CQ Researcher: Modernizing the Grid

The U.S. electric power grid — the nationwide system of interconnected regional power systems — is a century old and under strain. Long-term power demand has grown steadily since the 1980s, but investments in transmission have lagged behind. Three major blackouts in the past decade have raised concerns about providing electricity reliably. Federal agencies are working with utilities, manufacturers and information technology companies to develop a modernized grid that uses computers to monitor the system. Advocates say this “smart grid” will be able to generate more electricity from renewable fuels and save money for businesses and families. The Obama administration calls the smart grid an urgent priority and is spending billions to help design it. But some experts worry that a digital grid could be vulnerable to cyberattacks or that it will violate consumers' privacy. Others say that promoting energy conservation or building new power plants near population centers would be more effective than building new high-voltage transmission lines. Read the entire report online (Text the librarian for user name and password.)
Source: CQ Researcher February 19
Image: Work crews restore power on high-voltage transmission lines outside New Orleans knocked down by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Obama administration wants to upgrade the nation's century-old power grid, but critics say energy conservation and new power plants closer to population centers are better solutions. (Bloomberg via Getty Images/Rae Morris

iTunes passes the billion songs downloaded mark

Do you remember when you had to go to a music store or order music online? iTunes just passed a billion songs downloaded. To mark the occasion,iTunes published a list of the top songs downloaded since they opened--seven years ago in 2003. The list contains the all-time top songs--“top” as in sales. 20 songs are listed. (I hope this won't make you feel old.)

Here are the Top Five:

1. I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas
2. Poker Face by Lady GaGa
3. Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas
4. I’m Yours by Jason Mraz
5. Viva La Vida by Coldplay

Of course you want to see the entire list. Go for it.
Source: Apple

Web Pages Going Away Fast

The average life of a web page these days is apparently somewhere between 44 and 77 days. A lot of the web simply disappears into the ether, but the British Library Web Archive and other archives are doing a valuable job of preserving some traces of our digital lives in a time capsule.
Source: BBC about the British Library Web Archive

New Revolution

"Penguin Boss Unfazed by the March of ebooks"
From the Article:

"When it first appeared in the 1930s, the paperback was regarded with suspicion and alarm in the book industry. Deploying a brand new technology, it brought cheap literature to the masses, transforming reading habits. The revolution shook the gentlemanly world of publishing to its core.

Three quarters of a century later the British company behind this disruptive force, Penguin, finds itself at the centre of another epoch-defining upheaval. The relentless march of the electronic book – epitomised by Amazon’s Kindle reader and the forthcoming Apple iPad – threatens to hollow out the publishing world in the same way as the internet has altered forever the dynamics of the music industry.

Penguin boss John Makinson likens the rise of the ebook to the moment when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century."

Access the entire article.

Source: Article in MailOnline February 25

Gotta Keep Reading

It's a gloomy day out there. I hope listening to this will brighten it for you.
Gotta Keep Reading - Ocoee Middle School

New Book: Checklist Manifesto

Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
This book, now available in the library, is highly recommended by Paula Dowd, Program Director and Associate Professor of Health Sciences.

"We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third."

Atul Gawande is the author of Better and Complications. He is also a MacArthur Fellow, a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Source: Quotation from product information

New Feature for Credo Reference Database

Credo Reference has announced Topic Pages, a new approach to presenting and organizing information resources. They developed topic pages to provide context and vocabulary around a subject and act as a starting point for research - all on one page. Every Topic Page assembles topical material from many resources from within and outside of the library. You choose which resources will be displayed on your own customized version of Credo Topic Pages. Watch the video introduction.

Source: Credo Reference Database

Social Media: Not a Fad!

If you have any doubts about whether we are in the midst of a social media revolution, you need to watch this video. Compelling facts show we all need to get on board if we want to remain in the mainstream and not be left behind.

Source: Special Library Association Boston Chapter

Worldometers

Worldometers is part of the Real Time Statistics Project, which is managed by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world. Watch the increases speed by in population, Google searchers, and much more!

Sources are carefully selected to include only data published by the most reputable organizations and statistical offices in the world.

Source: Worldometers

African American Sites in the Digital Collections

Contributions by African Americans to the arts, education, industry, literature, politics and much more are well represented in the vast collections of the Library of Congress. The digital collections are no exception. American Memory, the flagship of the Library's digital collections, online exhibits and other areas of the Library's Web site provide a broad range of digitized materials pertaining to the African American experience. Many are represented here to provide the user with an electronic research tool.

This webliography, documenting electronic resources within this subject area, is organized by historical eras based on the American Memory timeline found on the Teachers Page. Its primary focus is to connect the user to full text online resources regarding significant people, major institutions and events from an African American perspective, historically related to an era. Complete essays from the Today in History Web site provide topical information and comprehensive search strategies to further research. This extensive resource enhances the use of the digital collections, allowing the user to explore more online materials. In addition, many subject entries were identified in America's Library, the Library's site for children and families.

Source: Web Guides

Featured Journal: Nurse Educator

The library subscribes to Nurse Educator. Now the library receives online access with that paid print subscription. Full text articles are available in issues dating back to 1971.

Nurse Educator's new website integrates journal content and rich media to allow a more personalized approach to content. Some of the new features designed to enhance readability, usability, and impact include Featured Articles, Editor's Picks, Most Viewed, and Quick Polls.

There are new options for article delivery, including an enhanced HTML format for easier reading, and ways to customize the site, including saved searches, personal article collections, e-mail, and RSS alerts. You also have the capability to export references into your favorite citation manager and figures from full-text articles into PowerPoint. You can even access from your smart phone.

In the months ahead new features will debut such as Published Ahead-of-Print papers and easy-to-find supplementary materials and media. Also notice the Classics from Nurse Educator to learn how issues faced today were addressed over the decades. Editor's Picks highlights background reading on a variety of issues, while Collections group like articles on various topics of interest. You can also take the Quick Poll.

Source: www.nurseeducator.com

Winter Pictures

This is the scene outside the library this morning at 7 a.m. (taken with an iPhone). The Library Advocacy Committee will soon announce how to enter your photos for the 2011 Goodwin Calendar. Keep posted!

Use the Buzz

"Google’s new microblogging service, is getting a lot of, well, buzz. “Hello World!” has literally been replaced by “Buzz! Buzz!” by new people trying it out. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the best way to explain it:

It’s all of the elements that one could think of getting out of Twitter (more than 140 characters, the ability to post videos and photos) packed neatly into your gmail account. While there are still some kinks to work out (you get an email every time someone you’re following posts or comments, which could get really annoying fast), Gmail’s built-in active user base of 176 million users is making it a clear force to be reckoned with."

In comparison, Twitter claims to have 75 million users and about 25% of accounts are reported to be inactive. Foursquare, known by some as “The Twitter of 2010″ is similar in that you “check in” using GPS on your phone and has been building momentum in it’s growth. David Lee King recently had a great post about it called “Foursquare and Libraries – Definitely Something There!” And I would agree, but it seems Buzz might be hot on the trail as it has the same built-in GPS/Geo-Location features and it works directly with Google Maps. Granted, it’s currently missing the fun “Mayor” game element Foursquare has, but this is a numbers game and Google definitely has numbers.

Source: Mobile Reference in Libraries

Connecting to Library off campus

If you are having trouble connecting to the library off campus and have followed the instructions on the library page, please call the help desk. Ask them to check if you have dial-in VPN rights.

Help Desk: (860) 528-4111 extension 6743

Sleep Deprivation: CQ Researcher This Week

New research links sleep deprivation to a large number of automobile and other accidents. Moreover, chronically sleep-deprived people are at higher risk for poor memories, mental illnesses, obesity, cardiovascular disease and early death. Yet today's 24/7 culture fights against the human body's biological need for about seven hours of sleep a night. Some people are especially sleep deprived, notably teenagers and late-shift workers such as police officers, nurses and medical residents. Meanwhile, some experts worry that overuse of sleeping medications is becoming a serious problem. Newer medications like Ambien and Lunesta are in some ways “safer” than older drugs, but they also affect brain function and sleep patterns in ways that are still not fully understood. With primary-care doctors now able to prescribe these medications because of their greater apparent safety, more people may get into trouble with sleeping pills. This is just the introduction. Read the whole report online (Password protected). Ask or text the librarian for password.

Source: CQ Researcher February 12
Image: Working in bed trains the brain to stop associating beds with sleep, which can cause insomnia. More than 40 million Americans have sleep disorders. (Getty Images/Time Life Pictures/Joe McNally)

Great Backyard Bird Count

The weekend of February 12-15, 2010 is the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. Birders across the country count birds in parks or fields or their own back yards, and then report the numbers on-line. If you are able to identify your common local species, join the count! Learn more and sign up at BirdSource.org.
Source: Birdnote

Works Cited Page Hints

Working on a Works Cited page for a research paper? Get it right. Use the resources available and make your life easier.

If you are using one of the EBSCO databases, when you are viewing an article detail, you can see how the citation for that article should be formatted in a variety of popular citation formats, including MLA, APA, etc.
To view citation formats for an article:
1.Run a search on EBSCOhost and view a search result. From the article details, click the Cite icon.
2.When you have decided which citation format you want for the article, copy and paste the citation directly into the Works Cited or References page of a document created in a word processing program such as Word.
3.Be sure to consult your library resources for the exact formatting and punctuation guidelines for the citation format you are using. That would be a librarian or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Be sure to use the sixth edition.

The EBSCO databases available through the Goodwin Library include: CINAHL (Cumulative Indext to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, PsycARTICLEs, PsycINFO, GreenFILE, and Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts.

Databases from other vendors, such as Gale or Proquest, also provide similar access to citation formats. Life is good.

Do you know about GreenFILE?

GreenFILE is a database provided by the Goodwin Library from EBSCO. GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done at each level to minimize these effects. Multidisciplinary by nature, GreenFILE draws on the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology. Topics covered include global climate change, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for approximately 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records.

Be sure to set a bookmark for http://www.greeninfoonline.com. This link takes you directly to the GreenFILE database.

U.S. Health Care Resources

HCS 310 and everyone else

"According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the United States is projected to spend more than $2.5 trillion on health care in 2009, or $8,160 perU.S. resident. Health spending in 2009 is projected to account for 17.6 percent of gross domestic product." (The citation for this information is at the end of this guide.)

This guide highlights free Web sites with data and information on issues relevant to the national health care debate, including health care cost, coverage, expenditure, access, delivery, utilization, disparities in quality, and outcomes. This report was prepared by Shikha Sharma, the business, economics, and legal studies librarian at the University of Connecticut. It was published in the College and Research Library News September 2009.

Here is the link to this report. All of the sites mentioned in the report can be link directly from the report. Students in HCS U.S. Health Care Delivery are exploring the health care system. We hope they will add comments to this post about information sources they find.

For those writing papers with APA format, here is the Goodwin Library APA Guide.

Go to Goodwin College Library Academic Databases If you are accessing off campus you will have to set up your computer with the Virtual Private Network (VPN). Directions for the VPN are on the library page .

NEW BOOKS

NEW BOOKS JUST IN TODAY

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (2009)
Plagiarism: Why it Happens How to Prevent (2009)
Wish her Safe at Home (novel) (2010)
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (2009)
Murder at Longbourn (novel) (2009)
Checklist Manifesto (2010)
Brightest Star in the Sky (novel) (2010)
Plagiarism: A How-not-to Guide for Students (2009)
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (2007)
Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008)
I Will Make Miracles (children’s book)

Gale Acquires Questia

Gale yesterday announced the acquisition of Questia Media, a subscription platform for humanities and social sciences content, providing access to "76,000 books from 300+ publishers and millions of articles from journals, magazines and newspapers," according to the company.

The assets, acquired for an undisclosed sum, include university press authors and titles from big commercial companies like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Perseus, said John Barnes, Gale executive VP of strategic marketing and business development.

Gale®, part of Cengage Learning, is a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. Many of the resources available to us through ICONN are Gale products.

Source: Library Journal Newsletter

Climate Change: CQ Researcher Report

Will the Copenhagen Accord slow global warming? by Reed Karaim

"Delegates from around the globe arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December hoping to forge a significant agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and temper climate change. But despite years of diplomatic preparation, two weeks of intense negotiations and the clamor for action from thousands of protesters outside the meeting, the conferees adopted no official treaty. Instead, a three-page accord — cobbled together on the final night by President Barack Obama and the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa — established only broad, nonbinding goals and postponed tough decisions. Yet defenders of the accord praised it for requiring greater accountability from emerging economies such as China, protecting forests and committing billions in aid to help poorer nations. But the key question remains: Will the accord help U.N. efforts to forge a legally binding climate change treaty for the world's nations?"

A sidebar lists related reports from CQ Researcher going back to 1991. A link also will take you to related topics.This report also includes:
Overview,Background,Current Situation,Outlook,Pro/Con, Chronology, Short Features, Voices from Abroad, Maps/Graphs, Bibliography, Next Step, Contacts, Footnote, and About the Author.

Source: Introduction from CQ Global Researcher February 2010
Image: Villagers displaced by flooding and erosion in Bangladesh move their house to higher ground in September 2008. Rising seas caused by climate change threaten to flood low-lying nations worldwide. (AP Photo/H. Rahman)

Text-a-Librarian

Text-a-Librarian, a quick way to ask questions and get a response, is now offered at the Goodwin Library.

Text the numbers 66746 on your cell phone. The first time you text a question put the keyword "ASKGOOD" at the beginning of the text, then type a question and send it. This first question will get an acknowledging text back immediately and when we have your answer, we will send a text to you. After the first text to ASKGOOD, you no longer need to use the keyword; the database will assign you a patron identification number.

GUEST BLOGGER: PAULA DOWD

I recently finished reading “The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Done Right” by Atul Gawande and I tore through it. Dr. Gawande, a surgeon, author and chairman of the WHO’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative, writes a compelling book on how, through the use of checklists, horrendous mistakes made in surgery that kill and injure thousands of people a year could be virtually eliminated. He suggests that because medicine ( especially surgery) is becoming more & more complicated each year, even the simplest of steps can be missed in treating patients. Everything from forgetting to infuse a preop patient with antibiotics ( or doing it too soon) to operating on the wrong patient is discussed. Dr. Gawande makes the point that checklists are used in the field of aviation to complex construction projects and proves that they were successful in averting disaster. But make no mistake,this is not a book filled with facts and figures. His discussions are rich and compelling. I would recommend this for anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of health care.
Source: Paula Dowd, Program Director and Associate Professor of Health Science

Wear Red Tomorrow

February is American Heart Month! The American Heart Association (AHA),along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, encourages everyone to wear red on Friday, February 5, 2010 in support of women's heart disease awareness. This is part of the Go Red For Women initiative, designed to raise heart disease awareness and prevent cardiovascular disease and related conditions in women. (National Wear Red Day is really February 6, but let's go along with Health and Human Services.)

Blog Followers

It is embarrassing to have so few acknowledged followers. I know that there are secret followers out there. Please sign on as a follower. No-one will bother you or try to sell you anything. I promise.

GUEST BLOGGER: MARY HENDERSON

ENOUGH : The Phony Leaders, Dead –End Movements, and the Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America---and What we Can Do About It
by Juan Williams

You know there are some books that you never lend; well this one should be on the top of your list. This is a book that should be read often, it should be kept close at hand almost like a reference to be pulled out when we forget that we as Blacks need to help ourselves. This book needs to be required reading for so many of us. The first time I picked it up I started reading sections aloud, I was so excited! Juan Williams speaks in a voice that we can all understand, he wakes us up, makes you say right and if you’re like me as soon as you finish you’ll need to start over because you read it so fast the first time.

Source: written by Mary Henderson

Black History Month Information

In the early 1900s, the most influential black leader in the United States was educator and former slave Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute. Read a biography on Washington at the Library of Congress African American Pamphlets Home Page. (The Library of Congress is also the home of the African-American Mosaic Exhibition).

Although many African-Americans agreed with Washington's philosophy that blacks should strive for economic advancement before political and social equality, some did not. One of Washington's chief critics was sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois of Atlanta University. The full text of Du Bois's famous 1903 work "The Souls of Black Folk" is available at Bartleby's Great Books Online.

Source: Library Spot

New in Credo Reference: Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography

This encyclopedia has just been added to Credo Reference. Women have been writing about their lives for hundreds of years, and their autobiographical works are a record of the eras and cultures in which they lived. Through alphabetically arranged entries (from Jane Addams through Zami: A New Spelling of My Name), written by more than 130 expert contributors, the Encyclopedia of Women overviews women autobiographers and autobiography from the Middle Ages to the present. Entries discuss individual writers, major works, national and ethnic autobiographical traditions, particular autobiographical genres, and special terms, issues, and themes related to women's autobiography from around the world. Multicultural in scope and the first work of its kind, this encyclopedia overviews more than 400 years of autobiographical writing by women.

Credo Reference is a full-text online reference service provided by Goodwin Library. The collection includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from some of world's the best reference publishers.

Credo has also added images from the National Gallery, London. The collection is comprised of over 2,200 high definition images from the National Gallery. Each entry includes a description of the work along with its artist, medium, dimensions, acquisition credit and date made. The image with this post is from that collection: A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh.

Tackling Writer's Block

"First, I cannot stress enough the importance of simply allowing yourself a draft. When I write, I often get mired down in the need to self-edit every sentence as I go. When I first started writing papers and stories, that meant I rarely had a first draftor final draft. Writing two versions of the same thing seemed like way more work than writing something once. However, I ended up writing that one draft so slo-o-owly that it took me far longer than writing three drafts of a paper does now. The reason for this is that a first draft often turns out better than you think it is when you’re writing it. So type with abandon, type like the wind, and don’t let questions of grammar or phrasing or vocabulary hold you back. You can vanquish writer’s block by writing everything that comes into your head, even if you think it’s beyond awful at the time. You can always fix it later, though you may find that, more often than you think, you won’t have to do so."

This is good advice from Betsy Cornwell writing in the Teen Ink Newsletter this week.

Employer-Led Higher Education

"It is a sign of things to come. Most students enroll in college to pursue careers. The most popular undergraduate major, by far, is business, while education and health professions check in at Nos. 3 and 4. Institutions that give the demands of the professional workplace short shrift will eventually exhaust the good will of students and employers. With information technology breaking down barriers to entering the higher-education market, and the economic stakes of postsecondary learning intensifying for students and society alike, the inclination to sacrifice teaching for research will grow less tenable by the year."

Here is the link to the article by Kevin Carey published December 14, 2009, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
'Teacher U': A New Model in Employer-Led Higher Education

Just in This Morning

These magazines and journals are just in this morning:
The Economist--special report on social networking
Nature--Fixing the communications failure
Science News--Flesh on bone: new work adds meat to dino skeletons
The Nation--Haiti: A just response
Fortune--100 best companies to work for
Journal of the Medical Library Associatiion--Information-seeking behavior of basic science researchers
Time--The most dangerous game
Education Week--Measuring teaching effectiveness

Black History Month

To commemorate and celebrate the contributions to our nation made by people of African descent, American historian Carter G. Woodson established Black History Week. The first celebration occurred on Feb. 12, 1926. For many years, the second week of February was set aside for this celebration to coincide with the birthdays of abolitionist/editor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial, the week was expanded into Black History Month. Each year, U.S. presidents proclaim February as National African-American History Month.

The library has a special exhibit in the showcase in front of the elevators and in the library.

If you have never heard Cornel West, you should. One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. He is currently a professor at Princeton University. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz.Listen to Cornel West on "why reading matters".

Connecticut Chuckles & Groundhog day

Groundhog Day is tomorrow

Will it be a long winter or an early spring? Only "Connecticut Chuckles" knows for sure.

The official rodent prognosticator of Connecticut’s weather resides at the Lutz Children’s Museum. Hundreds of people flock to the museum each year to hear the news straight from the groundhog’s mouth (with a little help from the Mayor).

The museum will open at 6:00 AM. Connecticut Chuckles, also known as Molly, makes her grand entrance at exactly 7:03 AM. This event is free and open to the public.