Happy Holidays!

Your library blogger will return in two weeks. The library closes today (Friday 12/21) at 4:45, and reopens Monday 1/7 at 8am. Looking for a holiday related picture, I saw this photo in our AP Mulitmedia site. It is of a Virginia Douglas, a high school principal in NY City in 1951. As a young girl she was the Virginia who wrote the now famous letter to the NY Sun in 1897 asking, "Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?"

(The AP Multimedia site is located on our E-Reference page.)

New online encyclopedias

We just got the 2008 International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and the New Encyclopedia of Africa online, at our Gale Virtual Reference site (off the E-Reference page.)

These are each substantial new scholarly reference sets that you can search and print from online.

Catching up on the news - online

Been busy this semester? Not enough time to keep up with current events? Over the winter break it should be a little quieter, and maybe there'll be some time for the news. Here's some good online sites you may not have visted before. It's cold out there, so make some hot chocolate, get comfortable at your PC, and surf away!

• Times of London: get the news from the UK counterpart to our NY Times!
• International Herald Tribune: news from an international perspective.
• The Onion: if the regular news gets too dreary, have a little fun at The Onion!

Phew, finals are (almost) over!

We hope finals week went well for all of our patrons, students and faculty, and offer our best wishes for a relaxing and enjoyable holiday break.

The library hours are going to be different the next month or so. We close today @4:45pm, are closed this weekend, and next week, 12/17-21 we are open 8am-4:45pm, no evenings.

After that we are closed the next two weeks, and will reopen on 1/7/08 for Winter Session.

I Robot?

No, I'm not a robot, just an old librarian :-) But pictured here is a real robot, from Honda. The library has a lot of articles in the article databases and books in the catalog on robotics. Want to know more? Just ask!

Finals Week

Good luck on your finals everyone!!! Don't hesitate to ask us for help with any questions you may have.

Pearl Harbor Day

Today is the 66th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As an example of the resources your library offers you, if you were researching Pearl Harbor, we have:

• Many books, dozens and dozens, on Pearl Harbor, the beginnings of WWII, the events that led to it etc.


• Articles? Lots, hundreds of them, easily! You could go to the NY Times Historical site, for articles from 1941. Academic Search would have many full text articles, as would JSTOR. America: History and Life, would be important too. It indexes a very wide range of history journals, and also points to chapters in books, book reviews, and PhD dissertations.

Pictured is Doris Miller, Mess Attendant 2nd Class, at the time of his being awarded the Navy Cross for heroism during the attack on his ship, the USS West Virginia. The photo is from the US Navy Historical Center site, which is a wonderful resource for military history.)

Random holiday trivia fun

You know that old rock 'n roll Christmas song, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" you always hear around the holidays? You may know that Brenda Lee was the singer, but did you know that she recorded the song in 1958 when she was only 13?! She is pictured here with Elvis back in the '50s.

Women in Politics

With Hillary Clinton running for president, the question of women in politics is in the air, and at Facts on File they have a nice article on the subject. Quick, without going to their site, can you name all the women pictured here? :-)

Winter Carnival

The snow we got today reminded me of the winter carnivals held here once, from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Pictured here are the King and Queen of 1963's "Nordic Mist" formal dance.

"Reference"

"Reference," what does this library term mean? In the Oxford English Dictionary, there is this definition in terms of library use: a direction to a book etc., where certain information may be found... Or, as an early use of the word from 1627 has it, If they had but only bookes of References, it would be exceeding profitable.

Well, we have many "bookes of Reference," including online! We are eager to help you with any directions we can offer to books, article databases etc. that might profit you in your research!