An Academic in America: On Stupidity

A cartload of recent books suggests that it's time to reverse the customer-service mentality plaguing academe. Here is an excerpt from English teacher Thomas Benton's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday. Read the entire article here.

"'No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,' said H.L. Mencken in the era of Babbitt and the Scopes "monkey" trial. Several generations later, one might speculate that no publisher has ever lost money with a book accusing Americans — particularly young ones — of being stupid.

As an English professor, I can attest to the power of that element in American culture, as can just about anyone in any academic field without direct, practical applications. When a stranger asks me what I do, I usually just say, "I'm a teacher." The unfortunate follow-up remarks — usually about political bias in the classroom and sham apologies for their poor grammar meant to imply that I am a snob — usually make me wish I had said, "I sell hydraulic couplers," an answer more likely to produce hums of respectful incomprehension.

Now, in the post-9/11 era, American anti-intellectualism has grown more powerful, pervasive, and dangerous than at any time in our history, and we have a duty — particularly as educators — to foster intelligence as a moral obligation. Or at least that is the urgent selling point of a cartload of books published in the past several months."

(Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. He welcomes mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.)

Is Information on the Internet Reliable?

Wikipedia banned Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," from editing articles on the popular online site after he made joke edits. So how reliable is the Internet really?

That is the subject of this week's CQ Researcher available online in the library. The Internet has been a huge boon for information-seekers. In addition to sites maintained by newspapers and other traditional news sources, there are untraditional sources ranging from videos, personal Web pages and blogs to postings by interest groups of all kinds — from government agencies to hate groups. But experts caution that determining the credibility of online data can be tricky, and that critical-reading skills are not being taught in most schools. In the new online age, readers no longer have the luxury of depending on a reference librarian's expertise in finding reliable sources. Anyone can post an article, book or opinion online with no second pair of eyes checking it for accuracy, as in traditional publishing and journalism. Now many readers are turning to user-created sources like Wikipedia, or powerful search engines like Google, which tally how many people previously have accessed online documents and sources — a process that is open to manipulation comic and otherwise.

Source: CQ Researcher
Image Source: Getty Images for Meet the Press/Alex Wong

Fitness Pill: A Dream Come True

Scientists are moving closer to developing a pill which could deliver some of the benefits of exercise - even for those who do not move a muscle. The journal Cell reports US researchers now have two possible pills which appear able to build muscle, increase stamina and even burn fat. In tests, mice were able to run 44% further - suggesting humans may be able to do the same without prior training.

Source: BBC World News August 1

Around the World in 80+ Books

"It's just a book, just ink on paper. But be careful when you open it. There's a universe inside. A good travel book has wings and the ability to transport us, word by word, tale by tale. It introduces us to the people and places that make travel—and, one could argue, life itself—worthwhile. Good travel stories are, in a word, magic. Not only do they show us the world, they help us define our place within it."
(National Geographic)

National Geographic has asked dozens of travelers (writers, photographers, explorers, editors, and others) to name the books that have most enriched their sense of place. The editors of National Geographic added their own to complete the ultimate library of travel books—not guidebooks, but novels and narrative nonfiction and classic photography books--organized by geographic region. If the price of gas is keeping your travel plans low or non-existent, live vicariously by reading one or more. Bon voyage!(If we don't have it, we can usually get it for you through Interlibrary Loan.)

Around the World in 80+ Books
National Geographic July/August 2008

Future of Reading

The Future of Reading
Digital Versus Print

Last Sunday, July 27, the New York Times printed the the first in a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. Access first article HERE.

African Americans in Connecticut

Citizens All: African Americans in Connecticut 1700-1850
Yale University

"Citizens All" is the collaborative work of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) and the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation (CMI2) at Yale University. Aimed at both students and teachers, this project illustrates the importance of local history in creating as well as challenging how national and global histories are retold. The stories of international history begin with local events, with the stories of individuals, real people and places in our own backyards.

The project provides a scholarly introduction to the history of slavery in Connecticut, the process of gradual emancipation, and the struggle for citizenship rights by free blacks and abolitionists both within and beyond the state's boundaries.

The story of African Americans' efforts to become full citizens raises important questions about the very definition of "citizenship" and the ideals upon which the United States was founded. We hope that the project contributes to larger discussions of issues such as freedom, education or citizenship and stimulates new discoveries about the legacies of slavery and racism at local, regional, national and international levels. "Citizens All" grew out of GLC involvement with the US Partnership of the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project: Breaking The Silence.

Don't forget other resources for local history.

CT Freedom Trail.Developed by the CT Historical Commission, this site includes information on ites in the state that are associated with the movement towards freedom of African-American citizens.

CT Historical Society. This website includes an online guide to African American Resources at the historical society.

Connecticut State Library. The library has a research guide on African Americans in CT and Slavery in CT.

Does Google Go Deep Enough?

Does Google's Web Search Go Deep Enough Into Scholarly Archives?

Many scholarly archives on college and public Web sites don’t show up in Google because the search engine doesn’t index them — they’re in what many call the “deep Web,” below the level that most search engines look. A new study found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches. This is just another reason to use the databases provided by the Goodwin Library.

Source: Wired Campus: The Chronicle of Higher Education July 29 2008

Digital Collection: New York Public Library

New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Launched in 2005, the NYPL Digital Gallery is one of the largest open-access image databases available on the Internet. Featuring more than 600,000 digital images, content covers a variety of subjects from the arts to science and technology and includes all kinds of primary materials, such as manuscripts, maps, photographs, prints, restaurant menus, sheet music covers, and much more from the special collections of the NYPL Research Libraries and the Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection. The Digital Gallery offers basic and advanced searches and also allows users to browse alphabetized lists of names, subjects, and libraries. As an added enhancement, users may select and store around 50 or more images for later viewing using the “selections” option.

(Illustration: Charting North America: Maps from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection: Part of New England, New York, east New Iarsey and Long Iland)

Access: New York Public Library Digital Gallery

Frontiers of Science

U.S. News & World Report features "Frontiers of Science" in the August 4-11 issue. The editors pulled together some of the big scientific questions with these stories:
How will humanity evolve?
What will we eat?
Where will global warming hit home?
How did life begin?
Will we find it in the heavens?

The magazine is in the library and may be checked out. This issue makes for very interesting reading.

Try a New Search Engine: CUIL

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. (Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge--pronounced "cool".)

The Internet has grown. It’s time searching did too. The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When it finds a page with your keywords, it stays on that page and analyzes the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then Cuil offers you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. Cuil developers believe that analyzing the Web rather than users is a more useful approach. Cuil doesn't collect data about you and your habits. With Cuil, your search history is always private. Very cuil!


Source: www.cuil.com

Highlighting Academic OneFile

This week's highlighted database is Academic OneFile. Academic OneFile is a comprehensive, subscription-based database that currently contains more than 12,000 journals covering topics from Science, Technology and Medicine to the humanities. This easy-to-use database is the perfect fit for academic libraries, providing both academics and students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels with the ultimate periodical resource for serious research.

Use Basic Search to define your own search strategy. Results are presented in reverse chronological order. Choose Basic Search from the navigation bar. For a broader or more limited search, you may use and, or and not connectors, or limit the results to documents with full-text, peer-reviewed publications, documents with images, publication date or publication title. You may select one or more articles for viewing from the results list in full-text. Academic OneFile is available 24/7 and effortlessly delivers quality content researchers can trust.

Occupational Outlook-Summer 2008

Occupational Outlook Quarterly — Summer 2008

Occupational Outlook Quarterly provides practical information on jobs and careers. Articles are written in straightforward, non-technical language and cover a wide variety of career and work-related topics such as new and emerging occupations, training opportunities, salary trends, and results of new studies from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this issue:
+ Working in politics (PDF; 881 KB)
+ The class of 1993: Earnings and occupations by college major, 1 and 10 years after graduation (PDF; 2.1 MB)
+ Healthcare jobs you might not know about (PDF; 664 KB)
+ Brief items of interest to counselors and students
+ You’re a what? Home stager (PDF; 216 KB)
+ Job openings by industry (PDF; 280 KB)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Randy Pausch

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, died Friday morning at his Virginia home.

Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three to six months to live, Pausch responded last September 12 by delivering a last lecture at Carnegie Mellon called "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." A videotape of the lecture became a YouTube hit and Pausch expanded its text into the best-selling book, The Last Lecture. Full of humor and common sense, and addressed to his three young children, the lecture urged listeners to dream and play and to not allow obstacles to discourage them. The book is available in the Goodwin Library.

Today in History: Collision at Sea

July 25, 1956

En route from Genoa, Italy, to New York City on a foggy July night, Italy's postwar pride, the passenger liner SS Andrea Doria, collides with the eastbound liner MS Stockholm off Nantucket, Massachusetts, and sinks, killing 46 Andrea Doria passengers and 5 crew members from the Stockholm. Later investigations determine the accident is a result of faulty radar signals and poor ballast. Legal claims against the two shipping firms, who established a joint legal fund, eventually exceed $40 million.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine July 2008

CQ Researcher: Human Rights in China

When the curtain rises on the Summer Olympics next month in Beijing, China will eagerly showcase its hypersonic economic growth and its embrace of what it calls the "rule of law." But 19 years after its bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square, China will also be displaying its human-rights record for all to judge. Human-rights advocates say the sheen of Chinese progress and prosperity hides repression and brutality by the Chinese Communist Party, including the violent repression of pro-independence protesters in Tibet, forced abortions stemming from China's one-child policy and the trampling of basic freedoms of speech, religion and assembly. Chinese government officials say their nation of 1.3 billion people has made huge strides on the legal and human-rights fronts and that the West has no business interfering in China's internal affairs

(The picture: A Tibetan protester in Brussels, Belgium, last April calls for a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Beijing following a violent crackdown by Chinese security forces on pro-independence demonstrators in Tibet. (AFP/Getty Images/John Thys)) CQ Researcher is available online from the Goodwin Library (password protected)

MapJack

Immerse yourself in panoramic views of Yosemite National Park; Chiang Mai, Thailand; and San Francisco using MapJack, a new alternative to Google Street View and Microsoft's Live Search Maps. MapJack has brighter, sharper photos than the others, and better navigation tools. To start exploring, just click and drag the icon of a person along the map in the bottom half of your browser; the photographic images in the upper portion will automatically refresh. Start-ups like Earthmine and EveryScape are developing similar next-gen maps, but for now, MapJack offers the best preview of the future of digital mapping.
Source: www.mapjack.com

Visual Introduction to the Periodic Table

The Royal Society of Chemistry has provided a free, online visualization of the Periodic Table of Elements. Click on the info button for html and pdf files that provide background information on any element. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read pdf files.
AccessL Royal Society of Chemistry Periodic Table

Digital Collection: Duke University

Duke Digital Collections. Founded in 1995, the Duke University Libraries’ Digital Collections have amassed impressive digital image holdings from various collections. Subjects cover an array of national and international subjects. While the database allows for federated keyword searching across the featured collections, other collections must be browsed by subject or through the alphabetized list of collection names. Access the collection here

Featured collections are freely available on the Internet and include the Emergence of Advertising in America, Ration Coupons on the Home Front (1942–1945), and the 50,000 item William Gedney Photographs and Writings collection.

Cellphones and Your Health

The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute sent a memo yesterday to his employees saying that, despite many published studies saying otherwise, cellphone use could be hazardous.

Ronald B. Herberman, director of the institute and a tumor immunologist, advised staff members to keep conversations short, to hold phones away from their heads, and not to allow children to use mobile phones. He said that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the phones could cause “possible adverse health effects including cancer.”

Dr. Herberman based his memo on the recommendations of an international panel of scientists, on which he served. The panel reviewed unpublished data.

The studies that have been published have produced conflicting results, but the largest studies found no link between cellphone use and cancer, the Associated Press reported.
Source: Lila Guterman in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Statistics Research: Sports

Resources of the Week: Niche Statistics
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

In the course of the average workweek, we are often asked for something that involves statistics. Surprisingly, someone out there is collecting information no matter what the subject. Check out this sports business data collection. (You may need to do this off campus because your computer here is likely to be blocked from sports-related sites.)

Rodney Fort’s Sports Economics: Sports Business Data
Professor Fort, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is one of the nation’s preeminent sports economists. The collection of data here is staggering in both depth and breadth. Fort has assembled years of salary, attendance, and financial information for Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and English and European football associations. If it’s not here, you are likely to have a very difficult time trying to find it — especially for free, on the open Web.

Source: Resource Shelf July 2008

Digital Collection from the Library of Congress

This is the second in our series of great digital collections:Library of Congress American History and Culture Collections.

The American History and Culture Collections, also known as the American Memory Historical Collections, began as a pilot project in 1990 to provide middle school as well as high school teachers and students with digital surrogates of collection material on CD-ROM. Over the years, the collection has become a “National Digital Library” with diverse institutions from all across the United States contributing content. Rich in imagery, the collection may be searched or browsed by way of alphabetized subject lists, time periods, and geographical locations. American Memory Historical Collections features more than 100 thematic subjects ranging from advertising to maps to women’s rights.
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Three FREE Databases

The Connecticut Digital Library (iCONN) announced this week that 3 free EBSCO databases have been turned on for libraries in Connecticut.

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.

Teacher Reference Center: Teacher Reference Center provides indexing and abstracts for more than 270 periodicals. In addition, 96% of journals indexed in TRC are peer-reviewed. Topics include: Assessment, Best Practices, Continuing Education, Current Pedagogical Research, Curriculum Development, Elementary Education, Higher Education, Instructional Media, Language Arts, Literacy Standards, School Administration, Science & Mathematics, and Teacher Education. It is EBSCO Publishing's intention to provide access to TRC on a continual basis at www.TeacherReference.com. It will also be added to the databases on the library page.

Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts(tm) (LISTA): indexes more than 500 core journals, more than 50 priority journals, and 125 selective journals; plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.

New Additions to Credo Reference

Latest Additions to Credo Reference
• Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, Routledge
• Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, Routledge
• Concise Encyclopedia of Plant Pathology, Routledge
• Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, Elsevier
• Encyclopedia of Ethics, Routledge
• Encyclopedia of Insects, Elsevier
• Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Routledge
• Encyclopedia of the Solar System, Elsevier
• Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, Elsevier
• An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930,
• Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children, Routledge
• International Encyclopedia of Hospitality Management, Elsevier
• Science in the Ancient World: An Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO
• Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO
• Science in the Enlightenment: An Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO

Credo Reference is a leading online reference services for libraries and information centers. There are over 300 titles consisting of an aggregate of 3.1 million entries all interconnected by over 100,000,000 links. Access from the library page!

Interlibrary Loans at Goodwin Library

In the first 15 days of July, Goodwin Library has had Interlibrary Loan transactions with:
Granby Public Library (PL), James Blackstone Memorial L (Branford), New Fairfield Free PL, Jonathan Trumbull L (Lebanon), Phoebe A. Noyes L (Old Lyme), Brooklyn PL, Hartford Seminary, E. Hampton PL, Scotland PL, Killingly PL, Cragin Memorial L (Colchester), Plumb Memorial L (Shelton), New London PL, Sprague PL (Baltic), Milford PL, Babbidge L (UCONN Storrs), Easton PL, New Britain PL, Buley L (SCSU), Briarwood College, and Prospect PL.

Are Your Wrists at Risk?

Learn About Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
You’re working at your desk, but you’re distracted by a tingling or numbness in your hand and wrist. Then a sharp, piercing pain shoots from your palm through your arm. If you’ve had symptoms like these for several days—or worse, weeks—or if they keep you up at night, you may have carpal tunnel syndrome.
full story

Illusion of Miles Per Gallon

(This information was recommended by T. Patrick Burke)

Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University ran a series of experiments to show that the current standard of miles per gallon leads consumers to believe that fuel consumption is reduced at an even rate as efficiency improves. But that’s not the case.

Soll and Larrick offered an alternative metric: gallons per mile. Expressed in gallons used per 100 miles, 18 m.p.g. becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 m.p.g. becomes 3.6 gallons per 100 miles. And the difference is suddenly obvious: nearly two gallons every 100 miles, or a difference of more than $8.
Many European countries already list efficiency in terms of volume per distance traveled (liters per 100 kilometers or L/100km).

“Miles per gallon is misleading and can play tricks on our intuitions,” Prof. Soll said in a press release, which also links to an interactive quiz.

Source: New York Times Blog by Richard Chang June 20 2008

Book Recommendation

Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google
Available in the Goodwin Library

"While it may seem that we're in the midst of an unprecedented technological transition, author Nicholas Carr thinks that the direction of the digital revolution has a strong historical corollary: electrification. Carr argues that computing, no longer personal, is going the way of a power utility. Manufacturers used to provide their own power (i.e., windmills and waterwheels) until they plugged into the electric grid a hundred years ago. According to Carr, we're in the midst of a similar transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal. Soon all companies and individuals will outsource their computing systems, from programming to data storage, to companies with big hard drives in out-of-the-way places. Carr's analysis of the recent past is clear and insightful as he examines common computing tools that are embedded in the Internet instead of stored on a hard drive, including Google and YouTube.

The social and economic consequences of this transition into the utility age fall somewhere between uncertain and grim, according toCarr. Wealth will be further consolidated into the hands of a few, and specific industries, publishing in particular, will perish at the hands of crowdsourcing and the unbundling of content. However, Carr eschews an entirely dystopian vision for the future, hypothesizing without prognosticating. Perhaps lucky for us, he leaves a great number of questions unanswered."

Source: Publisher's Weekly

Evidence-based Handbook for Nurses

Nurses play a vital role in improving the safety and quality of patient care—not only in the hospital or ambulatory treatment facility, but also of community-based care and the care performed by family members. Nurses need to know what proven techniques and interventions they can use to enhance patient outcomes.

To address this need, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has prepared a comprehensive online handbook--Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses. (AHRQ Publication No. 08-0043).

Experts in the field reviewed the literature, and their contributions are grouped into sections. Click to see sections.
patient safety and quality;
evidence-based practice;
patient-centered care;
working conditions-work environment;
critical opportunities for patient safety and quality;
tools.

You may also select to download the Entire Volume as a PDF file (10 MB) or individual chapters. All PDF files are accessible.

Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (www.ahrq.gov)

Bioinformatics: Review of Web Resources

"Information sources in the biological sciences have grown far beyond journals and books. Sequencing projects and new molecular biology tools are creating vast amounts of new data and information in new formats. The manipulation, storage, and analysis of these new data constitute the growing field of bioinformatics. This field is diverse and interdisciplinary, drawing necessary expertise from information science and computer science, as well as biology. With our keen interest in the organization, provision, and management of information, it is natural for librarians to be intrigued by bioinformatics and play a role in bioinformatics teaching and research." (introduction to review by Tina O'Grady. This is a very useful list! It will also be available soon on the library page.)

Click here for Brief Review of Bioinformatics Resources

Source: ACRL Newsletter July/August 2008

Global Researcher: Child Soldiers

Since the mid-1990s, the world has watched in horror as hundreds of thousands of children and young teenagers have participated in nearly 50 wars, mostly in Africa and Asia. Children as young as 5 or 6 have served in combat, and thousands of abducted young girls were forced into sexual slavery. Some terrorist groups even strap explosive-rigged vests onto children and send them off as suicide bombers. Others have been recruited, sometimes forcibly, into the official armed forces or paramilitary units of several dozen countries. U.N. treaties prohibit the use of child soldiers, and the Security Council "names and shames" persistent violators. But only four former guerrilla commanders have been convicted by international tribunals, and some human-rights advocates urge more aggressive prosecution of perpetrators. However, some peace negotiators say threats of prosecution can obstruct cease-fire negotiations and prolong the fighting. In the U.S., where children under 18 serve in the military in non-combat roles, Congress is considering laws to combat the use of child soldiers overseas. Read the article online. (password protected)

(picture above: Preteen soldiers in the Karen rebel army fighting Myanmar's military government are among the estimated 250,000 children under age 18 in national and guerrilla armies worldwide. (Reuters/Jason Reed)

Source: Global Researcher July 2008

CQ Researcher: Global Food Crisis

Food prices have spiked around the world over the past year, bringing hunger and unrest to many developing countries, along with pain at the checkout counter for lower-income American families. In North Korea, for example, where 35 percent of the population is undernourished, the price of the major food staple, rice, soared 186 percent, and overall food prices rose 70 percent. With 2.1 billion people around the world living on less than $2 a day, such price increases may plunge hundreds of millions into malnutrition and starvation. Drought, high oil prices that make food transport pricey and diversion of corn for use as a biofuel all contribute to the price spike. The effect of globalization — which has led poor countries to abandon domestic food crops in favor of commodity crops for export — also has been blamed. The crisis also has sparked international tension over the impact of wealthy nations' farm subsidies and meat-heavy diets, which take many more resources to produce than grain- or legume-based diets. Read the entire report. (password protected)
Source: Introduction to report in CQ Researcher

New Feature: Digital Collections

The Internet is often the first and sometimes only research resource for scholars and educators, but many open-access digital image collections are part of the deep Web, keeping important visual content out of a search engine’s reach. In recent years, libraries, archives, and historical societies across the United States have created rich online visual resource collections that include a wealth of subjects and media formats. Researchers now have access to millions of primary materials from any Internet-accessible computer, which would otherwise require an in-person visit to the physical collection. Each week this blog will let you know about one of these collections. This week it is right here in Connecticut--Yale University.
Yale University Library Digital Collections. More than 100,000 digital images are accessible through the homepage for the Yale University Library Digital Collections. Although some subscription databases are not accessible to the public, content belonging to the collections at Yale University is searchable and viewable by the public. Visitors to the site may search for images across featured collections by using the basic or advanced search options, or they may browse collections by name, topic, medium, or by the owning repository, which include the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, and the Law Library.(Before I came to Goodwin College, I did some work with the digital collection of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library.)
Click here for Yale University Digital Collections

One-Stop Shopping for Composition Instructors: Compile

This summer, The National Council for the Teachers of English (NCTE) is exploring a variety of Web sites and tools that teachers can use in the classroom and/or for their professional development. This week, NCTE explains why writing teachers at the college level should know about Compile.

So what is it? Compile is a database of 94956 records that catalog books, journal articles, and other publications in composition, rhetoric, technical writing, ESL, and discourse studies. The collection has a full range of search capabilities.

The purpose of Compile is to allow ready reference to the published twentieth-century work in post-secondary composition and rhetoric, from the beginning of WWII to the end of the century. It does not extend before 1939 or after 1999. It is an on-line, keyworded, searchable inventory for researchers and teachers and anybody else interested. Compile is offered in the spirit of free research and scholarship. (Use of this bibliography for profit, however, requires permission.)

CompPile's focus is on post-secondary writing. It integrates journal articles, review-essays, notes and comments, books, dissertations, ERIC items, and edited collections. It does not systematically cover textbooks, how-to books, conference notices, editor's forwards, or reviews of single works.
Source: NCTE

Is This a Mistake?

USA Today reports that in the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students. Is this a mistake?

This is definitely a mistake, according to Fareed Zakaria who writes in Foreign Affairs that "the United States' potential advantages today are in large part a product of immigration. Foreign students and immigrants account for 50% of the science researchers in the country and in 2006 received 40% of the doctorates in science and engineering and 65% of the doctorates in computer science.... In short, the United States potential new burst of productivity,its edge in nanotechnology and biotechnology, its ability to invent the future--all rest on its immigration policies. If the United States can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here." This essay is adapted from his book, The Post-American World. --currently on the New York Times best seller list.
Source of the quote: Foreign Affairs May/June 2008

Time Magazine Features Mark Twain

"Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. It might even be fair to call him the inventor of the American short story. And he surely deserves an additional encomium: the man who popularized the sophisticated literary attack on racism," according to Stephen Carter in his Time magazine cover story about Mark Twain this week. You must read this article, "Getting Past Black and White."
Source: Time Magazine

Evaluating Online Learning

The U.S. Department of Education last week released its first guide to the evaluation of online-learning programs in K-12 education. The report is designed to help school leaders gauge the effectiveness of online education, as its use grows rapidly across the United States.

“While online-learning programs that deliver courses have been around for about a decade, this report is the first to fully address the issues in evaluating online programs in K-12 education,” said Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the North American Council for Online Learning, or NACOL, which released its own standards for online programs earlier this year. Voluntary Online-Teaching Standards Come Amid Concerns Over Quality.
Source: Educaton Week July 8 2008

Community Guide to Environmental Health

Drawing the connections between people’s health and the environments in which we live, this groundbreaking book empowers health promoters, development workers, educators, activists, community leaders and ordinary people to take charge of their communities’ health.
…
Years in the making, this comprehensive guide has twenty-three chapters which break down the broad overview of environmental issues and concerns into specific examples of how they affect peoples’ health, and how communities have organized to improve their environment and thus their own lives. These chapters include: Promoting Environmental Health; Environmental Rights and Justice; Protecting Community Water; Building Toilets; Mining and Health; Solid Waste: Turning a Health Risk into a Resource; Preventing and Reducing Harm from Toxics; Sustainable Farming; Restoring Land and Planting Trees, The False Promise of Genetically-Engineered Foods; and Clean Energy.

Eighty-two specific stories from communities around the world enliven the chapters, showing the environmental challenges faced, and what people and grassroots organizations have done to empower themselves and transform their communities. The book also includes 22 activities and 40 easy-to-build “how-to” projects.
Source: Hesperian Foundation

What Americans Know

The Newsweek Poll gauges what Americans know on a broad range of topics from the price of oil to the works of Shakespeare. A few of the results:
77% don't know who the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court is (answer: John Robers)
32% think that the popular vote determines the outcome if a presidential election ends in an Electoral College tie (Answer: US. House of Representatives breaks the tie)
67% know that a barrel of oil costs about $140 on the world market today.
80% know that TV broadcasts in the United States are scheduled to switch from analog to digital in 2009.
20% know that Sunnis are the largest group of muslims worldwide.
for the complete poll results, go to xtra.Newsweek.com

College-Educated Women Keep Working

Opting-Out Trend Doesn't Square With Census Data. There have been a number of high-profile articles about well- educated women "opting out" of the work force after having children. But a new study published in the June issue of the "American Sociological Review" says that this so-called opting-out revolution has been overblown.

Among the findings: Fewer than 8% of professional, college-educated women born since 1956 leave the work force for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, writes sociologist Christine Percheski, a doctoral student at Princeton, in an examination of census data. What's more, full-time employment levels of women with young children have risen dramatically in recent decades. And more women with young children are working longer hours.
Source: Wall Street Journal July 1 2008

Reading First Program Not Funded

The full Senate Appropriations Committee last week approved a fiscal 2009 spending measure that would eliminate funding for the Reading First program, while providing modest increases for other programs serving disadvantaged students and those in special education. See the full article in Education Week.
Source: Education Week June 27 2008

Virtual Library Day on the Hill

Today is Virtual Library Day on the Hill!We are looking for library advocates from across the country to call attention to the value of today’s libraries, as well as the issues the library community is facing. This is especially important in an election year, as many of our nation’s legislators will be looking to hear from their constituents. This is our chance to make the library voice heard!

Virtual Library Day on the Hill is an amazing opportunity to showcase the value and importance of libraries to Members of Congress and let them know how important federal funding is to our nation’s libraries. Go to www.capwiz.com/ala to write your Members of Congress about the importance of libraries.

Top 10 Most Re-Read Books List

Listed below is the Top 10 Most Re-Read Books List created in July 2004 byThe American Library Association's panel:

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird

Shakespeare's collected works

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter series

Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House on the Prairie series

A.A. Milne - Winnie the Pooh

Alice Walker - The Color Purple

Alt Healthwatch Database--free trial

The library has a free trial of this database that focuses on the many perspectives of complementary, holistic and integrated approaches to health care and wellness. It offers libraries full text articles for more than 180 international, and often peer-reviewed journals and reports. In addition, there are hundreds of pamphlets, booklets, special reports, original research and book excerpts.

Full text titles include American Journal of Chinese Medicine, American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine, California Journal of Oriental Medicine, European Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, Journal of Asian Natural Products Research, Journal of the Australian Traditional-Medicine Society, Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association and many others. Alt HealthWatch provides in-depth coverage across the full spectrum of subject areas covered by complementary and alternative medicine. Contact the library for access information.

Avoid High Price of Textbooks--Rent Them

With a college textbook often costing more than $100, it’s no wonder that students are protesting, and Congress has discussed legislation to lower the price of textbooks.

But what if students rented books instead of buying them? That’s the business model behind a company called Chegg, which was started a year ago and bills itself as “the Netflix for college textbooks.” Students identify the books they want to rent and place their order online. Then, Chegg ships the books to students’ residences. After using the books for a semester, students mail the books back to Chegg with prepaid shipping labels that they download from the Chegg Web site. Chegg literature says its rental model can save students 60 percent to 80 percent off the price of a book.
Source: Chronicle's Community College Newsletter July 1 2008

IT Business Hiring Strong

If error messages and bundles of wire get you enthusiastic, you're in luck, as the IT field continues to boast the greatest hiring demand, according to a nationwide CareerBuilder.com survey.

Nearly 40 percent of IT employers are looking to add full-time, permanent employees in the third quarter. But IT isn't the only burgeoning field.
Source: Hartford Business Journal July 1 2008

Is Google Making us Stupid?

What is the Internet doinig to our brain?
Remember in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the astronaut was coldy disconnecting the memory circuits as Hal pleads "Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it." Is that what the Internet is doing to our brains? In the article in the Atlantic, author Nicholas Carr writes that "media supplies the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." For those of us who spend much time with the Internet medium, this article is definitely required reading.
Source: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Atlantic July/August 2008

Science Animations; Interactive Tutorials

This site makes it so much fun to understand scientific theories and phenomena, including plant life cycles, plate tectonics, bacterial growth, severe weather, how lasers works, and much more. It even has microbiology, Anatomy and physiology I & II, biology, ecology, geology, physics, and lots of general collections. The NASA simulations and downloadable multimedia from Penn State are awesome.

Science Animations: Movies and Interactive Tutorial Links

New Database: Campus Research

The Connecticut Digital Library (ICONN) is discontinuing access to LexisNexis Academic July 1 and replacing it with Thopmson's Campus Research. Campus Research is a comprehensive collection of news, business and law-related information for students--organized and packaged with timesaving tools and an easy-to-use interface. It offers full-text information on a wide range of academic disciplines – information that can't easily be found on the Internet or any other readily available source. Remember to try it out on July 1 and frequently after that.

You Get:
Thousands of news databases arranged geographically and topically
Hundreds of newspapers, newswires, magazines, and broadcast transcripts
Business, trade, and professional journals such as Financial Times and New England Journal of Medicine
More than 800 law reviews and journals, including Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal
Federal and state caselaw, including cases from the U.S. Supreme Court
The full text of the United States Code Annotated (USCA) and Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)

Instruction on use of the database is available for anyone in the Goodwin community.

Free Chemistry Audio Shows

Every other month the Nature journals are publishing a FREE audio show, 'ChemPod', specifically for the chemistry community, from interviews with Nobel Prize winners, to discussions on nanotechnology research and much, much more...

The shows feature important research from the Nature journals as well as interviews with the people behind the science, in-depth commentary, location reports and analysis from journalists covering chemistry around the world.

2008 podcasts
March/April 2008: Audio (mp3 file)

In this episode of Chempod, we get caught up in catalysis, discover drawbacks to some Alzheimer's drug candidates, and bring you a round up of the best of the American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans.

January/February 2008: Audio (mp3 file)

In this show, we find out how DNA is helping researches build crystals out of nanoparticles, discover a clever chemical trick for manipulating uranium, explore the controversial field of DNA conductivity and talk to chemist Bruce Gibb about re-building life and lab after hurricane Katrina.

Go to Chempod
To download a show to your computer, right click the Audio link and select 'Save target as/Save link as' and save the file to your computer or a CD.

Source: Nature

Entrepreneurship: Not Just for Business Majors

Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing subjects in the undergraduate curricula, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Entreprenuerial ingenuity and risk-taking may seem like traits that can't be taught, but colleges are attempting to do just that--and in nontraditional contexts. More than 2,000 colleges are now offering some sort of entrepreneurship course. The artcle is highly recommended and essential reading for members of the curriculum and standards committees.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education June 20 2008

Case Against Assessment Tests

250 presidents, senior administrators, faculty leaders, and trustees gathered last week for The Chronicle of Higher Education's Executive Leadership Forum. What seems to worry these campus officials the most is proving the value of college to students, parents, and politicians at a time of rising tuition and tightening credit. In recent years, spurred in large part by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings's National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, some people have called for a better measure: assessment tests.

Higher-education leaders have railed against such one-size-fits-all efforts, and those at the Chronicle forum heard perhaps one of the strongest arguments against a test from the opening speaker, Daniel H. Pink, best-selling author of A Whole New Mind. Read the whole article in the Chronicle at the library or request an email copy from the librarian.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education June 20 2008

Homeland Security Critical Releases

Critical Releases in Homeland Security [June 2008]
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.

Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information, Together with Additional and Minority Views
United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence

National Response Framework: FEMA Needs Policies and Procedures to Better Integrate Non-Federal Stakeholders in the Revision Process
United States. Government Accountability Office

Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States
RAND Corporation

Intelligence Community Legal Reference Book [U]
United States. Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 24: Biometrics for Identification of Screening to Enhance National Security [June 5, 2008]
United States. White House Office
Source: Homeland Security Digital Library

Psychology Resources: PsycINFO & PsycARTICLES

PsycINFO gives members of the Goodwin community access to a critical mass of over 2.5 million abstracts of worldwide behavioral literature. From the historical perspective to cutting-edge research, the PsycINFO database is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Quickly find abstracts of specific types of documents such as journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, editorials, and research methodologies (such as clinical case reports, empirical studies, and literature reviews.

PsycARTICLEs is the largest full-text database of psychology journals. This databse provides student researchers with full-text access to the complete collection of peer-reviewed journals from the leading publisher in psychology,the American Psychological Association (APA). PsycARTICLEs contains more than 124,000 articles from APA-published content from 1894 to present. These are subscription databases available to Goodwin students on and off campus.

Fuel Economy Information

Since Connecticut has the highest gas prices in the country, we all could use some help with fuel economy. The federal government has stepped in with information on your car's gas mileage and energy impact rating.

The site

also tells you where to find the lowest gasoline prices, and even tips on improving your mileage.

source: Environmental Protection Agency

iTunes University: Global Perspective

Welcome to iTunes U.
Higher education has gone high tech. Thanks to iTunes U, professors can post lectures, discussions, and videos of classes on the school’s iTunes U site. Students can download them and put them on their iPods. Then they can learn wherever they are, whenever they want — all free of charge.

If Goodwin college doesn’t yet post content to iTunes U, no problem. Students can access free content from dozens of universities around the world, with topics on everything from business to science to law. At last count, there were more than 60,000 educational audio and video files available. Whether on or off campus, now college comes to you.
Source: Campus Technology June 4 2008

Locating E-resources in the Goodwin Library

The Goodwin Library has over 38,000 electronic periodicals--magazines, newspapers, journals. So how on earth do you find them? Very easy!On the library page, the "Finding Articles-Databases" is the EBSCO A to Z locator tool that now links to the Goodwin College academic databases with digitized peer-reviewed articles on a huge variety of topics. At this site, you can go directly to a database to search or you can choose to search in a particular journal or magazine or you can find journals or magazines by subject. You can use the list to see if the library has a specific source. This is incredibly easy to use. Please try it out.

National Trails Day June 7

Looking for a free and healthy weekend activity? Well,Saturday is National Trails and there are more than 130 guided hikes and outings scheduled in Connecticut. Trail Days events in Connecticut are coordinated by the Connecticut Forest and Park Association (CFPA). Trails Day is a nationwide celebration that brings awareness to trails and the many joys and benefits they provide. Organizations participating in our state include the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), local and regional land trusts, town agencies,and outdoor-minded businesses. Brochures are available from the CFPA . You can download a complete Trails Day 2008 brochure. Connecticut is a beautiful state. Go out and enjoy it this weekend. Get in shape for the Goodwin hiking club outing later this month.

Source: Connecticut Forest and Park Association

Van Gogh Free Exhibit at Yale Art Gallery

The Yale University Art Gallery is exhibiting two of Vincent Van Gogh's most renowned paintings, Cypresses and Starry Night, side by side for the first time. Together, the paintings reveal the artist's vivid and tender vision of Saint-Remy as he observed the French countryside from his window--by day through the night. Exhibit runs from June 15-September 7.
Source: Yale Art Gallery

Ed-tech Success Story

Since the early 1990s, Maine has been at the forefront of educational innovation, thanks largely to the adoption of new standards--called the Maine Learning Results--as a driver for 21st-century teaching and learning. A critical outcome and guiding principle of these standards is to graduate all students from Maine high schools to be clear and effective communicators. Read this fascinating article about Maine's success story: "Maine writes a new ed-tech success story".

Source: eSchool News June 2, 2008

Women's Rights

Are violence and discrimination against women declining?

Women around the world have made significant gains in the past decade, but tens of millions still face significant and often appalling hardship. Most governments now have gender-equality commissions, electoral gender quotas and laws to protect women against violence. But progress has been mixed. A record number of women now serve in parliaments, but only 14 of the world's 193 countries currently have elected female leaders. Globalization has produced more jobs for women, but they still constitute 70 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants and 64 percent of the illiterate. Spousal abuse, female infanticide, genital mutilation, forced abortions, bride-burnings, acid attacks and sexual slavery remain pervasive in some countries, and rape and sexual mutilation have reached epic proportions in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Experts say without greater economic, political and educational equality, the plight of women will not improve, and society will continue suffering the consequences. The full report is available online from CQ Global Researcher

Source: CQ Global Researcher May 30, 2008

Free Business Plans: Bplans.com

Bplans.com contains the largest single collection of free sample business plans online. In addition to that, it has helpful tools and know-how for managing a business. Bplans.com includes practical advice on planning, interactive tools, and a panel of experts who have answered more than 1,400 questions from people like our students.

Warning to Colleges from Accreditors

If colleges want to avoid onerous and ham-handed forms of government regulation, they should become much smarter about analyzing and responding to their own internal student-achievement data. That, in a nutshell, is the message that six representatives of major regional accrediting organizations delivered during a panel discussion Monday at the annual conference of the Association for Institutional Research.

The accreditors told the assembled scholars that they have a responsibility to persuade their deans and faculty colleagues of the importance of using internal data to improve student learning.

Several of the panelists emphasized that their accrediting organizations would continue to respect colleges' distinctive missions. But colleges must be candid with the public about how they measure their success, the accreditors warned, or risk inviting government regulation that is not so respectful of colleges' individual identities. Read the entire article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education May 27, 2008

EPA Libraries Re-open in Tiny Spaces

Closed Environmental Protection Agency libraries return in shamefully small spaces. Political appointee assert control over all libraries.

Ordered by Congress to re-open its shuttered libraries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is grudgingly allocating only minimal space and resources, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA is issuing a series of edicts placing virtually every aspect of library operations under centralized control of a political appointee.

In a May 8, 2008 e-mail to EPA employee unions, the agency announced its plan for re-opening four of the closed libraries effective September 1. The unions were given until May 22 to reply or object. The announced plan for the Chicago library, for example, formerly the largest regional library serving the entire six-state Great Lakes area, stipulates:

The re-opened library will be in a vacant reception area on the 16th floor of a federal building;
The re-opened library will occupy less than one-tenth the area of the closed library and will be only slightly larger than the typical men’s restroom in that same building; and
No provision is made to restore the unique Great Lakes ecological collection or to recover any of the other holdings from the former library.

Source: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

Facebook-based Alumni Connections

Harris Connect has launched a new alumni and student relations tool built on the Facebook Platform. Dubbed "Community Connections," the application is designed to provide secure connections between schools and their Facebook-using constituents and keep them engaged with news and other information.

Read More!

Some New Books

Now or coming soon to Goodwin Library:

Skinny Bitch by Freedman and Barnouin
Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter
Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
Audition by Barbara Walters
Oxymorons: The Mytth of the U. S. Health Care System by J. D. Kleinke
New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle (Oprah's Book Club)
Curious You: On Your Way by H. A. Roy
Flipping Brilliant: A Penguin's Guide to a Happy Life by Chester & Regan
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Just War: The Just War Tradition: Ethics in Modern Welfare by Guthrie & Quinlan

Basics of Investing

Smart Money University teaches the basics of investing - stocks, bonds, mutual funds, taxes, asset allocation, building portfolios, choosing a broker, and more. It includes a glossary of financial terms, and worksheets to help business students and others assess current finances and plan for the future.
Source: Smart Money Magazine online

Global Perspective with British Podcasts

The British newspaper, The Guardian, provides audio articles in a wide range of categories that will give our students an international perspective on current events. They may search or browse audios by categories. RSS feeds are available for the 13 subject-specific weekly podcasts.
Source: Marylaine Block, Librarian

Learn About Learning Communities

The reort on learning communities published by the National Center for Postsecondary Research has implications for Goodwin College as well as community colleges. As we know,community colleges have taken great strides in recent decades in providing access to college for millions of students with diverse ethnic and academic backgrounds. Now, however, community colleges and private colleges must tackle an even more formidable challenge: how to help increasingly large numbers of academically underprepared students succeed in college. The developmental courses to which over half of entering students are directed often prove to be too great a hurdle, and the majority who hope to earn a certificate or a degree, or to transfer, drop out before reaching their goals.

Learning communities are a popular strategy that community colleges nationwide have embraced in support of developmental students. In a learning community, a cohort of students takes two or more courses linked by integrated themes and assignments that are developed through ongoing faculty collaboration. Learning communities are intended to foster active and collaborative learning and to create stronger relationships among students and between students and faculty. These elements are theorized to increase students’ motivation and sense of belonging, which in turn drive their effort, learning, persistence, and, ultimately, success.

Read the whole report.

Health Information Technology: Costs and Benefits

Many people believe that health information technology (health IT) has the potential to transform the practice of health care by reducing costs and improving quality. The Government Budg just released a significant study, prepared at the request of the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, examining the evidence on the costs and benefits of health information technology.

“Health IT” generally refers to computer applications for the practice of medicine. (Those applications may include computerized entry systems for physicians’ orders for tests or medications, support systems for clinical decisionmaking, and electronic prescribing of medications.) Relatively few providers—as of 2006, about 12 percent of physicians and 11 percent of hospitals—have adopted health IT.

Source: Congressional Budget Office

EPA's Report on the Environment

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the 2008 EPA Report on the Environment yesterday, a document that provides the American people with information on trends in the condition of air, water, and land and related changes in human health in the United States.

The EPA 2008 ROE is a valuable resource that will inform and focus EPA activities to improve and protect America’s environment. The report frames key questions related to the protection of human health and the environment, and addresses each issue using scientifically sound indicators that have been developed with extensive public input. The 2008 ROE updates a draft report released by EPA in 2003. EPA’s 2008 Report on the Environment: http://www.epa.gov/roe.

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Homeland Security Students: Trial Database!

NEW TRIAL STARTED TODAY IN YOUR HONOR!

International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center™ (ISCTRC)
This database offers information on virtually every dimension of security & counter-terrorism and is designed to inform the analysis process, as well as to enhance the general understanding of security and terrorism-related issues. ISCTRC provides a comprehensive Open Source Intelligence Resource for analysts, risk management professionals, and students.

Content includes hundreds of full text journals and periodicals, hundreds of thousands of selected articles, news feeds, reports, summaries, books, blogs, FAQs, and proprietary Background Information Summaries that pertain to terrorism and security. ISCTRC also combines deep background from scholarly writings with expert commentary from a variety of organizations, agencies and publisher and timely reviews of recent developments across the international political, military, economic, social and technical spectrum.
An Images file of over 9,000 pertinent images has been added to the database. Users can access applicable images on a Result List, under the Images sub-tab.

Access: On library pagelook under Library Resources in "Find Articles-Databases." Then click on "EBSCO databases" and choose ISCTRC or

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=isctrc

What they're Reading on College Campuses

1. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
2. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Obama
3. Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
5. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. Flipping Brilliant: A Penguin's Guide to a Happy Life by Chester & Regan
7. Curious You: On Your Way by H. A. Roy
8. Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
9. I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
10. Skinny Bitch by Freedman and Barnouin

New Open Access Humanities Press

Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

The nonprofit operation—described by those involved as "an international open-access publishing collective"—made its official debut last week with a roster of seven already-established journals in critical and cultural studies and related fields: Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia, and Vectors.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

English class With an Edge

English teacher Andie Brown in Manchester, MO, believes in sedition--well, a form of it, anyway. She purposely gives her students the assignment to challenge the status quo, and they use technology as a means toward that end. The result is truly meaningful education; students learn that what they do may have a powerful impact. In her Vonnegut class, they study contemporary satire. The final assignment is for students in groups of two or three to create a three- to five-minute satiric film. (They used Mac computers and imovie as well as Youtube.)


"Ms Brown says, "figuring out a way to take advantage of something like YouTube was my aha moment. Students today sometimes don't believe that they can make a difference in society. In a pendulum swing that's polar, where my generation tuned out, this generation has plugged in, but the effect is the same. When the students see their small movie projects screened and really get to feel the response of the audience, they seem to deeply understand the place satire has in a free society. They also see that there are many, varied ways to seek change, but that humor and art are two of them." Wow!
Source: The Journal May 2008

Student Retention

Student Retention: Are Schools Taking Advantage of Technology?

College and university administrators consider personal attention to be the most critical factor in retaining at risk students. But what role should technology play in the effort? While many consider technology-based interventions important to student retention, few seem to be using such solutions, and only 2 percent have any kind of early warning system in place to identify at risk students, according to data released to Campus Technology by higher education strategy firm EducationDynamics.

Read Complete Article:
http://www.1105newsletters.com/t.do?id=1182711:1202596

National Library Legislative Day May 14

We need your voice to be heard on National Library Legislative Day (May 14)!
We need you to join the thousands of other librarians, library workers, trustees, and library users participating in "Virtual Library Legislative Day!"

Please take 10-15 minutes today or tomorrow to send a message to all of your congressional representatives, letting them know how important libraries are to society, and the need for:

more federal funding for libraries
a certified school media specialist in every school
fair copyright laws
an expanded role for libraries in E-Government
national security letter reform
ALA's Legislative Action Center provides you with talking points on these important issues. You can use them to craft your message as you wish, and send it to all of your representatives.

Thanks so much for taking a few minutes out of your day to help libraries across the nation

Book of the Week

Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter

This is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguisn live as they have for many years.Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their homes--and pretty much no one listens to him. It is based on Eight Steps that produce needed change in any sort of group. This book is now available in the library and was recommended by Jack Matthews.

Idea for Homeland Security

Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life

Imagine entering the virtual world Second Life to discover that a flu pandemic requires you, a health care professional, to attend to stricken patients lying on the streets around an over-capacity virtual hospital. When you report in to collect your virtual uniform, you're told what your responsibilities will be during the disaster and to whom you'll report.

Read Complete Article:
http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61150

The Blog is Back!

GREETINGS FROM CORNWALL

Celebrate Arbor Day

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

Free Access to GreenFile

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

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


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

CQ Researcher this week: Cost of the Iraq War

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

Source: CQ Researcher online

New Books for Homeland Security Students

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

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

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

Sand County Almanac

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

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

A Nation at Risk: 25 Years Later

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

Belated Happy Birthday to William Shakespeare

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

HAPPY EARTH DAY

New Design for LexisNexis

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

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

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

End of National Library Week

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

Global Researcher: Separatist Movements

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

CQ Researcher this Week: Public Defenders

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

Climate and the Stock Market

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

Science Research: Recommended Site

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

CafeScribe and Electronic Texts

Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks?

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

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

Improving Reading Skills in College

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

21st Century Literacies

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

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

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

Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?

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

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

NATIONAL LIBRARY WORKERS DAY

National Library Workers Day
April 15, 2008

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

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