Mon. afterThanksgiving

Pat Schroeder, former Congresswoman from Colorado, who used to be one of my favorite women politicos has struck again in her role as spokewoman for the American Association of Publishers. She previously blamed librarians for being unsympathetic to the needs of her publishers. Now she is after university bookstores. We all know quite well that textbooks cost a fortune. Schroeder is blaming the bookstore for excesssive markup. The truth, whatever that may be, must include the fact the publisher-set prices for textbooks have risen 35% in the past five years in the U.S., even though the same textbooks are often available overseas at half the price. Sounds kind of like the prescription drug industry, doesn't it? Wonder exactly who is banking these profits? Here's an article from InfoTrac that talks about the problem.

"Textbook prices ignite industry dispute; AAP, angered over price-gouging charge, suggests selling directly to students." John Mutter; Jim Milliot.

[If you are off campus, you will have to login first before accessing this info.]

Day before Thanksgiving

EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal from something called the World Resource Institute now provides a huge set of data for things like international business, climate, energy production and consumption, water resources and ecosystems. Want to know the number of Internet users in Brazil or the number of AIDS orphans in Zambia, it's here. The data is culled from UN and non-governmental agencies such as the World Bank, UN Children's Fund, U.S. Geological Survey and many others.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/

Another one: One-Look Reverse Dictionary Ever have a word on the tip of your tongue, but can't quite reach it. Describe it in the search box here and the site will return a list of words that might be related. Sometimes you can pick out the one you've been thinking of. This site is going to be at the top of my favorites, as there are more and more words that don't come to mind as fast as they used to in my aging brain.
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

Thanks to Marylaine Block for these two. js

At last, online E. D. Hirsch, Jr's completely revised 3rd edition of The NEW Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Here's how it books itself: "The manifestation of one of the most influential modern educational theories, the 6,900 entries in this major new reference work form the touchstone of what it means to be not only just a literate American but an active citizen in our multicultural democracy."

Does knowing all of the cultural trivia in this book really mean that one is educated, literate and active? Multiculturally aware, too! If so, let's stop wasting money on education and set up little memorization academies to study the contents of this book-then we can be assured that no child will be left behind not knowing these excellent answers which will make them educated, literate and active--or maybe they can just win a lot of money on Jeopardy and retire early. js

There's blatant and outrageous censorship and then there's sneaky, under-the-radar government censorship like that reported by NAD, National Association of the Deaf. Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities program in the Department of Education gets to decide which television programs are to be closed-captioned and they've decided that 200 TV shows are inappropriate for captioning. Among them are:
Disney Monthly Original Children's Movie
I Dream of Jeannie
Inspector Gadget's Field Trip
Law & Order series
Major League Baseball ESPN/ABC
Documentary: Gay Hollywood
The Simpsons--FOX

We might be forced to grant that the Simpson's is often wonderfully subversive, but I Dream of Jeannie? Read the NAD article here and see the complete list here. js

Have you tried Amazon's "Search Inside a Book" feature? Amazon is sending books overseas and having them scanned. Doing a search will bring up words on the pages of these books. So far you can browse the pages of 120,000 books from 190 publishers. It is very much like our NetLibrary collection of 7,000 books, except that you can read the whole book on NetLibrary without charge if you are one of our students. You will have to buy books from Amazon.

But it is a great idea! Library catalogs are notoriusly difficult to use by the inexperienced. Now our freshmen will be inundated with huge amounts of information just waiting for a credit card number. Wait! Is that really an improvement?

This is from The New York Times online, 6 Nov. 2003. "Until last week, users could print pages too, but Amazon shut off that feature so that a printout will now show a blank space where the book's text had been. (Of course, people are already talking about how savvy users with screen-grab software may get around that restriction.) Amazon has also said that it will limit any reader to viewing 20 percent of a book's pages in a given month, although it is not clear how the company would prevent people from logging in under multiple names or from different computers; Amazon declined to discuss security measures." js

Here are a few tidbits of info about info from a Berkeley research report entitled "How Much Information? 2003."
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

"Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work – about 13% of the time."

"The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections."

"Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year."

"Summary estimates show that the storage of new information has been growing at a rate of over 30% a year (upper estimate, uncompressed)."

". . . annually each of the inhabitants of North America consumes 11,916 sheets of paper (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper (15 reams). At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents. "

"About half of all postal mail in the United States is currently first class and about half is junk mail.

"The U.S. produces 37% of the world’s audio CD titles, 50% of the CD ROM titles, and 40% of the DVD titles."

js

Veterans' Day

compiled by Vickey Baggott

I get really angry when the "government" decides that "we" no longer need information that was formerly provided. Gary Price, MLIS, in his Resource Shelf newsletter [http://www.resourceshelf.com/] of Oct 28th reports that the Congressional Research Service Reports are no longer available on the web. These are well-researched studies done by the librarians and researchers at the Library of Congress for the legislators to provide the best, most up-to-date information to inform their lawmaking function. I blogged it in August 12th, this year. js

Here's Gary Price's piece and a reprint of his source:

Congressional Research Service, CRS Source Goes Offline
Over the past couple of years ResourceShelf has worked hard to keep you updated with recently published or recently updated Congressional Research Service material. A favorite source was via a gateway on Congressman Chris Shay's or Congressman Mark Green's web site to a server on the U.S. House web server. What follows is a reprint of an article from Secrecy News that discusses the fact that these two sites have been taken down."

Here's a link to the Secrecy News article: http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2003/10/102803.html

Committee on the Library: Resolution on Ties with Elsevier Journals

The continuing discussion about the for-profit academic journal publisher's prices has been heated up a notch. The University of California, Santa Cruz's Academic Senate has passed a resolution encouraging its faculty to provide wider access to current research information by avoiding certain publishers. If the research faculty neither submit to, nor serve as editors for the most expensive [also often prestigious] journals, and instead use not-for-profit alternative methods of publishing like Public Library of Science: Biology or BioMedCentral then the monopoly will be broken. Of course, the faculty have to take the risk and forgo prestige for the common good. "Faculty action to retain intellectual property rights would also contribute to meeting the challenge. Authors can negotiate to retain certain rights, including the right to post their work in an institutional repository or distribute copies to their classes." And the university administrators must reward that risk-taking. js Here's the resolution:

http://senate.ucsc.edu/col/res.1405.pdf

Two sites of interest today:

1. This is Broken Got a favorite design flaw? I do--hundreds in fact. Who designed my microwave with the biggest button being the clock reset button? For two years I've reset the clock at least once a day. Am I stupid?--yes, but so is this designer who makes me think every single time I use that microwave. How about the guy who put three locks into three cabinet doors in the auditorium--all going a different direction. For one, the key is teeth up, the other, teeth down and the last teeth sideways. ARGH! Sometimes it must be on purpose--guerilla design! Anyhow, if you have a pet peeve, take a picture and send it here. Here's a Harvard University bookdrop picture. See they're not so smart! http://www.goodexperience.com/tib/

2. National Security Archive at George Washington University An archive of declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Nothing more interesting than someone else's old secrets. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

Here's the most practical academic website I've seen since sliced bread(?It's Monday morning.)!

The University of Minnesota's Assignment Calculator-You Can Beat the Clock. Put in the date your assignment is due; choose the course discipline; hit "Calculate Assignment Schedule" and it spits out suggested deadlines for the various sections. It even has links to ways to accomplish each part of the process. For those of us who always underestimate the time it will take to research, read, write and edit a paper, this is a super-duper organizer. Try it. So simple. So smart. . . . So adjustable! http://www.lib.umn.edu/help/calculator/ js

Fri. the 24th of October

National Take Back Your Time Day

Just found out that today is National Take Back Your Time Day.

This is from the University of Washington's Daily Newspaper 10/23 issue:

"The end of daylight-saving time Sunday will give everyone an extra hour, but tomorrow’s National Take Back Your Time Day is encouraging people not to settle with such a miniscule amount.
At least 60 communities nationwide are sponsoring activities to alleviate what organizers see as a modern epidemic of overworking. For the UW’s part, events across campus will offer places to meditate, write poems, learn yoga and listen to a story.
“Many people –– students, faculty and staff –– are suffering from overwork. Our lives are becoming faster and busier and the quality of life is declining,” said information school professor David Levy, who organized the UW’s participation. “This isn’t good for our health, it isn’t good for our education and I believe it isn’t good for society.”" . . .

"The day falls nine weeks before the end of the year, symbolizing the nine weeks, 350 hours, more each year that Americans work than western Europeans, according to national organizer John de Graaf. It is also the 63rd anniversary of the implementation of the 40-hour work week in the United States."

The Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, may be the closest thing we have to "objective" journalism in this country [although even here, some may disagree. See rant below]. Their affiliate, WGBH in Boston, has put together a Frontline show on the causes and consequences of the war in Iraq since 9/11. Much of this program consists of interviews with government officials and experts in the field. Whatever your belief about our involvement there, we as citizens need to be able to voice our choices for the future based on the best "objective" research we can do. You can watch the whole show online at Truth, War and Consequences.

All recommendations in this Blog are mine and mine alone. JS

With all the EH 102 students now investigating some current events issue and soon to write a persuasive paper on that issues, I am constantly aware of their problem in finding good, unbiased sources of information.

Can anyone find out the "truth" anymore? There is so much spin in every television program and newspaper and magazine reporting decision, that I'm not sure that we can ever get even a clear picture of an issue--forget the truth. Almost every issue is now politicized and corporatized. However there are some media watchdogs worth consulting when you do need to know who's "making" the story. One is the excellent Columbia Journalism Review. Another is PR Watch (Public Interest Reporting on the PR/Public Affairs Industry). Or try Spinsanity or FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). Some of these have their own biases--true objectivity has never been possible, but at least we used to think that "the news" tried. js

The big academic news this week was the incredible response (500,000 hits in the first week) to free journal articles published in vol. 1, issue 1 of The Public Library of Science. Now if university tenure committees and administrators can come to understand the importance of such non-profit, peer-reviewed, online journal ventures then maybe our researchers would use them. Libraries "might could" unskew journal vs book expenditure ratio. We would be able to buy more books with a less inflation-driven budget.

This is its description of itself:

"The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

The internet and electronic publishing enable the creation of public libraries of science containing the full text and data of any published research article, available free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Immediate unrestricted access to scientific ideas, methods, results, and conclusions will speed the progress of science and medicine, and will more directly bring the benefits of research to the public." js

I think I need to hype librarianship at least once a week because most people don't really "get it." Here's the hype for reference librarians this week--a quote from:

Jessamyn West. "The Librarian Is In and Online." Computers in Libraries, October, 2003. http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct03/west.shtml

"These days, I get fewer blank stares when I talk about library school than I did 8 years ago, but that doesn't mean people really "get" the reference thing. I explain it to my friends like this: This is a question, but not a reference question: "Do you guys have any information on caves?" And this is a reference question: "I am trying to find information on those sightless fish that live in caves. I would like a book for my 10th graders to read." It's the librarian's job to turn the first type of question into the second. The fact that we as librarians will also tell you what time it is or where the bathroom is does not mean that we're not doing some serious question alchemy to help you find most things. The best reference interactions are ones in which the patrons find what they want and are not even aware that the librarians have been giving them reference interviews the entire time. "
js

Wednesday

We just added a whole symphony of music journals to our JSTOR Collection! Here's the list and their dates of fulltext coverage.

19th-Century Music 1977-1998
Acta Musicologica 1931-1997
Mitteilungen der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft / Bulletin de la Société internationale de Musicologie 1928-1930
American Music 1983-2000
Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 1918-1998
Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 1899-1914
Asian Music 1968-1998
Black Music Research Journal 1980-1999
British Journal of Ethnomusicology 1992-1997
Cambridge Opera Journal 1989-1997
Early Music History 1981-1997
Ethnomusicology 1953-1998
Galpin Society Journal 1948-1997
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 1971-1995
International Review of Music Aesthetics and Sociology 1970
Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 1928-1998
Journal of Music Theory 1957-1997
Journal of Musicology 1982-1998
Journal of the American Musicological Society 1948-1997
Bulletin of the American Musicological Society 1936-1948
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 1986-1997
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 1944-1985
Proceedings of the Musical Association 1874-1944
Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 1980-1999
Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 1970-1975
Anuario 1965-1969
Music & Letters 1920-1997
Music Analysis 1982-1997
Music Theory Spectrum 1979-1998
Musical Quarterly 1915-1997
Musical Times 1903-1999
Notes 1934-1997
Perspectives of New Music 1962-1995
Popular Music 1981-1997
Revue de musicologie 1922-1995
Bulletin de la Société française de musicologie 1917-1921
Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 1961-1997
Tempo 1939-1997
Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 1995-1997
Tidjschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 1960-1994
Tidjschrift der Vereeniging voor Noord-Nederlands Muziekgeschiedenis 1882-1959
Yearbook for Traditional Music 1981-1998
Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 1969-1980
Journal of the International Folk Music Council 1949-1968

Tues. Oct.14

One of the marvelous features of the web is the way it can facilitate our access to primary documents. Many items previously hidden in archival collections can now be found by doing a Google search. But what then? How can you find, really evaluate and cite these primary sources? The History Section of Reference & User Services Association of the American Library Association has developed a webpage entitled: Using Primary Sources on the Web.

My current signature quote on my emails is: "The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the
subject." Marcus Aurelius. But if you are really interested in polls as a source of information for your next global PR campaign or for developing the proper political spin for your candidate's next election bid, try this site--at least it seems impartial.

Americans & the World http://www.americans-world.org/

". . . a source of comprehensive information on US public opinion on international issues. The site includes The Digest, which provides comprehensive analyses of polling on various international topics. Over the coming months we will periodically release analyses of US public opinion on other international topics."

PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland at the School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland.

Weds.

University Library from the air.

2:00 P.M. Ebsco databases are now up and running.

9:00 A.M. This is the third day in a row that the Ebsco databases are not functioning. Ebsco decided that they would do an update to their administrative system on Saturday and, what was supposed to be painless for the endusers, has proved to be disastrous.

For those students who need to research using ERIC, let me direct you to the free web version called AskERIC. It doesn't have the complete functionality of the Ebsco version but you can limit to reports/research by putting the number 143 in the "publication type" field search and it has a working thesaurus. Used the search box in "full-text by title list" to see if the journal is owned in print or electronically in another non-Ebsco database.

For anyone who thinks that all info should be electronic immediately, this is a lesson. Until software becomes less vulnerable and programmers have more foresight, we'd better not totally give up on the most flexible, friendly and stable form of info--the printed page. js

If you spend hours doing Internet searching and would rather not, Science Direct, the Elsevier database, has developed a tutorial to help you become an expert searcher. I haven't tried it yet but just browsing it makes me think that I could learn a lot--just need my wasted time back! Try it at: http://www.webresearch.sciencedirect.com/ js

Click here to find out what's happening in the Library this month.

NetLibrary Added to Homepage

Check out the links that have been added to the rearranged Library Homepage, esp. NetLibrary. This is a collection, to which we just subscribed, of recent books that are full-text online. About 9,000. I wish there existed a list of the titles included, because it's a little hard to figure out what kinds of books are included, but they seem to be mostly from 1999 to the present and in every discipline including some reference books.

The first time you access it, you must create an account so it will know that you are from a subscribed institution. Then you can search, browse your results, and check out any book you wish for 4 hours at a time.You probably won't be able to read from your computer screen for four full hours, but the next time you're ready you can go back in and check out the book again. If someone else has it checked out, you won't be able to get it until it is free again. Because of copyright considerations, the software will not let you print out multiple pages, but you can print individual pages with your browser print function--useful for capturing quotes and important info. You can also browse for words anywhere in the book. The software will return those pages on which the word or words shows up. Pretty Nifty.

Try it when you're up in the middle of the night worrying about that paper that's due at the end of the week and you haven't hit the library yet. Then Let us know what you think about this collection. Do you like it? Hate it? And why! js

You've heard all about the brouhaha over the FCC's decision to allow large corporations to buy more media outlets in one area than had been allowed before. Well, the Center for Public Integrity's Well Connected database is a way to find out who owns what in any area. So check out the page and put in your area code to find out that Disney owns WQUA in Citronelle and other interesting facts about the local radio, tv, telephone and cable companies.

Find out Clear Channel's corporate mission: “If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be someone from our company,” Clear Channel Communications, Inc. Chairman and CEO Lowry Mays told Fortune magazine recently. “We’re not in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers’ products.” Very Interesting! js

The State of Alabama has a new website--http://www.alabama.gov/. Lots of good info including this link to a beach-cam at Gulf Shores. There's also one at Alabama Point.

Foreign Media Reaction

from International Information Programs at the State Department

Wow! I know that LexisNexis is a great way to find out a variety of reactions to current events from around the world in one place because of the large number of newspapers included in its coverage. But this site is amazing, because it gathers editorial articles from newspapers in all the major countries of the world on one webpage. The page is kind of awkward because you have to scroll to the right and then up and down to read the articles, but it is worth it. Try the current page on world opinion commemorating 9/11 from "old Europe," many muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, the Near East, Far East, Central and South America and whomever is left. It's produced by the U.S. Government probably as way to monitor local opinions, but is a valuable way to see what the rest of the world thinks. They aren't always wrong! js

Vickey Baggott of our Gov. Docs. department has put together this great annotated list. If you have any questions about these or any other documents send her an email.

Thomas Jefferson : [Library of Congress Exhibition ]. Library of Congress, 2000. LC 1.2:J 35 x and http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffwest.html

"Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail" Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/lecl/

"LewisandClark200.Gov : Lewis and Clark Bicentennial" Dept. of the Interior. http://www.lewisandclark200.gov/