Resource of the Week: Maps and More Maps

UN Environmental Programme Maps and Graphics Library
Are there any other map junkies out there besides me? Then you know that there is no such thing as too many maps. So enjoy this database at the UNEP/GRID- Arendal Maps and Graphics library currently containing more than 1,000 items.

What you need to know about UNEP/GRID-Arendal:
The mission of GRID-Arendal is to provide environmental information, communications and capacity building services for information management and assessment. They focus on making credible, science-based knowledge understandable to the public and supporting decision-making for sustainable development. Actually, there's a whole lot of stuff available on/from this website besides the maps and graphics library, including:
* Vital Ozone Graphics - resource kit for journalists
* Global Outlook for Ice & Snow report
* UNEP (coastal) Shelf Programme One Stop Data Shop
* The EarthWire news portal
* Globalis, an interactive world atlas

Administration Alert

Your competitors are reading these books. Shouldn't you?

Reframing Persistence Research to Improve Academic Success
Economic Inequality and Higher Education
Understanding and Reducing College Student Departure
College Student Retention
Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle
What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited

These books are in the library now. Readers of the Blog can be the first to read them. Do I hear my phone ringing?

Bioethics Topics for Health Sciences

From the University of Washington School of Medicine we have a wide variety of topics in medical ethics. "Each topic begins with an overview and a series of commonly asked questions. In addition, there are several case-based scenarios with discussions linked to each topic. Links to additional readings and related websites are included at the end of topic."
http://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/index.html

Selling the College to Students

Times are only getting tougher for small private liberal-arts colleges and small colleges in general, but a prominent management consultant said on Tuesday that they can help themselves by emphasizing their advantages.

The consultant, George Dehne, said that to attract the best students, small colleges need to update their marketing campaigns to advertise not just that they have small class sizes but why that is important.

Colleges should be emphasizing to students that "you have to be prepared—you can't hide in a small class," he said at a session of the annual meeting here of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "You have to be able to defend your views. You are going to learn from others."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education February 6

Where is the Goodwin Second Life Island?

S.A.T. Prep in Second Life
The Princeton Review already has its SAT LiveOnline courses, and Ohio University already has an island and an expert Second Life (SL) developer. Together, they are offering a series of SAT strategy sessions in a Second Life site within the Ohio University island at Second Life. Who is our Second Life developer?

Online Focus

U of Colorado Classroom Capture Supports Distance Learning for Military. Soldiers in the United States military who want to take college courses while they're deployed overseas face some tough challenges. But they can also represent an attractive market for universities.
Read Complete Article:
http://www.1105newsletters.com/t.do?id=862264:1202596
Source: Smart Classroom

WYSIWYG ???

All Acronyms
http://www.all-acronyms.com/

Maybe you should use this site if you don't know a WYSIWYG from a WHAP. The number of acronyms seems to grow by the day. Use this tool, which lists over 600,000 of them, to browse and search for acronyms across many subject areas: business, government, technology, military, and others. Once you get the definition, the site provides links to other sources that may provide further information. There are separate sections for abbreviations and acronyms for countries, the U.S., and Canadian postal organizations and time zones.
Source: Information Outlook January 2008

Entrepreneurship & American Economy

Each year, the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration is tasked with documenting the importance of entrepreneurship to the American economy and with highlighting policy issues of relevance to small firms. This report summarizes the publications produced by the Office of Advocacy’s Office of Economic Research in 2007.
SBA — Research Publications, 2007

Finding Government Information

Did you know you can browse the US Code in LexisNexis Academic? The following is a list of browsable sources related to the USCS that you can access by entering their names (in quotes) in the Find option under the Sources tab.
USCS - Constitution of the United States
United States Code Service - Titles 1 through 50
USCS - Federal Rules Annotated
USCS - International Conventions
USCS-Title 26;Internal Revenue Code Annotated
CFR - Code of Federal Regulations

Electronic Reference Library Update

CREDOREFERENCE NOW HAS 300 BOOKS FROM 58 PUBLISHERS. The collection continues to expand and now includes over 3 million entries. 80 titles - 41 new and 39 updates - were added in the past year. You have easy access to all of this from the library page http://www.goodwincollege.org/library/index.htm.

This database recently added more in-depth, encyclopedic books, including 11 RUSA award-winners from Routledge (a $2700+ print value!). A few of the new titles include: Encyclopedia of African History • Encyclopedia of American Folk Art • Reader's Guide to the History of Science • Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy • Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development • Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia including Atlas (with animations, sound clips, video and more) • Cambridge World History of Food • Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia. See a complete list of titles added in the past year.

AND COMING SOON - 7 key titles from Harvard University Presswill be added, including Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World • New Harvard Guide to Women's Health • The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 • Keywords and Concepts In Evolutionary Developmental Biology. PLUS all 5 volumes of the Notable American Women series -- biographies of exceptional women from 1607 to the end of the 20th century. Exciting new titles are constantly being added to your subscription. See a complete list at corp.credoreference.com/forthcoming.

New Database Feature

Did you ever want to know whether our iCONN databases have a particular magazine, journal or newspaper? Now, there is a quick way to find that out without having to check the individual title lists of every database in iCONN. It is called "E-Journal Finder" and you will find it on a tab at the top of every iCONN search screen. It answers questions like:
Does iCONN have articles from Consumer Reports?
Can I get a Scientific American article from 1979?
What years of the Christian Science Monitor are in iCONN?

When you click on the tab, you will be taken to an intermediate page where you can select the appropriate version of E-Journal Finder: one for public/school databases and one for college databases. All titles listed are full-text titles. No authentication is required to access the E-Journal Finder site directly(http://www.iconn.org/staff/ejournals.aspx) or to search for a title.


The need to authenticate occurs when you click on a desired title in order to access its contents. If you are in a library, you will go directly to the title using IP authentication. If you are at home, you can access also if you have set up the virtual private network on your computer. (The instructions for doing this are on the library page and on the student intranet. If you have questions about this, call us.)

Black History Month Resource

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

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

Homelnd Security Critical Releases

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

FREE TRIALS

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

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

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

Career Resources

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

Members of WALDO

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

Free Health Research Toolkit

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

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

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

New Books

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

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

New Database: CQ Global Researcher

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

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

Most Literate U.S. Cities 2007

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