Black History Month Resource

In remembrance and celebration of Black History Month, Gale is providing free access to Biography Resource Center: African Americans for the entire month of February to all iCONN users. This resource is further described at http://gale.cengage.com/BRCAA

To access Biography Resource Center: African Americans, just access any Gale database from the Goodwin library page and from the Gale search screen select the link called "Change Databases" (or, in some cases, it is called "Gale Databases"), which will take you to the common menu listing of all Gale databases - from this menu you can then access this resource.
Gale is also providing promotional materials for Black History Month at http://gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/

Homelnd Security Critical Releases

Every two weeks, the Homeland Security Digital Library identifies "Critical Releases in Homeland Security," a targeted collection of recently-released documents that are expected to influence homeland security policy & strategy development.
Secure Borders and Open Doors: Preserving Our Welcome to the World in an Age of TerrorismSecure Borders and Open Doors Advisory Committee
National Response Framework: January 2008United States. Dept. of Homeland Security
Homeland Security Advisory Council Report of the Administration Transition Task ForceUnited States. Dept. of Homeland Security. Homeland Security Advisory Council
Changing Homeland Security: The Year in Review 2007Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.). Center for Homeland Defense and Security

FREE TRIALS

I am pleased to provide you with free access to some of Gale's core databases to help our users find the authoritative information they need when they need it:
History Resource Center U.S
History Resource Center World
Literature Resource Center

Some of Gale's free trials are already in ICONN. The Health and Wellness Resource Center has a new interfaces and significant new content. Both Academic and General OneFile are now the world's largest two periodical resources and they are cross-searchable, giving our students access to more than 18,000 periodicals. Business and Company Resource Center recently was updated to include real-time financials, investment information, podcasts and blogs. These databases are already available to us.

Please use the link below to access these databases for the next two weeks, free of charge. And, as always, please let me know how I can help serve you better.
http://trials.gale.com/public/go/?key=1353_22222

Career Resources

EBSCO representatives demonstrated the Career Community and Coin Career Library online databasess here last week. An extended free trial is now available to any of you who are interested. Please contact me for user name and password. These resources provide high school and college students with information on careers and college programs as well as valuable assessment tools to help match their skills with the appropriate academic/career paths. The library staff would be happy to provide a demonstration of the features: careers, assessment, academic planning, skill development, curriculum and lesson plans, administrative reports/management.

Members of WALDO

The Goodwin Library is now a member of WALDO (Westchester Academic Library Directors Organization). Our membership was announced in the January newsletter. Also joining at this time are Boston University, School for International Training (VT), and Southern Vermont College. WALDO is a membership organization supporting the procurement and administration of electronic information services for libraries since 1982. Through WALDO, the library has purchased a discounted subscription to CQ Global Researcher. WALDO offers members free trials and discounted subscriptions to many electronic resources. Members also receive free access to The Charleston Advisor, the library industry's leading consumer report and review tool for electronic resources.

Free Health Research Toolkit

The Health Research and Educational Trust Disparities Toolkit team has released this updated Toolkit. The Toolkit is a Web-based tool that provides hospitals, health systems, clinics, and health plans information and resources for systematically collecting race, ethnicity, and primary language data from patients.

This Toolkit is useful for educating and informing health professionals about the importance of data collection, how to implement a framework to collect race, ethnicity, and primary language data and ultimately how to use these data to improve quality of care for all populations. For more information on how to use this Toolkit, click here.

Registration Now Free
To access the full Toolkit, including all resources, please click here to register. Because of the importance of collecting good data on patient race, ethnicity, and primary language data, HRET and the American Hospital Association have decided to allow access to the Toolkit for free without purchase.
Source: http://www.hretdisparities.org/

New Books

A Practical Guide to Connecticut School Law by Thomas B. Mooney of Shipman & Goodwin--a review of Connecticut school law offered as a guide to the various education law questions that arise most frequently.

Public School Law: Teachers' and Students' Rights by Cambron-McCabe, McCarthy and Thomas-a comprehensive treatment of the evolution and current status of the law governing public schools. A new chapter on the rights of children with disabilities has been added to reflect the expansion of litigation in this area.

New Database: CQ Global Researcher

The Goodwin Library has added a new database--CQ Global Researcher. This database provides students and faculty with definitive, in-depth coverage of global affairs from a number of international viewpoints. Available exclusively online, CQ Global Researcher offers focused, readable, single-topic reports on vital world issues. These reports make use of such popular sections as "current situation," "pro-con," and a new feature called "voices from abroad." By exposing students to a wide range of viewpoints CQ Global Researcher provides a comprehensive snapshot of today's most pressing issues and supports the global perspective goals of the college.

Each single-themed, 12,000-word CQ Global Researcher report is researched and written by an experienced observer of the given issue. The consistent, reader-friendly organization provides researchers with an introductory overview; background and assessment of the current situation; pro/con statements from representatives of opposing positions; chronology on the topic, followed by short features for extensive context; a sampling of related international perspectives; maps and graphs; bibliographies of key sources; next steps for additional reading; and author profiles. The current report is "China in Africa: Is China Gaining Control of Africa's Resources?",

Most Literate U.S. Cities 2007

Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the 69 largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, is the author of this study.
Source: http://www.ccsu.edu/Amlc/

Distance Learning using Second Life

This the brave new world in college education that we all have to adapt to. I just read recently about a college professor whose surgery keeps him homebound. He teaches his courses in Second Life -- http://secondlife.com/ -- which his colleagues in his department can hardly imagine.

How do his students respond to this? Well, some of his students employ the following strategy to write an assigned paper:
- Flickr -- to get ideas for images to include in report (or store their own images there)
-Del-icio-us -- to store bookmarked research sites (from the library home page, no doubt)
- Wikipedia -- to clarify the definitions of key terms
- Consults relevant blogs
-Searches YouTube -- to find videos related to her topic
- Checks in with friends at Facebook -- to see if anyone has ideas about the project

Critical Releases in Homeland Security

The Homeland Security Digital Library identifies "Critical Releases in Homeland Security," a targeted collection of recently-released documents that are expected to influence homeland security policy & strategy development. Here are the latest documents:

Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health-Not a Law Enforcement/National Security-ApproachAmerican Civil Liberties Union

Maritime SecurityLexington Institute

Keeping an Eye on an Unruly Neighbor: Chinese Views of Economic Reform and Stability in North KoreaCenter for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, D.C.); United States Institute of Peace

Information Security Breach at TSA: The Traveler Redress WebsiteUnited States. Congress. House. Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

How Crime in the United States Is Measured [January 3, 2008]Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service
Source: Homeland Security Digital Library

Reel Fiction: Read the Book, See the Movie

What is better in cold, snowy January and February than reading books and watching movies? Some recent and classic books that have been transferred to screen would be a great combination. Some suggestions:

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (a Coen Brothers film)
Ian McEwan's Atonement (Joe Wright, director)
Marjarie Satrapi's Persepolis (She wrote it and directed the movie)
Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, director)
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (Three Academcy Awards)
Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (won all five major Oscars)
Dorothy Johnson's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (a John Ford western, of course)

What do you want to add to the list? Post your suggestions! Make a New Year's resolution to involve yourself in Web 2.0.

Science in America

Are we falling behind in science and technology?

Many leaders in business, government and education warn that a shortage of scientists is jeopardizing the nation's world leadership in science and technology, along with its military supremacy and high standard of living. For a short-term fix, they propose loosening immigration restrictions to allow more high-skilled workers from overseas. Long term, they say the United States must greatly improve pre-college education, produce more college graduates with mathematics and science degrees and increase investment in research and development. Others argue the alarm is just a scare tactic by employers who want to import more high-tech workers and pay them low wages. Across the country, meanwhile, businesses are joining thousands of schools in innovative efforts to convince more children to study science and to teach them more effectively.

Does the United States need to import more foreign-born scientists to maintain a robust economy? Does the U.S. education system discourage young Americans from studying science?
Is becoming highly educated the key to long-term job security?

To read the Overview of this week's report, click here.To view this week's entire report on CQ Researcher Online, click here. For that last "click here" you will need the user name and password from the library staff.
Source: CQ Researcher

Agents of Change

Since all politicians now are agents of change and will "change" the country and "change" the world, may we suggest they consult a thesaurus for some synonyms? It would make listening to them so much more pleasant. For example:

Main Entry:
change
Part of Speech:
noun 1
Definition:
alteration
Synonyms:
about-face*, addition, adjustment, advance, break, compression, contraction, conversion, correction, development, difference, distortion, diversification, diversity, enlargement, innovation, metamorphosis, modification, modulation, mutation, novelty, permutation, reconstruction, refinement, remodeling, reversal, revision, revolution, shift, surrogate, switch, tempering, transformation, transition, transmutation, turn, turnover, variance, variation, variety, vicissitude

Source: http://www.thesaurus.com/

Business Information

I often rely on this general business site that compiles "approved" links in one place. CEO Express serves as a one-stop guide to a myriad of business resources on the Internet. It logically organizes most major classes of resources including news, business and technology magazines, government sites, international business resources, and company research sites on a single page.
http://www.ceoexpress.com/

Children's Author now Reading Ambassador

Jon Scieszka, author of "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" and the "Time Warp Trio" series, received the imprimatur of the Library of Congress last week as the first National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

The appointment comes at a time when declines in Americans' reading proficiency and time spent reading have been widely noted -- most recently in "To Read or Not to Read," a report issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. For many reasons, including economic competitiveness, it is "a matter of crucial national importance" that young people read, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said.
Source: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

Khaled Hosseini's Most Important Books

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner has s become an international bestseller, published in 38 countries and now a popular movie. It is one of the books we share most often with other libraries through interlibrary loan. Many of you have read it. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published last year. and once again is a best seller. Hosseini recently told Newsweek about his five most important books. One book on the list was Shahnameh: The persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, an 11th century epic and a jewel of Persiana literature. Read about all five titles on Hosseini's list.

Boomer Generation Highlights

RELATIONSHIPS The average 62-year-old American……is married to the same spouse, who is 60 years old.…has 2.4 children over the age of 18, who are not living at home.…has two grandchildren, also not living at their home. Neither parent is alive, so they are truly empty-nesters.
HEALTH They……are in good to very good health.…have not experienced any major health problem in the past 12 months.…feel that they have done a good job of maintaining their health.…feel that their own health status and the age at death of their parents and grandparents most influences their own life expectancy.
EDUCATION They have at least some college education.
EMPLOYMENT They work full-time for an employer, who provides a defined benefit pension plan and health benefits.
Source: MetLife Mature Market Institute

Housing Bust Shatters Migration Patterns

Analysis of the new Census Bureau annual estimates of state population changes for 2006-7 shows that the sinking housing market has yanked back high-flying states like Nevada and Arizona. An even bigger tug in growth occurred in Florida, another housing-boom driven state. With credit harder to get and the disappearance of housing deals, the allure of these states appears to have dimmed. New York and some New England States are seeing fewer residents leave.
Source: Brooking Institue-Migration Report

CQ Researcher: Oil Jitters

Vastly increased demand for oil in rapidly modernizing China and India, warfare and instability in the Middle East and the weakening U.S. dollar have revived fears of a new energy crisis. Gasoline shortages — and the accompanying lines at gas stations — were thought to have ended with the Jimmy Carter administration. But as 2008 began, American drivers were paying more than $3 a gallon. Read the full report in the CQ Researcher on the library home page. Ask the library staff for user name and password.

Source: CQ Researcher

What They are Reading on College Campuses

1. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert
2. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

3. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Màrquez

4. Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Editionby The Onion

5. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

6. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

7. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

8. What Is the What by Dave Eggers

9. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
10. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Generation Y Uses Libraries!

Generation Y Reports Greater Library Use Than Older Groups.
Students may not be abandoning libraries for the Internet, as some people have worried. The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report Sunday that says Generation Y—18-to-30-year-olds, in particular—is more likely to turn to libraries to ferret out information than their older counterparts are. Adults do use the Internet to gain information more than any other source, including government agencies and experts, according to the report. However, 18-to-30-year-olds said they used library resources—mostly computers—more than older groups.
Steve Bell, associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University, writes: “Now although the report mostly deals with public-library use, I would bet that a good number of respondents in this age category have regular access to an academic library.”

Bell admits that it might be too soon to jump to this conclusion, and the Pew report concludes that libraries should work to better understand why information seekers might or might not use them. It could be, however, that rather than the Internet replacing libraries, it creates a new niche for them to fill.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Year in Questons 2007: Answers

I gave you the quiz yesterday by Ben Schott from the New York Times. about events, people, and places in 2007 news. Here are the answers.

You can view the complete quiz--questions and answers (pdf) here.

Public Access Mandate Made Law

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. Congress has just unlocked the taxpayers’ $29 billion investment in NIH.
Source: Alliance for Taxpayer Access

Book Recommendation From Jack Matthews

Leading Change by John Kotter recommended by Jack Matthews, acting chair of the Business Department

Kotter, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, shares his insights regarding organizations for the twenty-first century. He compares the structure, systems, and culture of the Twentieth Century with those of the Twenty-First Century and argues that organizations can't get where they need to be through incremental change.

He makes a convincing case that the twenty-first-century employee will need to know more about both leadership and management than his or her counterpart. Kotter suggests that the mental habits needed to support lifelong learning are: (1) risk taking, (2) humble self-reflection, (3) solicitation of ideas and opinions of others, (4) careful listening and (5) openness to new ideas. The last chapter of book includes a flow chart that succinctly outlines the relationship of lifelong learning, leadership skills, and the capacity to succeed in the future.

Leading Change should encourage a commitment to the process of change at Goodwin College and help us develop new leadership skills. Great recommendation!

The Year in Questions from the New York Times

Ben Schott on the Op-Ed page this week of the New York Times asked us "to cast our minds back on the incidents and accidents, alarums and excursions that populated the year 2007. This s a test. No conferring. Well, perhaps a little." Answers will appear tomorrow. Here is the test of your memory of events and people last year. You may surprise yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/20071230_Questions.pdf

Read the First Chapter: Brother, I'm Dying

This is a new weekly feature on the library blog that gives you the opportunity to sample the first chapter of recent books.

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (nonfiction)

Edwidge Danticat employs the charms of a storyteller and the authority of a witness to evoke the political forces and personal sacrifices behind her parents' journey to this country from Haiti and her uncle's decision to stay behind. Her previous book, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was chosen as the one book for Greater Hartford in 2002.

Read the first chapter provided by the Washington Post book section.
Source: Washington Post First Chapters and book reviews

OSHA Records 2007

In FY 2007, OSHA conducted 39,324 total inspections, a 4.3 percent increase over its stated goal of 37,700. Total violations of OSHA’s standards and regulations were 88,846, a 6 percent increase from Fiscal Year (FY) 2006. The agency cited 67,176 serious violations, a 9 percent increase from the previous year and a more than 12 percent increase over the past four years. The number of cited repeat violations also rose from 2,551 in FY 2006 to 2,714 in FY 2007.
OSHA Enforcement: Striving for Safe and Healthy Workplaces
Source: Occupational and Safety Health Administration

First Interlibrary Loans of 2008

Here are the first Interlibrary Loan requests of Goodwin College in 2008:

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross 2008
loaned to Watertown Library Association

Three Cups of Tea by Mortenson and Relin 2006
loaned to New Fairfield Free Public Library

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 2003
loaned to Levi E. Coe Library (Middlefield)

The Goodwin College community has requested these books from other libraries at the beginning of 2008:

Intuition by Allegra Goodman 2006
borrowed from Middletown Library Service Center

Secret History by Donna Tartt 2004
borrowed from the Mark Twain Library Association (Redding)

New Amerian Militarism: How Americans are Reduced by War by A. J. Bacevich 2005
borrowed from Housatonic Valley Regional High School (Falls Village)

Selected Letters of John Keats 2002
borrowed from Southern Connecticut State Unversity

Leading Change by John Kotter 1996
borrowed from Sprague Library (Baltic)

Nursing and Allied Health Source

The Goodwin Library has just subscribed to theProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source database that provides our students with reliable healthcare information covering nursing, allied health, alternative and complementary medicine, and much more. This versatile database is designed to meet the needs of researchers at healthcare facilities as well as nursing and allied health programs at academic institutions. ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source provides abstracting and indexing for more than 700 titles, with over 580 titles in full-text. You can access it from the library homepage on and off campus.

GeoBee Challenge

If you need a short break in your day, or are preparing for your Jeopardy! debut, take the National Geographic GeoBee Challenge, which pulls questions from the National Geographic Bee. There are ten new questions each day that test your knowledge of geography, climate, and history. If you miss a day, you can access the quizzes from the previous two days.
www.nationalgeographiccom/geobee/index.html

GovGab: Your U.S. Government Blog

http://blog.usa.gov/roller/govgab
Some U.S. government employees have gotten together and created a blog to share bits of consumer information from federal Web sites in a very readable way. The tone is familiar and conversational, so much so you might not realize you're learning about energy conservation, safe online shopping, personal health, and responsible spending and saving. Posts are peppered with links to the vast resources of the U.S. government. So far, there are five regular bloggers, each assigned a different day, and a substitute. All work for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications at the General Services Administration.
Source: Information Outlook

Congress Backs Away from Science Education

The money and priority given to science and engineering education in the coming year by Congress and President Bush is woefully inadequate, says the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, whose members include a wide spectrum of scholarly and industry groups ranging from Google to the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
The occasion for the slam is the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations bill, according to a blog post today by the Computing Research Association, a task-force member.
“The President and Congress, for all their stated support this year for making basic research in the physical sciences and engineering a top budget priority, ended up essentially cutting, or flat-funding, key science agencies after accounting for inflation,” reports the blog."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus

Thursday Brainteaser # 1

This brainteaser is about places - real or fictitious - where films were set.
1. The largest city in Morocco was the setting for a famous 1943 film staring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Name the city.
2. Was the 1971 film "Walkabout" set in Australia, New Zealand or Hawaii?
3. Which postwar city was the setting for the 1949 film "The Third Man"?
4. In a 1999 film written by Richard Curtis, Julia Roberts played a celebrated US film actress who falls for a British bookshop manager, played by Hugh Grant. In which area of London was the film set (The area gave the film its title)?
5.The picturesque Scottish fishing village of Pennan was the location for the village shots in which 1983 film directed by Bill Forsyth?
6. Which county in Iowa was the setting for a 1995 film about a man (played by Clint Eastwood) who has come to photograph the seven covered bridges in the location?
7. The film "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was about a bridge being built in which country: China, Japan or Burma?
8. What was the name of the Georgia plantation which was the home of Scarlett O'Hara in the film "Gone With the Wind"?
9. The 1996 film "Trainspotting" was about young heroin addicts in which city?
10. In which 1937 film was Ojai in southwestern California the location for "Shangri-La"?
Look on the blog tomorrow for the answers!

December Additions to Credo Reference

The Credo Reference database added these full text reference books this month:

Collins Irish Dictionary,

Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century ,

RoutledgeEncyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century ,

New Penguin Business Dictionary,

New Penguin Dictionary of Music,

Penguin Dictionary of Sociology,

Penguin Dictionary of Economics,

Penguin International Dictionary of Finance.

Credo Reference is a completely customizable general reference solution for the Goodwin community of learners. Its full-text, aggregated content covers every major subject from the world's best publishers of reference.

Gallup Poll Publications

I want to inform you that two important Gallup Poll publications have been added to LexisNexis Academic database. In addition to the Gallup Management Journal, which was already available, as subscribers to this database we will now be able to access the following two titles:

Gallup Poll News Service
Description: The Gallup Poll News Service is the internet's leading polling-based news source. The Gallup Poll News Service provides news centered on public opinion. Published each business day, articles from the Gallup Poll News Service analyze findings and trends in politics, business, social issues, and Americans' lifestyles.
Full source description: http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?263351
Direct search link: http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?shr=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=263351
*Note: Updating of this source is temporarily suspended during a data format conversion; current coverage will be reinstated shortly.

Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing
Description: The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing is Gallup's premier weekly online news publication. Each Tuesday, the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing publishes in-depth articles on the opinions and issues Gallup is investigating in government, in the workplace, in schools, in hospitals, and in faith communities.
Full source description: http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?263354
Direct search link: http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sf?shr=t&sfi=AC00NBGenSrch&csi=263354

Those needing opinion poll data should also try using the Polls & Surveys SmartIndexing term in combination with news searches run from the Power Search form or the News search form. This will retrieve news stories that report on the contents of public opinion polls.

LexisNexis Academic Enhancements

I’m very pleased to announce several important enhancements to LexisNexis Academic database that went into effect last weekend.

1. Individual States added to Federal & State Codes Search Form source selection
They have added the combined statutes, constitution, annotated code, and court rules file for each state to the source selection box.

2. Improved tools for Results Groups
The results classification tools at the left of the results window now allows you to sort alphabetically in addition to the previous arrangement by number of hits. There is also a new “View Multiple Groups” feature that allows you to combine any of the groupings displayed into a customized subset of your results.

3. Findable People and Companies
This new feature exploits the XML tagging LexisNexis has been adding over the past few years. Companies and personal names that have been identified and tagged in full text documents are now highlighted with links to related searches. For companies, a single click takes you to the full Company Dossier report, or you can choose a Company Profiles search or a news search. For people you can choose a biographies & news search or a straight news search.

Instruction on using LexisNexis Academic database can be arranged with library staff.

Getting More From the Web: Tip # 1

Use search engines and Wikipedia to find quality research. Yes, I included Wikipedia so read on. It often makes sense to start with search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and other favorites. It doesn't hurt to see if there is a good article on Wikipedia. But you use these sources to carry you to better places such as the library databases and other authoritative information--sources you can cite in research papers.

“Wikipedia itself is very hit or miss,” says Ann Cullen, an adjunct professor at Simmons College's library science program. “I have seen Wikipedia entries that shocked me because of what was not included. And others blew me away because they were so good.” Cullen adds that “Wikipedia is an excellent avenue for finding other resources, but Wikipedia itself should not be the source.”

W.E.B. Griffin Vacation Reading

Escape from the stress of shopping, ice, snow, cold, The Nutcracker, and too much Christmas music. Why not read a Griffin novel for relief?
Griffin is the author of 38 thrilling military and detective novels, all of which have been listed on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other best-seller lists. The Goodwin Library has twelve of them. Hurry to the library before they are all checked out.

Spiritual Changes iin Students

This report comes at just the right time of the year and appears to have nothing to do with Mike Huckabee. While attendance at religious services declines, college students nationwide show significant growth in a wide spectrum of spiritual and ethical considerations during their first three years of college, according to a UCLA study, the first longitudinal research project of its kind.

Compared to when they were entering freshmen, college juniors are more likely to be engaged in a spiritual quest, are more caring, and show higher levels of equanimity and an ecumenical worldview. While 41.2 percent of freshmen in 2004 reported they considered developing a meaningful philosophy of life “very important” or “essential,” just three years later in 2007 a 55.4 percent majority of those same students agreed. Additionally, “attaining inner harmony” was reported as “very important” or “essential” by 48.7 percent when they were freshmen in 2004, and jumped to 62.6 percent by 2007.

Source: Spirituality in Higher Education (Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA)

Poverty Effects on U.S. Scores

Not only did many industrialized countries outperform the United States in science on a recent international exam, but American students’ academic achievement was also more likely to be affected by their wealth or poverty and family background than was their peers’ in higher-scoring nations.

That was one of several sobering findings for the United States included in the results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, released this week. The program showed U.S. students lagging behind a majority of participating developed nations in both science and mathematics. On the same subject, an article in the Hartford Courant today states that "Connecticut must address the severe poverty in the inner cities and the achievement gap in its urban schools if it is to have a chance of staying competitive in this century."
Source: Education Week December 12 2007 and today's Courant

New York Times: 10 Best Books 2007

FICTION
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas--This first novel explores the fragmented pesonal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer's life.**
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson--In this short Norwegian novel translated by Anne Born, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.*
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Translated by Natash Wimmer, this is a crafitlty autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris--Layoff notices fly in Ferris's acidely funny first novel set in a white-collar office during the dot-com debacle.*
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. The author offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.**

NONFICTION
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran--The author catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America's governance of Iraq.**
Little Heathens: Hard Times & High Spirts on an Iowa Farm During the Depression by Mildred Kalish--This long-titled book is a memoir of childhood memories filled with joy and wonder.**
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin--An outsider's account of the cloistered court's inner workings.**
Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley--Colley tracks the "compulsively itinerant" Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.**
Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross--In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker's music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.**
*-in library now
**ordered
Source: New York Times December 9, 2007

Really No Child Left Behind

The British government will today promise every pupil a dedicated tutor to support them through their secondary schooling and act as a personal contact point for parents who are worried about their child's progress. Pupils will be assigned one member of the school staff to act as behaviour mentor and to meet their parents, to allow swift action should their grades begin to slide.

Parent-run school councils and a national parent panel to advise ministers on policy will be established under plans that ministers said should redraw the boundaries between home and school for the 21st century. Parents will be at the heart of a 10-year children's plan to improve children's education and happiness. What will they think of next!
Source: Guardian Unlimited December 11, 2007

Just in Time for Next Semester: Graphic Syllabi

Much like a concept map or mind map, a graphic syllabus uses spatial arrangement, connecting lines and arrows, and sometimes numbers to show the logical, temporal progression of the course through topics within the subject matter, according to author Linda Nilson. The library has just ordered her book, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course. Why use a graphic syllabus? Nilson suggests that a text syllabus is often not read by students unless the teacher reads it with them on the first day of class. A Great deal of research documents that students handle text poorly, especially when confronted with technical language--thus the graphic syllabus.
Source: The Teaching Professor December 2007

Electronic Book from ICONN

Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, 2005 Covers alternative and complementary medical practices, such as reflexology, acupressure, chelation therapy, kinesiology, polarity therapy, naturopathy, and Chinese medicine. Includes therapies for specific disorders and diseases, medicinal uses for plants and herbs, efficacy studies, and analysis of acceptance by traditional scientists and doctors. Access this from library homepage under ICONN.

Do Something

The staff of this website, Do Something, believe young people have the power to make a difference. It is their aim "to inspire, support and celebrate a generation of do-ers: people who see the need to do something, believe in their ability to get it done, and then take action."

This website is a community where young people learn, listen, speak, vote, volunteer, ask, and take action to make the world a better place. Currently, only 23% of this generation actively volunteers. The Do Something staff hopes to create a do something generation: a world where more than 51% of young people are involved with community action.
http://www.dosomething.org/

Happier?

Thousands of Harvard University students have discovered that you can become happier. They learned that secret from accalimed teacher Tal Ben-Shahar's class on positive psychology--a branch of psychology that combines the latest scientific research with good old common sense. Imagine that! Now by listening to the CD version of Shahar's book Happier, you can join his class and learn how positive psychology can make you happier right now--no lottery win, job promotion, or new love required. The Happier CDs are in the Goodwin library.

America's Best high Schools

A new study from U.S. News & World Report ranks America's best high schools. U.S. News & World Report, November 29, 2007

Then We Came to the End: Recommended Reading

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is widely recognized as one of the very best first novels of 2007. Anyone who has ever worked in an office will empathize and laugh reading this hilariousl novel of the humanity and cruelty of corporate life. It is available in the Goodwin Library.

The Academic Leader

The December issue of The Academic Leader, the newsletter for academic deans and department chairs, is here! In this issue you will find:
Simple Commitment but Long-Term Challenge (promotion and tenure)
A Case Study of a University Leadership Seminar (leadership development)
Creating and Sustaining Institution-wide Pedagogical Change (strategic initiatives)
College Faculty and the "Choice of Achilles" (faculty roles)
Notify the library staff if you are interested in a copy of this issue.

Free Resources for Children

The "Additional Research Resources" section of iCONN -- links to free resources -- has been substantially expanded in the areas of Children (K-12 Resources) and Science. I encourage you to check both out at http://www.iconn.org/AdditionalResources.aspx

History Tidbits for December 3

Tennessee Williams' drama of class conflict and self-deception, A Streetcar Named Desire, opened on Broadway December 3, 1947. Stanley Kowalski was played by 23-year old Marlon Brando with Kim Hunter playing his wife, Stella. The play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and made Brando a star.

Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on December 3, 1967 in a nine hour procedure in Capetown, South Africa. The recipient of the first transplant died 18 days later of pneumonia. By this year, some 70,000 hearts will have been transplanted with some functioning more than 20 years.
Source: Smithsonian magazine December 2007

EXTENDED LIBRARY HOURS

The Library will have extended hours the week before final exams.
December 10-13
We will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Other hours stay the same.
Friday 6:30 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Saturday 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
Sunday 12:00 p.m. -5:30 p.m.

Please don't hesitate to contact us at 860.727.6782 with any questions you might have. We wish all Goodwin students well with their final exams!

Create Family Health Report

This web site allows you to create a personalized family health history report from any computer with an Internet connection and an up-to-date Web browser. View a sample report .


Information you provide creates a drawing of your family tree and a chart of your family health history. Both the chart and the drawing can be printed and shared with your family members or your healthcare professional. Used in consultation with your healthcare professional, your family health history can help you review your family's health history and develop disease prevention strategies that are right for you.
Source: My Family Health Report, a tool from the Surgeon General

Inventor of Gatorade:Robert Cade

I watched six baseball games last weekend and all of the teams were drinking Gatorade, of course. Yesterday the university of Florida researcher who invented Gatorade, Robert Cade, died at the age of 80. Cade brought home a windfall to Gainesville by inventing the sports drink. The invention, originally designed to help the university’s football team, the Gators, started the vast sports-drink industry and has been one of the most lucrative technology-transfer products in higher-education history. The drink has earned the university more than $150-million in royalties since 1973.
Source: Associated Press

Classroom Ideas This Week

The ideas this week suggest ways to ask students to explore the messages behind public language. The English Journal article "Doublespeak Detection for the English Classroom" explores examples from literature, newspapers, and advertisements.

Advertisements are a fertile source for examples. To explore advertising's use of doublespeak, look to the analytical techniques outlined in the Teaching English in the Two-Year College article "Advertising and Interpretive Analysis: Developing Reading, Thinking, and Writing Skills in the Composition Course".
Source: NCTE

George Orwell and Doublespeak Awards

Ted Gup, author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, was the winner of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2007 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.

The NCTE Public Language Award Committee presented the 2007 Doublespeak Award to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The award is an ironic "tribute" to American public figures who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory. These awards was announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention in New Yoirk City Sunday, November 18.
Source: NCTE

Twelve Reasons for Soaring College Costs

Today, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), a higher education think tank based in Washington, DC, released a new study outlining 12 reasons for soaring college tuition and questioning whether the government is spending too much money on higher education as a whole.
Source: New Study Outlines 12 Reasons for Soaring College Costs

Windfalls of War: Baghdad Bonanza: Useful Statistics

KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company. In fact, the total dollar value of contracts that went to KBR—which used to be known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root and until April 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton—was nearly nine times greater than those awarded to DynCorp International, a private security firm that is No. 2 on the list of the top 100 recipients of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction funds.
Another private security company, Blackwater USA, is 12th on the list of companies and joint ventures, with $485 million in contracts.

Other key findings :

• Over the three years studied, more than $20 billion in contracts went to foreign companies whose identities—at least so far—are impossible to determine.
• Nearly a third of the companies and joint ventures on the Top 100 are based outside the United States. These foreign contractors, along with the $20 billion in contracts awarded to the unidentified companies, account for about 45 percent of all funds obligated to the Top 100.
• U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006.

Source: Center for Public Integrity Windfalls of War II: Baghdad Bonanza

U.S. Health Benefits Continue to Rise

Total U.S. health benefit cost rose by 6.1 percent in 2007, the same pace as last year, to an average of US$7,983 per employee, according to the National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, conducted annually by Mercer and released today.

The good news is that cost increases have held steady for three years (after spiking to nearly 15 percent in 2002) and are likely to slow a bit further in 2008. The bad news is that’s still more than twice the rate of inflation. Health cost growth is outpacing wages and material costs and eroding business profitability.
Source: Mercer Consulting

Big Bucks, Red Tape for Colleges

The U.S. House of Representatives education committee unanimously approved sweeping legislation last week that would create a plethora of new grant programs for colleges and students while holding institutions accountable for skyrocketing tuition.

The 747-page bill to reauthorize, or renew, the Higher Education Act would impose dozens of new reporting requirements on colleges, requiring institutions to disclose everything from their transfer-of-credit policies to the details of their arrangements with lenders.It would also require colleges to crack down on illegal downloading and soften some of the restrictions on the receipt of federal aid by for-profit institutions.
Source Chronicle of Higher Education November 20 2007

Americans Closing the Book on Reading

Americans aren't just reading fewer books, but are reading less and less of everything, in any medium. That's the doleful conclusion of "To Read or Not to Read," a report scheduled for release today by the National Endowment for the Arts. Subtitled "A Question of National Consequence," the report piles on the bad news delivered by "Reading at Risk," the NEA's 2004 warning about the nation's rapidly declining literacy. This is not true of the Goodwin community; our library statistics show a continued increase in circulation.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Educaton Novemberr 19

Learning Languages in U.S.

Interest in language study at American colleges and universities has increased significantly since 2002, according to a comprehensive new survey released today by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA). Interest in language study has been increasing steadily since 1998. While the study of the most popular languages, Spanish, French, and German, continues to grow and together represents more than 70% of language enrollments, their dominance is slowly decreasing in the face of growing interest in languages such as Arabic (up 127%), Chinese (up 51%), and Korean (up 37%). Enrollments in American Sign Language increased nearly 30% from 2002, making it the fourth most studied language on college campuses, slightly ahead of Italian.
Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006
Source: Modern Language Association

Critical Release in Homeland Security

Every two weeks, the Homeland Security Digital Library identifies "Critical Releases in Homeland Security," a targeted collection of recently-released documents that are expected to influence homeland security policy & strategy development.
Terrorism Risk Modeling for Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure ProtectionRAND Corporation
Terrorism 2002-2005United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation
National Strategy for Information Sharing: Successes and Challenges in Improving Terrorism-Related Information SharingUnited States. White House Office
National Strategy for Combating Terrorism: Background and Issues for Congress [November 1, 2007]Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service
Critical Infrastructure Protection: Sector-Specific Plans' Coverage of Key Cyber Security Elements VariesUnited States. Government Accountability Office
Source: Homeland Security Digital Library

U.S. Loses in Math and Science

Students in the highest-performing U.S. states rank well below their peers in the world’s top-achieving countries in mathematics and science skill, according to a new study that judges American youths on an international scale.
Source: Education Week Online November 13 2007

History of the "Topping Off" Ceremony

The last steel beam of the new building at Goodwin College's river campus goes up today. The topping off ceremony includes the placing a tree on the top of the building. The beam and the tree represent one of the construction industry’s oldest customs – the "topping out" or "topping off" of a completed project.

This ancient European tradition lives on among American steelworkers. No-one really seems to know exactly how it started, but the tradition of topping out has become a cherished custom whenever the skeleton of a bridge or building is completed, a signal that the uppermost steel member is going into place. As that final beam is hoisted, an evergreen tree or a flag or both are attached to it as it ascends.

How did this custome start? Here is one version. Scandinavian mythology suggests that humans originated from trees and our souls returned to the trees after death, giving each tree a spirit of its own. Before cutting a tree, they would formally address the forest, reminding it of the consideration they had always shown toward the trees and asking the forest to grant use of a tree for construction of their home. When the house was complete, the topmost leafy branch of the tree used would be set atop the roof so that the tree spirit would not be rendered homeless. The gesture was supposed to convince the tree spirit of the sincere appreciation of those building the home. As time passed, the early conception of tree worship gradually changed, but the custom is continued across the world.

Source: Modern Steel Construction December 2000

National Book Awards

Tree of Smoke, a sweeping novel by Denis Johnson about the Vietnam War that features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers, won the National Book Award for fiction last night in Manhattan.

In the nonfiction category, Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, took the prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. Weiner, who won a Pultizer Prize for his reporting on national security programs, examined more than 50,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of C.I.A. veterans for his book, a critical history of C.I.A. failures.

The prize for young people’s literature was awarded to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school. Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, won the award for poetry for Time and Materials. Each of this year’s winners received a bronze statue and $10,000.
Source: New York Times

Rummaging in the Government Attic

This is a quick intro to GovernmentAttic.org, a new site digitizing materials accessed using the Freedom of Information Act. If they gain access to similar to the work being done by National Security Archive and Cryptome, they will digitize and make that available also. The aim of this web site is to make available materials unavailable elsewhere.
Source: Information Archives and Special Collections

On-Line Guide for Members of Congress

GPO Creates Its First Ever On-Line Guide To Members Of Congress
The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) creates a one stop website with easy searchable information on all Members of Congress. A simple click will bring the user to a picture and biography of any current member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. This information previously was available in separate databases, but now can be accessed from one central point.
Source: GPO

Fishy Farms: Environmental Issues

“Offshore aquaculture is not ready for primetime,” said Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive Director. “So far the industry has failed to demonstrate that the practice is environmentally sustainable, financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale.”

Commercial-scale open ocean aquaculture will neither ease pressure on collapsing wild marine fish populations, nor eliminate our seafood trade deficit, according to a new report by Food & Water Watch. The U.S. government has been pushing to open public waters to offshore aquaculture – growing fish in nets or cages between three and 200 miles from shore.
Source: Full Report

Brush up Your Shakespeare, Start Doing it Now

Shakespeare has been a staple of management training for a long time. But only in the last few years have programs used Shakespeare’s works to teach chief executives the vulnerabilities to which the powerful are susceptible.

“C.E.O.’s are the modern kings and queens of the global world,” says Kevin Coleman, a Shakespearean actor who dramatizes for chief executives how a mistake made in the global economy might have vast and unintended consequences.

James Dimon rediscovered Shakespeare shortly after he was fired from his job as president of Citigroup (by a man who was like a father to him). Then he was invited to talk at Columbia Business School to students who had been studying power and succession using "King Lear." That day Dimon learned that Shakespeare had written a case study predicting his dismissal from Citigroup.
Source: New York Times November 10, 2007

What I've Been Reading

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting...

The novel is relatively short (184 pages) and since it is written as one extended conversation, it is next to impossible not to read the entire book at one sitting: leaving the story even for a moment would be like leaving a personal encounter - rude. The story is superb, written with elegance, and contains views from outside our American perspective that refreshingly inform us to re-examine our point of view. For those who want a different voice, a different view of the aftermath of 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is well worth reading. Highly Recommended.

What are you reading?? Click on Comments below and let us know--even just the title will do. You will have to register briefly just once and then you can comment like crazy every day.

Live Chat: Battling Staph Infections

Live Chat
Battling Staph Infections in Schools
When: Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern standard time
Submit questions here in advance.

Please join in for a live chat about measures that school leaders can take to prevent an outbreak of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections in their schools, and soothe students' and parents' anxieties about the illness. The key, school leaders say, is releasing accurate information to parents and students quickly, while collaborating closely with school-based and local health officials.
Source: Education Week

Norman Mailer

A major voice in American literature, Norman Mailer died Saturday at Mount Sinai Hospital. From his classic debut novel "The Naked and The Dead" to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality. His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. "The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He wrote much more, not all of it as well received.

In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me." I have read that he had a great distrust for technology and wrote in long hand--usually about 1500 words a day.

Quotes from Normal Mailer:
"I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
Source: Obituaries in national newspapers

History Yesterday

1918 - The armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany in Compiègne, France, effectively ending World War I.

"When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars'
And another wild Armistice Day."
[Robert Graves: poem, 'Armistice Day' - 11 Nov 1918]

TurnOff the Cellphones

Like many of his colleagues, Ali Nazemi tells his students that they'd better turn their cellphones off before they come to class. But Mr. Nazemi, a professor of business administration and economics at Roanoke College, has gone to unusual lengths to drive home that message. When a student's phone rang during a recent lecture, the professor confiscated it and proceeded to demolish with a hammer. The incident was staged--Mr. Nazemi had arranged it with the student before class--but it had plenty of shock value. And that was precisely the point: As Samuel G. Freedman notes in The New York Times, plenty of professors are considering drastic measures to keep students from spending lecture-hall time fiddling with cellphones, iPods, and laptops. One such tactic seems particularly interesting. A Canadian company called Smart Technologies has developed a program, called SynchronEyes, which lets professors monitor their students' computers and freeze any machines that are not being used for note-taking.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Human Service Worker Shortage

Students in Human Services, there are jobs out there! Youth servicing agencies are having difficulty filling empty job slots. In North Carolina, for example, UNC Chapel Hill’s recruitment and retention project recently focused on action steps that frontline staff, supervisors, administrators and agency directors can take to address workforce issues. The January 2007 issue of Children’s Service Practice Notes, issued by the North Carolina Division of Social Services and the Family and Children’s Resource Program focused on issues being faced by the child welfare workforce and strategies that can be used to address these issues.

In Massachusetts, the state’s Council of Human Service Providers commissioned two reports that focus on examining the state’s workforce challenges. Help Wanted: The Future of the Human Services Workforce in Massachusetts was released in April 2006, and Help Wanted 2: Recruiting and Retaining the Next Generation of Human Services Workers in Massachusetts was issued a year later, in April 2007. In the state, there are more than 100,000 workers in the human services workforce, and these employees serve more than one in ten of the state’s residents

Help Desk Hours

With more and more students — especially those taking online courses — demanding access to technology help at all hours of the day and night, colleges are responding by extending help-desk hours. More than half are open late into the evening, according to a recent survey by Educause, the educational technology consortium, and a few are available 24/7. But colleges are not set up for the extra hours. Their staffs are too small, and their budgets too tight. So many institutions are outsourcing the service to Presidium and similar companies. Presidium Learning, Inc., is a company in a rural Kentucky town that handles technology help desks for about 450 institutions.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Librarians and Surveillance Bills

Librarians Say Surveillance Bills Lack Adequate OversightA little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight. Read the full article in The Washington Post.

Recommended site: Maps of the World

I love maps and I love Maps of the World. This site is a fantastic repository of Physical Maps, Political Maps, Outline Maps, and Location Maps of all countries. One can also find Printable World Map, Blank World Map, Continent Map, World Time Zone Map, World Geography Map, World Economy Map, World Travel Map, and many more maps in the site.This is so good I think I will put it on the library page.

Five Assessment Myths

"America has spent 60 years building layer upon layer of district, state, national, and international assessments at immense cost—and with little evidence that our assessment practices have improved learning. True, testing data have revealed achievement problems. But revealing problems and helping fix them are two entirely different things. As a member of the measurement community, I find this legacy very discouraging. It causes me to reflect deeply on my role and function. Are we helping students and teachers with our assessment practices, or contributing to their problems?" This commentary by Rick Stiggins in Education Week considers five problematic myths about assessment:
Myth 1: The path to school improvement is paved with standardized tests.
Myth 2: School and community leaders know how to use assessment to improve schools.
Myth 3: Teachers are trained to assess productively.
Myth 4: Adult decisions drive school effectiveness.
Myth 5: Grades and test scores maximize student motivation and learning.
Stiggins is the founder of the Educational Testing Service's Assessment Training Institute in Portland, Ore.
Source: "Five Assessment Myths and Their Consequences" Education Week October 16, 2007

Early Childhood Education: Reading

Much attention has been devoted to parent-child interactions that involve the reading of printed materials; such interactions have been labeled joint book reading (JBR). JBR has been identified as the most imprtant activity in which parents can engage their children that will influence later academic success. However, there is still some debate about the impact of JBR on child development. The article, "Joint Book Reading in the Second Year and Vocabulary Outcomes", in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education provides evidence supporting the positive impact of JBR. Call off the debate; now we know.
Source: Journal of Research in Childhood Education Spring 2007 (available in the library)

Teacher Professionnal Development Sourcebook

The publisher of Education Week has launched a new biannual resource guide on teacher professional development, available online for free. The first issue of the Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook focuses on the role of teacher collaborative work in improving instruction, and includes research overviews, data on current practices and requirements, a professional development calendar, and an exclusive directory.
Source: Education Week Update

Did You Know?

Did you know that the Credo Reference database accessible from the library home page has 273 full-text reference books online for you? Today we will look at just one--The Ultimate Business Library--one of at least twenty in the field of business.

Hundreds of new business and management books have been and continue to be published every year. With time as your most valuable asset how can you ensure that you absorb only the best and most influential thinking from this seemingly inexhaustible supply?
This new edition of worldwide bestseller The Ultimate Business Library is a one-stop guide to the world's leading business thinkers. It is a unique summary of those books which have had the most significant impact on management thinking, drawing out the lessons any business can learn. Navigating the cross-currents of management thinking from Tom Peters to Peter Drucker, Rosabeth Moss Kanter to Charles Handy, The Ultimate Business Library will ensure you are rapidly up to speed with the ideas shaping modern business.

Source: http://www.goodwincollege.org/library/index.htm

Future Reading: Digitization and Its Discontent

Here is an excerpt from an interesting New Yorker article by Anthony Grafton on the future of reading. Reading seems to be a theme of this week's blog.

"Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books." Soon the sunlight will gleam on the varnished tables in the new Goodwin Library. Read the article here or in the library.
Source: The New Yorker Nov. 6, 2007 beginning on page 50--Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton.

Time's Invention of the Year

Stop. I mean, don't stop reading this, but stop thinking what you're about to think. Or, O.K., I'll think it for you:
The thing is hard to type on. It's too slow. It's too big. It doesn't have instant messaging. It's too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it's too cheap!) It doesn't support my work e-mail. It's locked to AT&T. And—all together now—we're sick of hearing about it! Yes, there's been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. But when that day is over, Apple's iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. Why? Five reasons:

1. It's pretty.

2. It's touchy-feely.

3. It will make other phones better.

4. It's not a phone. It's a platform.

5. It is but the ghost of iPhones to come.

Source: Time Magazine

Book Recommendation

FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION--AND EVERYONE ELSE
Proust and the Squid: The Story of and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

In her first book aimed at a general readership, Wolf (director, Ctr. for Reading and Language Research, Tufts Univ.) examines reading's extraordinary evolution. Beginning with an exploration of how the human brain evolved and adapted itself to become able to read, she then offers a history of linguistic development that concludes with the progress of alphabet-based languages. Wolf's detailed description of how children learn to read examines this process from combined social, psychological, and neurological perspectives. She illustrates how specific books and activities provide fundamental catalysts for developing cognitive paths. Wolf then examines dyslexia, providing a short historical foundation and analyzing current research. Particularly interested in how to teach those with reading difficulties, she writes from a researcher's perspective and a parent's (her son is dyslexic). Throughout, Wolf's intriguing combination of linguistic history, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience is engaging and clear. The figures and illustrations as well as the wonderful literary quotes enrich her readable prose. her text speaks to the changes the online information boom is bringing our world and provides a foundation for the importance of teaching information literacy.
Source: Library Journal Recommendation for Academic Libraries

NEEAN Fall Forum

Over the past few years, accountability issues have surfaced in higher education, much as they did for K-12 public schooling in recent years. At the New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN) fall forum Friday at the College of Holy Cross, keynote speaker Dr. Cecilia Lopez, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Harold Washington College, spoke forcefully on how current federal policy affects accreditation and assessment and why we should care. Dr. Daniel Fogel, president of University of Vermont, discussed the proposed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) proposed by National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC.) and American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU).

In individual sessions, colleagues discussed key issues in higher education assessment, including: general education and general outcomes assessment, discipline and program-based assessment, e-portfolios and other tools, and best practices in assessment implementation. You will hear more about this in the very near future. (Attending from Goodwin College: Janet Jefford, Judy Zimmerman, Marilyn Nowlan)

New Books

FICTION

Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
World Without End by Ken Follett (sequel to Pillars of the Earth)
Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
Worst Thing I’ve Done by Ursula Hegi

NONFICTION
Assault on Reason by Al Gore
Proust and the Squid: Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
Yoga as Medicine by Timothy McCall
Giving by Bill Clinton
Peterson’s Two-Year Colleges 2008

Most of these were requests from the faculty and staff.

Great Thing About Reading

'The great thing about reading books is that it makes us better than cats. Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books? A book read is a life added to one’s own. So it takes only nine books to make cats look at you with envy.

And I’m not talking here only of “good” books. Any book—trash to classic—makes us live the life of another person, injects us with the wisdom and folly of their years. When we’ve read the last page of a book, we know more, either in the form of raw knowledge—the name of a gun, perhaps—or in the form of greater understanding. The worth of these vicarious lives is not to be underestimated. There’s nothing sadder—or sometimes more dangerous—than the person who has lived only his or her single, narrow life, unenlightened by the experience, real or invented, of others."

These are the words of Yann Martel, Canadian author of The Life of Pi. Martel is sending a book every two weeks to Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada. Why Martel is doing this is a long and intriguing story. His choices and the accompanying comments explaining his selection are priceless. If you are interested in reading along with Prime Minster Harper, the first book was The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy because, says Martel, "I can’t think of a work of such brevity, hardly 60 pages, that shows so convincingly the power and depth of great literature." So here it is online: The Death of Ivan Ilych. (Next up is Animal Farm by GeorgeOrwell.)

Social Science Resource Par Excellence

Established in 1962, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science Research (ICPSR) is the world's largest archive of digital social science data. They acquire, preserve, and distribute original research data and provide training in its analysis. The site right now is featuring a collaborative psychiatric epidemiology service. Archives and research project websites at ICPSR provide access to data collections and other resources in many disciplines. There's something here for everyone!
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/

Early Childhood Education: StoryPlace

StoryPlace, presented in both English and Spanish, offers children the opportunity to view online stories, participate in interactive activities, and print activity pages. Five themes are currently available in the Pre-school Library: colors, teddy bears, crocodiles, animals, and monkeys. Each section features activities centered on the theme. For instance, in the teddy bear theme, children can choose to view and listen to the story 6 Little Teddy Bears, help Bella Teddy Bear choose the correct clothing for the weather, or print a teddy bear doll to cut out and put together. There is also an annotated booklist for each theme. The site developers plan to add an Early Elementary Library soon.

Homeland Security: Risk Reduction

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has adopted a focused approach to risk reduction. DHS is moving increasingly to risk analysis and risk-based resource allocation, a process that is designed to manage the greatest risks instead of attempting to protect everything. This report applies a probabilistic terrorism model that is broadly applied in the insurance industry to assess risk across cities, to assess risks within specific cities, and to assist intelligence analysis.
Terrorism Risk Modeling for Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
Source: RAND Corporation

Teacher Sourcebook

The publisher of Education Week has launched a new, twice-yearly resource guide on teacher professional development, available online for free. The first issue examines the role of teacher collaborative work in improving instructon and student achievement.
http://www.teachersourcebook.org/
Source: Education Week October 31, 2007

Campus Safety and Student Privacy

The U.S. Department of Education released new guidance on Tuesday to parents and educators about the circumstances under which information about troubled students can be disclosed under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, a federal law governing student records that is often criticized for being too complicated. The brochures have been sent to colleges and schools across the country and are available on the Department of Education's Web site.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education