Welcome back!

Welcome back from the holiday break, we hope it was a pleasant and relaxing one for everyone. The library is back to our regular hours and we look forward to helping you these last few weeks of the semester.

Thanksgiving & the Wampanoag

This week is the Thanksgiving break, and we wish everyone a pleasant and relaxing holiday. Once you come back there are only three more weeks to go of the semester! If you want to take a break from your usual reading and do something different, we have many books not only on the Mayflower and the "Pilgrims," but we also have books on the Native Americans who met them, for example the Wampanoag of Cape Cod and the Massachusetts coast. (The Wampanoag are still around by the way, here is the link to the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's website.) Pictured here is Nanepashemet, a Wampanoag dressed in traditional garb.

O Canada?

Looking to do some research involving our neighbors to the north? One of our databases in particular would be excellent, the Canadian Reference Centre. It includes articles from leading Canadian periodicals, as well as US and international titles, entries from reference books, photographs etc.

New homepage!

The library has a new homepage, to better integrate us and our IT colleagues. Your comments and suggestions are welcome! Comment here, or on the library Facebook page.

Faculty, please!

We sometimes see students in here who are required to print out a copy of something for everyone in the class - please, reconsider this, it uses up so much paper! We also see students printing out powerpoints from professors with black or dark backgrounds, and light color text - please, reconsider this too, it uses so much toner!

We do want to support your efforts to see students succeed here, but we also can't help but notice how many boxes of paper (each one = 5000 pages) and toner cartridges we go through each week. The expense is tremendous...

The Dollar, or the $

The U.S. dollar is currently rather weak, according to news stories lately. What does that mean really, where are the facts and statistics behind that? One place to look is on the Federal Reserve site, where they post their weekly foreign exchange rate table. For articles try Business Source Complete.

Curious about the symbol commonly used for the dollar, the "$" symbol? One story is that it comes from the numeral 8 with a line drawn through it, to denote the Spanish "pieces of eight," the common coin of early America. The Dept. of the Treasury has a fun page at "moneyfactory.gov" with lots of information about U.S. money, its history etc.

Recycling

There have been some great displays up in the library lately about recycling. The U.S. government EPA has an informative web page about recycling, lots of statistics etc.

Sabi the army dog!

If you like a good dog story, here's one for you that is all over the news. We actually have quite a few books about dogs in our collection, from children's books to titles on the natural history of dogs and so forth. If you were interested in the use of military or police dogs, Academic Search Complete and its companion Military and Government Collection would have lots of articles.

JSTOR tips

JSTOR can be a great resource, lots of full text articles from key scholarly journals in a wide range of fields. Like any database it has its particular points:

• everything in JSTOR is at least 3 years old - but then it has every article in the journal before that, back to the beginning, sometimes 100+ years worth!



• use the advanced search - the default basic search is way too broad - often going to advanced, changing the drop down from "full text" to article title, or abstract is a good plan.



• every record is full text - but you can't just do file/print, that will only get you the first page - click on the .pdf link in the upper right, ok, then you get the whole thing.

Berlin Wall

Twenty years ago today, the unimaginable happened, and the Berlin Wall fell. Erected in 1961, it was a potent symbol of the Cold War. We have many books in our catalog on the Wall, and on the fall of the Soviet empire. Good databases for articles would include Academic Search, Historical Abstracts, and the NY Times Historical Archive. The photo here is a 1961 shot of the contstuction of the Berlin Wall from our AP Mulitmedia Archive.

ERIC

ERIC, or, "Education Resources Information Center," is an education resource of long standing. It has two sections, one is links to journal articles, the other is links to "ERIC documents." The "documents" are a mixed collection of reports from schools, papers submitted by educators etc. The best ERIC site to use is ours, because it hooks you up with the full text in the easiest way!

A $6,500 hobbit

The Hobbit that is, the book, as in a signed second edition recently sold on abebooks.com. You can see the list of the top 10 sales in AbeBooks for October here. Of course, there are copies of that book, and many others too in that site for far less; have a look sometime, it's an excellent umbrella site for used book dealers across the U.S. The library sometimes searches for out of print titles there.

Feral Detroit?

There was a set of articles in Newsweek, the Sept. 21st issue, about Detroit (you can read them in Academic Search.) There have been some articles online too, for example in CityJournal, and a blog has some quite startling pictures (one is shown here,) of how parts of Detroit are becoming "feral," or returning to wilderness.

AquaBrowser & Films on Demand

AquaBrowser is back up! Well, it was, lol, but now is back down again. It will be back, just use the classic catalog for now.

On another topic, let your blogger alert you to a fairly new resource of ours you may not be familiar with, FMG Films on Demand. This is the same group that we have bought many of our documentary videos from over the years, but now we have access to it online. For example, someone was just looking for video about Rosa Parks, the civil rights era heroine, to use in a class - we showed her how to access Films on Demand, which has a video about Parks, something the student could easily access in her classroom's PC.

AquaBrowswer catalog down

Our new AquaBrowser catalog is temporarily down, but you can still access the "classic" online catalog here. Yes, one thing you can say about the old time card catalogs is that they never were "down." Of course, you couldn't do all the nifty random searches, limit by type etc. like you can in modern online catalogs!