Celebrate Arbor Day

Today, April 25, is Arbor Day.a day to celebrate trees. Arbor Day is a nationally-celebrated observance that encourages tree planting and care. Founded by J. Sterling Morton in Nebraska in 1872, National Arbor Day is celebrated each year on the last Friday in April. Visit the Arbor Day Foundation online for more information.

Free Access to GreenFile

We now have free access to GreenFile, an EBSCO bibliographical database of information about environmental concerns such as global warming, energy conservation, natural resources, and pollution. GreenFile covers content going back more than 35 years and contains back files of volume one, issue one for Bioscience: Journal of Environmental Planning & Management, Journal of Ecology, and Conservation Biology. The database also contains bibliographic information for key non-scholarly titles such as E-The Environmental Magazine, Natural Life, and Mother Earth News. The database contains nearly 300,000 records, full text for certain titles and searchable cited references for more than 200 titles as well.

This resource offers a unique perspective on the positive and negative ways humans affect the environment. Drawing on the connection between the environment and disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology, GreenFILE serves as an informative resource for anyone concerned about the issues facing our planet.


To access GreenFile, go to http://www.greeninfoonline.com.

CQ Researcher this week: Cost of the Iraq War

The fifth anniversary of the Iraq War hit just as the subprime mortgage crisis and rising unemployment in the United States were turning the economic situation bleak. Against this backdrop, a Nobel laureate economist and a federal budget expert linked the economic downturn to the war and calculated its eventual total financial cost at $3 trillion and possibly even more, plus the tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed or wounded. President George W. Bush dismisses the linkage argument, contending the war creates job opportunities at home and that military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to only a "modest fraction" of the U.S. economy. But even Republican lawmakers have been asking why taxpayers are funding much of the rebuilding of oil-rich Iraq while it reaps billions in profits thanks to record-high oil prices. For its part, the administration says Iraq is now starting to bear more of the reconstruction costs.

Source: CQ Researcher online

New Books for Homeland Security Students

Just War and Terrorism: The End of the Just War Concept edited by W. Smit. This book offers the interested reader a wide spectrum of views on one of the most challenging issues in politicis today--war and its justification. The essays here are offered as a call to stir up and reconsider our settled opinions on the matter.

How Just is the War on Terror? by Eileen Flynn. "In this timely treatment of nightmarish issues that make up the war on terror, Flynn flexes the moral muscle of the just war tradition. In her hands, the just war theory is not the mere plaything of an armchair philosopher, but compels real constraint on social and personal conduct in war." (quoted from Richard Gula, professor at Berkeley, California)

Both of these books were recommended by Ron Lee of the Homeland Security program.

Sand County Almanac

The library now has a stunning illustrated edition of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. It includes a new introduction discussing America's greatest naturalist's work and legacy and concludes with two of his most eloquent essays on conservation. You must read this for the first time or again.

"If the environmental movement has sacred texts--literary cornerstones--then they are Thoreau's Walden, George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, Caron's Silent Spring, and Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. The almanac is an epochal, seminal, ageless work. It is the bible still for land managers, koran for those who work the soil where literature overlaps ecology, urtext for the ecological restoeation movement."
-quoted from the introduction by Kenneth Brower.

A Nation at Risk: 25 Years Later

This week, Education Week kicks off a yearlong series:
A Nation at Risk: 25 Years Later.
The series includes exclusive commentaries, feature stories, profiles of educational systems in China, Japan, India, and the European Union, and an interactive timeline of more than 100 Education Week stories tracking developments since release of the original report. Read it in the library.
Source: Education Week April 23 2008

Belated Happy Birthday to William Shakespeare

Happy Birthday to William Shakespeare!
On April 23, 1564, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon.
Celebrate the bard with this strategy outlined in the following resourcs for college students:
Using Shakespeare's Plays to Teach Critical Thinking and Writing Skills
Source: National Council of Teachers of English Newsletter

HAPPY EARTH DAY

New Design for LexisNexis

LexisNexis Academic is getting a new look on April 26, 2008.

Summary
The Display Is Changing
Top navigation tabs will look slightly different
Navigation elements will move from the right side to the left side of the page
Sub-tab such as the "Easy" and "Power" tabs under the "General" tab are being replaced with navigation options on the left side of the page
The beige background will be removed from the search forms
On the results page, the results classification options have been changed from a dropdown box to an expandable list
The spacing and layout of elements on the page will change
A new "Selected Sources" tray is being added to the Source Selection page

The Functionality Is Not Changing
Procedures for searching, choosing sources, and working with results are not changing

End of National Library Week

The library staff thanks you for your supportive comments during National Library Week. National Library Week was sponsored by the American Library Association. ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 65,000 members. Its mission is to promote the highest quality library and information services and public access to information. ALA offers professional services and publications to members and nonmembers, including online news stories from American Libraries and analysis of crucial issues from the Washington Office. ALA includes members in academic, public, school, government, and special libraries. Melvil Dewey, Justin Winsor, C. A. Cutter, Samuel S. Green, James L. Whitney, Fred B. Perkins, and Thomas W. Bicknell founded the Association on October 6, 1876, in Philadelphia. The annual conference this year is in Anaheim from June 28 to July 2.

Global Researcher: Separatist Movements

Overview from the Global Researcher Report
When Kosovo declared its independence on Feb. 17, thousands of angry Serbs took to the streets to protest the breakaway region's secession from Serbia. Less than a month later, Chinese authorities battled Buddhist monks in Lhasa, the legendary capital of Tibet, where separatist resentments have been simmering since China occupied the Himalayan region more than 50 years ago. The protests were the latest flashpoints in some two dozen separatist “hot spots” — the most active of roughly 70 such movements around the globe. They are part of a post-World War II independence trend that has produced a nearly fourfold jump in the number of countries worldwide, with 26 of those new countries emerging just since 1990. Some nations, like the far-flung Kurds and the Sri Lankan Tamils, are fighting fiercely to establish a homeland, while others — like Canada's Québécois — seem content with local autonomy. A handful have become de facto states that are as-yet-unrecognized by the U.N., including Somaliland, Taiwan, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The entire report is available from the library catalog (password protected).

CQ Researcher this Week: Public Defenders

Over the years, several landmark Supreme Court decisions have established the right of an indigent defendant to the assistance of counsel at public expense. But today critics say the nation's public defender system is in crisis. Roughly 80 to 85 percent of all criminal defendants in state courts, where most crimes are prosecuted, are indigent and represented by some kind of public counsel at an annual cost to states and counties of more than $3.5 billion. But many public defense lawyers and researchers argue that much more needs to be spent because funding for many indigent defense systems is "shamefully inadequate." Excessive caseloads, high turnover of underpaid lawyers, poor training and supervision and judicial interference are also blamed for many of the deficiencies. According to one expert, in some poorly funded systems in the field, a single public defender handles 1,000 cases a year. CQ Researcher's reports are available through the Goodwin Catalog (password protected).

Climate and the Stock Market

Earth Day is coming next week and the stock market is low enough to tempt one to invest. Climate Counts encourages you to consider investing with the climate in mind.Climate Counts is a collaborative effort to bring consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change. They are a nonprofit organization funded by Stonyfield Farm, Inc. and launched in collaboration with Clean Air-Cool Planet. You can use the Climate Counts Company Scorecard to see how serious companies are about stopping climate change - and how they compare to their sector competitors. The annually updated scorecard reflects the self-reported efforts of companies to address climate change - or avoid it altogether.

Science Research: Recommended Site

Deep Web Technologies presents ScienceResearch.com™ - a free, publicly available web portal allowing access to numerous scientific journals and public science databases. It allows students, teachers, professors, researchers, and the general public to access pertinent science information quickly and easily. Science disciplines include: astronomy, biology & nature, chemistry, computers & technology, earth & environmental sciences, engineering, general science, health & medicine, materials science,mathematics, physics, and social sciences.

CafeScribe and Electronic Texts

Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks?

The digital textbook is one of those technologies that seem obvious but can take a long time to gain traction. In March, the concept got a boost when long-time textbook distributor and retailer Follet Corp. acquired Salt Lake City-based Fourteen40, and, along with it, CafeScribe, a Web site in its beta phase of offering electronic textbooks.

Read Complete Article:
http://www.1105newsletters.com/t.do?id=1084508:1202596

Improving Reading Skills in College

The review essay "Learning to Read as Continuing Education", from College Composition and Communication, works to convince readers that college composition instruction can capitalize on (and improve) students' high school reading experiences if instructors and program administrators think carefully about where their students are starting as readers and where they want them to get by the end of the course.

21st Century Literacies

This definition of 21st century literacies was adopted by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)this year.

"Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups.

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments"

Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?

Walking from meeting room to meeting room at this week’s annual conference of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, and scanning the program, it was impossible not to be struck by the fact that a good half of the hundreds of sessions have embedded in their titles the words “student outcomes,” “assessment,” or “accountability.”

The volume and earnestness of the efforts was particularly jarring in the context of the mantra that has been heard so much from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and other policy makers in Washington in the last two years, suggesting that colleges have been doing far too little to measure and make publicly available results about how much, and how effectively, their students are learning.
Read the article from Inside Higher Education

NATIONAL LIBRARY WORKERS DAY

National Library Workers Day
April 15, 2008

Our library works because they do!
Elizabeth Diamond
LaShonie Douglas
Shakira Greene
Crystalann Haines

Use the "Comment" to say something nice about our student workers!

Mental-Health Problems and Students

The facts and figures about mental-health problems on our campuses are sobering. When the American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment surveyed college students in the fall of 2006, 78 percent reported having felt very sad at least once within the preceding 12 months, 42 percent felt so depressed it was difficult to function, 9.4 percent had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 1.4 percent had attempted suicide. Fourteen percent of women and 10 percent of men reported feeling hopeless nine or more times.

Similarly, respondents to the 2007 National Survey of Counseling Center Directors reported that almost half of their student clients had severe psychological problems, and close to 8 percent had impairments so serious that they could not remain in college, or could do so only with extensive psychological or psychiatric help. On the 272 campuses surveyed, almost 2,000 students were hospitalized for psychological problems in 2007. Read the article in the Chronicle Review April 18.

Libraries in the News: Hastings Public Library

Built on a brownfield site, Hastings Public Library (Michigan) is targeted to receive a LEED Gold Certificate. Contributing to the library's rating are low VOC (volatile organic compound) furnishings and finishes, linoleum tabletops, condensing gas boilers, an underground air distribution system, vegetative roofs in the turrets, and toilet partitions made of recyled milk jugs.
Source: American Libraries April 2008

The day the Titanic Struck an Iceberg

A luxury liner on 14-15 April, 1912, struck an iceberg near Newfoundland on its maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1513 lives. Thought to be unsinkable, the Titanic carried enough lifeboats for only half the passengers. As a result of the disaster safety rules for ships at sea were drawn up by the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea (1913) and the International Ice Patrol was established. The wreck of the Titanic was located and photographed in 1985.
Source: CredoReference

Database Training: Health & Wellness Resource Center

The library is providing online web based training from Gale Publishers on Wednesday, April 16 in the conference room from 10 to ll a.m. The training is open to all members of the Goodwin community. Refreshments will be served.

Health & Wellness Resource Center is a comprehensive resource that provides integrated access to medical, statistical, health, and related information. Including the Gale Encyclopedia of medicine, Health & Wellness Resource Center delivers up-to-date reference material as well as full-text magazines, journals, and pamphlets from a wide variety of authoritative medical sources. Consumers, students, and professionals are provided with descriptions of and links to many pertinent websites selected for their usefulness and appropriateness. Topics covered in Wednesday's webinar include content and purpose of the database, database nivagation, searching techniques, and additional database features.

Library Statistics for March

Not suprising, 46% of the users of the library in March were students in the health sciences, nursing, and respiratory care. Of that group, 51% were in health sciences. Students from early childhood education and business were also well represented. 21% more students used the library in March this year over March of 2007. Circulation of materials increased by 21% in this March over March of 2007.

From January to April 1 this year the library loaned 111 books to other libraries while we borrowed only 49. This could indicate that our library resources are working well for the Goodwin community. It also indicates that we have materials that other libraries want to use.

Online College Fair

Check out a recent New York Times essay on a parent’s experience with CollegeWeekLive.com, a virtual college fair where students and parents chat live with admissions officers from 200 institutions.

One thing Michelle Slatalla, the essay’s author, seemed to miss about going to a real (offline) college fair was the ability to follow the crowd to the “most selective” institutions: “here there was no way to gauge whether more attendees were flocking to Bryn Mawr College or Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.”

The next CollegeWeekLive fair, which is free, is scheduled for the fall.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education Wire Campus

National Library Week

It's National Library Week, a time to celebrate the contributions of libraries, librarians, and library workers in schools, campuses and communities nationwide--and the perfect time to discover how you can join the circle of knowledge @ your library.
First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

THE LIBRARY STAFF INVITES YOU TO VISIT THE LIBRARY DURING NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK. YOU WON'T BE SORRY!

Library of Congress Online Exhibit

The Library of Congress opened a new interactive Web site on Saturday, as a companion to a high-tech exhibit designed to give visitors a close-up view of some of the institution's treasures. A copy of the Gutenberg Bible, for instance, is in a glass case at the library, but the new Web site will let users flip through the book and zoom in on its pages virtually. An article in Ars Technica points out that the exhibit is the result of a $3-million gift from Microsoft to promote the use of the company's latest multimedia platform, called Silverlight. The exhibit sounds like a theme park ride -- it's called The Library of Congress Experience.
Source: Library of Congress Experience

U.S. Waterpipes are Breaking

"Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring. The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say. The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 million. Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group."
Source: Colleen Long reported for the Associated Press April 9, 2008.

Portals to the World

A simple and elegant site. Each link opens a country page where more links pages under each topic are given. Brief and sensible annotations are provided. These pages link you to the best web pages available for every and any country.
Library of Congress, Portals to the World.

Libraries in the News

Located underground beneath the campus's Sterling Memorial main library, Bass Library at Yale University houses 150,000 high-use items. The renovated facility includes individual study rooms, two electronic classrooms, a cafe, and a new entrance pavilion in Collegiate Gothic Style. This is in New haven--go see it!
Size: 59,800 sq. ft.
Cost of renovation: $47.5 million

Global Reach:: Europe

Vincent Van Gogh's down-at-heel boots were the first thing to appear on the test website of the European Digital Library last month. Btanded Europeana, the website will break new ground by bringing together millions of digitized resources from Europe's archives, museums, libraries, and audiovisual collections through a single portal. The full site is scheduled to launch in November.
Source: European Digital Library Network

Today, April 8: Flower Festival

Today is the Buddha’s birthday observed in Buddhist temples throughout Japan, where it is known as Kambutsu-e. The highlight of the celebration is a ritual known as kambutsue (“ceremony of ‘baptizing’ the Buddha”), in which a tiny bronze statue of the Buddha, standing in an open lotus flower, is anointed with sweet tea. People use a small bamboo ladle to pour the tea, made of hydrangea leaves, over the head of the statue. The custom is supposed to date from the seventh century, when perfume was used, as well as tea. Festivities often include a procession of children carrying flowers.
Source: Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary

New Additions to Credo Reference

Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Harvard University Press in Science

Handbook of United States Economic and Financial Indicators, Greenwood in Business

Notable American Women: 1607-1950, A Biographical Dictionary, Harvard University Press in Biography

Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, Harvard University Press in Biography

Credo Reference is a leading provider of reference services for libraries and information centers. This service provides you with over 270 full-text titles consisting of an aggregate of 3.1 million entries all interconnected by over 100,000,000 links.

New Latin America: Global Researcher

Latin America is struggling to re-define its soul. The region's once ubiquitous military dictators in dark glasses have been replaced by a new generation of democratically elected leaders. Under their tutelage Latin America is enjoying steady growth and trying to bridge the notoriously deep chasm between the rich and the poor. Wealth and global trade have brought a new sense of cohesion and an unprecedented regional identity, while newly empowered women and indigenous and mixed-race populations are transforming the political landscape. Amid these positive signs, experts ask whether the future belongs to the more moderate, market-oriented democracies — such as those in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Argentina — or to the more radical, left-wing populism inspired by Venezuela's bombastic socialist leader Hugo Chávez. Meanwhile, with the United States preoccupied in Iraq and elsewhere, the European Union, the Gulf States and China are increasing their economic presence in the region as U.S. influence declines. Read the report online from the Goodwin Library (password protected).

Preventing Memory Loss: CQ Researcher

As the nation's baby boomers age, they are increasingly worried that their memories will deteriorate — and with good reason. An estimated 10 million boomers will develop Alzheimer's disease or another memory-destroying neurodegenerative condition in the coming years. Policy makers and health officials worry that the resulting bulge in the number of sufferers will burden the nation's already strained health-care system. In the wake of these concerns, a vibrant brain-fitness industry is offering a variety of ways to help people keep their brains healthy, including the use of cognition-enhancing drugs and exercise. But many experts say much of what the public is being told is of limited value, at best. Intensified brain research begun years ago at the National Institutes of Health is just now beginning to produce data that scientists hope will advance efforts to prevent memory loss, but they worry that flat federal funding since 2003 may compromise the drive for solutions. Read the entire report available online from the Goodwin Library.
Source: CQ Researcher April 4, 2008

Oxford Reference Online Trial

Oxford Reference online: Premium Collection combines rich and scholarly resources with authoritative, quick-reference coverage of the full subject spectrum. It also offers excellent functionality, and a wide range of additional material such as maps, illustrations, and timelines.
175+ Oxford reference titles
Over 1.3 million entries, many from an expanding range of acclaimed titles in the Oxford Companions series
All 20,000+ quotation entries from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
15,540+ illustrations, including colour photographs, line diagrams, tables, etc
42 Timelines
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167,000+ biographical entries
3,165+ external web links
Enhanced search functions to access results by category
New and revised titles added regularly
TRY IT!
Trial URL: http://www.oxfordreference.com
username: waldolib
password: waldolib

Shrug Off Remediation with Learning Communities

"Opening Doors" by Scrivener, Bloom, LeBlanc, Paxson, Rouse and Sommo

Currently one of the most significant challenges facing education is how to meet the needs of students who lack basic reading, writing and math skills. This problem is ever present in the need for remediation as 29% of incoming college freshmen enroll in at least one development/remedial class. To help these students, schools have turned to "learning communities" wherein students take remedial classess linked with other college-level courses. A new study of a one-semester learning community for freshmen offers the first experimental evidence that learnintg communities help students make a successful transition to college and move more quickly through developmental English requirements. The program places freshmen in groups of up to 25that take three classes together during their first semester. Also included is enhanced counseling and tutoring. Read the article.

Challenges of Low Literacy

How can we better communicate the challenges of low literacy in the 21st Century? Share your thoughts on this issue. The National Center for Family Literacy is launching a blog, Literacy Now, to provide an opportunity for anyone engaged or interested in the cause of literacy to share information, news, and insights. You can access the blog anytime at http://www.famlit.org/blog.
Source: National Center for Family Literacy

USPTO Rejects Blackboard Patent Claims

Blackboard's e-learning patent looks to be going down. The United States Patent and Trademark Office last week sent out a "non-final" determination on the reexamination of Blackboard's patent in which all of the claims on the patent were rejected. Blackboard still has a period of two months to respond to the determination.

We spoke with representatives from the two parties that filed for the reexamination of the patent: Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Their comments follow. Blackboard itself chose to release a statement (approximately 3:30 p.m. PDT) rather than speak directly with us today, although we might have additional comments next week.

While Desire2Learn and the SFLC celebrated the decision, Blackboard said that its patent still stands, that the company does not intend to back down, and that the decision has no effect on Blackboard's patent infringement suit victory over Desire2Learn.
Source: Campus Technology online March 28, 2008