Workshop: Connect to Databases Off Campus

LEARN HOW TO CONNECT TO THE LIBRARY RESOURCES OFF CAMPUS!
Room 142 (next to the library)
10 a.m. May 27

Dan Bonacum of the IT Department will demonstrate how to use the Virtual Private Network successfully. Please tell everyone!

Guide to Online Learning

Power Up: A Practica Student's Guide to Online Learning by Barret, Poe, and Spagnola-Doyle (124 pages)

Many students have asked for help with online learning and not just how to get on to Blackboard. Now in the library, this book discusses the realities of online learning and highlights the resources available to online students. The tips and techniques will help you succeed in the virtual classroom. You will discover how to regulate your learning paces and processes--skills that will serve you well into the future. This book is published by Pearson Prentice Hall who also has a Student Success Supersite where students and faculty can find an arrray of resources.

Educational Video

Accessible Educational Technology Series

Australia's open access repository of research and scholarly output at Bond University includes a video series on education, accessibility, and assitive technology. The videos are posted on Vimeo, the high-definition video sharing and networking site. The series include videos on topics such as "Issues of Online Learning ina disability Studies Context," "Braille Literacy," and "Over-Reliance on Assisted Technology." Videso feature inerviews with disabled students and scholars.
Access here. http://vimeo.com/8205436
Source: Association of College and Research Library News May 2010

Book of the Day: Gift of Fear

Recommended by Pam Kudra and Oprah

Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker
Available in the Goodwin Library

The Gift of Fear is a must-read for everyone, particularly women. It teaches people how to stay safe, how to avoid becoming a victim, how to listen to your instincts and react. The author developed the Mosaic (a threat assessment tool) that is used nation wide by the court systems, police departments, and schools. Gavin De Beckers believes that most violent acts are random and have clear warning signs enabling us to stay safer in the community.

The Gift of Fear educates the reader on situations that involve stalkers, men who abuse woman, predators, death threats, disgruntled employees, or mass killers. He offers the readers lessons on survival signals, relying on one's intuition, separating what is real from imagined danger, and predicting dangerous behavior. He also teaches the readers to evaluate whether someone will use violence against them or not.

Baby's Hearing Test

Nowadays, 97 percent of babies born in this country have their hearing screened in the newborn nursery. That means essential follow-up testing and treatment can begin very early indeed. But the key term is “follow-up.”

As many as 46 percent of children who failed the newborn screening test in 2007 did not have documented repeat testing and treatment, said Marcus Gaffney, a health scientist with the Early Hearing Detection and Intervention program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Screening a child doesn’t do a lot of good,” Mr. Gaffney told me, “if you don’t take the appropriate follow-up.”

To learn more, read the full story, “What to Do When a Newborn Can’t Hear”.
Source: New York Times May 20 2010

21st Century Literacies

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) defines 21st Century literacies.

“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.”

Source: NCTE Inbox

Most Challenged Books of 2009

The Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has released the list of the Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2009. New to the list this year are Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and Jodi Piccoult’s My Sister’s Keeper.

Lauren Myracle’s Internet girl series – ttyl, ttfn, and l8r g8r - tops the list, replacing the children’s book, And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, in the #1 spot. Tango had appeared at the top of the list for the prior three years in a row. Myracle’s series has been challenged for reasons that include nudity, sexually explicit, offensive language, and drugs.

OIF recorded a total of 460 challenges in 2009. For every challenge reported to OIF, however, we estimate that there are 4 or 5 challenges that go unreported. Thanks to the dedication of countless individuals, materials do remain accessible to users in a majority of cases. Banned Books Week will be held September 25 through October 2, 2010.
Source: OIF Blog May 19, 2010

Census Controversy

Should undocumented immigrants be counted?

Now under way, the 2010 census has sparked bitter partisanship. Some conservative Republicans, for example, have criticized the census as an unconstitutional intrusion on privacy; others warn that census participation is important for maintaining GOP power, since the count is used to apportion congressional seats and allocate federal money to cities and states. Liberal Democrats have been more supportive of census procedures, which for the first time will count same-sex couples. To raise response rates, the Census Bureau sent every household the same brief 10-question form and dropped use of the “long form” — a lengthy questionnaire seeking data on housing, transportation, education and income. The long form has been replaced by a separate, ongoing monthly survey that will provide timelier data, but from a smaller sample of households. Researchers generally hail the change but say it will cause some problems, at least initially.
Source: Introduction: CQ Researcher May 14, 2010
Image: Despite controversy over this year's count, U.S. households returned census forms at the same 72 percent rate as in 2000. Census data determine the number of seats in congressional districts and how nearly $5 trillion in federal funds will be distributed to states and localities over the coming decade. (AFP/Getty Images/Paul J. Richards)

Statistical Directory For Social Sciences

The EBSS division of the Association of College and Research Libraries created this directory for those of us who regularly need to find statistics.
General United States Statistics
Education Statistics
Gerontology Statistics
Psychology Statistics
Social Work Statistics
Demographics

New DVDs in the Library

Dimming the Sun: What does this Climate conundrum Mean for the Future of the Earth-56 minutes (NOVA)
Global Warming: The Signs and the Science-60 minutes (PBS)
World in the Balance: The Population Paradox-120 minutes (NOVA)
An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning-96 minutes (Paramount)
Black Gold: The Story of Oil-50 minutes (History Channel)
Future of Food-88 minutes (Arts Alliance America)

Sociology Journal Online

Founded January 28th, 2010, the Socjournal is a new media journal of sociology and society intended to offer sociologists a window into the world of new media communications. Recognizing that traditional scholarly publication in traditional scholarly journals is limited, slow, and isolated (i.e. sociological research remains hidden behind an academic wall that is impenetrable to most people), the Socjournal aims to bring sociology to the world by providing blog space, regular columns, and academic reports designed to popularize and disseminate the fascinating world of sociological research.

I particularly like "What is Sociology?" Please read it!

Students: Credo Partners with EasyBib

Exporting citations to EasyBib is now available from Credo!

The Credo Reference Database has partnered with EasyBib.com to simplify the research process. You can research a topic using Credo Reference, and with just one click, you can export to EasyBib to keep track of bibliographic data. EasyBib exporting on Credo is available from:

Entry pages: an icon appears at the top (shown below) and EasyBib is listed in the citation drop-down menu at the bottom of each entry
Saved results: EasyBib has been added as an exporting option

EasyBib provides citation formatting tools to over 16 million users yearly and is geared towards students of all levels. With over 55 different source types, EasyBib is designed to be simple yet comprehensive, making it the most popular bibliography tool amongst students.

Credo Reference can be acessed from the database list on the library page.

New DVDs Just Arrived

Who Killed the Electric Car? (93 minutes)
Fast Food Nation (114 minutes)
Bad Seed: The Truth About Our Food (112 minutes)
Genetically Modified Food: Panacea or Poison? (70 minutes)
Developmentally Appropriate Practice: A Focus on Play (85 minutes) 2 copies
Drinking Water Consumer Information (no time listed)

Feature Film
Day After Tomorrow (121 minutes)

CDs
Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (12

New Beginning

The philosopher Seneca said that every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. On 5 May, Nature Reports Climate Change will close. The site will no longer be updated, but the archived content will still be freely available online. In April 2011, Nature journal will launch Nature Climate Change, a full-fledged journal, whose mission will be to publish original research on climate change and its impacts, as well as to place such change in a wider social and political context. As an interdisciplinary publication, Nature Climate Change will be the first Nature-branded title to publish research from social scientists.
Source: Condensed from an editorial by Oliver Heffernan in the May 5 issue of Nature.

WELCOME TO STUDENTS

The library staff welcomes you to the Goodwin campus and especially the Goodwin Library. We have many resources for you and all of us are ready to help you find and use them. Most of what you need to know initially about the library you will find on the library page. Instruction is available for groups and individually.

Access to, and not necessarily ownership of, information needed to support research regardless of format and independent of physical location is the emerging focus of the library's collection. More and more resources in today's college libraries are available electronically or through arrangements with other libraries. If we don't have what you are looking for, we can get it for you.

If you have a question or need help, you can text us. Information on Text-a-Librarian is on the library page.

www.goodwin.edu/

"Avatar" DVD in the library

Director James Cameron hoped the Earth Day release of "Avatar" on DVD would draw attention to the real-life environmental issues that inspired his story. It's no coincidence that the film's DVD was released last Thursday. Cameron has lately tied the publicity surrounding "Avatar", the highest-grossing movie of all time, with the environmental issues. The library has the recently released DVD available for checkout.

Congratulations to the 15th Graduating Nurse Class

Last night was the pinning ceremony for Goodwin's 15h graduating class of nurses. As always, it was a splendid and moving ceremony. The speaker, James J. Biernat, nursing director of psychiatry at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, was excellent and happens to be the uncle of one of the graduates. The student and faculty "Words of Wisdom" were also inspiring. Two student library workers were in this class: LaShonie Douglas, who spoke last night, and Elizabeth Diamond. Congratulations to all of the graduates, Janet Costello, and the nursing faculty.

Students use Credo Reference

The library has this terrific database called Credo Reference. Credo Reference is a general reference source for students and faculty offering more than 475 highly-regarded titles from over 70 publishers. That’s 475 full text reference books online. Credo covers every major subject from the world's best publishers of reference.

We have it, but is it being used? Yes! In March, students had consulted 81 books in the Credo Reference database. So far in April students have used 76 Credo Reference books.

What are some of the searches from March and April?
CIA World Fact book: Compared individual countries or compare statistics across all countries
History Paper: used the chronologies of world history from multiplie sources
Medical Images: used Color Atlas of Human Anatomy
Art images: explored a theme such as “impressionist river” paintings in Bridgeman Art Library with 15,000 art images
See for yourself. Look at the image of River Banks at Saint-Mammes.
(I saw this painting at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.)

Happy 40th Earth Day

Print smarter: The average U.S. office worker goes through 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year. If you come to the library today, you will see how much paper is wasted by printing mistakes in one day.

* Print on both sides or use the back side of old documents for faxes, scrap paper, or drafts. Avoid color printing and print in draft mode whenever feasible.
* Buy chlorine-free paper with a higher percentage of post-consumer recycled content or consider switching to a lighter stock of paper or alternatives made from bamboo, hemp, organic cotton, or kenaf.
* Recycle toner and ink cartridges and buy remanufactured ones. According to Office Depot, each remanufactured toner cartridge "keeps approximately 2.5 pounds of metal and plastic out of landfills... and conserves about a half-gallon of oil."
* Think before you print: could this be read or stored online instead? When you receive unwanted catalogs, newsletters, magazines, or junk mail, ask to be removed from the mailing list. Then recycle the item.
* Download the new Ecofont – a new typeface that incorporates tiny, inkless circles that minimize ink usage by up to 20 percent. Best of all: it’s free.
Source: Sierra Club Green Life page

100 Places to Remember Before They Disappear

Some of the most beautiful locales on earth could change radically or vanish altogether if climatologists' predictions prove correct. This sampling from a Newsweek special issue reminds us what's at stake--not just for the people, plants, and animals that inhabit these magical, fragile places, but for all of us. What's on the list?
Chicago, Illinois
Western Hudson Bay, Canada
Olumpia, Greece
Kauai, Hawaii