Text-a-Librarian

Text-a-Librarian, a quick way to ask questions and get a response, is now offered at the Goodwin Library.

Text the numbers 66746 on your cell phone. The first time you text a question put the keyword "ASKGOOD" at the beginning of the text, then type a question and send it. This first question will get an acknowledging text back immediately and when we have your answer, we will send a text to you. After the first text to ASKGOOD, you no longer need to use the keyword; the database will assign you a patron identification number.

GUEST BLOGGER: PAULA DOWD

I recently finished reading “The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Done Right” by Atul Gawande and I tore through it. Dr. Gawande, a surgeon, author and chairman of the WHO’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative, writes a compelling book on how, through the use of checklists, horrendous mistakes made in surgery that kill and injure thousands of people a year could be virtually eliminated. He suggests that because medicine ( especially surgery) is becoming more & more complicated each year, even the simplest of steps can be missed in treating patients. Everything from forgetting to infuse a preop patient with antibiotics ( or doing it too soon) to operating on the wrong patient is discussed. Dr. Gawande makes the point that checklists are used in the field of aviation to complex construction projects and proves that they were successful in averting disaster. But make no mistake,this is not a book filled with facts and figures. His discussions are rich and compelling. I would recommend this for anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of health care.
Source: Paula Dowd, Program Director and Associate Professor of Health Science

Wear Red Tomorrow

February is American Heart Month! The American Heart Association (AHA),along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, encourages everyone to wear red on Friday, February 5, 2010 in support of women's heart disease awareness. This is part of the Go Red For Women initiative, designed to raise heart disease awareness and prevent cardiovascular disease and related conditions in women. (National Wear Red Day is really February 6, but let's go along with Health and Human Services.)

Blog Followers

It is embarrassing to have so few acknowledged followers. I know that there are secret followers out there. Please sign on as a follower. No-one will bother you or try to sell you anything. I promise.

GUEST BLOGGER: MARY HENDERSON

ENOUGH : The Phony Leaders, Dead –End Movements, and the Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America---and What we Can Do About It
by Juan Williams

You know there are some books that you never lend; well this one should be on the top of your list. This is a book that should be read often, it should be kept close at hand almost like a reference to be pulled out when we forget that we as Blacks need to help ourselves. This book needs to be required reading for so many of us. The first time I picked it up I started reading sections aloud, I was so excited! Juan Williams speaks in a voice that we can all understand, he wakes us up, makes you say right and if you’re like me as soon as you finish you’ll need to start over because you read it so fast the first time.

Source: written by Mary Henderson

Black History Month Information

In the early 1900s, the most influential black leader in the United States was educator and former slave Booker T. Washington, the principal of Tuskegee Institute. Read a biography on Washington at the Library of Congress African American Pamphlets Home Page. (The Library of Congress is also the home of the African-American Mosaic Exhibition).

Although many African-Americans agreed with Washington's philosophy that blacks should strive for economic advancement before political and social equality, some did not. One of Washington's chief critics was sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois of Atlanta University. The full text of Du Bois's famous 1903 work "The Souls of Black Folk" is available at Bartleby's Great Books Online.

Source: Library Spot

New in Credo Reference: Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography

This encyclopedia has just been added to Credo Reference. Women have been writing about their lives for hundreds of years, and their autobiographical works are a record of the eras and cultures in which they lived. Through alphabetically arranged entries (from Jane Addams through Zami: A New Spelling of My Name), written by more than 130 expert contributors, the Encyclopedia of Women overviews women autobiographers and autobiography from the Middle Ages to the present. Entries discuss individual writers, major works, national and ethnic autobiographical traditions, particular autobiographical genres, and special terms, issues, and themes related to women's autobiography from around the world. Multicultural in scope and the first work of its kind, this encyclopedia overviews more than 400 years of autobiographical writing by women.

Credo Reference is a full-text online reference service provided by Goodwin Library. The collection includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from some of world's the best reference publishers.

Credo has also added images from the National Gallery, London. The collection is comprised of over 2,200 high definition images from the National Gallery. Each entry includes a description of the work along with its artist, medium, dimensions, acquisition credit and date made. The image with this post is from that collection: A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh.

Tackling Writer's Block

"First, I cannot stress enough the importance of simply allowing yourself a draft. When I write, I often get mired down in the need to self-edit every sentence as I go. When I first started writing papers and stories, that meant I rarely had a first draftor final draft. Writing two versions of the same thing seemed like way more work than writing something once. However, I ended up writing that one draft so slo-o-owly that it took me far longer than writing three drafts of a paper does now. The reason for this is that a first draft often turns out better than you think it is when you’re writing it. So type with abandon, type like the wind, and don’t let questions of grammar or phrasing or vocabulary hold you back. You can vanquish writer’s block by writing everything that comes into your head, even if you think it’s beyond awful at the time. You can always fix it later, though you may find that, more often than you think, you won’t have to do so."

This is good advice from Betsy Cornwell writing in the Teen Ink Newsletter this week.

Employer-Led Higher Education

"It is a sign of things to come. Most students enroll in college to pursue careers. The most popular undergraduate major, by far, is business, while education and health professions check in at Nos. 3 and 4. Institutions that give the demands of the professional workplace short shrift will eventually exhaust the good will of students and employers. With information technology breaking down barriers to entering the higher-education market, and the economic stakes of postsecondary learning intensifying for students and society alike, the inclination to sacrifice teaching for research will grow less tenable by the year."

Here is the link to the article by Kevin Carey published December 14, 2009, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
'Teacher U': A New Model in Employer-Led Higher Education

Just in This Morning

These magazines and journals are just in this morning:
The Economist--special report on social networking
Nature--Fixing the communications failure
Science News--Flesh on bone: new work adds meat to dino skeletons
The Nation--Haiti: A just response
Fortune--100 best companies to work for
Journal of the Medical Library Associatiion--Information-seeking behavior of basic science researchers
Time--The most dangerous game
Education Week--Measuring teaching effectiveness

Black History Month

To commemorate and celebrate the contributions to our nation made by people of African descent, American historian Carter G. Woodson established Black History Week. The first celebration occurred on Feb. 12, 1926. For many years, the second week of February was set aside for this celebration to coincide with the birthdays of abolitionist/editor Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial, the week was expanded into Black History Month. Each year, U.S. presidents proclaim February as National African-American History Month.

The library has a special exhibit in the showcase in front of the elevators and in the library.

If you have never heard Cornel West, you should. One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. He is currently a professor at Princeton University. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz.Listen to Cornel West on "why reading matters".

Connecticut Chuckles & Groundhog day

Groundhog Day is tomorrow

Will it be a long winter or an early spring? Only "Connecticut Chuckles" knows for sure.

The official rodent prognosticator of Connecticut’s weather resides at the Lutz Children’s Museum. Hundreds of people flock to the museum each year to hear the news straight from the groundhog’s mouth (with a little help from the Mayor).

The museum will open at 6:00 AM. Connecticut Chuckles, also known as Molly, makes her grand entrance at exactly 7:03 AM. This event is free and open to the public.

Library Blog Comment Change

You can now comment anonymously to library blog posts. I have eliminated the requirement of a user name and email account. That was cumbersome and time consuming. Who can remember all those user names and passwords? So now your comments will be posted from Anonymous unless you choose to sign your name. You can immediately react to something you read without wasting time.

I hope this will encourage more of you to comment and start discussions. I welcome guest entries for the blog on any topic of interest to the Goodwin community. That should be almost anything.

Congratulations Goodwin College

The February issue of the Hartford Magazine has a Greater Hartford Report Card for 2009. Goodwin College received an A. The only other A was UCONN Sports. AWSOME!

The magazine is in the Goodwin Library.

Ohio State's New Smartphone Mobile Site

January 25th, 2010
The staff, students, faculty, and alumni at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio now have a new mobile site that’s optimized for smartphones (like the iPhone). Another version for traditional mobiles is also available.

This page has a quick overview of what’s available for the smartphone version.

1. It’s location aware.
2. Directions to campus locations (freshmen will love this feature)
3. Real-Time arrival times for campus buses
4. Ohio State “backgrounds, ringtones, links to Ohio State on Facebook and Twitter. OSU’s devoted fans will love this. Smart move to include it.
5. Access the Library Catalog (but no other databases at this time).

I like number 5 myself. Don't forget that the Goodwin Library has Text-a-Librarian.

Source: Ohio State University via Gerry McKiernan, Lorcan Dempsey (via Twitter)

Preprint: Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy

This blog is starting to capture ideas in education about information literacy. This is a preprint quote from an article to be published next year. The definition of information literacy as a stand-alone library research entity seems to be no longer valid in the world of today's college students and faculty using collaborative technologies.

"Social media environments and online communities are innovative collaborative technologies that challenge traditional definitions of information literacy. Metaliteracy is an overarching and self-referential framework that integrates emerging technologies and unifies multiple literacy types. This redefinition of information literacy expands the scope of generally understood information competencies and places a particular emphasis on producing and sharing information in participatory digital environments."

What do you think?

Source: Authors: Thomas P. Mackey, Trudi E. Jacobson
Accepted: January 24, 2010
Anticipated Publication Date: January 2011
Source: College and Research Libraries PREPRINT

Google Advances

Google has announced several new search and other applications allowing users to use voice, location, and sight to find information, mostly on mobile devices.

Google Goggles visual search enables users to take a snapshot of a landmark or business and receive results based upon the image.

Google Translate has added a mobile application that translates audio from one language to another on the go.

Google Favorite Places returns information on businesses that choose to display a special barcode.

A local results application for mobile devices returns results based upon one’s GPS coordinates.

Real Time search will automatically update search results as content is updated, for example, with Twitter, MySpace, or Facebook.

Source: Greg Sterling, Google Mobile Gets ‘What’s Nearby,’ Voice Search Expands & ‘Goggles’ Search By Snapping Pictures, Search Engine Land, December 7, 2009, cited December 8, 2009, searchengineland.com/google-mobile-announcements-voice-languages-whats-nearby-goggles-31374.

In-demand Occupations

The top five in-demand and desirable occupations in the United States, using Bureau of Labor Statistics, are regisered nurses, general and operations managers, physicians and surgeons, accountants and auditors, and elementary school teachers.

The projected need for nurses (2006-2016) is 1,001,000. The projected need for elementary school teachers is 545,000. Of all the occupations regardless of wage, the highest need is for retails salespeople with 1,935,000 needed during the time period 2006-2016.

Are you surprised?

Source: U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Education, 2009

Preserving Biomed Central Articles

January 14, 2010 – CLOCKSS has partnered with BioMed Central, the world’s largest open access publisher, to preserve over 60,000 articles in CLOCKSS’s geographically and geopolitically distributed network of redundant archive nodes, located at 12 major research libraries around the world.

A non-profit joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries, CLOCKSS’s mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive for the benefit of the greater global research community. By archiving with CLOCKSS, BioMed Central ensures that its open access articles remain open access forever. If necessary, CLOCKSS will make this content available, under a creative commons license, for free to all scholars around the world.

All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central views open access to research as essential in order to ensure the rapid and efficient communication of research findings. BioMed Central's portfolio of 206 journals includes general titles such as Journal of Biology alongside specialist journals (e.g. BMC Bioinformatics, Malaria Journal) that focus on particular disciplines.

Source: CLOCKSS on Resource Shelf January 14, 2009

OECD Factbook 2010 on Credo Reference

Credo Reference Database has signed has integrated the Organzation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) Factbook 2010 into the Credo collection. This is the first OECD title to be made available on Credo.

The OECD Factbook 2010 is a key reference tool in economic and policy issues. The most comprehensive and dynamic statistical annual from the OECD, it contains extensive information, as well as graphs and tables for more than 100 indicators covering a wide range of areas. Topics include economy, agriculture, education, energy, environment, foreign aid, health and quality of life, industry, communications, population, trade, and taxation. With the new agreement, the Factbook’s content will now be accessible and completely cross-searchable by researchers worldwide, within Credo’s collection of more than 440 full text reference books. This reference book database is available to the Goodwin community on the library page A to Z list of databases.

Source: Credo Reference Update January 2010