National Library Week

National Library Week is observed this week with the theme, "Worlds connect @ your library®."

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate.

National Library Workers Day, celebrated the Tuesday of National Library Week (April 14, 2009), is a day for library staff, users, administrators and Friends groups to recognize the valuable contributions made by all library workers.

Where Have All the Teachers Gone?

"Over 50 percent of the nation’s teachers and principals are Baby Boomers. During the next four years we could lose a third of our most accomplished educators to retirement. The wave of departures will peak during the 2010-11 school year, when over one hundred thousand veteran teachers could leave. In less than a decade more than half of today’s teachers – 1.7 million – could be gone.

We can’t recruit our way out of this problem. Wholesale replacement of accomplished veterans with inexperienced beginners is a bad bet. Beginning teacher attrition rates have been rising steadily for more than a decade. By some estimates, over a third of the nation’s new teachers leave the profession within three years. In some school districts half of the new hires are replaced every five years. The schools in these districts struggle to close the student achievement gap, because precious resources and time are consumed by constant efforts to rebuild their staff."
Source: Report "Learning Teams: Creating What's Next" from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future April 7 2009

CQ Researcher: Extreme Sports

The wild world of so-called extreme sports ranges from motorcyclists executing double back flips to kayakers navigating deadly Class 5 rapids to mixed martial arts (MMA) — also known as “ultimate fighting” — where combatants use kicks, punches and stress holds. But many “extreme” athletes reject the label, arguing that the term marginalizes their sports as the sole province of adrenaline and violence junkies, when they actually require high degrees of skill. Now legislatures in New York and other states are considering bans on MMA. Proponents say the matches, legal at the pro level in 37 states, are safer than boxing and emphasize fighters' broad-based martial-arts training. But opponents argue that allowing such a wide variety of aggressive moves in a single fight is barbaric. However, skateboarders and other extreme athletes cite statistics showing that traditional sports such as boxing and football cause injuries and deaths at a higher rate than any of the extreme sports. The new CQ Researcher report comes out every Friday and is available online for the Goodwin community (password protected).

Source: CQ Researcher April 3 2009
Image: Georges St. Pierre pummels BJ Penn during their mixed martial arts title match last Jan. 31 in Las Vegas. St. Pierre won when the fight was stopped after four rounds. (AP Photo/Eric Jamison)

Public Health in General Education

Ask 10 people what an educated citizen should study and you’re bound to get 10 different answers (albeit with some overlap). The Educated Citizen and Public Health Initiative continues to make its case that public health should make any such list, and recently released a set of recommendations for integrating public health into general and liberal education. “This is not about professional education. This is about citizenship,” said Susan Albertine, co-author of "Recommendations for Undergraduate Public Health Education." Read more here.
Source: Inside Higher Education April 2 2009

Before Your Time: Universal Newsreels

Friday's history lesson introduces you to the newsreel. Most of your are too young to know what a newsreel is. In the pre-TV era, people saw the news every week in their neighborhood movie theaters. Newsreels were shown before every feature film and in dedicated newsreel theaters located in large cities. Universal Newsreel, produced from 1929 to 1967, was released twice a week. Each issue contained six or seven short stories, usually one to two minutes in length, covering world events, politics, sports, fashion, and whatever else might entertain the movie audience. These newsreels offer a fascinating and unique view of an era when motion pictures defined our culture and were a primary source of visual news reporting.

Universal City Studios gifted Universal Newsreel to the American people, put the newsreels into the public domain, and gave film materials to the National Archives in 1976. Surviving materials from the entire collection are available at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.
Browse the collection.
source: Universal Newsreels. The image is from Flickr.

Robot Scientists Make Original Discoveries

In recent decades, robots have replaced millions of manual laborers; now they're moving in on scientists, too. Computer scientist Ross King of Aberystwyth University along with systems biologists at the University of Cambridge, U.K., developed a robot named Adam to identify genes involved in yeast metabolism. Adam doesn't look so much like an android as a huge box of Rube Goldberg–type equipment. But it does far more than just analyze cells.

Using algorithms programmed by scientists, Adam formulates hypotheses about the origins of "orphan enzymes": enzymes for which scientists have been unable to identify the encoding genes. The robot then plans and executes experiments to test its hypotheses--selecting yeast mutants from a collection, incubating cells, and measuring their growth rates. As King's team reports this week in Science, Adam came up with 20 hypotheses about genes encoding 13 enzymes, 12 of which it confirmed.

Computer scientist David Waltz says "There's an interesting message from this and perhaps a daunting one for some scientists." In the future, he says, scientists, in order to carry out their work, "might have to learn how to program computers and express knowledge about the world the way people in artificial intelligence have done."
Source: Constance Holden in ScienceNOW Daily News 2 April 2009

CQ Researcher: Future of Newspapers

"Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked that if he had to choose between government without newspapers or newspapers without government, he wouldn't hesitate to preserve newspapers. Today, however, newspapers across the country are declining in circulation, advertising and profitability. Some are ceasing to publish. Others are reducing or closing Washington and state-capital bureaus, laying off staff and cutting back the news coverage they provide.

Many journalists, scholars, political activists and government officials worry that government without newspapers could be on the horizon, and that citizens then would be unable to obtain sufficient information for effective self-government. As more Americans turn to the Internet and cable television for news, however, others are hopeful that new forms of journalism will fill the gaps. Meanwhile, newspapers are attempting to give themselves new birth online."

Source: CQ Reearcher March 27
Image: After publishing for 150 years, Denver's Rocky Mountain News shut down on Feb. 27, ending daily newspaper competition in the city. Scores of other papers are cutting staffs, closing bureaus or facing bankruptcy. (Getty Images/John Moore)

Preventing Medical Mistakes

"The terrifying truth: Our big, complex, and imperfect health-care system can sometimes make you sicker. In this three-part series, Health investigates why more than 100,000 people a year are dying from medical errors and millions are being injured, what safety measures may help, and how you can protect yourself during your three points of vulnerability—at the hospital, your doctor’s office, and the drugstore."

Source: Health online

Nursing Procedures Video Series

The library just purchased Lippincott's video series entitled Nursing Procedures Student set. Students can follow a team of nursing students and their instructor as they perform 90+ nursing procedures in realistic clinical settings. The videos are organized into basic, intermediate, and advanced procedures. They are on reserve to be used only in the library or classroom.

New Features in Goodwin Catalog

There was a system upgrade yesterday to our reQuest Goodwin Catalog. This update includes the following new features:

1. Creating Lists – any reQuest user will be able to create and view a list of items in reQuest they would like to read, have read, or would like to request through ILL by easily creating a password-protected account, then checking the items in reQuest that they would like to add to their account. Each user will be able to create multiple lists for different purposes.

2. New search indexes for Title and Subject searches:

- Title Begins With
- Title Exact
- Subject Begins With
- Subject Exact

These indexes will appear in the Advanced Search and Browse screens.

Soon after this upgrade takes place, there will be links from records in reQuest to Google Books (both preview-only and full-text, where available). This capability is close to being completed and we will send out another announcement as soon as we have an implementation date.

Source: ICONN

Another Free Trial: American History in Video

American History in Video is a massive, first-of-its kind collection of streaming video covering the entire gamut of American history–it will total 2,000 hours of video / 5,000 total videos at completion (currently it’s at about 420 hours and growing fast). It includes a wide range of documentaries (like those from The History Channel), newsreels–including the complete series of both Universal News and United Newsreel–and other contemporaneous films. It’s all deeply indexed, and the technical features make it easy to zoom in on exact moments of footage, make clips, create playlists (of clips by theme, entire films, and anything else anywhere on the Web) and share them with a class, for example.There are synchronized scrolling transcripts for every video (and those are searchable, too).

This trial is available to all through April 30. No login/password is required during the trial. The new database comes from Alexander Street Press.

More Technology, Please

The physics department at M.I.T. has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.

Today M.I.T. students meet in high-tech classrooms, where students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. The walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups. Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged. The new approach at M.I.T. is known by its acronym, TEAL, for Technology Enhanced Active Learning.

Source: New York Times January 19 from article by Sara Rimer

Literary Reference Center Free Trial Now

The library has just arranged a free trial of Literary Reference Center,a full text database that combines information from major respected reference works, books, literary journals as well as original content from EBSCO Publishing.

This database contains full text for 31,098 plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, nearly 100,000 articles/essays of literary criticism, nearly 140,000 author biographies (including more than 22,000 in-depth bios), more than 430 literary journals, more than 613,000 book reviews, more than 67,000 classic and contemporary poems, more than 17,000 classic and contemporary short stories, more than 5,400 author interviews, more than 8,200 classic texts and much more.

In addition, the Reference Center also includes Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature, Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Beacham's Research Guide to Biography and Criticism (six volumes), The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, The Literary Encyclopedia, The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story, all of MagillOnLiterature Plus™, and much more.

This is one of the most highly recommended electronic literary references available for two and four year college students. PLEASE TRY IT! Access will be available from the library page today.

Source: Fact Sheet on Literary Reference Center from the publisher

Global Researcher Monthly Report: Aiding Refugees

Some 42 million people worldwide have been uprooted by warfare or other violence, including 16 million refugees who are legally protected because they left their home countries. Most live in refugee camps and receive aid from the United Nations or other agencies but cannot work or leave the camps without special permission. Another 26 million people who fled violence are not protected by international treaties because they remained in their home countries. The number of such “internally displaced persons” (IDPs) has risen in the last decade, largely due to wars in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. Millions of IDPs live in harsh conditions, and many receive no aid. Some critics say the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees should do much more for IDPs, but the agency already faces severe budget shortfalls and bleak prospects for more donations from wealthy nations. Meanwhile, scientists warn that the number of people displaced by natural disasters — now about 50 million a year — could rise dramatically in coming years due to climate change. The photo shows Somali refugees waiting to be admitted to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

CQ Global Researcher monthly reports provide Goodwin students with definitive, in-depth coverage of global affairs from a number of international viewpoints. Access to the full report is available on and off-campus. Ask the library staff for the user name and password.

Source: Global Researcher March 2009
Photo source: IRIN/Manoocher Deghati

Historic American Sheet Music

We are indebted to Duke University and other colleges and universities that share their special collections. The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920. This is only one of Duke's digital collections arranged alphabetically and by subject.

Source: Information and image from Duke University
Digital Collections at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/

Women Striving Forward Image

Lowell, MA - Portuguese mill girls between 1910 and 1915






At the time, there were few respectable ways for a girl to earn money. She could hire herself out as a domestic to work in someone else’s home for no more than fifty cents per week. She could set up her own business as a seamstress, or she could teach school, but only in the summer. During the regular school year, that position was reserved for men. She might also have worked as a book binder. Starting wages were $1.00 per week.

Source: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).
Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

About Music and the Brain

The Library of Congress's Music and the Brain events offer lectures,podcasts, conversations and symposia about the explosion of new research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and music. Project chair Kay Redfield Jamison convenes scientists and scholars, composers, performers, theorists, physicians, psychologists, and other experts at the Library for a compelling 2-year series, with generous support from the Dana Foundation.

So far, these podcasts are available at Music and the Brain: Your Brain on Jazz: Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Improvisation; The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature; The Music of Language and the Language of Music; and Dangerous Music.

Source: Library of Congress: Music and the Brain

Global Gateway: Internet Resource

The Library of Congress (LC) calls Global Gateway a portal to its"unparalleled internatinal collections and those of other major repositories worldwide." Users will find it sensational. It is a stunning portal to primary sources from countries across the globe. It is an excellent starting point for both beginning and experienced researchers
Source: Sarah Goodwin Thiel, University of Kansas in C&RL News March 2009

Alternative Search Engines

An article by Adrian Janes in Free Pint last month urges us to search the Web with alternatives to Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Live. "The alternatives are useful, he says, "because it can be more efficient to search with something that may have a smaller but more focused, index." It is also important to encourage smaller comp[anies so as to prevent companies like Google from taking over. Janes provides links and mini-reviews for Zuula, Hakia, Agent 55, Mednar, Clust, and others. Read the article.
Source: College and Research News March 2009

Women Striving Forward Images

Women Striving Forward is a collection of 23 photos from the Library of Congress that highlight the many arenas in which women have striven individually and collectively not only for their own betterment, but for better conditions and greater justice in the world at large. The photos show the resilience, determination, and humor that it takes to survive and flourish, sometimes against great odds. For the rest of Women's History Month, the blog will be including pictures from this collection.

This photo, taken between 1910 and 1915, shows women suffrage hikers General Rosalie Jones, Jessie Stubbs, and Colonel Ida Craft, who is wearing a bag labeled "Votes for Women pilgrim leaflets."
Source: Flickr Commons project, 2008)
George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress)
Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication