We regret to announce that the reading by Temple mathematics professor and bestselling author John Allen Paulos, originally scheduled for April 11th, has been canceled. The event will be rescheduled for Fall 2007, with a specific data and time to be announced at a later date.
Jakob Nielsen, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on website usability, usually addresses content and interface design issues in his Alertbox columns. In a recent column however, he provided some rather different advice for educators. Too often, he claimed, students are taught how to use specific versions of software. That’s certainly important for enabling students to use software to complete course assignments. The problem, pointed out Nielsen, is that instructors need to spend more time on deeper conceptual skills about computing both for when they enter the workforce and 10 to 15 years beyond that. He said:
Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them — and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It’s the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.
Where this column gets even more interesting is when he discusses search engines and information retrieval. If we can agree that search is going to change significantly in the next 10 years, then the value of teaching students how to formulate good search strategies, how to judge search results relevancy, and how to be adept at using multiple search engines that offer different technical features is going to be critical knowledge for today’s students. For students, these skills transcend knowing which search engine offers a certain feature or how to manipulate the search buttons. Temple University librarians are experts in understanding how electronic research systems, both the many commercial subscription databases provided by the library and free internet search engines, function and their underlying mechanics. They are knowledgeable about the appropriate conceptual skills needed to obtain high quality research results with these resources. We encourage faculty to seek out our subject expert librarians for assistance in developing assignments that will help students to build the critical conceptual research skills that will take them through their college years and well into their time in the workplace. –Steven Bell
Tommie Smith is best known for his protest on the victory stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, for which he and John Carlos were banned forever from the Olympics. He came to Temple on Friday, March 23 for a lecture and book signing and spoke to a standing room only crowd in the Paley Library Lecture Hall. His recently released autobiography Silent Gesture is written with Baltimore Sun sports columnist David Steele and published by the Temple University Press. Before the lecture, Tommie Smith and David Steele sat down with librarian Fred Rowland and discussed their new book.
[ensemblevideo contentid=z-xrqSDi30GDm_trSydTIA audio=true] (26:00, 12MB mp3 file)
iTunes U link (for downloads)
Subscribe to this podcast series
Many New York Times readers were disappointed when the Times took away free access to editorials and commentaries and converted this content into the subscription-only TimesSelect. Well those of us who attend and work at higher education institutions are getting a break from the Times. They recently announced that as of March 13 students and faculty with an “edu” email address would be eligible to get free access to TimesSelect. From the press release:
Beginning on March 13, subscriptions to TimesSelect will be available for free to all registered college students and faculty with a .edu in their e-mail addresses. TimesSelect is NYTimes.com’s paid offering that provides exclusive access to 22 columnists of The Times and the International Herald Tribune as well as an array of other services, including access to The Times’s archives, advance previews of various sections and tools for tracking and storing news and information. Current student subscribers will receive pro-rated refunds for their previously paid subscriptions. College students interested in registering for free TimesSelect subscriptions should go towww.nytimes.com/university for more information.
Since the registration form provides options for only students or faculty, this does leave some questions for the rest of us. Are computer services, library, writing center, and other institutional personnel eligible for the complimentary access to TimesSelect? What about alumni who may have an institutional email address from the .edu domain? So far there is no word from the Times on these matters, so for now it may be best to review the registration information when deciding how to proceed.
While having access to the current editorials and commentaries is a tremendous benefit to faculty and students, we recommend that when you need to search the archives of the New York Times you use the library’s version of the archive rather than the Times’ own version (now also being made freely available to faculty and students). The ProQuest Historical Newspaper database offers the full-text of the New York Times from 1851 through 2003. Not only is the search system more robust and functional than the Times’ own interface, but the ProQuest version offers more text, such as classified advertisements. In addition, the Times has placed limits on the number of documents that can be retrieved from the archive. There are no limits for Temple faculty and students when using the Library’s ProQuest Historical Newspaper database.
March 27th, 28th, and 29th at 1pm Tech Center – Green Room 205A “Google gave me 8,956,441 hits. This stinks.” Decrease your frustration with Google by learning how to use it like any other library database. In other words, like a pro! In this session a Temple University Librarian will cover how to find books, journal articles, news, maps, and more through Google. Learn how to use Google’s advanced options to focus a search and get the most relevant results. Questions? Contact David Murray.
On Friday, March 23, 2007 the Temple University Libraries, in collaboration with Temple University Press, will host an author appearance by Tommie Smith, one of the most celebrated track and field athletes of all time. He will discuss his book “Silent Gesture: The autobiography of Tommie Smith” written by Tommie Smith and David Steele.
The author appearance is accompanied by an exhibit which reflects on Tommie Smith and his Black Power display at the 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico City. The exhibit includes originals or replicas of historical documents from the Charles Blockson Collection, Special Collections, and Urban Archives about Philadelphia’s response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the history of Temple University. A reception follows the discussion and book signing.
The event will be held in the Paley Library, Lecture Hall, Ground Floor beginning at 2:30 p.m.
For more information, please contact the Urban Archives at 215-204-5750.
(Recommendations from library staff.)
READING: The Medici Effect: What elephants & epidemics can teach us about innovation by Frans Johansson. It’s a business management book (yawn) celebrating the Intersection of ideas that makes me feel pretty good about being in a library (career choice!) — although I don’t think libraries are ever mentioned (hmmm.)
PLAYING: “Lost in Blue” for Nintendo DS. High school senior Keith and nearly blind Skye get tossed on a deserted island and have to keep themselves going with realistic tasks and on the lookout. It’s hard, it’s sometimes tedious, it’s great to stay alive.
LISTENING: The Big Bam : the life and times of Babe Ruth (paper version) by Leigh Montville as an abriged audio book. The guy was a true American phenomena of time and place and this is a great bio that works as a story being told.
WATCHING: The Wire. A David Simon and Edward Burns television creation that continues their amazing documentation and fictionalization of the shadows of urban Baltimore (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighborhood) that have universal appeal and relevance.
—
READING: A companion to African-American Studies edited by Lewis Gordon and Jane Gordon. Essays on the difficulty and installation of African-American Studies in colleges and universities in the USA. We might take it for granted now, but there is still antagonism about this site. Gordon and Gordon (philosophy and political science) are editors, both at Temple University. Introduction by the editors sets up the playing field of this subject matter.
WATCHING: A Street Car Named Desire (1951) film. Janet Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden A must-see film; one of Brando’s first films. The DVD from circulation is a special edition with two discs: disc #2 has outtakes and screen tests of Brando. Do it! (Brando looks like a teen-ager, in the screen test.)
LISTENING: “Sing Sing Sing”. A famous jazz number, popularized by Benny Goodman (1939). I heard a performance from the Lincoln Center, with a contemporary band, and with commentary by Ed Bradle
The three biography databases below are very useful and you should not overlook them in your research. One of the amazing things about these online sources is that you can search by religion, gender, occupation and more. So you don’t have to have a particular person in mind to use these databases. You can just have a certain type of person in mind, i.e. a Quaker abolitionist in 18th century Britain; a Baptist African American female teacher from the 19th century; or an Irish American involved in the steel industry in the 20th. All databases below are available on the library’s A-Z database list.
African American Biographical Database
A resource of first resort when you are looking for biographical information, including photographs and illustrations, for African Americans. From the famous to the everyday person, AABD includes profiles and full-text sketches providing both biographical detail and illuminating narratives chronicling the lives of Black Americans.
American National Biography
Offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women — from all eras and walks of life — whose lives have shaped the nation. More than a decade in preparation, the American National Biography is the first biographical resource of this scope to be published in more than sixty years.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
56,000 lives … 63 million words … 10,300 portraits … all on your desktop. For more info, see the blog I wrote on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Also check out Biographies Illustrated Plus and Biography Resource Center.
Fred
Library Prize for Undergraduate Research Information Sessions.
The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research was established to encourage the use of Library resources, to enhance the development of library research techniques, and to honor the best research projects produced each year by Temple University undergraduate students.
The deadline for submissions for this year’s Prize is April 6, 2007. Please come to one of these four info sessions with your questions and for information about the submission process and requirements.
Location: Paley Library Mezzanine, room 130
Tuesday, March 13
12 noon – 1 p.m.
Wednesday, March 21
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Wednesday, March 28
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Tuesday, April 3
11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
For more information, click here.
–Gretchen Sneff
RefWorks, which is provided free through the library, is a tool to manage citations (import, export, search, create formatted bibliographies). Information on free webinars about using RefWorks follows:
RefWorks will be hosting a series of training webinars in the coming weeks. The sessions are designed to cover the “fundamental” features of the service and are open to any RefWorks user at no cost.
Enrollment is limited to 50 people per session and registration is required.
During the 75 minute session(s), we will cover the following:
– Creating an account and logging in
– Navigating RefWorks
– Getting references into RefWorks:
– from a direct export partner
– from a text file
– from an online catalog or database search in RefWorks
– adding references manually
– Organizing references
– Using quick search to search your RefWorks database
– Creating a bibliography from a folder of references
– Using Write-N-Cite to format your paper
The first three schedule webinars will be held:
Wednesday, 28 March 2007 at 11 AM EDT — attendees click here to register
Tuesday, 3 April 2007 at 2 PM EDT — attendees click here to register
Wednesday, 11 April 2007 at 3:30 PM EDT — attendees click here to register