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.