"On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission is planning on authorizing sweeping changes to the American news media. The rule changes could allow your local TV stations, newspaper, radio stations, and cable provider to all be owned by one company. NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox could have the same corporate parent. The resulting concentration of ownership could be deeply destructive to our democracy." MoveOn

If you have a problem with all your information coming from a few huge corporate sources, you can send the FCC a message and your vote on this issue. Go to http://www.moveon.org/ today and get involved!

For a more direct link try this link: http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/ecfs/Upload/ After you hit the link, please click on the button marked:
Broadcast Ownership - Docket 02-277

Here are some newspaper articles on the issue:

FCC PLAN TO ALTER MEDIA RULES SPURS GROWING DEBATE
by Frank Ahrens
Washington Post
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
http://www.moveon.org/r?442

ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN AGAINST MURDOCH AS US MEDIA OWNERSHIP LAWS FACE
RELAXATION
by David Teather
The Guardian
Friday, May 30, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,966694,00.html

PUTTING A FACE TO A CAUSE
By David D. Kirkpatrick
New York Times
Thursday, May 29, 2003
http://www.moveon.org/r?443

js

Jim Norman, head of Circulation in the University Library, died in a hiking accident on Saturday near Knoxville, TN.

Requiescat in Pace.

Thurs. the 22nd of May

Building Trust on the Web:
Consumer WebWatch's
First National Summit on Web Credibility

Web experts talking about searching, the issues, the problems and the forecast. It's long, but fascinating, especially to us who have to watch students, who wouldn't fall for a snake oil salesman at their door, just not recognize him on the web. JS

April 24, 2003
Speakers:EP: Eugenie Prime, Hewlett-Packard
DL: Doug Leeds, Overture
MC: Matt Cutts, Google
SS: Sandy Schlosser, ConsumerReports.org
LM: Leslie Marable, Consumer WebWatch
NS: New Speaker

More free academic journal articles, this time from Stanford's HighWire Press.

HighWire Journals--Some are free, especially older issues

"542,130 free full-text articles as of 5/15/03
HighWire Press at Stanford University develops and maintains the Web versions of important journals in biomedicine and other disciplines." Here's a list of journals with free full-text articles online.

If you are looking for a webpage that used to be there and now is gone, try The WayBack Machine.

"The Internet Archive, working with Alexa Internet, has created the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine makes it possible to surf more than 10 billion pages stored in the Internet Archive's web archive. The Wayback Machine was unveiled on October 24th, 2001 at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library."

Do you use KaZaA? Watch out for a virus included in the download.

Fizzer

Looking for high quality, free, full-text academic journals on the public Internet? They are few and far between, but here's a project that's trying to make it easier to find them. Click on the Graphic below:

"The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.
The Directory aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. All subject areas and languages will be covered."

You have until 4:00 tomorrow--Friday the 9th--to complete the incredibly wonderful survey linked from the library homepage. At that time the link will be broken and you will have forever lost your chance to state your issues with this library anonymously. Just do it.

http://library.southalabama.edu/

or

here

Me Bad! Bad Librarian! Bad Information! I must apologize to Edgar Governo: Historian of Things That Never Were for saying yesterday that his site was one which "spew[s] pop-up ads and drop[s] cookies." The other site does both. Mr. Governo is also right on top of what goes on the Web with his site--I had an email from him this morning about the error.

There is always a flip side to information sources like the web--for all that it can offer good information, quickly and easily, it can also disseminate bad information just as quickly and just as easily. Sorry Mr. Governo; I have learned again about this lesson I sometimes too facilely teach. js

I have two history websites that might intrigue you--one for the history buffs--which is actually called The History Buff. It's fun for browsing some of the primary newspaper sources for historical events, like why the French should sell us the Louisiana Purchase.

The second one is for people not so closely tied to reality. It's called: Edgar Governo: Historian of Things That Never Were. Amazingly it has links to timelines for things like the Douglas Adam's series Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, for Harry Potter, for the fictional life of Nero Wolfe or how about a complete biography of Dr. Who1

Warning: Both of these sites spew pop-up ads and drop cookies. js

Check out the best of the web (for design at least).

The 2003 Webby Award Nominations

The Top 10 Reasons to Be a Librarian

Because Hannelore DuBose, our cataloging librarian, has her retirement party today and because graduation is just a week away, I think it most appropriate to present you with this link.

The MLS is the professional degree for practicing librarians. It's a masters' degree from an ALA accredited institution--U of Alabama, Southern Miss., Florida State, and LSU all have programs. Many librarians have other specialities and a second masters', but there are those of us who are generalists, teachers, love books, like computers and don't see why information should be hard to find. If you don't know what you are going to do with your life, try this article.

The Top 10 Reasons to Be a Librarian

From another article on the real need for new librarians:
"One of the survey's questions asked respondents to indicate what percentage of professionals in their specific institutions were expected to retire in the next five years. The responses were:

34 percent expect less than 5 percent of their librarians to retire;
22 percent expect 5 to 10 percent of their librarians to retire;
22 percent expect 10 to 20 percent of their librarians to retire; and
22 percent expect more than 20 percent of their librarians to retire.

Come see me if you are interested in looking into librarianship as a career. js

The first seven laptop connections to our network are now live in the Reference area of the University Library (second floor, north). Four tables between the Reference stacks and three near the windows have AC plugins and live ethernet jacks which are marked with bright orange dots (use the plugins on the side with the orange dot only). Bring in an ethernet cable and link to the broadband campus network for quick Internet access. We have a couple short ethernet cables you can borrow while you are in the library if you forget yours; just ask at the Ref. desk. There will be no printing from this network right now, but you can download or email items and print them in a campus lab or home setup. Let us know about any quirks this arrangment might have so we fix the problems. Happy surfing! js

FYI: If you need a definition quickly, instead of hunting for a dictionary or a dictionary website, you can do a Google search and click on the word as it shows up in the blue stripe on the retrieval screen--like this:

Just how much herbal viagra and organ enlargers do e-mail recipients actually buy? Must be enough to keep these spammers in business!

"Spam Accounts for Roughly 36% of E-Mails "Worldwide"

Easter Monday

Here's some really relevant research in honor of yesterday's holiday.

Peep Research
A Study of Small Fluffy Creatures and Library Usage

HOT DOCS at USA

Vickey Baggott

Let your imagination "take flight" with these new government publications available in the Documents Department:
Significant Events in Air Force History / Phillip S. Meilinger. McLean, VA : U.S. Air Force Centennial of Flight Office, Air Force History and Museums Program, U.S. Dept. of Defense, [2003]. Beginning with the first military aeroplane, the Wright Flyer, in 1909, this document examines specific events that represent turning points in US airpower history which have had long-term effects or consequences.
D 301.82/7:H 62/4

First Flight : the Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane / Tom D. Crouch. Washington, DC : National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, [2002]. Designed as a handbook for the Wright Brothers National Memorial on North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, this document follows the lives of the Wrights from printers and bicycle shop owners, to self-made engineers and courageous experimenters, to world-famous inventors and aviators.
I 29.9/5:159

Looking Backward, Looking Forward : Forty Years of U.S. Human Spaceflight Symposium / edited by Stephen J. Garber. Washington, DC : NASA History Office, Office of External Relations, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2002. The product of a conference organized by the NASA History Office and the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in May 2001, this collected work features 17 leading observers of the U.S. civil space program and provides a retrospective look at human spaceflight, the experience of spaceflight by astronauts, and offers a look forward towards the future of human spaceflight. NAS 1.21:2002-4107/CORR.

C'mon Google! The ALA?

"Google's SafeSearch porn filter was found to exclude non-porn sites such as the American Library Association, in a recent test conducted by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Google admits the porn filter isn't perfect but says the test wasn't perfect, either. The porn filter, when engaged, automatically excludes any sites Google only knows about through link analysis, rather than by actually visiting the site." Read the whole article.

University Library LibQual+ Survey

If you haven't yet filled in the library survey, please, please do so. These are questions being asked in several academic libraries in the state of Alabama and we, the University Library, need reasonable response by our students, staff and faculty in order make any comparison possible. It will take only ten minutes. this link is also available near the top of our homepage.

http://survey.libqual.org/index.cfm?ID=522381

Three links that have to do with news and news reporting: an alternative news website--always useful to see the whole picture; a freedom of the press site; and a cautionary tale website that reports major slipups by journalists who used the public Internet for information gathering.

"AlterNet.org is a project of the Independent Media Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting independent and alternative journalism."

And another link to Behind the Homefront: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "A daily chronicle of news in homeland security and military operations affecting newsgathering, access to information and the public's right to know. "

CyberJounalist. Net: Cyber Slip-Ups

JS

On April 9, 1865, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Read the New York Times article from that date

Fetch E-journal Database

For all that we librarians want students to use the journals to which we subscribe, there are a huge number of useful periodicals on the public Internet of great value. Many of them offer alternative viewpoints and are not indexed in any of USA's 86 subscribed databases. Since these articles are often served to the web in a database fashion the major search engines like Google can't always find them. A Manhattan College librarian has put together a selective database of 11,000 free online periodicals of every type. Since the search engine only allows searching by a title word or phrase, ISSN or publisher, if you don't know a specific title, try using one word like "psychology" or "sports." You will pull up a list of free periodicals and URL links to their homepages. Remember these include all type of periodicals--newsletters, magazines, zines, trade journals and academic journals--so choose carefully; you must evaluate all information!

The periodicals are selected using the following criteria:

"• Ejournals with substantial full-text archives.
• Journals written in English.
• Journals for which there is a print (i.e. paper) version.
• Journals produced by academic societies, educational institutions and U.S. and international government institutions and non-governmental organizations.
• Journals indexed by citation databases, such as ERIC and the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE service.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What kind of journals were left out of this database?
• Ejournals which require subscriptions or fees for access to all full-text.
• Ejournals which are free on a temporary basis or for a limited time period.
• Journals in non-English languages which cannot be translated into English using the Alta Vista Babel Fish service.
• Web "zines" written by individuals, web diaries, blogs.
• Orphan journals, which were published once and then abandoned. What are e-journals?"

I had forgotten about this website until today when I taught library research to a journalism class. Good for public opinion trends from a supposedly unbiased source.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

"The Center's purpose is to serve as a forum for ideas on the media and public policy through public opinion research. In this role it serves as an important information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations. All of our current survey results are made available free of charge."

At the end of Women's History Month, during which I neglected to give any websites, I hope to make up for the oversight by offering this one: Women of Our Time--a Flash presentation of wonderful photographs of some of the women who made the century more interesting! It's from the National Portrait Gallery.

http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/woot/index.htm

Are you skeptical enough about all the information that bombards you daily?

Spin of the Day

Reporters' Log: War in Iraq

Mon,. March 24th
Day after Spring Break

Maybe you're curious about how Google comes up with better results than some of the other search engines. Here's a website that tells you the "rules" for showing up high on the Google retrieval list.

Search engine standards for website placement, ranking and positioning

Tues., March 11

I'm so far behind! I haven't even give you a good link to check out in a long time. But things are getting better now the new building is open. If you haven't explored it yet, please come over. I think you'll like it.

And if you are interested in an open library instruction session-- tomorrow, Wed. at 1:25 in the new library auditorium, I'll have an open session on Research Strategies sponsored by the Writing Outreach program of the English Dept. For 50 minutes I'll try to answer any questions you might have about your research problems. JS

Come celebrate your wonderful new library facility!

So much to do. . . so little time! The Library's dedication of its new building will happen on Ash Wednesday whether we are ready or not. Come if the weather is nice. Don't come if it's raining. Whatever happens on Weds., please make sure you come on Thursday and Friday of this week. We've been promised cookies and beverages in the Atrium on those two days and we will have tour guides ready to take you around every hour on the hour. Or just wander through yourself.

We are all delighted with the ambience of the addition. Great lights, good desks and comfortable chairs looking out on the wetlands. Lots of group study rooms and a plethora of ethernet drops for laptops, but don't plug your laptop in yet--the server for those plugs is still on order. They will be working sometime this summer.

We are still moving in over there, so please be patient and ask for help from any library staff you can find!

A Hard Lesson in Information Economics

Periodical librarians all over the country are having nightmares the past few weeks. Libraries use agents to pay publishers for their journal subscription. The agent charges a fee, but it saves thelibrary and accounts department at the university a huge amount of work. Instead of having to send 2000 separate checks to individual journal publishers, libraries send one big check to the agent who then takes care of paying the publishers. What's happened is that an agent company called RoweCom (which used to be Faxon) was bought up by a company called "divine." Libraries sent their big checks to RoweCom, but divine took much of the money for its own use and convoluted reasons and the publishers never got paid--therefore the libraries never got their journals. Faculty and students can't get the articles they need from the library. There will result a gap in the collections of several thousand libraries of all kinds: public, academic, special libraries. '02 and '03 journals will be missing from them-forever.

Library journal collections can offer a study in the ups and downs of the U.S. economy. When they don't get enough money, libraries have to cut their journal collections. And now it seems that greed and corruption at high corporate levels can also affect important library collections.

We at USA haven't been directly affected by this situation right now, but nothing this big can happen without creating waves of issues that will affect all libraries in the near and distant future.

JS

Try this link or a Google News search on the business names to get more info:

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=7756

Happy Valentine's Day

"Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other....." Joshua Liebman

REMINDER:
The main books on 3-South are being moved this week.
"F through HA" to 3-North
"HB through ? " to 4-North

They are moving the HG's over this morning.

Ask at any service desk for help in retrieving these books.

Things are incredibly busy in the University Library with the preparations for the Grand Opening scheduled for March 5th. All the circulating books are being moved over to the new building. For you that means no more browsing the stacks for the next three weeks or so. If you need a book, take the call# to one of the service desks and one of us will get it and bring it back for you. Also, please be careful--the workers are doing final adjustments and there are ladders, men (and raccoons) in the ceiling, carpenters, hoses, wet paint, cleaners and lost librarians wandering the building! This will be over soon. Watch for announcements of tours and be sure to take one so you get the hot skinny on all the new facilities and functions the new building will have for you. JS

For those of you who are interested, today is the "Day of Poetry Against the War" and here's the website with thousands of poems on that theme.

More on Music Copyright--From the European Union (If you are not registered for the free NYTimes online this is a chance to do so--or use LexisNexis (general news> major papers> for this author on this date).

"Copyright protection lasts only 50 years in European Union countries, compared with 95 years in the United States, even if the recordings were originally made and released in America. So recordings made in the early- to mid-1950's - by figures like Maria Callas, Elvis Presley and Ella Fitzgerald - are entering the public domain in Europe, opening the way for any European recording company to release albums that had been owned exclusively by particular labels." Tommasini, Anthony. New York Times Online 2 Jan. 2003.

The Recording Industry Association of America is not happy. So watch for an attempt to get the EU to change their laws, as we (U.S.) have (95 years), or to encourage a customs barrier on imported albums. It seems that the principles of copyright and the "common good" often fall when a huge amount of corporate money is at stake, js

2003 List of Banished Words - (for mis-, Mal- or Over-Used, as well as General Uselessness). Here's an annual list from a school whose students won't see Spring till June.

Here's a new proposal from Lawrence Lessig, the great copyright/Internet guru, to regain some of the "public" domain lost last week in the Supreme Court.(click here to find out what I'm talking about) Part of the problem with the extension of copyright(70 years after the death of the author or 95 years for corporate authorship) is that if you wish to use a copyright item (other than under fair use guidelines) and are willing to pay for its use, you still have to find out who currently owns it. The great, great grandchild of the author, musician, poet, artist may be in the witness protection program in Boseman, may have emigrated to the Terra del Fuego or may be in the land of apathy and not give a hoot. This proposal would allow copyright to lapse after 50 years in the case of any of those scenarios. This proposal gives me hope that maybe creativity will win out over corporate greed--if (a big IF) our legislators can be made to think about the "public interest." js

"Five Hundred University of California Press eScholarship Editions Now Available on the Web"

This announcement just came to my email box and I immediately browsed this collection of freebies. All are published by UC Press and most are very academic. Thirty free books in Women's Studies; 90 free in History; 114 in Politics with many other subject areas covered.

My guess is that the publisher knew that there would be no demand for a reprint of any of these, therefore putting them on the web would not cut into any future profits; why not enhance the books' and the publisher's visibility by giving them away.

Copyright for individuals is now 70 years after the death of the author and UCaliforniaP, who no doubt holds the copyright, could have hung on to most of these for almost one hundred years. But why would they? We most fervently wish that other academic publishers would follow suit.

Here's the email--"Over 300 of the University of California Press eScholarship Editions are available to the public. The other titles are currently only available to UC faculty, students and staff. Readers outside the UC system may view citations, abstracts and tables of contents, but not the full texts.

P.S. The website itself says 350, not 300.

P.P.S. If you haven't tried The National Academies Press, try it also for full-text free books whose authorship is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, a government agency, which does not copyright its books. js

Thurs. 23 Jan.

If you receive an e-mail that just tugs at your heartstrings--it's probably playing you for a sucker! There are a lot of 15 year olds with not enough to do and 35 year olds scam artists looking for the "rube." The Internet makes us all easy victims.

Here's a website that you can check before sending out a mass mailing to your friends and acquaintances that might embarrass you and hurt them.

Hoax Busters is a public service of the Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC).

Eldred Illustrated

http://www.waxy.org/random/images/weblog/eldred.jpg

Thurs. 16

Mickey Mouse won yesterday. The rest of us lost. The Supreme Court delivered its decision on the Eldred vs Ashcroft case argued before the Court in 2002.

Congress extended copyright in the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Scholars, librarians and many other knowledgeable people argued that the law favors corporate copyright holders over consumers and that Congress did not change the law in the public interest. The Court said yesterday in a 7-2 decision that the law IS constitutional. Congress can interpret the word "limited" in the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean.

"The Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries . . ." Article I, Section 6

"Corporate" works like Mickey Mouse are now copyrighted for 95 years instead of 75. Twenty more years of royalties are a lot of mouse droppings. If it was just Mickey maybe we would feel resigned, but you won't be able to sing Happy Birthday freely until 2030. Forget Gershwin or Irving Berlin. Even items for which the copyright had expired have been drawn back under this law. Thousands of books written between 1913 and 1928 have to be pulled off the web or those mounting them will be in defiance of this law

Read about the decision in:
The Chronicle of Higher Education and on Lawrence Lessig's own Blog. Lessig is the lawyer who argued against the law before the Supreme Court. Or read the decision itself and weep for the narrowing of the "public" domain. JS

For those of our USA community who haven't been over to the library lately, be prepared:

• The floors have all been renumbered (1, 2, 3, 4).
• The reference desk is now on the 4th floor outside the Admin offices.
• You can't get off the elevator on the 2nd fl(old ref. is being remediated[asbestos]).
• Most of the reference books and those circulating books with call #s A to E are not browsable because they are in the new addition.
• The ref. librarians will get whatever books you need, just give us the call numbers.
• All this will change again in the next few weeks!

Some history of the Internet from an e-mail newsletter, Greenhouse Effects

...AND LOOKING BACK
"While looking forward, we think it's also appropriate to look backward on the Internet's 20th birthday. In 1983, the ARPANET converted to TCP/IP from an older protocol, enabling it to become the "network of networks" that evolved into the Internet. (The term "Internet" was first used in 1984.) At that time, less than 1000 host computers were connected to the network. Today, there are over 200 million hosts and nearly a billion users.
Internet growth hasn't slowed since the dotcom bust. In fact, growth has accelerated. The number of Internet host computers quadrupled from 50 million to 200 million between January 2001 and September 2002.
The Internet has grown much faster than any other new medium. To achieve an audience of 50 million users, radio took 38 years and TV took 13 years, but the Internet needed just four years from its introduction as a public network. Furthermore, the spread of the Internet to less-developed countries could have positive effects on their economic and political development. China is now the second largest Internet country with around 50 million users, nearly double from a year ago, and it should surpass the US in two years. "

Monday, 13 Jan.
1st Day of Classes

Another stereotype blown to bits. Guess what— newspaper subscriptions are increasing. That might mean that more people are reading! More people reading might mean more educated citizens. JS

The graph below is from Media Markets Daily:

Librarians have been wrestling with the implications of the U. S. Patriot Act since it became law last year. One of the provisions is that when requested by government authority, we must provide information about our patrons' use of the library and the Internet, with the added provision that we can't tell ANYONE that we have disclosed this information. Since this is totally antithetical to Alabama State Code of law, § 41-8-10. Confidentiality of registration records and our own professional ethics--everyone has a right to read whatever they care to; reading is education, not subversion; what one reads is private—we are caught in a dilemma: accessory to possible breaches of "homeland" security vs the right to the reading privacy of our patrons. Here are some signs suggested by librarians that might be hung to warn our patrons of the risks they take when they read or surf in our libraries. (from http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html)

[the above--on the assumption that it's only illegal
to say they've been there if it's true...]

For those who might tend to think that libraries are free—or maybe that libraries will soon be obsolete—try this website:

The Best Things in Life Aren't Freel

Monday Jan. 6,
2003

Just got back from extended Holiday to find lots of changes. The Reference Desk is on the newly named "4th Floor South" previously called the Third Floor. The whole old "Lobby" Floor is closed off for moving and asbestos abatement. Pictures coming! We're almost there. Sometime in February, we think, both sides will be open. JS

Try the Google Zeitgeist--a list of the most googled terms for the year:

2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist: Search patterns, trends, and surprises