New Books in the New Library

Stop by to see the wonderful new library! They are hanging bird feeders outside the library today to attract more birds. We also have a few new books:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison--The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this novel about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Read the first chapter.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins--The New York Times correspondent let us witness the rise of the Taliban, the attacks of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This book is hailed as one of the best books about America's wars and the nature of war itself. Read the first chapter.

These two were chosen in the ten best books of 2008 by the New York Times. The first chapters provided here come to us from the New York Times book section. Other new books include:
Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes*
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb
Snake Oil Science by R. Barker Bausell
2666 by Roberto Bolano*
The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew G. Faust*
The World is What it is by Patrick French*
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by Palfrey & Gasser
Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader
Four Skills of Cultural Diversity Competence by Mikel Hogan

(*These books were also on the Times Best Boooks of 2008 list.)

Library Moves to New Campus Thursday

The Goodwin Library is moving to the new campus at One Riverside Drive on Thursday, December 18. There will be no acess to the library catalog or databases on or off campus from December 19 to December 23. (The picture was taken before the building was finished.)

CQ Researcher New Blog

The mission of the CQ REsearcher blog is to open the CQ Researcher up to be more participatory. What topics should they cover in the coming months? What’s your opinion on the latest pro/con question? What ideas do you have for making the Researcher better? They will share some of the behind-the-scenes, sausage-making that goes into the CQ Researcher. And we will blog about how a current news story or an issue in library land. But most importantly we will play and experiment.
Source: CQ Researcher news

Second Life for Nursing Students

In Second Life,the wildly popular virtual world now inhabited by more than eight million residents, Elsevier has conducted a large prototype project and built a small simulated environment to train nurses in how to use the communication protocol SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation). As it allows multiple, geographically dispersed colleagues to meet and collaborate online in real time, using text chat and voice communication, Second Life was a natural choice for this project. Elsevier is a leading publisher and database vendor in the field of nursing and health science fields.

The clinical environment in SL features simulated patients which respond to visitors via simple chat bots and react following a basic model of human vital signs that can be tailored for different scenarios. Nurses can interact with the environment and use instruments to assess patients and then, following the SBAR protocol, talk to the assessor doctor in-world.
Source: Elsevier Library Connect Newsletter December

New Web 2.0 Platform for Education

The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.
Source: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

New ACCUPLACER Platform Coming Soon

I am pleased to remind you that beginning in 2009, the ACCUPLACER program will be supported by a new platform, ACCUPLACER i3, created by Pearson Education. Really, this is good news. ACCUPLACER i3, ACCUPLACER's third Internet-based platform, will maintain the same general functionality of the current system, while offering more features and flexibility.

The move will begin in early 2009 and conclude by June 30, 2009. ACCUPLACER i3 will have a look and feel very similar to the current system, and we anticipate only a minor learning curve. To ensure a smooth transfer, Person Education will provide ample training and assistance. Several Goodwin representatives will attend a training session in January. If you want to know more, just ask us.

Majors Making a Difference

For our students looking for a career in which they can make a difference in the world, this series from WorldChanging will be of interest. The fact that several of these seem to be careers of the future makes them even more appealing. Worldchanging is a media organization that comprises a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers covering the world's most intelligent solutions to today's problems.
Source: Worldchanging

E-patients

About 80% of internet users go online for health information. Surprisingly, E-patients who feel they have serious health problems are more likely to go online in search of health information. For example, 75% of e-patients with chronic conditions reported their last health-related search affected a decision about how to treat an illnes or condition.
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

What happened in Bhopal?

On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. There are extensive links from the parent page of Bhopal.org at:
http://www.bhopal.org/

30,000 ebooks in Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg this month has officially passed 30,000 original eBooks, bringing the the original Project Gutenberg editions to as many titles as the average U.S. public library. Another major landmark is that the number of books in the Chinese language has now passed Dutch to become the newest member of Project Gutenberg’s “Top 5 Languages”, with a total of over 375 books in the Gutenberg archives.

There are still around 300 Chinese titles being held on the PrePrint site so we really need help in cataloging these. If you can work in Chinese you are encouraged to look into the directory called /china over at PrePrints, or get the .zip file (one directory above) to downloaded all the files in one go.

Project Gutenberg encourages the creation and distribution of digital books. They have provided copyright free eBooks for downloading since 1971.
Source: Project Gutenberg

Read The Federal Register

Federal Register announces launch of new Electronic Public Inspection Desk.The Office of the Federal Register has created an Electronic Public Inspection Desk to provide free worldwide electronic access to public documents. For the first time in the 72-year existence of the daily Federal Register, the documents on file are available for viewing anytime, anywhere. Every Federal business day, anyone with access to a computer now can read critical documents governing Federal regulations relating to business, health, and safety as soon as the documents are placed on file.
Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog

National Book Awards 2008

Here are the winners of the National Book Awards for 2008 announced this week:


Young People's Literature

Judy Blundell
What I Saw and How I Lied
(Scholastic)

Poetry

Mark Doty
Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
(HarperCollins)

Nonfiction

Annette Gordon-Reed
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(W.W. Norton & Company)

Fiction

Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country
(Modern Library)

Source: National Book Foundation

Seven Titles Added to Credo Reference Today

Today Credo Referenc, online reference library, integrated seven Edward Elgar titles into the Credo General Reference collection. Elgar is recognized as a leading publisher in the fields of economics, business and finance, as well as publishing other cutting-edge titles in law and public policy. The seven titles will provide Credo researchers with key content in the area of economics:

A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists
A Biographical Dictionary of Women Economists
Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics (Choice Outstanding Academic Title)
An Encyclopedia of Macroeconomics (Choice Outstanding Academic Title)
An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics (Choice Outstanding Academic Title)
Nobel Memorial Laureates in Economics
Who's Who in Economics, 4th edition

The Credo Reference Library is available to the Goodwin Community. This is always a good place to start research.

Equal Opportunity Day

At the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery in southern Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863, President Abraham LINCOLN delivered the GETTYSBURG Address, a 270-word speech that is considered one of the greatest in American history, though it didn’t receive much attention at the time. Equal Opportunity Day is observed at Gettysburg National Cemetery each year, where ceremonies commemorating Lincoln’s address are held under the sponsorship of the Sons of Union Veterans and the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania. Sometimes this day is referred to as Gettysburg Address Day.

Source: From Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary in the Credo Reference database at Goodwin Library. The painting is by Franz Marc called "The Fox."

Biodiversity Heritage Library

Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. This literature will be available through a global “biodiversity commons.” Most of the literature is in the developed world, in the Northern Hemisphere, but most of the biodiversity is in the developing world and the Southern Hemisphere. One ofthe most desirable outcomes of the project is to repatriate literature to the originating countries of
publication by making it accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
Source: WORLD LIBRARY AND INFORMATION CONGRESS INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF LIBRARIES AND ASSOCIATIONS

World Wide Science Resource

WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway connecting you to national and international scientific databases and portals. WorldWideScience.org accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of global science sources. The WorldWideScience Alliance, a multilateral partnership, consists of participating member countries and provides the governance structure for WorldWideScience.org. This site enables anyone with Internet access to launch a single-query search of 32 national scientific databases and portals from 44 countries, covering six continents and nearly half of the world’s population. Users of WorldWideScience.org can search more than 200 million pages of science and technology information not typically accessible through popular search engines.

CA Researcher: National Debt: Too Big?

With the national debt now more than $10 trillion — twice what it was eight years ago — the country faces a dire financial future, some analysts argue. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has run larger and larger annual deficits, adding to the national debt and restricting the government's ability to respond to a new crisis. Now, with the U.S. and global financial meltdown. . . .

Source: CQ Researcher
Read the Full Report online. (Ask the library staff for password.)

Medical Image Search Engine

OmniMedicalSearch.com - Medical Image Search Engine
http://www.omnimedicalsearch.com/images.html

For students looking for medical imatges, this is a great site. It also includes
1. Web: The Web search option finds authoritative, consumer-oriented health and medical information.

2. News: the news search option reports the latest health & medical news from around the world.

3. Forums: Here one can discover what other patients, caregivers and health professionals are discussing about the conditions, diseases and treatments. Communicating with others about the progress and mutual support may be one of the most underestimated aspects of recovery.
Source: Omni Medical Search

Freshmen Success Studies

Three new studies of college freshmen suggest that even the most promising can run into academic difficulties as a long-term consequence of experiences like attending a violent or run-down high school or being raised by parents who never went to college.

Two of the studies call into question a large body of research on the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity on campuses, concluding that most first-year students do not reap any gains from diversity that can be measured objectively.Taken together, the studies not only challenge many of the assumptions colleges make in admitting and educating freshmen but could also influence discussions of how to improve the nation’s high schools to promote college preparation.

Source: "Studies Focus on Factors That Influence Freshmen's Success" in The Chronicle of Higher Education November 13

New York Public Library Treasures Online

The New York Public Library quietly rolled out a new video series last month. Titled "Treasures," it showcases 11 gems of the library's vast collection of more than 50 million items. And since then it has joined Facebook, broadening an online reach that already included YouTube and iTunes pages to gain more of an audience.
The library has made the videos available on its site, nypl.org, as well as on YouTube— where its photography piece is by far its most popular with more than 13,000views. (Picture: Harlem Renaissance)
Source: USA Today