Classroom Copyright Crisis

College professors receive next to no training on copyright law and fair-use doctrine, a new report argues, and their students are suffering as a result. “The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy,” released by American University’s Center for Social Media, is based on interviews that university researchers conducted with more than 60 media-literacy educators. Those interviews paint a fairly grim portrait of teachers, unsure about the specifics of fair-use doctrine, cowed into avoiding perfectly valid uses of copyrighted material.

“Too many teachers fear they will misinterpret fair use or are simply unaware of its expansive nature,” write the study’s authors, including Peter A. Jaszi, a professor of law. Because they are afraid of violating copyright, “teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms.” This would be a good topic for an in-service workshop.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Surfing History

Created by the University of Connecticut Libraries, these digitized volumes of public records of Connecticut during the colonial period include the transcription of the original records of the General Assembly. For those seeking more information on Connecticut's history online, here are some reliable starting points:

Colonial Connecticut Records 1636-1776 (colonialct.uconn.edu). Created by the University of Connecticut Libraries, these digitized volumes of public records of Connecticut during the colonial period include the transcription of the original records of the General Assembly.
Connecticut Historical Society (chs.org). Founded in 1825, this nonprofit center has special online exhibits highlighting the state's history and demographics.
Connecticut State Library ( http://www.cslib.org/). This portal provides access to state and local history, genealogy and public records.
Godfrey Memorial Library (godfrey.org). Based in Middletown, this celebrated collection of approximately 200,000 books and periodicals can be tapped into via its Godfrey Scholar Program, which enables members to access to a vast number of online databases.
iCONN (iconn.org). A part of the Connecticut Education Network, this service provides students, teachers and state residents with essential library and information resources, including access to The Courant and other newspaper archives. Specialized research information is also available to college students and faculty.

Source: (Hartford Courant)

College Sustainability Report Card 2008

zCollege campuses across the United States and Canada are stepping up green practices and policies, with more than two out of three schools showing improved performance over the last year, according to the new College Sustainability Report Card 2008.
College Sustainability Report Card 2008
Source: Sustainable Endowments Institute

APA 2007 Stress in America Report

One-third of Americans are living with extreme stress and nearly half of Americans (48 percent) believe that their stress has increased over the past five years. Stress is taking a toll on people — contributing to health problems, poor relationships and lost productivity at work, according to a new national survey released today by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Money and work continue as the leading causes of stress for three quarters of Americans, a dramatic increase over the 59 percent reporting the same sources of stress in 2006. The survey also found that the housing crisis is having an effect on many, with half of Americans (51 percent) citing rent or mortgage costs as sources of stress this year.
APA 2007 Stress in America Report
Source: American Psychological Association

CQ Researcher: Baby Boomers

In January, the oldest baby boomers will turn 62 — and become eligible to collect Social Security benefits. For the next 18 years, a member of the baby boom generation — the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — will reach that age every eight seconds. Boomers have long been famous for their desire to stay or at least act young. What will they be like as seniors? Many predict they will reshape the nation's view of old age, as healthier boomers continue to work and stay active longer than their parents. Others worry that the vast expansion of the nation's senior population will put unaffordable strains on government entitlement programs.Still others worry boomers could upset the economy as they begin spending down their assets all at once. Boomers have left their imprint on every stage of American life they've passed through, and there's no reason to think that the senior years will be any exception. Read the entire CQ Researcher report online. Contact the library staff for user name and password.

Source: CQ Researcher

Web Site: Knowledgespeak

Knowledgespeak is the world's first online news service to report all the relevant developments within the STM publishing industry, on a daily basis. This is a free service that also offers additional resources including a blog area, calendar of events, articles, white papers and a directory of STM publishers.

Who is STM? STM is an international association of about 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, over half the active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of print and electronic books, reference works and databases.
Source: Mary Laine, Librarian

New Recruiting Idea

Have we been missing out? Should we be recruiting at Mohegan Sun? Can poker capture — and improve — the minds of young Americans? Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor, insists that it can. He has set up a group called the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society with a clear mission: "the legitimation of poker."

While Congress has severely restricted online poker, Mr. Nesson and colleagues are creating an open, online poker community that hopes to persuade young, sharp-minded players to consider college. A good poker player makes a great college student, argues Mr. Nesson, an expert on evidence who has appeared several times before the U.S. Supreme Court and who founded and co-directs Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The organization (http://www.gpsts.org/) is forming chapters at several universities, including Boston, Brown, Tufts, and Stanford.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Education's End

I recommended this book, Education's End, in the Four Year Task Force meeting yesterday. According to author Anthony Kronman, the question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this book, Kronman explores why this he thinks this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education. Anthony T. Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Since stepping down as Dean of the Law School in 2004, he has been teaching in the Directed Studies Program at Yale. It will soon be in the Goodwin collection.

Economics and Murder: New books in the Library

Murder at the Margins by Marshall Jevons is an amusing mystery story that introdced a new method of detection: Professor Henry Spearman's "little grey cells" use the framework of microeconomic analysis to solve a sequence of murders. This novel is used as text book in colleges and high schools. The novel, also valuable as supplementary reading for introductory economics courses, gives a vivid display of how economic choices affect human behavior. Marshall Jevons is the pseudonym of William Brett and Kenneth G. Elzinga, both university professors of economics. The library has two more mysteries by Jevons: The Fatal Equilibrium and A Deadly Indifference--a painless and enjoyable way to learn some economics.

MRSA in Health Care Settings

MRSA has been featured in the news and on television programs a great deal recently. MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This type of bacteria causes “staph” infections that are resistant to treatment with usual antibiotics. MRSA occurs most frequently among patients who undergo invasive medical procedures or who have weakened immune systems and are being treated in hospitals and healthcare facilities such as nursing homes and dialysis centers.

MRSA in healthcare settings commonly causes serious and potentially life threatening infections, such as bloodstream infections, surgical site infections, or pneumonia. In addition to healthcare associated infections, MRSA can also infect people in the community at large, generally as skin infections that may look like pimples or boils and can be swollen, painful and have draining pus. These skin infections often occur in otherwise healthy people.
Source: Center for Disease Control (CDC)

Berkeleyh puts Courses on YouTube

University of California, Berkeley began making its course lectures and special events freely available on YouTube. At present, this amounts to more than 300 hours of captured courses and events. The university said it will continue to expand the volume and range of videos it makes available to the public. "UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life--academics, events and athletics--which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education, in a prepared statement.
Source: Campus Technology

More Power to Government Regulators?

Americans have been alarmed by recent product recalls, including toothpaste containing an ingredient found in antifreeze, tainted pet food and millions of Mattel toys containing toxic lead paint. The recalls — all involving Chinese-made products — prompted government hearings that spotlighted problems at the underfunded and, critics say, overwhelmed Consumer Product Safety Commission. Meanwhile, inspectors found contamination in imported seafood as well as millions of pounds of U.S.-produced ground beef, triggering concerns that the two agencies responsible for food safety — the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture — were also understaffed and underpowered. While food and product safety scares are not new, the skyrocketing growth of Asian imports has forced even industry groups to call for stepped-up consumer protection. Consumer advocates salute the trend but warn that some industries may be seeking to regulate themselves in an effort to preempt Congress from passing tougher laws.

Source: CQ Researcher 10/12/07 (available in the library, password protected subscription)

Nobel Literature Prize to Lessing

It's about time. "Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her engagement with the social and political issues of her time, yesterday won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature." (first paragraph from the New York Times article today)

Ms Lessing is best known for her series of novels Children of Violence , written in the 1950s and featuring her heroine Martha Quest, whose growth in consciousness reflected the author's concerns over social justice. Her first, semi-autobiographical novel, The Grass is Singing , addressed the culture clashes and racial discrimination she encountered during her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

She was most influential with her 1960's novel, The Golden Notebook, which examined the multiple aspects of the life of a woman, Anna Wulf, in an experimental style. The feminist movement regarded it as a pioneering work. She went on to experiment with a variety of styles, publishing her most recent novel, Cleft, in January. She is 88 years old. The previous two winners were Orhan Pamuk of Turkey and Harold Pinter of Britain.

New Sunday Library Hours

TheGoodwin library will be open Sundays from 12 to 5:30. This is in reponse to student requests for expanded hours.

Racial Diversity in the Public School

Has the Supreme Court dealt a blow to integration?

CQ Researcher 9/14/07

Fifty years after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, a new ruling has raised doubts about how far local school boards can go to integrate classrooms. The court's 5-4 ruling in cases from Seattle and Louisville bars school districts from using race as a factor in individual pupil assignments. Like many other school districts, the two school systems used racial classifications to promote diversity in the face of segregated housing patterns.

This 20 page report is available online, password protected. Contact the library staff for the user name and password.

New Feature: Famous Libraries I Have Seen

The Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford and one of the highlights of any visit to Oxford. Its collections are used by scholars from around the world.

The Bodleian Library is really not one library but many, housed in buildings all over the city of Oxford. The historic core of the Bodleian is located around Radcliffe Square, however, with the oldest parts being the magnificent Duke Humphrey's Library (1488)--shown here. It is now the second largest library in the UK (after the British Library in London).

The Bodleian receives a copy of every new book printed in Britain, a practice that began in 1610, so that the library contains an unrivaled 400 year record of British literature. The Bodleian is unique in that it is not a lending library - no books can be borrowed, only read on the premises. The Bodleian takes this restriction seriously; in a famous case, King Charles I was refused permission to borrow a book.

Open Course Ware

Tufts University http://ocw.tufts.edu/

Here's a treasure trove from one of our most prestigious universities: the site provides free access to the syllabus, calendar, lectures, and slides for a variety of courses, primarily in the health sciences.
Source: Mary Laine, Librarian

Play the Candidate Match Game

It seems like everyone is running for president. How will you decided whom to support? This quiz from USA Today asks you 11 questions on issues ranging from Iraq to taxes. Answer each question and see how the candidates stak up. When you're finished, see how that changes which candidates are on your side. Take the quiz!
Source: USA Today

Astronomy Media Player

This is a collection of the best astronomy podcasts from around the world." Includes astronomy courses, observations of the night sky, "ask an astronomer" podcasts, and podcasts from observatories and space agencies. The media player was created as something that will play both audio and video - specifically for astronomy (that includes the night sky, planetary science, astrophysics and cosmology). The aim was to make it easier for everyone to find the astronomy multimedia resources that are out there and perhaps be entertained at the same time.

http://www.jodcast.net/amp/index.html

Crowded Course at Harvard

The final numbers came in this week: Positive Psychology, a class whose content resembles that of many a self-help book but is grounded in serious psychological research, has enrolled 855 students, beating out even Introductory Economics.

Every Tuesday and Thursday at 11:30 a.m., students crowd into Sanders Theatre to learn about creating, as the course description puts it, ''a fulfilling and flourishing life," courtesy of the booming new area of psychology that focuses on what makes people feel good rather than the pathologies that can make them feel miserable.

In the last several years, positive psychology classes have cropped up on more than 100 campuses around the country. But with such an enormous course enrollment, Tal D. Ben-Shahar, the lecturer who teaches Harvard's course, ''is the leader of the pack right now." Ben-Shahar has written book that covers some of the material in the class; it is called "Happier."
Source: Boston.com Local News