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NEWS FROM THE FIELD
C&RL News, June 2007
Vol. 68, No. 6
by Stephanie Orphan
San Jose State opens Second Life campus
San Jose State University’s (SJSU) School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) opened a 16-acre campus site in the Second Life virtual environment in May. The project began with a Soros Foundation grant to Associate Director Linda Main to acquire the island and build the campus. Assistant director Jeremy Kemp then worked with a design team of graduate students to develop the site and train faculty, staff, and students. Students taking courses during the summer session will use Second Life as a lab to experiment with virtual environments for teaching, service, and library space building. Livingstone and Kemp also received a first-year grant of £80,000 from Britain’s Eduserv Foundation to develop their Sloodle project. Sloodle is a project to integrate the Moodle course management system with 3-D immersive environments such as Second Life. New developments for spring 2007 included a design laboratory for young adult spaces, an e-portfolio exhibit, and new presentation spaces. Beginning in summer 2007 students will be taking full and partial classes in Second Life. To learn more about SJSU’s Second Life presence, watch the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADE0VSffgis.
Syndetic offers video and music integration into OPACs
Syndetic Solutions now offers video and music content that can be integrated into a library’s online public access catalog. The new offering includes cover images for more than 742,000 music and video CDs, summaries for more than 112,000 videos and 650,000 music CDs, and thousands of track listings for music recordings in various formats. The new video and music content is the latest OPAC enrichment option offered by Syndetic. Others include full-text reviews, cover images, fiction profiles, excerpts, summaries, and author notes. More information about the video and music elements available can be found at www.Syndetics.com/videoandmusic.
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ACRL 101: Learn the ins and outs of your association at Annual Conference
Join us at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., to discover how to fully use the member benefits of ACRL. ACRL staff, new members, and your colleagues will be holding two ACRL 101 meetings for new members and first-time attendees in the Washington Convention Center from 10:30 a.m. until 12:00 p.m., Saturday, June 23, in room 206 and Sunday, June 24, in room 204B.
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UCLA puts historic newspaper photos online
The University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Library has launched “Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920–90,” an online collection of more than 5,000 photographs from the Los Angeles Daily News and the Los Angeles Times. The digitized images have been selected from the photographic archives of both newspapers, which are housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. They were chosen from the total collection of 3 million images because they show historically and socially significant people, places, and events, as well as everyday life in Southern California. Subjects represented reflect broad categories of arts and culture, crime and law enforcement, the entertainment industry, politics, popular culture and trends, religion, sports, and urban and economic development. The digital files can be downloaded for educational and noncommercial uses; commercial uses are not allowed without advance written permission. The online collection is available at digital.library.ucla.edu/latimesanddailynews.
Purdue celebrates centennial as federal depository library
Purdue University Libraries recently celebrated its 100th anniversary as a federal depository library. During the May event, Judith Russell, the former superintendent who is now the dean of libraries at the University of Florida, gave the keynote address, and a joint luncheon between the libraries Dean’s Advisory Council and Indiana Networking for Documents and Information of Government Organizations was held. INDIGO, as it is known, is composed of government document librarians from around the state. The libraries also celebrated with a cake and had demonstrations of online government databases and displays of historic government documents in the Humanities, Social Science and Education Library.
The depository was established in 1907 as the result of congressional legislation extending federal depository library status to land-grant universities. The Federal Depository Library Program, administered by the federal government, provides Americans with access to information produced by the government and paid for with tax dollars.
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ACRL task force to begin review of information literacy standards
ACRL policy calls for standards to be reviewed every five years to ensure that official statements are kept up to date. A review of the “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,” approved by the ACRL Board in 2000, was deliberately delayed to give them more time to be recognized by the higher education community. However, after seven years it seems appropriate to consider whether these standards need any changes.
The widespread use of the “Information Literacy Competency Standards” both within academic libraries and discipline-based organizations has been achieved through great effort on the part of ACRL members. To determine the degree of change to this particular standard requires thoughtful and deliberate action.
Therefore, the ACRL Board has set up a two-step process for review. First, an ACRL Task Force consisting of ACRL members who are representative of units with an interest in information literacy will recommend the degree of review needed at this time. If a full review is called for, a second task force that includes nonlibrarians with representatives from discipline faculty, accrediting agencies, other higher education organizations, and the like, as well as ACRL members will be set up and tasked.
In April 2007 the ACRL Board approved an Information Literacy Competency Standards in Higher Education Review Task Force with the charge to review the standards that were last approved and reviewed in 2000 and recommend to the ACRL Board of Directors whether the standards need any revisions or updating. Members of the Task Force are Lori Goetsch (chair), Kansas State University; Jeanne Davidson, Arizona State University; Bonnie Gratch-Lindauer, City College of San Francisco; Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Tom Kirk, Earlham College.
The task force is charged to solicit input from ACRL members and other interested bodies, determine need for update or revision, identify pros and cons of updating the standards, and, if the task force recommends an update to the standards, identify the areas that need updating or that are missing from the current standard.
The task force will be seeking comments during the ALA Annual Conference. Times will be announced on the ACRL Web site (www.ala.org/acrl) and on relevant discussion lists prior to the conference.
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Columbia University launches Chinese Paper Gods Web site
Columbia University Libraries has launched the new Web resource, Chinese Paper Gods, an online visual catalog of more than 200 woodcuts used in folk religious practices in Beijing and other parts of China in the 1930s. The Web site is part of C. V. Starr East Asian Library’s initiative to digitize its unique holdings and make them available online, to the benefit of scholars and other interested people who are unable to visit its collections in person. The woodcuts represented in Chinese Paper Gods were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life and, after publishing her research conclusions in 1991, donated her prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library.
On the new Web site, full-color digital reproductions of the woodcut prints are organized according to their primary purpose (display or ceremonial use). The images are further categorized according to where in the house they were to be displayed and by the types of deities they represent. The site was created by Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures in collaboration with the C. V. Starr East Asian Library and the Columbia Libraries Digital Program Division. It can found online at www.columbia.edu/library/paper_gods.
Science Commons and SPARC release new tools for scholarly publishing
Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have developed new online tools to help authors exercise choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly articles, including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to post them in online repositories. The new tools include the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine, created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher’s copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online. The Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through the Science Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, and it will be freely available to other institutions that wish to host it. It may be accessed on the Science Commons Web site at scholars.sciencecommons.org.
Also available for the first time is a new addendum from Science Commons and SPARC, “Access-Reuse,” that represents a collaboration to simplify choices for scholars by combining two existing addenda, the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Open Access-Creative Commons Addendum. This new addendum will ensure that authors not only retain the rights to reuse their own work and post them on online depositories, but also to grant a nonexclusive license, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license, to the public to reuse and distribute the work. Science Commons will also be offering two other addenda, called “Immediate Access” and “Delayed Access,” representing alternative arrangements that authors can choose.
The all-conference reception at the National Aquarium
during ACRL’s 13th National Conference in Baltimore,
March 29-April 1, was a hit with attendees. Additional
photos can be found on flickr at
www.flickr.com/photos/30006487@N00/.
CUNY Libraries Win Achievement Award from NYLINK
The 2007 NYLINK Achievement Award in recognition of contributions to NYLINK or to library cooperation or collaboration was awarded to the City University of New York (CUNY). The award is in recognition of CUNY’s contributions in the area of resource sharing, particularly for the CUNY Libraries Intra Campus Service. CUNY is the largest urban public university in the U.S., with 23 institutions serving more than 226,000 degree-credit students and 230,000 adult, continuing, and professional education students. NYLINK Awards Committee Chair Gary Thompson congratulated CUNY for “their perseverance and investment in library collaboration and their contribution to creating more points of light toward the day when New York State truly has a statewide borrowing and delivery system.” NYLINK, based in Albany, New York, is a nonprofit membership organization consisting of all types of libraries and information organizations throughout New York State and surrounding areas.
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I can’t live without . . .
One of the most comprehensive representations of APA style found on the Web is the APA Formatting and Style Guide presented by the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL). Samples of in-text citation include short and long quotations, paraphrasing, and indirect sources. The reference list examples consist of print, electronic, and other information resources. The guidelines for an APA style paper, the use of footnotes and endnotes, and links to other useful OWL tutorials on APA format (hierarchy of headings and a complete sample paper) are also incorporated. OWL’s APA Formatting and Style Guide is an organized resource that students and librarians will benefit from utilizing.—Warren Jacobs, California State University-Stanislaus, wjacobs@csustan.edu
. . . APA Formatting and Style Guide
from Purdue University’s OWL
owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/printable/560
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ACRL publishes Library plagiarism policies: CLIP note 37
ACRL is proud to announce the publication of Library Plagiarism Policies: CLIP Note 37, compiled by Vera Stepchyshyn and Robert S. Nelson of Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. It is part of ACRL’s College Libraries Section’s College Library Information Packet (CLIP) series. CLIP Note 37 is a pragmatic resource for college libraries, their faculty, staff, and administrators to use to develop policies on the prevention and detection of plagiarism. The study gathered data and documents from small college libraries and presents them for the reader’s consideration when examining the issue of student plagiarism and its relationship to the college library. Survey questions covered general information, policy information, librarian responsibilities/activities, incidents and action, and personal/professional experiences.
Ordering information can be found on the ACRL Web site, www.ala.org/acrl (click on Publications/Books & Monographs/CLIP Notes). ACRL members receive a 10 percent discount.
Haworth Press completes e-journal legacy digitization
Haworth Press has completed digitization of its entire available inventory of close to 200 scholarly and academic journals. The three-year project was completed by a five-person in-house scanning team, along with a professional scanning service. The estimated accuracy level of the work is 98 percent. Dual visual checks and machine checks were used for quality and quantity assurance. Titles, abstracts, contributor, and other information was manually re-keyboarded into the Haworth platform as needed. As of April 2007, Haworth has 86,869 journal articles in fields such as social work, librarianship, hospitality and tourism, and women’s studies. Only part of two smaller journals could not be completely digitized. One because the authors could not be reached for copyright clearance and the other because a licensing agreement needed further negotiation. All other titles are digitized going back to volume one, issue one, beginning with 1974—the year in which the company was founded.
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