Literacy Funding in Jeopardy

Congress appears on track to deal a heavy blow to federal aid for literacy.

The Republican-led House yesterday delivered a bipartisan vote of 335-91 on a stopgap spending measure that would abolish federal funding for several literacy programs at the U.S. Department of Education, part of a planned government-wide reduction of $4 billion.

The proposed cuts include funding for the $250 million Striving Readers program, the $66 million Even Start family-literacy program, the $25 million Reading Is Fundamental program, and the $26 million National Writing Project.

The Democratic-controlled Senate is widely expected to go along with the package, which is intended to keep the government running for two more weeks while lawmakers and the White House continue to negotiate a budget plan. A vote is scheduled there today.

Source: Education Week March 2

Smart Phones Make Book Citations a Snap

A new smartphone application helps you cite books in scholarly papers.

Quick Cite, which costs 99 cents and is available for both iPhones and Android-based phones, uses the camera on a smartphone to scan the bar code on the back of a book. It then e-mails you a bibliography-ready citation in one of four popular styles—APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE.

Point the phone at the bar code on the book and Quick Cite will send you the citations in APA style or in MLA style.

Source: Wired Campus February 14

March is National Women's History Month

The theme for National History Month this year is "Our HISTORY is Our Strength."

The stories of women’s achievements are integral to the fabric of our history. Learning about women’s tenacity, courage, and creativity throughout the centuries is a tremendous source of strength. Until relatively recently, this sphere of women’s history was overlooked and undervalued. Women’s achievements were often distorted, disdained, and denied. But, knowing women’s stories provides essential role models for everyone. And role models are genuinely needed to face the extraordinary changes and unrelenting challenges of the 21st century.

Source: National Women's History Project

Free Resource for Teachers

Academic Earth offers video lectures from elite universities, and it allows viewers to grade the professors. Academic Earth also offers a “Playlists” feature based around themes such as “Laws of Nature,” “Wars Throughout History,” or “You Are What You Eat.”

Free Access to Music Online!

Alexander Street's Music Online: Listening collection has tripled in size!

All the classical, jazz, American, and world music content you need—in every format. Cross-search all of our recordings, scores, reference, and video content from a single interface. Listen to the best recordings from the best record labels—while you follow along with the score and read the composer's biography.


Access the complete Music Online suite of recordings, scores, reference, and video content, now through March 15th by registering at:

http://alexanderstreet.com/MUSICtrial2011.htm

Using SQL Webcast February 17

Using SQL to Explore Any Data on Hadoop in the Cloud
- February 17 Webcast at 11 am PT/ 2 pm ET

This webcast will cover how to explore big data in the cloud from within a graphical SQL environment in five minutes, with virtually no learning curve. Attendees will see how to discover or create schema from existing data, whether structured or unstructured and then explore and visualize the results with SQL from your desktop. The webcast will also showcase customer implementations and how this solution delivers value to enterprises challenged with large, complex and quickly growing data.

Let the library staff know if you are interested in this.

Streaming Videos

Alexander Street Press (ASP) has been rapidly growing streaming media collections and is releasing three major new video products for libraries in early 2011. Some of these may work for us.

ASP has just acquired Filmakers Library, the highly regarded New York-based distributor of documentary films. For 40 years, Filmmakers Library has distributed high-quality, issue-based documentaries to the academic market. ASP plans to launch the complete Filmakers Library as a subscription-based online streaming database, Filmakers Library Online, in early 2011. The publisher will also make it possible for libraries and educational institutions to order individual films via the ASP streaming platform.

Education in Video is the first online collection of streaming video developed specifically for the training and development of teachers. More than 1,000 video titles totaling 750+ hours of teaching demonstrations, lectures, documentaries, and primary-source footage of students and teachers in actual classrooms.

World History in Video is an online collection of 1,750 global documentaries covering everything from early civilizations to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of the critically acclaimed documentaries from filmmakers worldwide are the most used today in university-level classes.

Access to information about the Collections:
Filmakers Library
Education in Video
World History in Video

Let me here from you.

Free Access to Visual Arts Journals!

Taylor & Francis Offers Free Access to Visual Arts Journals Throughout February
February 9, 2011

Taylor & Francis is offering us free online access to their complete range of visual arts journals throughout the month of February. Read articles from each journal’s online archive, including the most recent issues.

Complete access to 19 Routledge visual arts journals is provided via Art Acess. The journals in this promotion cover art history, photography, art therapy, visual anthropology, visual culture and more. These visual arts journals are included in the T&F Arts & Humanities Online Collection and Arts & Humanities Online Archive.


Start your free access here:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/artaccess

Black History Month Resources

These resources will be freely available in the month of February, courtesy of ICONN.

EBSCO-African American Archives
The African American Archives provides over a million pages of original historical documents pertaining to the African American experience over several centuries, the earliest coming from the collection of Essential Records Concerning Slavery and Emancipation from the Danish West Indies (1672-1917). There are several other slavery-related collections, including letters, account books, annual reports, news clippings, and related manuscripts from the American Colonization Society. The African American Archives also includes Records of the Southern Claims Commission, government records, original muster and hospital rolls, descriptive books, lists of deserters, returns, notational cards, enlistment papers, casualty sheets, death reports, prisoner of war papers, and correspondence.

The African American Archives also includes Records of the Southern Claims Commission, government records, original muster and hospital rolls, descriptive books, lists of deserters, returns, notational cards, enlistment papers, casualty sheets, death reports, prisoner of war papers, and correspondence.

Gale Cengage
this resource includes biographical and historical resources.

ProQuest Black Historical Newspapers
ProQuest Historical Newspapers-Black Newspapers offers primary source material essential to the study of American history and African-American culture, history, politics, and the arts. Examine major movements from the Harlem Renaissance to Civil Rights, and explore everyday life as written in the Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles Sentinel, Atlanta Daily World, The Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Philadelphia Tribune, and Cleveland Call and Post.

Collection: American Environmental Leaders

American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present
A comprehensive and diverse, award-winning collection of biographies of the most important figures in American environmentalism. As our environment changes, and environmental concerns become more and more prevalent, this encyclopedia provides much-needed information on the key players in the environmental movement.

The biographies are arranged alphabetically, from Edward Abbey to David Zwick. This is a full text reference book in the Credo Reference database accessible on and off campus.

Happy New Year

Happy Chinese New Year
Years 1915, 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011, 2023
If you were born in any of those years, the rabbit is your Chinese zodiac sign.

Rabbit personality traits
Although generally calm, gentle and loving, Rabbit people can be very ambitious and intuitively know how to get ahead in the world.


They are good listeners, kind and sweet by nature, and are therefore often sought out as popular and trusted friends. Generally noted for their physical beauty, Rabbits like to surround themselves with beautiful things. They have a good eye for art, design and fashion, and are usually at the top of anyone's Best Dressed list.

Others may call the Rabbit timid, but those born under this sign rightly view themselves as wise and cautious.

Disappearing Forests: Global CQ Researcher Report

"As the U.N. celebrates the International Year of Forests to promote forest conservation, thousands of square miles of the planet's woodlands are destroyed each year to make way for sprawling suburbs, palm oil and soybean plantations, cattle ranches and farms. Experts say deforestation threatens a delicate balance in which forests act as Earth's lungs: absorbing carbon dioxide — the biggest contributor to climate change — and expelling oxygen. Now, scientists say, deforestation could soon release enormous amounts of carbon gases stored in the trees, undergrowth and melting permafrost. Such a “carbon bomb,” experts warn, would exacerbate climate change, triggering even more deforestation and threatening a variety of crucial environmental functions forests perform, such as air and water purification, erosion prevention, rain production and the creation of fuel, shelter, medicines and endangered species habitat. Efforts by world leaders to slow deforestation are showing progress, but scientists say more aggressive action is needed."

Source: Global CQ Researcher January 28
Image: Jamanxim National Forest on Nov. 29, 2009, that has been illegally burned down. Brazil, which lost more rainforest over the past decade than any other country, is using a $1 billion grant from Norway to crack down on deforestation. (AFP/Getty Images/Antonio Scorza)

Managing Nuclear Waste: CQ Researcher Report

"Thousands of tons of lethal nuclear waste from civilian power plants and military sites are stored at more than 100 sites around the country. But the federal government doesn't have a long-term plan today for managing nuclear waste. In the 1980s, Congress decided to build a single underground repository for spent fuel and highly radioactive defense waste in the southern Nevada desert. But work on the Yucca Mountain complex has faced political and technical problems and was canceled by President Obama, who advocates a new storage solution. Cancellation has created uncertainty for the nuclear power industry and for states where military waste is stored. It also is forcing utilities to pay to store used nuclear fuel at reactors — costs they pass on to customers. Some utilities have won multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the federal government, and more cases are pending. Obama supports expanding nuclear power as a clean energy strategy, but if the waste problem isn't solved, new reactors may be a hard sell in many states."
Source: CQ Researcher January 28
Image: Spent nuclear fuel is moved to a storage area at Dominion Virginia Power's North Anna Nuclear Generating Station, which supplies electricity to Richmond and Northern Virginia. Nuclear plants around the country store such radioactive waste on-site because the U.S. does not have a nuclear waste repository. (AP Photo/The Daily Progress/Bill Clark)

Black History Month: Art Database

Database of Published Images of African Art from Yale Unuversity





The James J. Ross Archive of African Images presents approximately 5000 pictures of African art published before 1921. The Archive aspires to include all the figurative African objects in books, periodicals, catalogues, newspapers, and other publications appearing in 1920 and earlier - the oldest dates to 1591.
RAAI is a collection of rich historical data and images extensively catalogued and annotated. Its historic sources afford exceptional insight into early European and American views - literal and figurative - of Africa's art.

ACCESS DATABASE!

Source: Image and information Yale Art Gallery

APA: How to cite an interview

How do you cite an interview?
An interview is not considered recoverable data, so no reference to this is provided in the reference list. You may, however, cite the interview within the text as a personal communication.

Examples:

(W. Wilson,personal communication, February 2, 2011)
W. Wilson (personal communication, February 2, 2011)

Adapted from the APA Manual

February is Heart Month

Cardiovascular diseases, including stroke, are our nation's No. 1 killer. To urge Americans to join the battle against these diseases, since 1963 Congress has required the president to proclaim February "American Heart Month." The American Heart Association (AHA) led initial efforts to develop Annual American Heart Month.

Although heart disease is one of the most costly and widespread health problems in the United States, it is among the most preventable.

Each year, the AHA, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies, brings together the most up–to–date statistics on heart disease, stroke, other vascular diseases, and their risk factors and presents them in its Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update. The Statistical Update is a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians, healthcare policy makers, media professionals, the lay public, and students who seek the best national data available on disease morbidity and mortality and the risks, quality of care, medical procedures and operations, and costs associated with the management of these diseases in a single document.
Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics—2011 Update
A Report From the American Heart Association

Source: American Heart Association

New Library Resources: Your Tax Money at Work

Fortunately for us, iCONN has added the following e-reference titles to our collection at no additional charge:

Alternative Energy
Crime and Punishment: Essential Primary Sources Diseases & Disorders, vol. 1-10 Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture Encyclopedia of Products & Industries - Manufacturing Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History, Government and Politics Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History, War

They also have added the following titles that are the parts of the Diseases and Disorders series:

Acne
AIDS
Anthrax
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Headaches
Hemophilia
Obesity
SARS
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
West Nile Virus



Source: iConn

Required Course Readings

The Goodwin Library works with faculty to make sure your required course readings are available. Most of them are on reserve. Yet despite our hard work you may encounter a problem. Please contact the library staff as soon as possible if you are having difficulties.

New Rules on Sharing Scientific Data

Last week, a significant change went into effect at the National Science Foundation: The agency will now require researchers to submit data-management plans with their grant proposals.

Open government advocates hailed the move as the latest in a series of steps that are expanding public access to work done with taxpayer money. The policy will not go so far as to mandate public sharing of all data, which in this context could mean anything from glacier images to scientific papers to computer code. But it will “require people to essentially justify why they choose not to be open,” says Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School.

You can find lots of detailed information about the change at the NSF and the Association of Research Libraries sites.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Start Meditating

Scientists say that meditators may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

Skeptical? Do you need evidence? MRI brain scans taken before and after participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

It is hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.

So what are you waiting for? Start meditating today. It can't hurt.

Source: Illustration and article "How Meditation May Change the Brain" by Sindya N. Branoo. New York Times January 28