Dragon Boat Festival Today

Today, June 19, is Dragon Boat Festival day. A few years ago, Goodwin College competed in the dragon boat races in Hartford.

Chu’ü Yüan (343–289 B.C.) was a Chinese poet and statesman of the Ch’u kingdom who drowned himself in the Mi Lo River to protest the political corruption and injustice. The colorful dragon boat races that take place on lakes and rivers throughout China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on this day are a reenactment of the search for his body, which was never found. Although the shape of the boats has changed over time, most are narrow shells about 30-feet long with a dragon’s head at the prow. This is also a traditional time for performing customs intended to drive away evil spirits and illness.
Source: Xreferplus Database

Xreferplus New Titles

A number of new titles have been added to Xreferplus in the past month, including the American Heritage Medical Dictionary. New treatments, new tests, and new insights into health and disease have resulted in an unprecedented explosion in medical terminology. The American Heritage Medical Dictionary provides students and health care professionals with a comprehensive reference that reflects the most recent developments in medicine and health care delivery. More than 45,000 clear, concise definitions are included, covering diseases and conditions, treatments, and microorganisms. Hundreds of entries for commonly prescribed and over-the-counter medications are also featured. Biographical entries describe the contributions of leading scientists and physicians from ancient times to the present. We will feature a new entry in Xreferplus each day this week. Xreferplus is accessible from the library page.

Free Library Database Trial

Free Goodwin College Library Database Trials
New Trial through August, 2007: A to Z Reader:

This is very cool! Easily locate and link to all the library's e-resources with EBSCO A to Z.
Search for journals by keyword or browse an alphabetical list by title or subject. Go ahead--try it. Some of the psychology classes are required to use the British journal, The Lancet, for research. See if our students have access to that journal.
click here.

New Books in the Library

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon --At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, this is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written. He won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander--This first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons told with exuberant wit and invention, a cosmic sense of the absurd, and a genius for balancing joyfulness and despair. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander captures the grief of a nation.

Gilgamesh, a new English version by Stephen Mitchell--Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature. Mitchell's version allows us to enter this ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it still is.

Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions by Kenneth D. Crews--Copyright in the world of digital information is changing at a fevered pace. It's essential to stay abreast of copyright law and fair use without information overload.

No Child Law Left Behind

Nearly two-thirds of American adults want Congress to re-write or outright abolish the landmark No Child Left Behind Act that mandates nationwide testing of elementary students to determine if public schools are performing adequately.Opposition is especially high among people most familiar with the law, according to a survey of 1,010 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.
Read the article here: http://newspolls.org/story.php?story_id=63

Source: Scripps Howard News Service

Teaching English Language Learners

As the numbers of English language learners increase in the nation, the numbers of English language learners increase in our classrooms. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recognizes bilingual and bicultural education as basic components of the English language arts field. Teachers of English can become familiar with bilingual education aims and methods and draw upon English as a Second Language literature for help in meeting the needs of those students through the suggestions in the "NCTE Position Paper on Educating English Language Learners."
Source: NCTE

FBI Warns New England Colleges

The FBI is cautioning colleges in New England to look out for potential terrorist or espionage threats, The Boston Globe reported this morning.As part of an outreach effort, federal agents are offering colleges tips on how to be alert to threats to their research — for example, foreign spies who could be posing as international students. The agents have already met with several college administrators in Massachusetts to discuss protecting research, and they plan to travel to other New England colleges in the coming months.

The agents say the visits are not designed to infiltrate academe. “The academic community is designed to be open, and we just have to make the community aware,” Warren T. Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, told the Globe. “There are people who would be willing to establish relationships to take secrets.” —Lyndsey Lewis
Source: Boston Globe

College Presidents Going Green

American leaders of higher education are pledging to forge ahead with concrete steps aimed at making their campuses "climate neutral" as soon as possible. At a ceremony here on Tuesday, 70 college presidents and chancellors signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, which has been joined by a total of 284 presidents to date, representing institutions with a total enrollment of two million students in 45 states. Read the commitment.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

A Losing Battle

An independent review of the Sheff v. O"Neill school desegregation case reports little progress so far, according to Robert Frahm's front page article in the Hartford Courant this morning. The Trinity College report will be issued today.
Read more at http://www.courant.com/trinity-report.

Source: Hartford Courant

New Rules for College Loans

Colleges would be required to give students information to help them shop around among loan providers under proposed changes in student-loan programs announced by the U.S. Department of Education.

The proposed regulations represent the department's most significant response to date to the continuing controversy over conflicts of interest in the student-loan industry. They were issued in a 225-page document posted on the department's Web site on June 1, six weeks after negotiations over the changes ended in an impasse and a month after the attorney general of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, accused the department of exercising lax oversight of the programs.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Free Community College: A Plan or A Dream

Gov. Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts has captured national attention with a plan to make community college free for all of his state's high-school graduates. But experts on higher-education policy and key players in Massachusetts politics say the details of his plan — which have yet to emerge — are what will determine whether his idea is the workable product of a visionary or the never-to-be-realized hope of a dreamer.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

No Edge for Technology

A major federal study of reading and mathematics software has found no difference in academic achievement between students who used the technology in their classrooms and youngsters who used other methods.
Source: Eduweek

Open Source Meeting

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Open Source
New England Library Association
Information Technology Section
Tower Hill Botanic Gardens, Boylston, MA
June 6, 2007

Alicia Cornelio and I attended this meeting specifically to hear about Koha, an open source integrated library sytem we are considering for the Goodwin Library. Joshua Ferraro of LibLime talked about open source integrated library systems, specifically Koha and Evergreen, and about his company, LibLime, which provides support and/or hosting for libraries who choose open source ILSs and can’t or don’t want to rely exclusively on in-house talent. The implementations of Koha that Joshua showed us were simply stunning. (Here’s one; here’s another, and another; and another [!!!]. Go play with them now. I’ll understand if you don’t come back.)

Campus Guide to Copyright compliance

The Copyright Clearance Center designed this guide to help answer questions ranging from basic copyright law to the more complex topics of ILL and e-reserves. Take the quiz to test your understanding of copyright compliance.
http://www.copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/

Source: Copyright Clearance Center Online

Regional Accrediting Agencies

With an invitation from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to play a bigger role in federal accreditation policy (see "Stacking the Deck"), the Education Department's National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity recommended last week that the department deny recognition to a division of one of the six regional accrediting agencies. The panel rejected a recommendation by the department’s staff to extend (for 18 months and with significant reservations) recognition of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’s Commission on Technical and Career Institutions. Also see Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2007

Benefits of College for Everybody

Jay Matthews, Washington Post Reporter wrote recently that "many colleges are worrying, with good reason, about the small portion of low-income students entering their freshman classes. The book "Passing The Torch," by Paul Attewell and David E. Lavin, sociologists at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, explains that the failure to welcome more such students into college not only reduces their chances for greater income and more choices, but ignores a golden opportunity to raise their children to a higher intellectual and social level, and increase the chances that they also will attend college." Read the article here. The book will be in the library soon!
Source: Washington Post Online, May 29, 2007

U.S. Faces Critical Shortage of Nurses

National Public Radio featured a segment on the nursing shortage Sunday, June 3. "The demand for nurses is soaring, but it isn't easy to get into nursing school these days because there aren't enough teachers.," according to the broadcast. Read about it or listen here. National Public Radio podcasts are great and free!
Source: National Public Radio

StemCells and Cloning: Critical Issues

The Scientist, a magazine about life science, pushed ahead recently with innovation that recasts the usual publication process. Taking a page from the likes of Wikipedia, OhMyNews, and even Scientific American, over a period of a month the editors asked readers to post their views on the critical issues surrounding stem cells and cloning, and how they might be solved (see www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53034/). This online forum formed the basis of their featured article here.
Source: The Scientist

Solution to Textbook Market

"College textbooks are expensive because the market for them is broken, and the solutions many colleges and state legislatures are developing are not enough, a federal panel says in a report scheduled for release today.

In the report, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises Congress, discourages the passage of more state and federal laws on the textbook-cost issue. Instead, it proposes the creation of a "national digital marketplace" that would allow instructors to select and students to buy custom-designed texts -- a chapter from one book, a case study from another -- while protecting fair-use allowances and publishers' copyrights." This is quoted from an article by Sara Lipka in today's report in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Do you have any comments on the cost of textbooks or possible solutions to the broken market? What do you think about a digital marketplace? Click on [Comments] below and let us know what you think.

Health Science Students: PubMed Search Tip

I have been asked recently how to search for specific age groups in PubMed. I use the limits feature-- and sometimes the mesh heading for that group i.e. child, child preschool, infant, infant newborn, aged, middle aged, adult, adolescents etc.

When doing searching for age groups, do not use pediatrics, geriatrics, obstetrics etc. These are medical disciplines that deal with specific age groups but the medical subheadings refer to the medical discipline not the age range. Instruction on using PubMed and other databases is available free of charge at the library.