emphasis is placed in the classical literature of Judaism and its history, this Encyclopaedia also includes principal entries on circumcision, genetic engineering, homosexuality, intermarriage in American Judaism, and other acutely contemporary issues. Covering a tradition of nearly four thousand years, some of the most distinguished scholars in the field describe the way of life, history, art, theology, philosophy, and the practices and beliefs of the Jewish people.  It contains 200 entries comprising more than 1,000,000 words.
• International Historical Statistics : The Americas 1750-1988 – this compilation of historical statistics (revised and updated) documents the growth and development of the Americas. Recent concern with economic growth has led not only to a vast increase in the quantity and quality of statistics collected and published, but also an interest in past statistics.
• The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language – this comprehensive reference work offers a unique experience of the English language in all its richness and diversity.
• The Oxford Companion to Christian thought – an authoritative guide to the intellectual, spiritual, and moral legacy of Christianity for the third millennium. Written by 260 contributors, the Companion focuses on the broad sweep of ideas rather than factual detail, surveying all traditions and centuries but concentrating more on the present than the past.
• The Oxford Latin Dictionary is the world's most authoritative dictionary of Classical Latin, offering unsurpassed coverage of the language of Rome from its beginnings until AD 200. As well as 40,000 headwords and 100,000 senses, the dictionary includes a vast collection of illustrative quotations taken from the canon of classical literature, each now conveniently arranged under the appropriate sense or sub sense. A widget enabling users to look up words is included on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.
• Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament – a fundamental reference tool for biblical studies.

Serials

• Biblica (Online) – published since 1920 by the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, Biblica is a peer-reviewed, research journal dedicated to biblical studies on the Old and New Testament, and inter-testamentary literature. It covers fields of research, such as exegesis, philology, and history. Online access via JSTOR Arts & Sciences XIII (1920-2016).
• Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine Archive – with coverage starting at the magazine’s first issue in 1929 through 2000, this archive contains more than 65 years' worth of content and over 4,100 issues. Contents include reports on news, ideas and trends affecting industry and the economy for those in business management, with national and international coverage.
• Fortune Magazine Archive – an extensive collection of the long-running business magazine dating from its very first issue in February 1930 through December 2000 with over 1,110 issues in a comprehensive cover-to-cover format. Published monthly by Time Inc., Fortune Magazine sought to provide news and analysis of both American and, later, international business, economics, technology, and industry.
• JSTOR Lives of Literature Archive – a collection of 131 academic journals devoted to the deep study of writers and texts associated with core literary movements. Key thematic topics include: Medieval Authors & Texts; Modernist Authors; Victorian, Edwardian & Gothic Authors; and Literary Theorists.
• Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Online – this module includes scholarly works on all aspects of Judaism from the Persian period through Late Antiquity.
• The Annual Register – the digitised version of the classic 250+ volume reference work. From world politics to society weddings; the latest scientific discoveries to the weather; the year's best-selling novels to obituaries of authors and other public figures -- The Annual Register provides a complete and detailed chronicle of events from 1758 to the current day and a wealth of new information for research.
• The New Republic Magazine Archive – a digital collection of the prominent political and cultural opinion magazine, covering more than 4,550 issues from 1914 to 2020. Providing full-text, indexing and abstracting, the archive is an essential tool for researchers of American politics, foreign policy, culture and arts.

Archival collections

• Confidential Print: Africa, 1834-1966 – hosted on the Adam Matthew Archives Direct platform this collection is drawn from The National Archives, Kew, in the United Kingdom. This resource gathers a wide range of confidential correspondence, documents and material types from the 19th and 20th centuries covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa.
• Eighteenth century drama : censorship, society and the stage – a unique archive of almost every play submitted for licence between 1737 and 1824, and hundreds of documents that provide social context for the plays, featuring:
  • John Larpent Collections of Plays from the Huntington Library digitised in its entirety, with over 2,500 plays, epilogues, prologues, addresses and songs
  • supplementary documents including Anna Larpent Diaries, providing unique insight into theatrical society, the process of censorship and contemporary theatre criticism
  • two essential reference works for theatre history: The London Stage 1660-1800 and A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 available for the first time in a searchable database
  • papers and correspondence of well-known theatrical figures such as David Garrick, Edmund Kean, the Kemble family, Sarah Siddons and many more.
• Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 3 – includes 17 long-running and highly influential trade and popular magazines and approximately one million pages of material from key publications like The Hollywood Reporter (1930-2015), American Cinematographer (1920-2015) and Kine Weekly (1907-1971). Each magazine can be browsed cover-to-cover in full-page, full-text format. Users are able to search for original reviews, interviews, industry news, listings, charts and features relating to the full range of popular media using advanced search and retrieval functionality.
• New Deal and World War II: President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office Files and Records of Federal Agencies (ProQuest History Vault module 24) – this module comprises 10 collections of primary sources including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Office Files as well as FBI Reports of the Roosevelt White House; Civilian Conservation Corps Press Releases; Records of the Committee on Economic Security; and Department of Treasury records.
• Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals, Part I : Women's, Children's, Humour, and Leisure – this archive marks the advent of commercial lifestyle publishing in Britain, drawn from the remarkable collections of the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Australia, and National Library of South Africa. The series acts as a barometer of literacy and social mobility in the 1800s, with a particular focus on the rarely documented aspects of women, children, humour, and leisure activity in the Victorian age. The rise of magazine publishing is reflected in the selection of publications, spanning publications aimed at and tailored to various audiences, including women and children.
• Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and State Department Intelligence and Research Reports, 1941-1961 (ProQuest History Vault module 23) – this module comprises 14 collections including over 3,500 World War II and Cold War era classified reports about Asia, Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the U.S. State Department and written by the days’ leading scholars. At the time, the reports helped to shape U.S. foreign policy decisions. Topics include the German war effort, occupation and division of Germany, reconstruction of Europe under the Marshall Plan, Soviet control of Eastern Europe, Palestine, African nationalism, Communist movements in South America and U.S. intervention in Central America.
• Oxford Scholarly Edition Online provides trustworthy, annotated primary texts for scholars and students. This collection currently includes writers active between 701 and 1901, plus Classical Latin and Greek authors — from Aristotle, Austen, Bentham, Catullus, Dickens, and Donne through to Plato, Virgil and Wordsworth. It contains 1,671 scholarly editions — the equivalent of more than 800,000 print pages.
• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection – this archive represents the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available from the British Library and includes more than 1,200 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period. It covers more than two hundred years of accounts, debates, and points of view, from the UK as well as a handful of publications from British colonies.
• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection – features the newspapers and periodicals, as well as pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols Newspaper Collection held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737, are presented in digitised format. Many early English newspapers have otherwise been lost, making this collection an invaluable resource for a range of research topics, forming a comprehensive mine of political and religious information of the period, and of the contemporary reactions to it.
• The papers of Lord John Russell c1800-1913 – digital images from existing microfilm have been acquired from the UK National Archives. This collection is made up of private and semi-official correspondence and writings pertaining to English politician Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell. The bulk of the materials consists of Russell's incoming and outgoing correspondence and essays; many items concern British history and government, Irish history, European history, and religion.
• World War II Studies – part of the Adam Matthew’s Research Source suite. This collection includes 10 modules with 3,528 titles and provides students and scholars with access to important primary sources relating to many aspects of the conflict, including government policy, the war in the Pacific, and the war in Europe. Sources include the records of the Special Operations Executive and private papers of American General Robert L Eichelberger from the Pacific War.
• World War II: U.S. Documents on Planning, Operations, Intelligence, Axis War Crimes, and Refugees (ProQuest History Vault module 15) - this module includes 45 collections covering records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, records of the War Department Operations Division, U.S. Navy action and operational reports, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s map room files, Records of the Office of War Information, papers of the War Refugee Board, George C. Marshall Papers, and several other collections documenting U.S. planning and participation in World War II. 

Digitisation

• Oceania Marist Province Archives (OMPA) – 395 reels of microfilm, containing records of the Catholic Church in islands of the Western Pacific have been digitised and added to the collection. These records were copied as part of a special project of the Ocean Marist Province Archives (OMPA), under the direction of Father Theo B. Cook, SM. The Marist Order (Society of Mary) which was canonically approved in April 1836 after the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome had sought means of evangelising the western half of the Pacific. The eastern half had been entrusted to the Sacred Heart (Picpus) Order in 1833. The Marists, originally an informal grouping of diocesan priests, accepted the task in the Western Pacific provided they were recognised as an independent religious order. This project was a collaboration between The Australian National University and The Pacific Manuscripts Bureau.

Donations

Over 4,000 books have been donated to the Library since the flooding incident. All the items have been catalogued and are available for borrowing from the J.B. Chifley branch. We continue to work with donors and the list of Chifley flood-affected titles remains online for consultation.

Requesting flood replacement material

We welcome your suggestions for purchases to replace items that were lost in the flood, or to further improve our collections. If you require any material that was destroyed by the flood and has not yet been replaced, please get in touch. We will prioritise your request, and try to locate an interim copy until a replacement is found.

Visit the ANU Library website to view the collection rebuilding updates.