Rising Tension over Iran: CQ Global Researcher

Is Iran trying to develop a nuclear weapon?
Successive U.S. presidents have insisted that a nuclear-armed Iran is “unacceptable.” Iran's Islamic leadership insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. A nuclear Iran would alter the strategic balance in the tense Middle East and, some say, possibly trigger a regional atomic arms race. Although the United States and Europe have imposed tough economic sanctions on Iran, the Iranians have not stopped enriching uranium or begun operating their nuclear program with more transparency. But with Israel reportedly considering a pre-emptive strike on nuclear facilities in Iran — which has vowed to destroy Israel — the question of the sanctions' effectiveness may be moot.

This report is available online through the Hoffman Family Library (password protected).

Source: CQ Global Researcher February 7, 2012
Picture: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (center) inspects some of the 9,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the Natanz nuclear facility, 200 miles south of Tehran. (Getty Images/Office of the Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran/April 2008)

Hoffman Family Library Staff opposes HR 3699

The staff of the Hoffman Family Library joins the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries(AAHSL)in opposing HR 3699, the Research Works Act. HR 3699 would restrict access to information generated through public funds, overturn the successful National Institutes of Health public access policy, and prohibit other federal agencies from establishing similar policies.

MLA and AAHSL worked to promote access to quality health information for the health care community and the public. The academic library community maintains that government-generated information, including online access to articles that report the results of federally funded research, is a public good and must be disseminated with as few barriers as possible. This act would restrict access to information generated through public funds, overturn the successful NIH public access policy, and prohibit other federal agencies from establishing similar policies.

Can Obama Withstand the Rebpulican Challenge?

CQ Researcher Report
February 3, 2012
"The 2012 contest pitting President Obama against a yet-to-be-determined Republican challenger ranks as one of the most intriguing presidential campaigns in history. Two powerful populist factions — the conservative Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street protest against income inequality — are helping to shape campaign ideologies and stump speeches. An unusually large field of Republican candidates, including multimillionaire Mormon Mitt Romney and thrice-married Newt Gingrich, have fought each other as aggressively as they have Obama, leaving the GOP so fractured that some think a nominee won't emerge until the party convention in August. Meanwhile, following a controversial Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance, wealthy donors are pouring millions of dollars into TV attack ads through so-called SuperPACs. And overshadowing the entire spectacle is the shaky U.S. economy and the question of which candidate is best equipped to turn it around."

The CQ Researcher weekly reports are available through the library (password protected). Ask in the library for username and password.

Source: CQ Researcher February 3, 2012
Picture: President Obama stops for a campaign photo op in Phoenix on Jan. 25. (AFP/Getty Images/Jewel Samad)

Granta Magazine of New Writing

Issue 118: Exit Strategies

In this latest issue John Barth contemplates the end of writing fiction. Alice Munro explores the interior world of an elderly woman losing her memory. Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his family's escape from the Bosnian War, and the love and fate of Mek, their Irish setter. David Long writes about a man haunted by a sexual encounter decades ago. Claire Messud searches for her father's Beirut, long since gone, as he himself lies dying in a hospice in Connecticut. Other well-known writers in this issue include Adrienne Rich, Ann Tyler, ad Ann Beattie. The cover is by Michael Salu.
Granta has publishes many of the world’s finest writers tackling some of the world’s most important subjects. Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction. This is one of the most exciting publications in the library—highly recommended by the library staff.

Previous Issues
117: Horror
116: Ten Years Later
115: The F Word
114: Aliens
113: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists
112: Pakistan
Source: Information from Granta

New Information on TOXMAP

TOXMAP helps users create nationwide, regional, or local area maps showing where TRI chemicals are released on-site into the air, water, and ground. It also identifies the releasing facilities, color-codes release amounts for a single year or year range, and provides multi-year aggregate chemical release data and trends over time, starting with 1988. Maps can also show locations of Superfund sites on the National Priority List (NPL) (http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl), listing all chemical contaminants present at these sites.

TOXMAP now includes the 2010 Toxics Release Inventory data (TRI) (http://www.epa.gov/tri/tridata/tri10/nationalanalysis/index.htm).

TOXMAP maps the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) chemicals reported to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as required by the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA).

A complete list of TRI chemicals required to be reported to the EPA can be found at http://www.epa.gov/tri/trichemicals/index.htm.

Access information HERE.

Source: United States National Library of Medicine
February 8, 2012

Registration Window Opens

February 20 –March 7
Registration windows will be open for students who wish to ADD a second half class for February 29th.

Official ACCUPLACER Study App is here!

ACCUPLACER® launches the official ACCUPLACER study app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. For only $1.99, students can brush up on their skills and become familiar with the style and content of questions asked on an ACCUPLACER test.

Product Features
•Interactive practice tests for ACCUPLACER Arithmetic, Elementary Algebra, College-Level Math, Reading Comprehension and Sentence Skills tests
•Immediate feedback and a detailed explanation of the correct response to multiple-choice questions

For more information go HERE

Evaluating Drug Information: Avoid Wikipedia

Be careful about using Wikipedia for drug information.While Wikipedia provides some basic drug information, students are encouraged to supplement that information with traditionally edited sources. Quality drug information is freely available from US government–provided sites such as the National Library of Medicine's Drug Information Portal,or MedlinePlus: Drugs, Supplements, and Herbal Information. Commercial consumer sites such as WebMD's RxList, Medscape: Pharmacists, and DailyMed are also available.

American Slaves Narrative

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.

The web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography .
READ IT HERE.
Source: University of Virginia Archives
Photograph: Picture taken at the time of the interviews

Literature to Life Web Cast: Zora

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most important and celebrated figures to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. Outspoken, spirited and gifted, Ms. Hurston was the most prolific African-American woman writer of the 1930's. Adapted from the theatrical biography of her life by Laurence Holder, this performance brings to life her story. The introduction is not so easy to hear, but the performance is very strong!
Source: Library Congress Web Casts

As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

Librarians and scholars are pushing back at the high prices of journals and the supression of research by publishers.

According to Josh Fischman, "A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.

The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall."

Read the article in today's edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Source: "As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices" By Josh Fischman
The Chronicle of Higher EducationFebruary 1, 2012

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Readings for Kim Reese's Class

The library purchased all of the books on Professor Reese's list. We have additional copies through Interlibrary Loan that are available in the library now.
Don't Kill the Birthday Girl
Year of Wonders
Fever 1793
Molo'kai

Extended Library Hours

Beginning this Saturday, February 4, the library will be open every Saturday from 8 am to 4 pm. We have many requests for longer hours during the week, which we are considering. Thanks to all of the students who have put suggestions in the suggestion box. That helps us provide all of you with better service.

DSM-5: The Future of Psychiatric Diagnosis

Publication of the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in May 2013 will mark one the most anticipated events in the mental health field. As part of the development process, the preliminary draft revisions to the current diagnostic criteria for psychiatric diagnoses are now available for public review. Use this opportunity not only to learn more about the proposed changes in DSM-5, but also about its history, its impact, and its developers. If you are writing research papers or giving speeches on such topics as autism, for example, you should include information on these revisions.
Source: American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 Development

Librarians oppose Research Works Act

A bill introduced December 16 in the House of Representatives has exacerbated tensions between open access advocates and the scholarly publishing industry over the dissemination of publicly funded scientific and medical research.

The Research Works Act (H.R.3699), co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), has only just been referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a zone from which few bills emerge unmodified (if they emerge at all), but the measure’s import has had, nevertheless, the effect of a 3 a.m. tocsin on librarians and other open access champions who wish to raze paywalls that enclose taxpayer-funded, peer-reviewed research.

The American Library Association said today that it “vehemently opposes the bill.”

Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online. The proposed bill, if it were to pass, would roll back the National Institute of Health’s Public Access Policy, which was introduced in 2008 and which makes NIH-funded research publicly available within 12 months via PubMed Central (many scholars object even to this 12-month delay before posting on this free online repository).

Free Access to Theses and Dissertations

A new web property called OpenThesis (www.openthesis.org) has been launched. It exposes theses and dissertations, making them highly accessible, useful, and shareable-at absolutely no cost. OpenThesis.org will allow authors to upload their theses/dissertations, and the documents will then be vaulted for posterity and made searchable anywhere in the world. If an author (or an author's family) has only a paper copy of a thesis/dissertation, the site will give guidance on how to get it scanned into computer-readable form for subsequent uploading.

Death Comes to Pemberley

For those of you who have read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and wonder what happened to Elizabeth and Darcy, P.D. James has written a murder mystery about just that subject--Death Comes to Pemberley: A Novel. James is a famous British writer of mysteries. The book is now available in the library.

New Subscription: Lapham's Quarterly

The library now subscribes to Lapham's Quarterly published four times annually. The current issue focuses on Family. In the introductory essay, Lewis Lapham tell us that "families grow as do the flowers and the weeds, of their own accord and as they will. Sometimes they lay waste to empires; sometimes they achieve the dignity of a dress label, but always they furnish a society with its living tissue and its intimations of immortaily, impart to the individual a sense of self if not a criminal record or a noble name."

Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly adopts and explores a single theme. A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers. Myriad photographs, paintings, charts, graphs, and maps round out each issue.The current issue, Winter 2012, is dynamite! Last year's issues, which will be available, focused on Lines of work (Spring), Food (Summer), The Future (Fall), and Celebrity (Winter).

JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles

Now you may have some access to JSTOR articles!
"It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. For more information, contact the librarian.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education January 16

LIBRARY HOURS 2012

LIBRARY HOURS FOR SPRING SEMESTER:

Monday-Friday 7am-9pm
Saturday 9am-2:30pm
Sunday 11am-4pm

The library will have extended hours on the week before final exams. That will be posted.