New Version NLM Gateway

A new version of the National Library of Medicine Gateway was released recently. Changes include the following:
Access to a new collection, "Bookshelf," was added to the NLM Gateway in the Bibliographic Resources category. The Bookshelf is a growing collection of full text biomedical books, and includes other resources such as GeneReviews and Health Services/Technology Assessment Text (HSTAT). The Bookshelf home page provides a complete book list.
Access to a new collection, "Household Products Database," was added to the NLM Gateway in the Consumer Health Resources category. The Household Products Database is a consumer's guide that provides information on the potential health effects of chemicals contained in more than 5,000 common household products used inside and around the home. The fact sheet provides additional information on this resource.
The results summary page will now display Error if an error is encountered in searching a particular collection or N/A if a search is not applicable to a particular collection. Previously, a hit count of zero was displayed. Default text and link colors are now being set. Visited results links will now change to the visited link color.
A warning message ("One or more search terms were dropped. See Search Details") is now displayed on the results page if part of a user search query is dropped, but the search is still run and results are returned to the user.
Additional fields - Investigator Link, Performing Organization Link, Performing Organization Phone, Supporting Agency Link, and Supporting Agency Phone - have been added to HSRPRoj.

For Your Reading Pleasure

The Notable Books Council of the American Library Association, annually selects titles for their significant contribution to the expansion of knowledge or for the pleasure they can provide to adult readers. Goodwin Library has the following titles from the current 2006 list:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander
Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishguro
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea
Bound for Canaan by F. Bordewich

Stop in the library to find summer reading selections.

Goodwin College As Entrepreneur

Goodwin College's growth and riverfront campus are featured on the front page of the Hartford Courant today in an article by Dan Uhlinger. "Goodwin College as Entrepreneur" is the headline. Read the article here!
http://www.courant.com/hc-goodwin0703.artjul03,0,1938310.story

New ICONN Resources

We have added EBSCO's History Reference Center, Science Reference Center, Student Research Center and 5 new Gale e-book reference titles to iCONN. The new EBSCO resources replace the Gale History Resource Centers (U.S. and World) which have been removed from iCONN.

Check the E-Books page to see these new Gale Virtual Reference Library titles:
Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security
Encyclopedia of Population
Fashion, Costume, and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations and Footwear through the Ages
Renaissance: an Encyclopedia for Students
Encyclopedia of Landforms and Other Geologic Features

New Orleans Library Conference

“You are pioneers, and you are sending a signal to the world that says New Orleans is okay,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin told librarians at the opening session of the American Library Association’s June 22–28 Annual Conference in the Big Easy, the largest convention in the city since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region in August and September 2005. With some 17,000 llibrarians streaming into New Orleans, the conference was an economic shot in the arm estimated at about $20 million.

Among the other major conference speakers were Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, Cokie Roberts, and Anderson Cooper. Keynoting the Opening General Session, Albright congratulated librarians for keeping the faith with the people of New Orleans. She called libraries “the laboratory of freedom” and “the biggest bargain on the face of the earth.”
(Your librarian was there!)

100 Years of US Consumer Spending

Students frequently come to the library looking for statistical information for sociology or business class assignments. This report offers a new approach to the use of Consumer Expenditure Survey data. Normally, the survey presents an in depth look at American households at a specific point in time. Here, the authors use consumer expenditure data longitudinally and draw on information from decennial census reports to present a 100-year history of significant changes in consumer spending, economic status, and family demographics in the country as a whole, as well as in New York City and Boston.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/

Children's Literature

THE HEROIC IDEAL REVISITEDJULY 30 - AUGUST 5, 2006, COLCHESTER, VERMONT
Children's Literature New England's twentieth and culminating annual summer institute will be held at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont (outside of Burlington). Participants will consider Paul Hazard's question "How would heroism be kept alive in our aging earth if not by each fresh, young generation that begins anew the epic of the human race."

Children’s Literature New England, Inc., is a nonprofit educational charity incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts to promote awareness of the significance of literature in the lives of children. It was founded in 1987.

New Browser Shelf: Notable Books

I heard Uzodinma Iewala speak about his first novel, Beasts of No Nation, at the American Library conference last week in New Orleans. It is the first addition to our new Browser shelf of Notable Books.

Few things can be more extreme than forcing a child to become a soldier. This is a slim novel with green grass, billowy clouds and a silhouetted group of youngsters on the cover. It all looks so nonthreatening, but don't be fooled. When you open this book, be ready. The story is told by Agu, who is somewhere between the age of nine and 12; and from page one, the writer snatches the reader in and does not let go until the end.

When Agu's West African village (the country is never specified) is attacked by soldiers and his father is killed, Agu (his name means "leopard" or "lion" in Igbo) escapes. He soon joins a group of militants and is forced to commit the most heinous atrocities. In turn, terrible things are done to Agu, Only another child-soldier named Strika helps Agu maintain his humanity.

Iweala was named the winner of the New York Public Library's Lions Fiction Award for this novel that honors a writer of distinction under the age of 35. He also won the Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers Award” for fiction.

If you have a recommendation for the Browser Shelf, let me know.

Upgrades to ICONN and reQuest

Last night there was an upgrade to iCONN and reQuest. This message explains the buttons that appear under "What would you like to do next?" that displays on the left-hand side of a bibliographic record, just under the area that contains the book jacket art, table of contents, etc.

Under "What would you like to do next?" you will see:
* "Buy this item": this button currently contains links to Amazon, Addall, Alibris, and Barnes and Noble.
* "Request this item": this button contains a link to the ILL form.
* "Suggest My Library Purchase": this button contains a link to a Suggest form.

Mathematical Imagery

Mathematical Imagery is a site that explores the visualization of mathematics. The home page introduction notes that "the connection between mathematics and art goes back thousands of years. Mathematics has been used in the design of Gothic cathedrals, Rose windows, oriental rugs, mosaics and tilings. Geometric forms were fundamental to the cubists and many abstract expressionists, and award-winning sculptors have used topology as the basis for their pieces. Dutch artist M.C. Escher represented infinity, Möbius bands, tessellations, deformations, reflections, Platonic solids, spirals, symmetry, and the hyperbolic plane in his works." There are also links to galleries, museums, and articles.
Source: Mathematical Imagery

Four New DVDs

"Oil on Ice" is a vivid, compelling and comprehensive documentary connecting the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to decisions America makes about energy policy, transportation choices, and other seemingly unrelated matters.

"French Fries to Go” is an award winning film that documents the origins of Telluride’s Biodiesel project, which resulted in the launching of the first city bus in the nation to run on 100% pure Biodiesel.

"Spotted in the Woods" shows the effects of the loss of habitat on the Northern Spotted Owl. This 8 minute video shows how our consumption of wood and paper is linked to the shrinking areas of old-growth forest that these owls need to survive.

"Architecture to Zucchini" is an educational video on the principles of sustainability and their application within a variety of industries. The DVD includes interviews and facility tours, featuring case studies of eight successful, socially responsible companies of various sizes and four nationally recognized non-profit organizations that support sustainability

Are You a Yankee or a Rebel

"If you say "pa-JAM-uzz" instead of "pa-JAHM-zz" or "yooz guys" instead of "ya'll," chances are, you're a Yankee. If you call a bag a sack, you're probably a rebel. Take the online quiz to determine where you are coming from."
"http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/yankeetest.html
Source: National Public Radio

Small,Smaller, Smallest

Diminutive autos are all over in European cities where parking is almost nonexistent and gas is over $4.00 a gallon. You can see Tom Hanks zip around Paris in one in "The Da Vinci Code." Until recently, you couldn't buy one of these in the United States. But now, ZAP, a California company whose name stands for Zero Auto Pollution, has started importing the 60-mpg cars. The company believes that the tiny two seaters will ride the same wave of popularity that has made the Mini Cooper a hit and spawned a new class of compacts that includes the Honda Fit, the Toyota Yaris, and the Nissan Versa.
Source: Sierra Club

Friday's Featured Journal: The Hedgehog Review

This is a new feature on the blog, highlighting something from the Goodwin Library Collection every Friday.

The Hedgehog Review is an interdisciplinary, academic journal of critical reflections on contemporary culture, published three times a year by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Each issue addresses a single theme with articles, interviews, book reviews, and a bibliographic review written by leading scholars from throughout the disciplines. By focusing attention from many vantage points on one topic, the journal strives for both the breadth of the fox and the depth of the hedgehog. Working against the current fragmentation and isolation of academic inquiry, this journal poses hard questions, pursues knotty controversies, and pushes intellectual discussions beyond their current impasse. The current issue pursues the topic "After Secularization."

Where does the title come from?
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."--Archilocus

BMC Journals Integrate With CITULIKE

CiteULike is a free web site that allows you to keep track of your favourite articles, tag them with keywords, and share them with others. A key feature that makes CiteULike easy to use is that it provides a button to add to your web browser. When you click on that button, when viewing any article on a website supported by CiteULike, the bibliographic details for the article concerned will be automatically retrieved and added to your CiteULike library.

CiteULike now supports all 150+ BioMed Central journals, making it easy to add BioMed Central articles with a single click. What's more, the latest articles from all BioMed Central journals are now listed on the CiteULike electronic table of contents page.
Source: BMC Update, June 13, 2006

History Reference Center at Goodwin College

Beginning July 1, the Goodwin College Community will have access to Ebsco’s History Reference Center, the world’s most comprehensive full text history reference database. The database features full text for more than 1,500 reference books, encyclopedias and non-fiction books from leading history publishers The database also includes full text for more than 100 leading history periodicals including America's Civil War, American Heritage, American Historical Review, American History, Archaeology, Aviation History, Beaver, British Heritage, Chinese America: History & Perspectives, Civil War Times, Foreign Affairs, German History, History, History Review, History Today (back to January 1975), History: Review of New Books, Kansas History, Journal of American History, Manitoba History, Military History, Naval History, North Carolina Historical Review, Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, Wild West, World War II and more. Further, the database contains 58,000 historical documents; 43,000 biographies of historical figures; more than 12,000 historical photos and maps; and more than 80 hours of historical video. Imagine what you can do with this!

Our library will gain access to the full text content from 91 journals not currently available through InfoTrac OneFile, our largest aggregated database.

LABAs May Make Asthma Worse

Long-acting ß-agonists may make asthma worse. A study in Annals of Internal Medicine analyzed date from 19 clinical trials involving 33, 826 patients. Those using the drugs were twice as likely to have life-threatening asthma attacks as patients on a placebo and 2.5 times as likely to be hospitalized. LABAs may also be responsible for thousands of asthma deaths each year in the United States, according to this study.
Source: Online Annals of Internal Medicine June 20, 2006 Volume 144 Issue 12

It's All About You

"Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you."

"A little over two years ago, even the most sensitive entrepreneurial radar could not pick out two pairs of people on opposite ends of the West Coast starting companies that would make plenty out of nothing. The southern California guys head MySpace, the prime hangout for 65 million (mostly young) people, and thousands of rock bands, movie stars and marketers begging for their attention. Canadian-born Flickr, by building a 2.5 million-member community solely around a passion for sharing photos, has become a poster child on how a well-executed Net effort can make big changes in people's habits. Welcome to the new tech boom."
Source: "The New Wisdom of the Web" Newsweek April 3, 2006

English Club for ESL

Welcome to EnglishClub.com, an ESL web site designed for students or teachers of English. It's a club, where one can:
study English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation
play ESL games and do ESL quizzes online
discuss anything with other students and teachers around the world
find English schools worldwide to learn ESL at home or abroad
find pen pals to email in English
find ESL learning aids to improve English
test levels in English
get help on English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation

Virtual Reference for Goodwin

The Goodwin Library is participating in the 2006-2007 InfoAnyTime Pilot Project, a statewide virtual reference service sponsored by the Connecticut Library Consortium. InfoAnyTime is a real-time, web-based reference service that provides live librarians to assist students and faculty in finding information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sessions will be conducted via online chat, using pushing and co-browsing technology to display information found on the web and in the ICONN databases. No special software is required. Our participation is scheduled to begin July 1. Keep checking this blog for further details.