New Books in Library

We do still buy books, quite a few actually. Drake has the distinction of enjoying the largest book collection of all the SUNY four year schools! Now, thanks to the work of staff member Pat Maxwell, you can see a list, updated monthly, of the new books we have acquired to support your research.

Let them eat cake!

The work has continued on an intriguing site begun last year as "I see dead people's libraries." Now known as the "Legacy Libraries," the site, a part of LibraryThing, presents online catalogs of the personal libraries of famous people. Twenty seven libraries have been completed, including that of Marie Antoinette, pictured here.

Curiously enough, despite the famous "Let them eat cake" remark attributed to her, I don't see any cook books in her library, lol. Perhaps I missed them, check for yourself! If Marie Antoinette's library isn't of interest, maybe you will be curious to see the libraries of people like Joseph Smith, founder of Mormanism, or John Muir, early environmentalist...

Financial bailout

The current financial crisis and proposed bailout are much on people's minds, and there are many information resources available to help understand them. Our online databases for the Wall St. Journal and Business Source Premier would be excellent sources for articles from business and economics journals, newspapers and magazines.

The U.S. Treasury web site has the testimony of the Secretary of the Treasury as well as much other information. President Bush's address can be found here, at the whitehouse.gov site. The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) is a good source for banking statistics. Also, the Bureau of Labor statistics site is an excellent window on the economy, employment etc.

Diners...

A recent online humor piece about the presidential candidates both frequenting local diners prompted the thought, I wonder if we have any books about diners? Well, of course we do!

A simple search in our catalog for diner? (the ? gives you diner, diners...) revealed several titles about this American phenomenon. One was Diners: People and Places, by Gerd Kittel, TX945 .K583. Pictured here is Quack's Diner, in lovely downtown Madison NY!

Court cases?

Looking for case law, the records of court cases? Go to Lexis, which has case law for both the state and federal level. Another option is the Legal Information Institute from Cornell, a very helpful and user friendly site.

Research Guide of the Day: Dance!

Our growing collection of research guides will help you pursue research in a number of areas, for example in dance! There is also a link on our home page to the research guides. Your comments and suggestions are welome.

ISI Web of Knowledge

Many faculty especially will be aware of the ISI Web of Knowledge site, which has such major indexes as Science and Social Science Citation indexes. These are substantial research tools allowing many sorts of sophisticated citation analysis and citation retrieval.

There is a trial on now through Friday, November 7, click here to access it (it is only available on campus.) The trial is sponsored by SUNYConnect. No pricing for individual campuses has been made known yet, but the ISI products are very expensive, so it is not clear that we will be able to subscribe to this once the trial is over. We would appreciate your input, you could post here or email Greg Toth, our electronic resources librarian at gtoth@brockport.edu.

Shhhhhhh!

Ha ha, no, we don't want to resurrect the old fashioned "shushing" librarian image, but, we do sometimes receive complaints from people in the library about noise. A couple of suggestions to make things more comfortable for everyone:

Cell phones are best used away from the PCs and other people, like in the entry lobby, cafe, tower hallways etc.

This building carries sound! The design of this building carries conversation like you wouldn't believe sometimes. Just a slightly louder than usual voice in one of the tower hall ways carries well out onto the main floors for example. Something to keep in mind when you're having an intimate conversation on the phone ;-)

Where is...?

Where is the Kiefer Room? The new ITS offices? The circulating books? You can find all these locations and others on our online floor plans.

Hurricane!

As this is being written, Hurricane Ike is on track to slam into Texas. Such huge storms have long attracted attention and study, and we have many resources for anyone researching these ferocious systems. For example, books: we have have dozens of books in our catalog on hurricane meteorology, on the history of particular hurricanes etc., like the book pictured here, Divine Wind.

Article databases like Academic Search, JSTOR and ScienceDirect would be great for peer reviewed journal articles. Don't forget newspaper sites like Lexis, or the New York Times Historical Archive for articles on storms going back a century and more.

The government's National Hurricane Center gives you a wealth of information about current and past storms.

Some Fall Semester tips...

We look forward to working with all of you! Please feel free to ask for help at any time: in person at the reference desk, phone us at 395-2760, IM us at drakeref, or email us at adrake@brockport.edu. (See our "Ask a Librarian" page.)

In addition to the new library home page, all the PCs in the library now are running Office 2007, and Word etc. are quite different in it from previous versions.

Try the link for our new online Research Guides, which already cover a number of topics!

The downstairs is very different too, new offices were built over the summer and both the ITS staff from Dailey and the 2nd floor labs from Dailey are over here in Drake now.

Good luck with the semester!

Animal House at 30

Yes, it's been thirty years since Animal House first hit movie theaters, as noted in a front page article in the current (Sept. 5) Chronicle of Higher Education. An interesting part of the article is the attention given to the end of the "in loco parentis" role for colleges, a role in which college officers stood in something of the role of parents to the students. The article notes that student's rights were first addressed in a landmark case, Dixon v. Alabama in 1961.

What if you wanted to know more? To see the actual case for example? Just go to Lexis-Nexis, one of the databases we provide!

Research Guides

Doing some research? Like some help? You are always welcome to ask one of us, of course, but there is a new source of help available as well. Click on the Research Guides link on the library web page and you'll see a list of guides that point out information resources on a wide, and growing, variety, of topics. Some guides currently available for example are on business, history, and environmental science.

Please, we want to know what you think of them, so feel free to use the "post comments" option on them! Suggestions for more guides are welcome too.

Library Banners

Have you ever noticed the banners that hang in the library as you come in? They are based on historic stained glass windows, some of which you can see in a wall of the Kiefer Room on the ground floor. The windows originally were in a building that stood where Hartwell Hall is today, and were class gifts to the school back in the WWI era.

When the old building was torn down and replaced by Hartwell, the windows were removed, boxed up and stored in a boiler room! They were found down there 30 some years later and mounted in rooms in the library. You can learn lots more about the history of the school at our college archives site.

North to Alaska

The announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP pick was a surprise to many, and it wouldn't taking sides to say that it was a surprise partly because many of us know very little about Alaska. Actually, how many of us could name the governors of states adjacent to our own? Or know much about their history and culture? Alaska may have the 2,000 mile Iron Dog snowmobile race, but every state has its own distinctive culture.

Googling the name of the state and the word tourism would give you some current information of course. Through the library web page you could get much more, history, geography, politics etc.

For example, in our print reference collection you might find the Almanac of American Politics, which has a nice several page biography on each governor, as well as general information about the states. We also have the Book of the States, a series that gives a great deal of factual and statistical information on the various states.

Our article databases would be a rich source of information from journals, newspapers and magazines.

A personal favorite of this blogger are the 1930s American Guide Series books, one for each state. We don't have all of them, but we have many, including the one on Alaska. While obviously dated, these titles give the history, geography etc. in a unique sort of way.

(PIctured here: racers in the 2007 Iron Dog race.)