Best Dataases of 2011

Best Overall: Credo Reference
Best Original Content Runner-Up CQ Researcher/CQ Global Researcher
Most Ambitious in Scope and Content: Gale's Virtual Reference Library

THE HOFFMAN LIBRARY HAS THESE!

EXTENDED LIBRARY HOURS

EXTENDED LIBRARY HOURS BEFORE FINALS!
DEC. 5-9 (7 am TO 11 pm)
DEC. 10 (9 am TO 5 pm)
DEC. 11 10 am TO 6 pm)

Tip of the Day

True perfectionists get a bad rap for being time-wasting sticklers who demoralize those around them. But it isn't all bad. In fact, being a stickler has some valuable attributes. The key is to separate healthy perfectionist behaviors, such as striving for high but achievable standards or devoting time to things you care about, from the damaging ones, such as feeling that every mistake is catastrophic. Focus on the positives of being a perfectionist while keeping an eye out for the harmful tendencies.
Source: Harvard Business Review

Best Web Site of the Month for Kids

What really happened at the First Thanksgiving in 1691? Be a history detective and discover for yourself, as you learn more about the lives of the English colonists and the Wampanoag people: Plimoth Plantation

National Book Award for Nonfiction: "The Swerve"

Stephen Greenblatt won for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, a “rumination on the pleasure of knowledge and on the agony of its loss,” the judges’ citation said. It was published by W.W. Norton & Company.

“My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you,” Mr. Greenblatt said in his acceptance speech. “My book is about what the magic of the written word is.” Last year's winner was Patti Smith for Just Kids.

National Book Award for Fiction: "Salvage the Bones"

Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction last night for Salvage the Bones, a haunting tale of the struggles of a 15-year-old pregnant girl as a hurricane bears down on her fictional Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Miss. Accepting the award, Ms. Ward said she had begun writing stories to honor her younger brother after his death.

“I understood that I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor, and the black and the rural people of the South,” Ms. Ward said, “so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important, as theirs.”

“Salvage the Bones” was published by Bloomsbury USA, a division of Bloomsbury Publishing. Ms. Ward, a former writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, has also written the novel Where the Line Bleeds. Last year's winner was Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule . To be eligible,a book must have been written by a United States citizen. Winners receive $10,000 and a bronze statue. Each of the other awards will receive a separate posting on this blog.

Veteran's Day

In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words: "To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…"

The original concept for the celebration was for a day observed with parades and public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11:00 a.m.

Goodwin Library makes the American Archives List

October was American Archives Month—an opportunity to raise awareness about the value of archives and archivists. There is strength in numbers, and our collective voice can be more powerful than individual voices when we set aside time each year to celebrate our collections. Goodwin Library is on the list, "See How Your Colleagues Celebrated American Archives Month."

Library Science Exhibit at Artspace

Artspace in New Haven will have an exhibition, "Library Science", opening Saturday in New Haven beginning at 5 p.m. Conceived of by New York based curator Rachel Gugelberger, the exhibition will feature 22 contemporary artists, both emerging and established, who are inspired by libraries in their drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, painting or web-based projects. The exhibtion runs through January 28.

The exhibition title references Eleanor Antin's artwork "Library Science" (1971), which appropriated libraries' classification methods to represent the identities of living women. The title also refers to Library and Information Science, a field that studies library resource usage, human interaction with library systems, and information organization. The show will investigate how our physical, intellectual and personal relationships with the library and its materials are changing as libraries adapt to the digital world. If the book dies, might the library survive? How can libraries evolve to keep pace with the 21st century?

How cool is this? Artspace is located at 50 Orange St. in New Haven

New Titles in Credo Reference

Credo's General Reference collection now has over 560 titles. The following well-regarded titles were recently added:
•The 2011 Annual Register: World Events 2010, ProQuest
•Animals: A Visual Encyclopedia, Dorling Kindersley Publishing Inc.
•Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Cambridge University Press
•Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press
•Collins English-Greek Dictionary, Collins
•Collins Greek-English Dictionary, Collins
•Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, I.B. Tauris
•Dictionary of Trade Policy Terms, Cambridge University Press
•Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture, ABC-CLIO
•Encyclopedia of New Jersey, Rutgers University Press
•Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ABC-CLIO
•Environmental Debate: A Documentary History, Grey House Publishing
•Exemplary Economists: Europe, Asia and Australasia, Edward Elgar
•Exemplary Economists: North America, Edward Elgar
•Globalization: Encyclopedia of Trade, Labor, and Politics, ABC-CLIO
•Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization, Cambridge University Press
•History of Feminist Literary Criticism, Cambridge University Press
•History of South African Literature, Cambridge University Press
•Key Concepts in Anti-Discriminatory Social Work, Sage UK
•Key Concepts in Education, Sage UK
•Key Concepts in Governance, Sage UK
•Key Concepts in Nursing, Sage UK
•Key Concepts in Public Health, Sage UK
•Key Concepts in Social Research, Sage UK
•National Gallery Companion Guide, The National Gallery
•Pocket Guides: Myths & Legends, The National Gallery
•Pocket Guides: Narrative, The National Gallery
•Poverty and the Government in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO
•Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO

Scholarly vs. Popular Periodicals

Here is a video presentation on how to distinguish between scholarly and popular journals and magazines. Melinda Brown, Sharon Weiner, Patricia Armstrong and Leslie Foutch, all part of the Heard Library at Vanderbilt, provided editorial support for this tutorial. Watch the video HERE.

Hoffman Family Library

The library staff is pleased to announce that the library is now officially the Hoffman Family Library. Yesterday afternoon was the ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony of the Hoffman Family Library, formerly the Goodwin College Library. We thank the Hoffmans for their generous donation to the scholarship fund and continuing support for the Goodwin College community.

What is the Best Way to Study?

What foods are best to eat before a test? When is the best time to review the toughest material? A growing body of research on the best study techniques offers some answers. Find those answers in Today's Wall Street Journal's Personal Journal section article "Toughest Exam Questiona; What is the Best Way to Study?" If you are in the library, the Wall Street Journal is on the table when you first come in.

Source: Wall Street Journal October 26

This Week's Issue: Copyright

Golan v. Holder: Supreme Court agrees to Review Copyrighting Works in Public Domain.

Issue: (1) Does the Progress Clause of the United States Constitution, Article I, § 8, cl. 8, prohibit Congress from taking works out of the public domain? (2) Does Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution?
Plain English Issue: Can Congress restore copyright protection to a work whose copyright protection had previously expired and was therefore in the public domain?

Symphony Conductor Lawrence Golan along with a group of supporters have successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari in their public domain copyright case. The lawsuit arose after Congress enacted the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994. Section 514 of URAA restored the copyright term for works created by foreign authors who had lost their rights due to some reason other than expiration of the copyright term. Most frequently, the authors had either failed to renew their copyrights or failed to include a notice of copyright on the works. According to the petitioners, Section 514 restored copyright protection to thousands of works that had previously been in the public domain, including symphonies by Stravinski, books by C.S. Lewis, films by Federico Fellini, and artwork by Pablo Picasso. These works had been previously recognized as public domain in the US and had been used extensively by the petitioners.

Copyright: A Fair(y) Use Tale

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms. Watch it on YouTube.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License

APA and DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

The APA documentation style requires the use of DOI numbers. However, occasionally one will run into a reference that does not have a DOI number.Cross Ref has a free tool that allows you to enter your full citation or what information you have, and will give you the DOI number for the article if it has one.

Ethanol Cost and Environmental Factors

The use of ethanol in gasoline has increased substantially over the past decade. Most ethanol in the United States currently is produced from domestically grown corn, and the rapid rise in the fuel’s production and usage means that roughly one-quarter of all corn grown in the United States is now used to produce ethanol. Since 2006, food prices have also risen more quickly than in earlier years, affecting Federal spending for nutrition programs (such as school lunches) and the household budgets of individual consumers.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008. In turn, that increase will boost Federal spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp program) and child nutrition programs by an estimated $600 million to $900 million in Fiscal Year (FY) 2009. In 2010, the use of ethanol reduced gasoline consumption in the United States by about 4 percent and greenhouse-gas emissions from the transportation sector by less than 1 percent.

Read the article in the Congressional Digest Debates Online, a Pro & Con Service.

Source: Ethanol Cost and Environmental Factors
Congressional Budget Office Analysis
Congressional Digest

Modernist Journals Project: 2nd Web Site of the Week

The Modernist Journals Project is a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. This is a joint project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa. Their primary mission is to produce "digital editions of culturally significant magazines from around the early 20th century and make them freely available to the public on our website."

"The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. With magazines at its core, the MJP also offers a range of genres that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for periodical study.

They end at 1922 for both intellectual and practical reasons: the practical reason is that copyright becomes an issue with publications from 1923 onward; the intellectual reason is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922, a date marked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land." This looks like a great place to do some original and interesting research.

Source: All of the information and the image came from the MJP page.

Opinion: A New Global Health Agenda

Last month (September 19-20), the General Assembly of the United Nations held a historic High-Level Meeting to discuss noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), an often overlooked burden on the world’s populations and economies. Only the second of its kind for a public health issue, the meeting was an unparalleled opportunity to put NCDs—including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and chronic respiratory disease—on the global health agenda. The successful meeting drew an impressive 34 heads of state, and member states unanimously adopted a political declaration that included important language to accelerate effective programs and resources to address NCDs. Read the article HERE.

Source: The Scientist October 4, 2011
Image: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS JOSEPH SCOZZAI