Choose Your Own...

(Note: For the rest of October 2011, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Armacost Library blog will showcase guest and regular writers. They were all asked to respond to the question "What does information literacy mean to me?")

Agency. In a word, that's what information literacy means to me. Before information retrieval skills, before the ability to critically evaluate information sources, before the competence to use information accurately and ethically, an information seeker must be aware of herself as an actor, someone who has the ability to choose and the freedom to act.

The knowledge that one has the ability to choose and the free will to exercise that choice is a very basic, fundamental concept. It is so beyond obvious that many feel it's not worth examining or even mentioning. But without this hyper level of self-awareness, we can't take the step to examine our own positions and the reasons for our actions, much else the positions of others who make efforts to convince us to agree (or go along) with their points of view.

From this sense of self-awareness springs the knowledge and ability to choose. In a big way, the agency I write about here is more a disposition or habit of mind than a skill, strategy, or tool. I'm talking about the mental framework that enables a person to choose and understand her choices.

This hyper-awareness is, I believe, part of what makes information literacy so exhausting. Underneath the hounding down of facts using different tools and resources and developing the skills to discern which sources will work for which information problem, an information seeker needs to know that there's a need for information in the first place and that she can do something about it.

Research and information seeking, when done well, takes time, persistence, and care. In a way, information seeking is very much like embarking on a big adventure. And like most journeys worth the effort, preparation can mean the difference between success and failure, life and death. Exercising one's self-reflective capacities, one's inclination towards and discernment of varying courses of action, is very much like the equipment check before the trip.

Be sure to choose wisely.

-- Melissa Cardenas-Dow, Armacost Library Outreach/Reference Librarian

Discovering Reality

(Note: For the rest of October 2011, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Armacost Library blog will showcase guest writers. They were asked to respond to the writing prompt, "What does information literacy mean to me?")

Information literacy is exhausting for someone who cares about reality.

But reality is worth it! I believe everything in the universe is knowable—and all knowledge is worth having. Everything we humans know, we know by gathering data, finding patterns, making predictions, and testing those predictions.

I love learning about what’s been discovered, proven, calculated, disproven, and what’s still unknown. And since human understanding and knowledge is always changing, it can all be difficult to keep track of. That’s where information literacy comes in.

“Information literacy” refers to the skills needed to discriminate between good information, bad information, and everything in between. Since I care about reality, I care about facts. If you’re like me, you know tracking down facts can be hard. It can also be expensive.

Opinions are easier to come by than facts. Opinions informed by facts are more useful, but you have to sort through a pile of opinions to find one. Then you have to go through those to find the opinions formed by a careful evaluation of a variety of facts. Luckily, once you find a trustworthy source such as a journalist, scientist, or publisher, you can safely rely on them—but even then you have to be careful of overreliance on authority.

You could evaluate the facts yourself. Again, finding a reliable source can be difficult and costly. If the source is free, can you figure out why it’s free and adjust your evaluation accordingly? If the source isn’t free, can you afford to access it? Perhaps more importantly: have you looked at your local library’s resources to see what’s already been paid for? News articles are always being published about the latest corporately-funded research; have you checked scientific and scholarly resources to compare findings?

Reality isn’t always easy to come by, but it is a joy. Luckily, libraries have the discovery tools ready for you.

-- Emily Croft, Armacost Library Acquisitions Assistant

Banned Books Week: hype or not?

With Banned Books Week 2011 over, that's it for censorship and book challenges, right? No. If anything, it's the time for us to think more deeply about the act of challenging information and excluding materials.

This is why Armacost Library decided to extend the conversation wall question till this Friday, October 15. And to ask the question we did--is Banned Books Week hype or not? 

Early in September 2011, columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote an opinion piece that stated that various reasons why he thinks Banned Books Week is hype. What's more, he politicizes the concern over book challenges, censorship and intellectual freedom as something championed by "the American left" and is therefore "propaganda." Goldberg does bring up some significant points, such as the differences between challenging books for age appropriateness and outright banning books from schools and libraries.

A response from Elaine Magliaro, school teacher and librarian, came not too long after. Then, Jonah Goldberg's rebuttal after that.

As we march on to October, and celebrate Information Literacy Awareness month, Armacost Library invites the University of Redlands community to continue to think, write and speak about the issues raised by Banned Books Week--limitations placed on access to information and our collective intellectual and academic freedoms.

Banned Books Week 2011: BBW Conversation Wall

Photo by Marc Wathieu via Flickr

From Saturday, September 24 to Saturday, October 15, Armacost Library will have a pin corkboard up in the Library lobby, asking the questions, "Is Banned Books Week exaggerated hype or not? Why/why not?"

Library visitors are welcome to post answers to the questions and responses to other posts.

Some posting guidelines:
1)  Posts should be on-topic.

2)  Posts that provide personal information (telephone numbers, email addresses, names and other identifying information) will be taken down.

3) Posts that advertise other events, whether on campus or not, will also be taken down.

Questions and comments? Please contact Melissa Cardenas-Dow at Melissa_Cardenasdow@redlands.edu or 909.748.8089.

Conversation wall design, organization and set-up led by Armacost Library Technical Services Supervisor, Trisha Aurelio.

Banned Books Week 2011: Suggest a Banned or Challenged Book Raffle!

Photo by Howard Lake via Flickr

Use the Armacost Library online catalog to suggest a banned or challenged book for inclusion to our collection. From now till October 15, 2011.

To get to the Armacost Library online catalog, go to: http://library.uor.edu/ . Click on the Suggest a Purchase link on the right-most column.

Suggestions can be made by current students, faculty and staff members of the University of Redlands community only. Single, individual suggestions will be considered single, individual entries to the raffle.

 

Submission rules: 

1) Suggestions must be for a book that has been challenged or banned and not already in Armacost Library’s collection. 

2) One unique title suggestion that meets rule #1 from one person will be considered as one eligible entry. No limits will be placed on the number of entries one person can submit.

3) Submissions can be made now until October 15, 2011. On Monday October 17, Armacost Library will randomly draw the winning submission and notify the individual who made the winning entry. The winner of the drawing will be announced on this blog. The winning submission will also be added to Armacost Library's collections.

Prize: $25 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble.

For questions and comments, please contact Melissa Cardenas-Dow at Melissa_Cardenasdow@redlands.edu or 909.748.8089.

Banned Books Week 2011: BBW Virtual Read-Out

 Banned Books Week Virtual Read-Out 2011 is the first global virtual read-out event sponsored by the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom (ALA-OIF).

From now until Saturday, October 1, 2011, readers from across the globe are invited to video-record themselves reading from a banned or challenged book.

To view what has been submitted by other readers, take a look at the BBW Virtual Read-Out YouTube channel.

Banned Books Week 2011: BBW Retrospective

BBW Retrospective celebrates the freedom to read and express by showcasing poster from past American Library Association Graphics Banned Books Week events. Armacost Library has been celebrating Banned Books Week since 1993, so we have a number of posters to show!

In addition, display areas will feature banned and challenged books that are part of Armacost Library's current collections.

The posters and displays will be up starting Saturday, September 24 till Saturday, October 1.

Bookmarks and buttons from the 2011 Banned Books Week ALA campaign will also be available as free giveaways.

Display organization, design, set-up and tear-down are led by Armacost Library's Technical Services Supervisor, Trisha Aurelio.

JSTOR's read-only period: Fri.-Sat. 9/9-9/10/11

Due to a scheduled site maintenance, some of JSTOR's MyJSTOR services will be offline for a little while. According to JSTOR support, "users will be able to search, browse, and access and download PDF files for content in JSTOR. They will not be able to save citations, reset passwords, create or update MyJSTOR accounts, or purchase articles."

Welcome to Fall 2011!

Our Southern California weather would have us believe we are still in the midst of summer, but Armacost Library is ready for fall. We start the new fall semester with a hearty greeting to all UofR students, new and returning!

Dorothy Inghram Honored

Dorothy Inghram, a 105-year-old pioneer in education received the University of Redlands Center for Educational Justice “Lifetime Achievement in Educational Justice Award.”

"Inghram became California’s first black school district superintendent in 1953 when she assumed leadership of the Mill Creek School District. She also was the first African-American teacher in San Bernardino County and its first black principal.

Inghram, an alumna of the classes of 1936 and 1958, studied music at the University on a scholarship and earned a master’s degree in education. She is the author of several books and has been widely recognized for her success in opening doors to area black educators. A public library branch in San Bernardino is named in her honor, as is an elementary school in the city."

Full text of article available at http://www.redlands.edu/10312.aspx.



Visit an exhibit dedicated to Dorothy Inghram in the Armacost Library lobby (designed by Denise Cline).

Au revoir, Lua!

Please join the faculty and staff of Armacost Library in wishing a fond farewell to Lua Gregory, Off-Campus Services Librarian. Lua is taking a leave of absence to explore the world of school librarianship at an independent school in the Boston, MA area. Over the past five years Lua has held several positions. First as an intern while finishing her MLIS at UCLA, then joining us as a visiting librarian when Les Canterbury stepped into the Interim Library Director position, and finally we were very fortunate to hire her as the Off-Campus Services Librarian. In addition to her core responsibilities to the Schools of Business and Education, Lua has brought wonderful programs to Armacost Library, such as the weeks of events related to Harry Potter’s World exhibit; taught a first-year seminar on Free Speech and Censorship in the United States; and served as Armacost Library’s resident copyright & fair use expert, plus so much more.

We will miss you, Lua! We’ll look forward to your return.

Nuclear awareness in Japan and beyond

Kamanaka Hitomi, a Japanese documentary filmmaker, will visit the University of Redlands campus on Tuesday, May 17th for the screening of her most recent film, Ashes to Honey: Toward a Sustainable Future (2010). As an active participant in Japan’s nuclear awareness movement, Kamanaka continues to record footage of anti-nuclear protesters in Japan that receive little media coverage. You can read more about her work here, here, and here. The screening begins at 6:00 p.m. in the Orton Center followed by a talk and Q&A with the director.

Armacost Library would like to share both current and historical resources on nuclear developments in Japan as well as some examples of pop-culture that feature the realities and anxieties of nuclear warfare and radiation. Please check out some items below to further your own awareness:

Books
Atomic bomb cinema : the apocalyptic imagination on film
Barefoot Gen : a cartoon story of Hiroshima
Black rain; a novel
Constructing civil society in Japan : voices of environmental movements
Filling the hole in the nuclear future : art and popular culture respond to the bomb
A world destroyed : Hiroshima and its legacies
Writing ground zero : Japanese literature and the atomic bomb

DVDs
The Atomic cafe
Barefoot Gen: the movies 1 & 2
Gojira/Godzilla
The Nuclear comeback
Radiation, a slow death: a new generation of Hibakusha

Online Coverage of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident
International Atomic Energy Agency
Nuclear Data Files from Citizens' Nuclear Information Center
Safecast A map of radiation levels in Japan aggregated from government, nonprofit, and other sources.

And the winner is...

The 3rd Annual Armacost Library Undergraduate Research Award reception took place on Friday, April 1, 2011. A joint reception with Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society, brought together librarians, disciplinary faculty, administrators and students to recognize outstanding student research and writing, and excellence in teaching writing.

This year our submissions more than doubled in number and the quality of the essays was truly impressive. Therefore we awarded three submissions with an honorable mention in addition to our ALURA winner.

2011 ALURA Recipient














(Danielle Wetmore with her faculty sponsor Dr. Kathleen Feeley)

This year’s Armacost Library Undergraduate Research Award goes to a paper that demonstrated impressive work with primary sources from Armacost and AK Smiley Libraries, as well as incorporated a broad variety of primary and secondary, popular and scholarly resources. Danielle Wetmore’s paper titled, “Making Makeup Respectable: Cosmetics Advertising During the Great Depression” synthesized all this material into an insightful essay on the gendered discourse of cosmetic advertisements during the 1930s. Congratulations!

Three additional papers made the Selection Committee's decision that much more difficult to make.














(Danielle Wetmore and Emily Harris)

Emily Harris for her paper titled, “Institutional Comparative Advantage in International Duopolies: A Game Theoretical Analysis of the Fuji-Kodak Dispute Settlement DS44.” One Selection Committee member described her paper as demonstrating “analytical and conceptual sophistication...deftly synthesiz[ing] her sources, [and] capturing her argument with concision.” Well done.












(Ashley Johnson and her faculty sponsor Dr. Bryce Ryan)

Ashley Johnson for her paper titled, “A Review of Mouse Models of Autistic-like Behavior.” The Selection Committee agreed that her research sources were “well integrated, interpreted and synthesized.” Excellent and valuable work.

Tavi Steinhardt for his essay, “Good Without God: Atheism as Affirmation.” Tavi’s essay was described as “brilliantly argued and beautifully written.”












(Professors Alisa Slaughter and Dr. Anne Shea)

Sigma Tau Delta honored two professors for their dedication to student learning in writing, literary analysis, and critical thinking/awareness: Alisa Slaughter, Creative Writing, and Anne Shea, Writing Across the Curriculum.

Many thanks for another successful ALURA.

Celebrate Cesar Chavez Day

"Cesar Chavez gave our nation and each of us a unique example to live our lives by. His selfless dedication for farm worker and worker rights, economic justice, civil rights, environmental justice, peace, nonviolence, empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised, is a monumental legacy that will inspire all and the generations to come. The winning of national recognition for Cesar Chavez with holidays, service, learning and community action events, is a fitting tribute and significant way to share his life’s work as the founder and leader of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW)." ~Cesar E. Chavez National Holiday

The Armacost Library has many resources on Cesar Chavez and the rights of agricultural laborers. Check out some of these books to ease your curiosity:
Beyond the fields : Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the struggle for justice in the 21st century
Cesar Chavez : a brief biography with documents
César Chávez, the Catholic bishops, and the farmworkers' struggle for social justice
Delano : the story of the California Grape Strike
The Human cost of food : farmworkers' lives, labor, and advocacy
The Migrant project : contemporary California farm workers
Sal si puedes = (Escape if you can) : Cesar Chavez and the new American revolution
The Union of their dreams : power, hope, and struggle in Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement
Why David sometimes wins : leadership, organization, and strategy in the California farm worker movement
The Words of César Chávez

*The video clip above is from the documentary The Fight in the Fields, available for check out from the Armacost Library.

African American poetry at Armacost Library

Are you ready to take up Maya Angelou's challenge to learn more about the rich tradition of African American poetry? Stop by the new book table on the second floor in Armacost Library to browse works selected by library staff from poets such as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Robert Hayden and Nikki Giovanni.

Harry Potter's World Exhibit: Opening Week

The Harry Potter's World Opening Speaker and Reception was a great success. Over fifty people from the University of Redlands and greater Redlands community attended to eat cupcakes and listen to Heather King's brilliant lecture!Event attendees also had the opportunity to visit the Highland Sam J. Racadio Library and Environmental Learning Center for a tour of the garden, animals and critters. Our tour guide, Lauren Bergh, was kind enough to introduce us to a snake, but unfortunately none of us were fluent in parseltongue!

Cochrane Review in the LA Times

If you take zinc supplements when you start to come down with a cold, will you feel better sooner? The LA Times reported Tuesday on a newly published Cochrane Library review that addressed this question.

The researchers, Meenu Singh and Rashmi Das of the Postgraduate Institution of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India, examined 15 studies that were conducted on zinc's ability to prevent or shorten the symptoms of the common cold. They found that test subjects who took zinc at the onset of their cold tended to recover a day earlier and report milder symptoms than people who took a placebo.

Several other researchers interviewed for the LA Times article were skeptical, noting that the studies with the most rigorous methodologies were inconclusive.

Interested? Read the original review article here, courtesy of Armacost Library's Cochrane Library subscription:
http://0-www.thecochranelibrary.com.library.uor.edu/details/file/1017735/CD001364.html

Registration now open for ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods in Social Research

Are you interested in learning about quantitative methods for social science research?

Did you know that the University's ICPSR membership allows you to register for the annual Summer Program in Quantitative Methods in Social Research at the University of Michigan? The summer program's four-week sessions can help you sharpen your data analysis skills and give you time to study methodologies pertaining to your research topics in depth. Registration has just opened and you can save $200 on application fees if you apply before May 1, 2011.

This year the Summer Program offers two sessions, from June 20-July 15, 2011 and from July 18-August 12, 2011.

For more information, including the fee schedule, syllabus and application instructions, visit http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/sumprog/

If Ann Arbor is too far to travel, consider one of the smaller three- to five-day workshops on focused topics, offered on a first-come, first-served basis at locations throughout the country. This year, a couple workshops will be hosted at UC Berkeley.

New Resource – Credo Reference

Armacost Library is pleased to introduce Credo Reference, an online library of reference books that you can use as the starting point for your next research paper.

Credo contains over 530 reference books, including specialized dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases. Its Topic Pages are miniature information portals bringing together definitions, images and book and journal sources for a given topic. And the Concept Map helps you develop your research topic by exploring related concepts.

Taken together, the tools in Credo Reference are designed to help you get started on a research assignment, saving your time by delivering authoritative definitions and steering you to book and journal sources for further reading. Give it a try!

New Resource – ICPSR

Armacost Library has joined the Interuniversity Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR), an organization dedicated to training scholars for social science research and providing access to their data. As a benefit of membership, we’re pleased to announce we now have access to their data archive of over half a million research studies!

The ICPSR data archive contains several features that could help you with your research:

• You can search or browse the archive to find research on your specific topic. If you find something interesting, you can create a MyData account while logged in from on campus to download the data file and analyze it in your analysis tool of choice (SAS, SPSS, STATA and text formats are supported).


• You can use the Bibliography of Data-Related Literature to see if a previous study has already treated your topic. This can help you jumpstart your literature review.


• Each study collects numerous items of data, or variables such as respondents’ age, gender, level of education, and so forth. Searching the Variables Database allows you to compare the findings of multiple studies investigating the same variables.


• Finally, while most of the data in the ICPSR archive requires a statistical analysis tool such as STATA, you can analyze some data online using the built-in Survey Documentation Analysis (SDA) tool.

In addition to access to all of the above through the ICPSR website, our membership also makes University of Redlands students and faculty eligible for discounted tuition to the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Research, a research paper competition, and more.

Faculty may be interested in the Online Learning Center and the Teaching With Data portal. Both sites will give you ideas on how to bring ICPSR data into the classroom and (hopefully) spark your students’ interest in quantitative research and data analysis.

For more information about ICPSR, contact the reference desk or sign up for one of ICPSR’s many online webinars. We’re excited about the potential of this new resource to enrich research and teaching at the University of Redlands.

New Resource – Cochrane Library

We are pleased to announce we have started a subscription for the Cochrane Library, a database of full text review articles and research studies in evidence-based medicine. This database fills an important role in our growing online collections, and will be of particular interest to students in Communicative Disorders and others pursuing research topics related to medical research.

The Cochrane Library contains six collections covering different areas of medical research:

• Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews – the core collection of the Cochrane Library, containing full text review articles summarizing research studies on a particular condition


• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, containing abstracts of clinical trials published elsewhere


• Cochrane Methodology Register, an annotated bibliography of books, conference papers and articles about the methodologies used to conduct clinical trials


• Health Technology Assessment Database, compiling research about the social, economic and ethical implications of healthcare interventions worldwide


• NHS Economic Evaluation Database, designed to help you identify the most informative and authoritative studies of the cost-effectiveness of various health care interventions


• Cochrane Collaborations Database, disclosing information about the groups and reviewers who have contributed content to the Cochrane Library

You can access the Cochrane Library from on or off campus by visiting http://0-www.thecochranelibrary.com.library.uor.edu/view/0/index.html or following the links from Armacost Library’s lists of Databases by title or subject.

For more information about content and functionality of the Cochrane Library, check out Wiley’s user support page here. You’ll find online tutorials, a PDF quick start guide and a sign-up list for free monthly webinars.

Also, we encourage you to consult with a librarian by phone, email, IM or in person. We can help you integrate this versatile resource into your overall research strategy.

Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine

The University of Redlands, Armacost Library, is pleased to announce we will be hosting a traveling exhibition developed and produced by the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, titled Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine. Armacost Library will host the exhibition from February 13th - March 26th and is open to the public during library hours.

Several exciting events will be held throughout the duration of the exhibit. This blog post will be updated frequently to address any changes in the event schedule. Events are as follows:

Opening Speaker and Reception, Heather King, PhD
Tuesday, February 15th, 6:00 – 7:45 p.m. in Armacost Library’s Redlands Room, 3rd floor of the Library
Heather King, Associate Professor of English at the University of Redlands, learned much of what she knows about Harry Potter through a seminar on the series she was able to co-teach with a student. Using the (perhaps) unlikely framework of economic structures, she will endeavor to tease out how the redoubtable Weasley twins provide insight into shifting paradigms of individual development and agency from the Renaissance to the present in her talk, “Harry Potter and the Invisible Hand.” The reception will begin at 6:00 p.m. followed by Heather King at 7:00 p.m.

Environmental Learning Center and Rooftop Garden Tour
Thursday, February 17th, 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. at the Highland Sam J. Racadio Library and Environmental Learning Center
Strange creatures, beasts, and flora are common elements in J. K. Rowling's masterpiece. On a tour of the Environmental Learning Center, view a collection of 200 animals from 40 different species! Explore the scents of local plants as you wander about a rooftop garden...

Frugal Frigate, a Children's Bookstore
Thursday, March 3rd, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., outside the Armacost Library
Now that you've finished the Harry Potter series, what will you read next? The Frugal Frigate, a Redlands community bookstore for children, will be visiting campus to recommend books for your reading pleasure. Great works of fantasy with similar Potter elements will be available for purchase.

The Magic of Chemistry, Teri Longin, PhD
Wednesday, March 9th, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. Gregory Hall, Room 272
Chemistry developed out of the alchemist movement mentioned in the Harry Potter series and deals with the mysterious changes undergone by matter. Dr. Teri Longin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Redlands, will demonstrate how chemical reactions and temperature can change the colors of certain liquids and will also teach the audience how to create slime!

Frugal Frigate, a Children's Bookstore
Thursday, March 10th, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., outside the Armacost Library
Frugal Frigate will be joining the University of Redlands one more time to recommend exciting fantasy titles!

Botany and Herbology
Thursday, March 17th, 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. at the Highland Sam J. Racadio Library and Environmental Learning Center
The Master Gardeners will discuss native plants as well as the usefulness of certain herbs in the pleasant atmosphere of the library's rooftop garden.

Observing Celestial Objects, Tyler Nordgren, PhD
Tuesday, March 22nd, 8:00 – 9:00 p.m., outside between Gregory and Lewis Halls
Astronomy is an ancient discipline studied by many including students at Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling was inspired to name several of her characters after stars and galaxies, such as Draco, Sirius, Bellatrix and Andromeda. In the exhibit’s last event, Dr. Tyler Nordgren, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Redlands, will point telescopes to these distant objects.

JFK Presidential Library Goes Online

Access to a Legacy

"Access to a Legacy" is a public-private partnership between the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The objectives are to digitize, index and retain permanently millions of presidential documents, photographs and audiovisual recordings; provide online accessibility to a worldwide audience...Library staff have digitized, described, and made available three entire textual collections or subcollections, which included photographic and audio components (the President's Office Files, the White House Central Chronological Files, and the John F. Kennedy Personal Papers); one collection of audio files (the White House Audio collection); one moving image collection (the White House Film collection); one collection of museum artifacts (the State Gifts); and a portion of the White House Photograph collection, which consists of over 35,000 photographs."

Photograph, Argentina (1941)

2010 Census Data

On December 21, 2010 the United States Census Bureau began releasing data from the 2010 decennial (ten year) census. This data included total national and state resident populations, and the new apportionment (allocation of seats) to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Detailed local and demographic census data will be released throughout 2011, 2012 and 2013. A list of data products and planned release dates is available from the Census Bureau here.

Check United States Census 2010 or the U.S. Census Bureau Home Page for the latest news, information, maps, data sets and data tools relating to this historic census.

Library proxy server maintenance scheduled for 12/21 to 12/23

Armacost Library will be conducting needed systems maintenance between Tuesday, December 21 and Thursday, December 23, 2010. Specifically, we will be updating our proxy server settings to allow access to additional electronic journals from off campus, and ensure that our existing on campus access meets the entitlements we have secured for you through our license agreements with database vendors.

If you are conducting research from off campus on these days, there is a possibility that you may encounter error messages when you try to log in with your MyRedlands username and password to a database whose settings are currently being updated. Access from on campus should be unaffected by the maintenance. Our goal is to have all electronic resources updated and fully functional from off campus by the start of the new year.

If you have questions or wish to report problems accessing electronic resources during this time, please contact Sanjeet Mann, Electronic Resources Librarian, at sanjeet_mann@redlands.edu or (909) 748-8051.

Federal Depository Library Survey

Did you know that the Armacost Library is a Federal Depository Library? This means that the library collects, organizes and provides access to United States government documents as part of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). Most of the 4th floor of the Armacost Library is devoted to these items, and many recent U.S. government documents are listed in the library catalog and available in electronic form.

Administrators from the FDLP would like input from library users on their perceptions of the value and performance of libraries participating in this program. If you have a few minutes, they would appreciate your answers to their 16-question survey available here. Your confidential responses will help the FDLP and the Armacost Library make decisions about the future direction of the program.

Newly updated Oxford English Dictionary now available

The Oxford English Dictionary has released a significant upgrade to its online interface, including a new design and integration with the Historical Thesaurus of the English Language. Take a look at http://0-www.oed.com.library.uor.edu/. If you've bookmarked the old URL in your browser, don't forget to update your Favorites!

Happy Halloween!

Here is a treat from Armacost Library's collection! It is a cartoon from the October 31, 1949 issue of the Redlands Daily Facts, our local newspaper. Enjoy, and have a spooky Halloween!

Open Access week in review

Thanks to all of you who attended Kevin Driscoll's talk last Monday night at the Casa Loma Room, stopped by one of our information tables, attended the Ubuntu Launch Party, or otherwise participated in our celebration of Open Access Week 2010.

For a look at what other universities did to commemorate the occasion, here's Heather Joseph and Jennifer McClennan's letter reposted from their blog on Open Access:

http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/the-conclusion-of-open-access

<<
The largest, most successful International Open Access Week yet has just come to a close. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year’s event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos, blog posts, and more were released to promote and highlight the benefits of Open Access to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community – and they absolutely did.

We could celebrate the week as a success in numbers like these alone, but the numbers really only tell part of the story.

The increase in diversity of participants is even more telling. Started as a student-driven event in 2007 with support from SPARC and the library community, Open Access Day was at first a library-centric affair. Having grown in recognition and participation every year since, in 2010 we truly began to make deep inroads into the academy.

The student stake in the conversation on access continues to grow more firm, but this year participants from the academy – including humanists, climate change scientists, provosts, research funders, Nobelists, and lawyers – really took advantage of the occasion to share their insights on how Open Access has had an impact on their work and lives.

Nobel prize-winning scientist and director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute Dr. Harold Varmus participated in the official OA Week kick-off event, saying, with respect to where open-access publishing has reached and what’s now possible: “All of these adventures are tremendously exciting because they markedly enrich the experience of being a scientist, of reading the work of others, and of exchanging views with others in the scientific community.” Dr. Varmus’s comments are online at http://vimeo.com/15881200.

In his video, Dr. Nico Sommerdijk, associate professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at the Dutch Eindhoven University of Technology, expresses a need for moving beyond traditional publishing approaches to share data. He made his research data openly available so that now, “Everybody can access [the data set] directly with one click of your computer mouse. People may use the same data set for things that we were not looking for and so generate new science with the same scientific data set.” (http://www.openaccessweek.org/video/open-access-of-data-generates)

The stories that were shared are inspiring, but so was the creativity of the delivery.

In Portugal, the Polytechnic Institute of Santarém held a portion of their Open Access Week program in Second Life. (http://www.openaccessweek.org/xn/detail/5385115:Event:9662?xg_source=activity)

Students at Boston University made a video to illustrate that studying without access to the resources you need is like having half a sock to wear, half a hotdog to eat, or half a book to read (http://www.openaccessweek.org/video/open-access).

And, in Open Families (http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/openfamilies), scientists relate in personal and compelling terms how Open Access to the research and data they produce, as well as that produced by others, is not just a professional cause for them but a family affair.

All these contributions to the conversation – in writing, photo, and video – are a fantastic resource that will help us all to continue the conversation over the course of the year and beyond, and are a sure sign of the growing momentum behind Open Access Week. Of course, the growing size and power of the global network also continues to impress.

Open Access Week 2010 was also a great reminder to us of the work and opportunities that lie ahead. We’ve isolated a need to dig deeper into the academy and find ways to meet faculty on their own terms – to find ways to bring Open Access Week, so to speak, to campus every day of the year. While we’ve made crucial advances, we’ve only just started to make the inroads needed to engage the community of scholars and researchers.

We’ve made fantastic progress, with awareness-raising around Week and with advancing Open Access as a new norm in scholarship. Congratulations to every single person who worked so hard to ensure the success of the event – locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. And, thank you.

SPARC also extends special thanks to the members of the 2010 Open Access Week program advisers (http://www.openaccessweek.org/group/programadvisers), SPARC members (http://www.arl.org/sparc/member), and everyone we’ve had the pleasure in working with this year. Thank you.

Naturally, there’s more to come. Watch for more OA Week round-up materials from SPARC, including more videos, throughout the week. And, course, there’s Open Access Week 2011 to look forward to! We'll look forward to seeing you at www.openaccessweek.org then.

Warm wishes,

Heather Joseph, Executive Director
Jennifer McLennan, Program Director for Open Access Week
>>

Database tip - advanced searching in EbscoHost databases

Did you know you can use advanced search commands in the library's EbscoHost databases, including Business Source Elite, ATLA, and Education Research Complete?

Each type of search (author, title, subject headings, company name, etc.) has a two letter "search tag" that allows you to search the database through that particular type of access. To run a search, type the search tag in ALL CAPS, followed by the equals sign and your search phrase in quotations.

Each database offers a slightly different set of search tags. They are listed in that database's help file and in the drop down menu in Advanced Search (see picture above). For example, the tag to search by author in Business Source Elite is AU, by title is TI, by subject is SU, etc.

The search tags could be useful when you want to use Boolean searching (AND, OR, NOT) to narrow or expand your result set.

For example, suppose you are looking at the impact of technology on outsourcing from a managerial perspective, and have identified several search terms relevant to your topic. To find articles at the intersection of these subject headings, you could try:

SU="business process outsourcing" AND SU="information technology" AND SU="management"

To run a search for articles on the Pepsi or Coca-Cola soft drink companies published in the Wall Street Journal, you could try:

(CO="Pepsico Inc" OR CO="COCA-Cola Enterprises Inc.") AND SO="Wall Street Journal"

The parentheses here are important - they ensure that the AND operator is applied to both Coke and Pepsi, instead of just to Coke.

At this point, you may be wondering, how did I know what terms to search for in quotes? In part two of this post, I'll share some tips on how to use a database to identify the "authoritative" term to use when searching for a company, subject heading, person, etc.

Open Access week continues...

Stop by the Open Access table during lunch hour today to pick up pins, pens, stickers and CDs from UOR Open Sound, and get your questions answered about Open Access!

Thursday, October 21
Naslund Study Lounge, inside Jones Computing Center
12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
Librarians: Bill Kennedy and Melissa Cardenas-Dow

Take a look at our slideshow on Openaccessweek.org:


Find more photos like this on Open Access Week

Open access resources at the University of Redlands

On this second day of Open Access Week we're turning the spotlight on a couple tools you can use to tap into the universe of open access scholarly publishing.

Open access is commonly considered to have two "roads" for you to take as a researcher looking for a way to access the literature.

The "green road" of institutional repositories contains texts and other resources that scholars post themselves, often on a website or in an institutional repository.

The "gold road" of open access journals mimics the for-profit journals that Armacost Library subscribes to, often including rigorous peer review. Funding mechanisms vary, including - but NOT limited to - fees paid by authors or their home campus.

With that in mind, here are the tools:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) lists over 5,000 open access journals. You can browse the journals across 17 subject areas to find a journal covering the field you are studying, or search the articles by keyword. This resource is useful when you are looking for open access journals to publish in, or to browse through, and you don't know the journal by name already.

DOAJ is also part of the library's Index List of Full Text Journals, available from the right side of the library home page. If you search for a journal by title and it happens to be an open access journal, chances are that access will be listed through the Directory of Open Access Journals or Freely Available Journals collections.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) will soon make its appearance in our list of databases by title. This resource is hosted by a European research library and allows you to search at the item level through over 1700 content providers, including open access journals as well as institutional repositories and digital collections. Several content providers index non-textual materials as well. Preliminary testing shows it is even useful at retrieving those elusive theses and dissertations hosted in campus repositories. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Open Access Week at University of Redlands

This week the University of Redlands joins many academic institutions around the world in celebrating Open Access Week from October 18-22. This event brings together a diverse coalition of students, faculty, researchers and other global citizens interested in promoting equitable access to scholarly information.

Access to scholarly journals and articles is a major focus of Open Access Week, and rightly so. But Open Access, and the innovation it makes possible, has broader implications for our society beyond the halls of academia, as the events we've scheduled this week make clear.

At tonight's keynote lecture, DJ, activist, Students for Free Culture board member and USC Annenberg School graduate student Kevin Driscoll spoke to the UoR community in the Casa Loma Room about intersections between the Free Culture movement and Open Access. We'll post more information about the event here for those who had to miss it.

SPARC, a Washington-based international library alliance, has put together a short video introduction to Open Access Week and the Open Access (OA) movement, featuring several renowned scientists including Dr. Harold Varmus. Take a look!

Open Access Week 2010 from SPARC on Vimeo.

Are you curious about the OA movement now? Want to know how you can put the power of Open Access to work in your own research, scholarship or everyday information-seeking? Stop by the Open Access Week booth during lunch hour and talk with our librarians.

Wondering how open source software fits in with all of this? Attend the Ubuntu 10.10 Launch Party hosted by Mark Holmquist in CLS 99, Jones Computing Center this Thursday, October 21 from 12-6 pm to find out.

Keep watching this blog for more information on the Open Access movement throughout the week!

Omnifile access restored

UPDATE: As of Monday, October 18, our Omnifile access appears to be working normally.

We discovered a problem with our Wilson Omnifile database preventing access from off campus. The link from the library lists of databases by subject and title (http://80-hwwilsonweb.com.library.uor.edu/) took a long time to resolve. Finally, it returned a "Bad Gateway" error message.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this caused you.

Thanks,
Sanjeet Mann
Electronic Resources Librarian
Armacost Library

UoR Open Sound 2010: Votes Are In!

The UoR Open Sound 2010 poll has closed. See below for results.

A big “thank you” to all those who participated! We will now burn the selections made onto CDs that we will be distributing during Open Access Week, starting Monday, October 18th. Look for them at Armacost Library’s circulation desk, the Fletcher Jones Foundation Computer Center main lab, the Campus Diversity and Inclusion main offices, and the information tables Armacost Library will have around Hunsaker Plaza during Open Access Week. CDs will be available only while supplies last, of course.

And...on Monday, October 18th, 7-9 p.m. at the Casa Loma Room, CDI, Armacost Library and ITS will be hosting a talk by Kevin Driscoll. Kevin is a board member of Students For Free Culture. He will speak about Open Access, Free Culture and why these issues matter to us all, especially undergrads. We hope to see you there!

So…where did they go?

Maybe you noticed. Or maybe you didn’t. The tracks provided to us by UoR student band Overeasy were withdrawn last week. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons.

1) Creative Commons, Free Culture and Open Access are newer concepts of understanding ownership and authorship, so can be difficult to grasp.
2) Free Culture and Open Access is all about creators having control over their creations. Not someone else.

Armacost Library realizes and honors both of these points.

And chief among the rights artists and creators should retain, we believe, is the right to decide what they want to happen with their work. Overeasy made the brave and honorable decision to take the time necessary to understand Creative Commons copyright before committing them to Open Access.

California Library Snapshot Day 2010

This week the library will be participating in a state-wide event, the California Library Snapshot Day. Academic, public, and special libraries all over California will be collecting photos and feedback from their patrons to capture life at the library.

Please come in to Armacost Library anytime this week to let us know what the library means to you, and we will welcome your digital photographs expressing the same. Click!

New University website includes library tweaks

The University of Redlands unveiled a new website this morning. While the library URL is unchanged (http://www.redlands.edu/library), the library website does benefit from a new visual style. You can now navigate through the site using the left hand navigation bar and "breadcrumb" trail at the top of each page. Tables and text are more readable, and pages have been resized to fit modern monitors.



One difference involves the home page links to the library catalog and electronic journals. These links have moved to the right side of the page, and are joined by the links to Course and Subject Guides and the login page to our new ILLIAD interlibrary loan system.

While the structure of library's web pages has not changed, this is a good opportunity to look over the site and make sure you know how to get to the resources you use regularly. If you have questions about the design, ideas for improvements, or just want to find out how to do something, contact our reference desk at (909) 748-8878 or reference@redlands.edu and one of our reference librarians will gladly work with you.

What is that thing anyway?

We hope you’ve seen the following image around.



It’s a QR Code. QR stands for “Quick Response” and the image is, really, a two-dimensional bar code. You might have seen these already in other contexts, such as postage you’ve received or sent from the Post Office or products you’ve purchased from stores.

Some mobile phones have QR readers that decipher the embedded information. To download a free QR reader to your phone, go to http://reader.kaywa.com/.

Scan the image above using your mobile phone and you’ll be taken to the UoR Open Sound 2010 poll on Armacost Library’s blog. Snap, click, vote!

Snap, Click, Vote!

Vote in UoR Open Sound 2010!

To mark International Open Access Week 2010, Armacost Library is holding a poll to select which freely available music tracks will be included in the first ever UoR Open Sound 2010 compilation CD.

The entire university community is encouraged to participate! UoR students, faculty, staff, alumni, family and friends are welcome. Vote as many times as you want, for as many tracks as you want. Music tracks that receive at least 50 votes will be included in the compilation CD. We'll also include some bonus tracks from the artists whose music tracks make the 50-vote cut.

UoR Open Sound 2010 CDs will be distributed at various locations during Open Access Week, starting Monday, October 18th till Sunday, October 24th. Look for them at Armacost Library’s circulation desk, the Fletcher Jones Foundation Computer Center main lab, the Campus Diversity and Inclusion main offices, and the information tables Armacost Library will have around Hunsaker Plaza during Open Access Week.

Voting will close on Sunday, October 10th at 11:59 p.m. Cast your vote below.

Sample each music track by clicking on the big orange Play button that each track has. If you like what you hear or think a track should be part of UoR Open Sound 2010, click on the little box at the left of the track title to select it. Select as many as you deem worthy. One vote can have many selections. When you are finished making your selections, click the Vote! button at the bottom of the poll. Doing this will submit your vote to us.

We want to know what you think. Post a comment to this blog post. Post a comment using Polldaddy, our poll site. Email or call us. Come visit us at Armacost Library. Leave a post on our Facebook wall. We want to hear from you!

To E-Book or Not E-Book?

Considering whether or not to buy a e-book reader? The Wall Street Journal has a great article weighing the pros and cons. Their main points are spelled out below.

1. Casual readers probably shouldn't bother.
2. The books aren't as cheap as they should be.
3. Savvy readers read the classics anyway.
4. Be aware of the potential costs of buying a Kindle.
5. Be aware of the costs of the rivals.
6. And if you're thinking of buying a book reader–wait!

Read the full article "Are E-Books Worth the Money?" by Brett Arends.

Tutorials: PsycINFO changes

For those of you already familiar with PsycINFO, you might be surprised to see how different it looks. That's because we've changed from the FirstSearch platform to ProQuest's CSA platform.

What used to look like something like this:


Now looks like this: (advanced search)


To familiarize yourself with a few of the enhancements, check out these PsycINFO video tutorials.

Free Textbooks

The Open Culture blog posts a growing list of freely available textbooks on the web. If it has the textbook you need, great! If it doesn't, browse the list for titles that could help support your learning in other classes. Need to brush up your algebra skills? Want help understanding the main points of international finance? Topics covered include mathematics, business and management, physics, history, computer science, and biology.

You may also want to check out the blog's listing of free online courses, free language lessons, and more.

Mobile Apps

Here's a list of mobile apps and websites you may be interested in.

• MedlinePlus--downloads an app
• PubMed--mobile web
  
• U.S. Gov't mobile apps & websites--18 mobile tools to help you with travel, the environment, government information, and more.
  
• Library of Congress tour--app for the iPhone
• Museum of Modern Art in NY for the iPhone for the iPhone
• The Man Booker Prize for Fiction for the iPhone
  

Interruption in Service: EconLit, Alternative Press Index, ATLA Religion Databases

Some may have noticed the interruption in service to Alternative Press Index, ATLA Religion, and EconLit databases. The extended interruption in service is due to a change in database vendors. Formerly hosted by OCLC, these three databases will soon be hosted by EBSCO. We greatly appreciate your patience as we work out licensing and set up access.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

Questions can be directed to Sanjeet Mann, Electronic Resources Librarian and our other librarians.

Library catalog and circulation system downtime on Monday, August 9

We have one last upgrade/outage to announce. The library catalog will be unavailable for up to two hours starting at approximately 5:30 PM on the evening of Monday, August 9, 2010 as our library systems receive an upgrade. During this time we will also be unable to check out books or interact with patron records. As soon as the upgrade is complete, you should be able to search the catalog and view your record as usual.

New LexisNexis interface debuts tomorrow!

In addition to the new Wiley Online Library reported earlier, we can also announce that Lexis-Nexis is completing their migration to a new interface this weekend. Lexis-Nexis will be unavailable for up to three hours, beginning Saturday, August 7 at 9 AM PST, as part of the migration.

The new LexisNexis interface makes it easier to pick particular sources and search for data on businesses, individuals, legal cases, and much more. Try the new interface out by visiting http://0-www.lexisnexis.com.library.uor.edu/hottopics/lnacademic!

New Wiley Online Library debuts this weekend

Wiley Interscience, home to over 1,000 of Armacost Library's electronic journals, will be unavailable this weekend between 1 AM on Saturday, August 7 and 9 AM on Sunday, August 8. The downtime will allow Wiley to implement their new e-journal platform, the Wiley Online Library.

On Saturday, you will be unable to access Wiley journals from the "Wiley Interscience" links on our lists of databases by title and subject, the Index List of Full Text Journals, Citation Finder, or Article Linker. Once the upgrade is completed Sunday morning, you should have normal access to all Wiley journals.

For more information about the upgrade, visit http://info.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/view/0/index.html.

World Bank data now freely available

For several years, Armacost Library has held a subscription to the World Bank's Global Development Finance and World Development Indicators databases. We are pleased to announce that the World Bank has now added these two datasets to their growing library of data freely available to the public!

Visit http://data.worldbank.org/ to view the wealth of World Bank-gathered statistics for countries around the world. Topics covered include agriculture, debt service, public- and private-sector economic data, scientific and technological capacity, health and education indicators, energy and environmental impact, and much more.

Data can be downloaded in Excel or CSV format and visualized through "Change Indicator" maps. World Bank statistics are a valuable resource for anyone researching economic or social issues of international scope, or simply curious to find hard data to better understand the international news we read in newspapers or online everyday. Check them out!

Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries

The cultural rise of the geek, in this story from NPR's Monkey See blogger Linda Holmes.

Government Statistics

Find your way around government statistics with this pathfinder created by the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association.

Google Scholar: Make it work better for you

Set your preferences to better connect with Armacost Library resources, search more efficiently, stay current, and follow the research trail with Google Scholar.