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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!