February is Library Lovers' Month

Join us in a celebration of libraries! February is Library Lovers' Month designed to recognize the value of all types libraries. You can visit the Library Lovers' website to get ideas on how to appreciate your favorite library and even find some free Bookmarks to share with your Valentine:

One of the materials available on the Library Lovers' page is a link to an impressive list of Librarians in the Movies: An Annotated Filmography compiled by Martin Rarish. Here's just a few of the movies with library scenes that are available to check-out from the Armacost Library DVD collection:

The Music Man

Harry Potter

A Beautiful Mind

Fanning the Embers of Knowledge

From September 1 to October 31, 2012, Armacost Library is holding an Intellectual Freedom Blogathon featuring posts on topics concerning censorship, the freedom to read, view, and express, and the connection these various freedoms have to individual life experiences and the state of society. The following essay is part of the Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon. 

All libraries do the first aspect of facilitation, providing access.... Where too many libraries fall short is in how they: see knowledge as a thing, overemphasize access, and support consuming knowledge instead of creating it. If our libraries are going to support our communities in the future, they must do a better job across the spectrum. 

~ R. David Lankes, 2012, Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today's Complex World, p. 43

Lately I've been asking myself why I chose to be an academic librarian. This navel-gazing is not just because my faculty review dossier, including a reflective evaluation piece, is due in a few weeks. I've been asking myself this question mostly because I have been feeling a little...lost in the dark. I entered library school thinking that what I was studying to become, the profession I was seeking to be a part of, made a difference in the world. I still hold this opinion. Well, I cling to it. The daily tasks of emailing, organizing, meeting, reviewing, and scheduling have made me lose sight of what drew me to academic librarianship in the first place.

Finding my professional path

While thinking about my professional purpose as an academic librarian, I settled on Armacost Library's own organizational vision statement. Simply, it affirms intellectual freedom as our reason for being, our collective purpose, our heartfire. Intellectual freedom, in brief, encompasses two parts -- the freedom to access others' ideas and the freedom to express one's own. Both are important and rely greatly on the other. The freedom to access and to express, germane elements of intellectual freedom, are necessary conditions in a world where knowledge is dynamic, powerful, and constructed in the hearts and minds of people.

Thinking about the active nature of knowledge presents big challenges. Questions abound. If reading about some things only provides initial steps toward learning, how do we go further, especially with our shelves and shelves of printed books? Our continuous searching for and licensing of more, increasingly expensive, databases and digital content? How can we nurture active learning spaces, feed the carefully tended intellectual flames throughout the University community? These are some questions we are currently grappling with at Armacost Library in order to better facilitate knowledge creation within our communities.

Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon is a small spark of light. It does not offer comprehensive answers or assume final solutions. But it does open up a part of our library online space for wider conversation.

How can Armacost Library inflame the embers of your knowledge creation?

Melissa Cardenas-Dow
Outreach/Behavioral Sciences Librarian
Armacost Library, University of Redlands
melissa_cardenasdow (a) redlands (dot) edu
909.748.8089

Books Removed From Classrooms

Only in AZ

From September 1 to October 31, 2012, Armacost Library is holding an Intellectual Freedom Blogathon featuring posts on topics concerning censorship, the freedom to read, view, and express, and the connection these various freedoms have to individual life experiences and the state of society. The following essay is part of the Armacost Library Intellectual Freedom (ALIF) Blogathon. 

My beloved home state of Arizona has done it again.  Must be something in the (lack of) water.  Books have been removed from classrooms (in front of students during class time, allegedly) and are gathering dust in a school district warehouse.  What message does this send?

A long-time state legislator, who became Superintendent of Public Instruction and is now Attorney General, got a bee in his bonnet over some comments made by labor leader Dolores Huerta to a Tucson high school class several years ago, allegedly.  He proceeded to draft, and lead to enactment, legislation that is now codified into Arizona law.  Under that statute, referred to by some as the anti-ethnic studies law, he ordered Tucson to immediately shut down their very successful Mexican American Studies (MAS) program - success measured in significantly higher graduation rates among Mexican American program participants compared to the overall Mexican American student population.  The Tucson school board then voted 4-1 to dismantle the MAS curriculum, ordering school officials to stop teaching MAS classes and to remove MAS program books from classroom shelves.  A few of the removed books (with Armacost Library call numbers):

Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience. PS3048 .A1 1970

Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. HV6439.U7 L77 1993

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. LB880.F73 P4313 2006

Alexie, Sherman. Ten Little Indians. PS3551.L35774 T46 2003

Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek. PS3553.I78 W66 1991

Díaz, Junot. Drown. PS3554.I259 D76 1997

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. PR2833.A2 H6 1955

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Black Mesa Poems. PS3552.A254 B54 1989

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. PQ7298.15.S638 C8613 1995

Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”. Message to Aztlan. PS3557.O47 M4 2001

Hooks, Bell. Feminism is for Everybody. HQ1190 .H67 2000

Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. LC4091 .K69 1992

Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit and Other Plays. PS3572.A387 Z6 1992

Some of these titles obviously found themselves on the wrong shelves at the wrong time.  Banning Shakespeare?  Are you kidding me?!  At the same time, plenty of the books present challenging material.  They present alternative viewpoints.  They contain ideas that require readers to use (develop) critical thinking skills.  They are exactly the kind of material that students should be reading.  If the book banners do not want students engaging with this material, they have chosen a tactic that is bound to fail.  By removing these books from the classroom, they have created greater interest in them within the student body and the public.  These titles are readily available via many libraries and booksellers.  We have most of them at the Armacost Library.

Adelita Grijalva was the lone dissenting board member in the 4-1 vote to stop the MAS program.  She, and others, spoke at the American Library Association Annual Conference in June 2012.  Another of the speakers was Tony Diaz, aka El Librotraficante (the Book Smuggler).  His website has interesting information on efforts to fight the book ban.  Many other people are trying to return books to students.  News of their efforts, and much more information, can be found online, of course, by Googling or searching for actual news articles via databases such as LexisNexis.


Les Canterbury, Collection Development/Reference/Natural Sciences Librarian, Armacost Library

Welcome back!

It's been an eventful summer at Armacost, filled with the noise of construction on the new front entrance and ground floor offices for student services, University Human Resources and the new computing center. Several new librarians have arrived and settled in to life on campus, and our whole staff has been busy preparing for the new school year.

For those of you who are new to campus, we encourage you to take a moment to stop by the library, say hello, and ask any questions you have. We offer a full range of services, including remote access to electronic journals and databases, interlibrary loans, and print and electronic course reserves. Our helpful librarians can be found at the reference desk by the second-floor library entrance, online via IM and Facebook, and even visiting your class to provide instruction specific to your course. This semester we're offering new drop-in workshops to make it easier than ever to get help when you need it. And keep checking this blog for more information about library events, cool research tools and helpful tips to learn more about events on campus and in the news.

This semester our regular hours will be:
Monday-Thursday 8 am - midnight
Friday 8 am - 9 pm
Saturday 10 am - 9 pm
Sunday 1 pm - midnight

Good luck with the start of the semester. We look forward to seeing you around the library!

Open Access Movement Takes a Step (for Mankind)

UC libraries and Springer sign pilot agreement for open access journal publishing

OAKLAND -- The University of California libraries and Springer Science+Business Media (Springer) have concluded a groundbreaking experimental agreement to support open access publishing by UC authors. The arrangement is part of the journals license negotiated by the California Digital Library on behalf of the 10 campuses of the University of California.

Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.

The University of California-Springer agreement is the first large-scale open access experiment of its type undertaken with a major commercial publisher in North America.