Biblio-Bits Bites the Dust: Deactivation Notice

The librarian who maintained the blog is no longer working in Peninsula College Library. Therefore, there will be no further blog entries. Thank you for reading.

Library Book Display Celebrates Women's History Month

Photo credit: Dennis Sanford

March 8 is International Women's Day and March is Women's History Month. The Library is celebrating with a book display of enticing titles. Here is the history of Women's History Month:

In 1981, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) co-sponsored a joint Congressional resolution proclaiming a national Women's History Week. In 1987, Congress expanded the celebration to a month, and March was declared Women's History Month.

Read more: History of Women's History Month http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womensintro1.html#ixzz1GJkA684h

Black History Month Library Book Display

Peninsula College Library now has a display of books related to Black History Month, featuring a poster of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), with this quote:

There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether or not the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.

Native American Art at UBC Museum. Photo Credit: fboudville

In its second exhibit of the 2010-2011 academic year, Peninsula College Library has a book display (in the Library's new glass display shelves) related to Native American Heritage Month:

In 1990 President George H. W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 "National American Indian Heritage Month." Similar proclamations, under variants on the name (including "Native American Heritage Month" and "National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month") have been issued each year since 1994. http://nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov/about/

The Peninsula College Library Native American Heritage Month book display will remain until the end of fall quarter, December 9, 2010.

Library Has New Book Display to Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month

Photo credit: Herald Post

In its first exhibit of the 2010-2011 academic year, Peninsula College Library has a book display (in the Library's new glass display shelves) related to Hispanic history and literature.

Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15, the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico declared its independence on September 16, and Chile on September 18.

The term Hispanic, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, refers to Spanish-speaking people in the United States of any race. On the 2000 Census form, people of Spanish/Hispanic/Latino origin could identify themselves as Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or "other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino." More than 35 million people identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino on the 2000 Census. Read more: InfoPlease

Peninsula College Selected to Participate in National Institutes of Health Study

Logo credit: Lana Ivanitskaya

Peninsula College has been selected to be one of only five institutions nationwide to participate in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) 2010 grant dedicated to information literacy. The grant is part of President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that gives summer research experiences to health and library science educators.

The two Peninsula College faculty who will participate in the grant are Jen Gouge, Program Director for the Medical Assistants program, and David Kent, Research & Instruction Librarian. They will collaborate to adapt and disseminate an eHealth literacy assessment, originally designed at Central Michigan University, to students enrolled in Peninsula College health-related programs. The other four participating institutions are Oakland Community College (MI), Morehead State University (KY), Oakton Community College (IL), and Daytona State College (FL).

Health faculty and librarians from the five selected universities and colleges will work together to develop their students' eHealth literacy. The code name for this effort is “Focus on Information Technology: Navigation that Emphasizes Scholarly Sources (FITNESS).”

The assessment, called READY:SET or Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA), was created to answer these questions:

• Do future health professionals have the requisite skills to engage in evidence-based practice and lifelong professional education?

• Can they find credible health information for their patients?

READY:SET is an online interactive application that was designed to assist librarians and faculty from different disciplines in their efforts to equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary to become effective, independent users of secondary source information from digital (electronic) sources.

Digital information competencies are defined as the key attributes, such as knowledge, skills and beliefs, manifested by people who purposefully manage and critically evaluate electronic information (e.g., digital libraries and the internet) and use it to make informed choices.

Specifically, READY:SET aims to develop these eHealth competencies:

1. What to assume:
.......1a. Capability & limitations of media
2. Where to go:
.......2a. Knowledge of channels & sources: electronic, analog, and human
.......2b. Knowledge of entry points (gateways)
.......2c. Knowledge of access barriers
3. How to use:
.......3a. Needs assessment (define task, set goal, plan strategy)
.......3b. Navigation (seek, find, refine, narrow) and critical judgment (verify, check) of content, features, and sources of eHealth multimedia (text, video, audio, graphics)
.......3c. Manipulation of eHealth tools and database search applications to get useful outputs
.......3d. Assessment of relevance (check context)
.......3e. Application of outputs (ethically use, recommend)
4. How to get better:
.......4a. Checking assumptions (question) and skill gaps (learn)
.......4b. Getting help

A National Institutes of Health reviewer described RRSA (now known as READY:SET) as "a useful innovation" where "not only individuals’ actual competence, but also perceived competence, is measured, so that those with a mis-match between the two can be identified and mentored" (NIH Scientific Review Group summary statement, grant application 1R03LM009851-01A1, 2007). The reviewer also commented, "the instrument itself contains valuable feedback mechanisms to help those taking the assessment to improve their skills, an innovative feature."

RRSA was originally designed and continues to be developed by Lana V. Ivanitskaya, Ph.D. and Anne Marie Casey, A.M.L.S. in collaboration with many of their colleagues. To learn more about information literacy, see http://infolit.org/about-the-national-forum/

Peninsula College Library Nursing Resources 2010

This June 2010 nursing resources guide for Peninsula College nursing students includes:

NURSING RESOURCES INDEX
JOURNAL PRINT INDEXES AND DATABASES
OTHER FREELY AVAILABLE ONLINE NURSING JOURNALS
ONLINE BOOKS
PENINSULA COLLEGE LIBRARY CATALOG
CULTURAL COMPETENCE
EVIDENCE-BASED NURSING
EVALUATING RESOURCES
WHAT IS A SCHOLARLY JOURNAL?
READING: HOW TO READ A RESEARCH PAPER
CITING: SOURCE DOUCUMENTATION USING APA
CRITICAL THINKING
NURSING CARE PLANS
NURSING ETHICS
NURSING RESEARCH
NURSING EMPLOYMENT
NURSING SPECIALTIES
NURSING THEORY
PDA NURSING RESOURCES
PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
SPECIALITY GROUPS
WASHINGTON STATE PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
HISTORY OF NURSING
INTERNET GUIDES
NURSING INFORMATION COMPETENCY ONLINE COURSE

First L.O.D.E. workshop held Feb. 22, 2010: "Secrets of the OPAC"

The first L.O.D.E. (Library Online Database Education) workshop, "Secrets of the OPAC" was held Feb. 22, 2010. The PowerPoint of the presentation can be accessed here: http://www.pencol.edu/biblio/LODEOPAC.pdf

The next L.O.D.E. workshop is: Academic Search Premier, our largest scholarly full-text multidisciplinary journal article database. March 15, 2010 in the Library Classroom

Library Display for National American Indian Heritage Month

Olympic National Park exhibit

“Freeing the Elwha: A Story of Dam Removal and Restoration.”

Image credit: Dennis Sanford

To celebrate National American Indian Heritage Month the library has a display of books related to Native American history, and an Olympic National Park exhibit, “Freeing the Elwha: A Story of Dam Removal and Restoration.”

The display and exhibit will be in the PC library until December 7.

Click on this link to see:

1) a list of the books with Native American themes on display in the PC Library
2) a list of titles in the Pacific NW Native American History, Culture & Arts collection, purchased through the generosity of Ruth Kirk and Jack & Jennie Zaccardo
3) a brief legislative history of presidential proclamations for National American Indian Heritage Month
4) a photo of the Olympic National Park exhibit

Come visit the “Freeing the Elwha” exhibit… and check out a book!

New Editions of APA and MLA This Year

Image Credit: Tessa Farrell


The American Psychological Association and the Modern Language Association have both revised their style guides. Highline Community College has created new four-page handouts for their students and has generously provided a link to them for Peninsula College Library students to use.

FIND IT! CITING SOURCES

http://library.highline.edu/findit/citing.php

There are both PDF and HTML versions available.

Thanks to Reference Librarian Deborah Moore and the Highline staff for their good work and for their collaboration.

The new bibliographic style publications (cited here in APA format, sans indentation) are:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gibaldi, J. (2009). MLA handbook for writers of research papers. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Human Rights and Banned Books Week Displays

During the month of October 2009 the Peninsula College Library has two book displays.

One is of new acquisitions related to human rights.

Image credit: Dennis Sanford

The other display is of books which have been challenged or banned during 2007-2008.

Banned Books Week is Sept 26 to Oct. 3, 2009.

From the website: Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982.

Image credit: Dennis Sanford

Tim McNulty to be spring 2010 Writer-in-Residence at Peninsula College

Image credit: Ricardo.Martins

Peninsula College has announced the spring quarter 2010 Writer-in-Residence will be poet and nature writer Tim McNulty.

The Peninsula College Library is developing an evolving bibliography related to Tim McNulty

Updated IL Resources & Tools Map

Photo credit: jonny goldstein


Lisa Metzer has published a really cool updated mind map of information literacy resources and tools.

Here is how Lisa describes her work:

"I now call this resource a "Visual Resource Guide for Information Literacy." The purpose of this guide is to visually aggregate resources for IL. I recently updated this visual guide very thoroughly. New topics and major revisions include screencasting software, online IL tutorials, and online citation management tools. "

Library "Bestsellers" in Electronic Books

Image Credit: #1 New York Times Bestseller by Timothy Valentine

Top Ten : E-books Most-Read at Peninsula College during Jan-Feb. 2009

(arranged by frequency of use)

1. New Biographical Dictionary of Film : Expanded and Updated by Thomson (Knopf Publishing Group)

2. Art of Travel by De Botton (Knopf Publishing Group)

3. In the Footsteps of the Masters : Desmond M. Tutu & Abel T. Muzorewa by Mungazi (Greenwood Publishing)

4. Mexican Immigration to the United States edited by Borjas (University of Chicago Press)

5. Vital Nephrology : Your Essential Reference for the Most Vital Points of Nephrology by Stein (Class Publishing)

6. Chemically Induced Birth Defects (3rd Edition) by Schardein (Marcel Dekker Incorporated)

7. Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent by Bernstein (University of Minnesota Press)

8. Rheumatoid Arthritis FAQs by Newman (B.C. Decker Incorporated)

9. Social Influences by Wren (Routledge)

10. The Muse of History and the Science of Culture by Carneiro (Kluwer Academic Publishers)

ACRL 14th National Conference Report

Image credit: Seattle 2009 by rmoniz510
This year the 2009 ACRL conference was held in Seattle from March 12 to March 15 at venues in the Washington State Convention and Trade Center and the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. From March 12 to March 14 the weather changed from sun to rain. On March 15 it snowed! The theme of the conference was "Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend." This report is of the experience of one unnamed Peninsula College librarian at the ACRL conference.

First, I was psyched to hear Naomi Klein, who was scheduled for the opening keynote, and unfortunately she was ill and unable to attend. I did hear two other keynotes which were excellent: poet Sherman Alexie and Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life. Other featured presentations I attended were: Marilee Bresciani on "Confronting the Business Lens for Accountability of General Education," a presentation which generated passionate audience response: "They are not products, they are not widgets, they are students!" and Robin Chase, an entrepreneur who is pioneering in ways of collaborative sharing. Robin is the former CEO of Zipcar, and current CEO of GoLoco. She was amazed, and gratified, to see a ballroom full of librarians at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, to hear a talk on addressing global resource crises.

At a national conference there are often many things happening simultaneously, so one has to choose among many appetizing offerings. The other sessions and workshops this librarian attended focused on more library-related themes like these: "Brother Can You Spare a Dime? The 2009 ACRL Trends for Academic Libraries," "Reeling in the Faculty: Baiting the Information Literacy Hook," and, my favorite presentation: "Workplace Information Literacy: Cultivation Strategies for Working Smarter in 21st Century Libraries" where I was thrilled, absolutely thrilled, to learn of Christine Bruce's new book, Informed Learing. After the presentation I rushed straight to the ACRL Bookstore to buy it.

On Saturday I got an ACRL veggie box lunch that was delicious: a sandwich with roasted vegetables, including my favorite: eggplant. It was a working lunch. The ballroom had 50 tables, with 50 different yet concurrent themes! I chose table 17, "From Instruction Traditionalist to Learning Facilitator: Exploring New Heights of Student Engagement."

The only sour note was my hotel experience. But once I got out of the fancy $165 a night hotel (plus $38 parking, plus $10 if you want an internet connection!) and went to a place in the University district, I felt at home. I paid $35 a night (which included free parking and free internet!), thereby saving the state hundreds of dollars. I was near my alma mater, the University of Washington, and I visited old haunts like the University Bookstore on the "Ave."

All in all, it was a great ACRL 2009 conference.

Library Research Guide Updated for 2009-2010

Image credit: Guide to Research by miseldine

The 2009-2010 Library Research Guide for Peninsula College has been updated for the current and coming academic years. Although research is an iterative process (often accompanied by caffeine), the guide proceeds in a chronological fashion.

First, get an overview and background information on a topic, which will be useful in developing a thesis. Library reference books (e.g., specialized and subject encyclopedias) can often provide in-depth overviews written by scholars. For example, the Library has the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the reference collection.

Wikipedia can also provide overviews. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article at any time, and the articles are written by unidentified and unknown authors. Nonetheless, Wikipedia might provide references to scholarly and reliable sources.

Second, maintain a list of important names, search terms, and dates which might be used in database or Web search. Consult thesauri of subject headings to find additional search terms.

Third, armed with an overview and search vocabulary, search the library article databases for articles and the library catalog for books.

The 2009-2010 Library Research Guide also lists additional search resources: the local public library system (NOLS), interlibrary loan, WorldCat, LC classification, evaluation criteria, links to source documentation (APA, MLA, etc.), and links to various Web search engines. All that in just two pages!

New MLA Handout

Image credit: trypdwyre

Thanks to Sharon A. Moore for permission to share this new Spring 2009 MLA handout: Citing Your Sources – MLA Format
.

Computer-Generated Bibliographic Citations: Can Machines Get It Right?

For decades we have been trying to get computers to correctly format bibliographic citations. Can machines get it right? Some programming is now doing a good job, but any machine-generated citation should be checked for accuracy, as tweaking is sometimes required.

Computer-Generated Bibliographic Citations is a brief tutorial (PDF format, 130KB, 13 slides) which covers why citation is important, compares formatting in a few bibliographic styles (APA, MLA, CHICAGO, CSE, NLM, AFS), lists a few programs which generate citations, and compares machine-generated citation accuracy for APA citations generated by WorldCat and Zotero.

Zotero : akin to Bibliographic Heaven

Image credit:
60 in 3





Zotero (rivaling sliced bread in my world) provides free bibliographic reference management through the Firefox browser. A Zotero tutorial is available here .

Google Books vs. Peninsula College Library Catalog

Don Quijote
Image Credit: [noone]

"La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierran la tierra y el mar: por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida."

-Don Quijote de la Mancha-

A Response to: “Google Books vs. BISON”
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6566451.html

An article by Mark J. Ludwig & Margaret R. Wells in Library Journal (6/15/2008) says: “…Google Books' deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of our local catalogs.”

I respectfully disagree.

Google Books often cannot even compete with our small, rural, community college library catalog (with 62,000 holdings) when the playing field is level, i.e., when the search parameters are identical.

In the last century (the 20th century) I remember studying at the University of Washington, consulting the catalog, climbing the stairs of Suzzallo Library, and pulling books out of the stacks. I did that daily for years. I had the full-text in my hands minutes after a catalog search. I was in heaven. Now, in 2008, Google Books cannot even come close to giving me the full-text I want.

Whereas for most search results with Google Books you do not get the full-text to read, in a library you do get full text of e-books (and more full text in print sources, along with some exercise, if you walk to the stacks).

Google Books default is “All Books,” which includes "full view" and "limited preview" books. To make the comparison of immediate full text accessibility more accurate, the “full view only” option should be selected in Google Advanced Book Search. The Peninsula College Library catalog often does better than Google Advanced Book Search "full view only."

Recently I was searching for books on leadership and did a Google Books search for books in English, published between 2000 and 2008, with the word “leadership” in the title. I wanted recent books, and access to full text, and I did a title keyword search to insure relevancy, since I wasn’t interested in items found by Google Books with the word “leadership” mentioned once on page 153. I repeated the identical search in the Peninsula College Library catalog.

A Peninsula College Library Catalog search retrieved more titles than a Google Books "full view only" search: 22 times more! For students in the PC Library all books are "full view." Some are e-books immediately available online (those reported below in the searches), and additional print sources require a few minutes walk to the stacks.

I then tried other topics using the same search parameters. PC Library contained more "full view" e-books than Google Books (full view only) on many of the topics searched.

Searches in both sources used identical parameters: title keyword search for books in English published between 2000 and 2008. Here is my search history:

LEADERSHIP
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 179 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 8 full-view titles

Hmmm… Google Books "full view only" did not do well, when compared to Peninsula College Library Catalog, to get immediate access to full text.

Maybe that was a fluke. Let’s try another search for the word “globalization” in the title.

GLOBALIZATION
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 130 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 5 full-view titles

Maybe they were both flukes. Let’s try another…

PHILOSOPHY
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 220 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 3 full-view titles

Ouch!

Let's try a couple more...

COMPUTER
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 152 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 4 full-view titles

PSYCHOANALYSIS
Peninsula College Library Catalog = 22 full-view e-books
Google Advanced Book Search = 0 full-view titles

Not only does our small Peninsula College Library frequently have more titles to offer students than Google Books, the quality of our copyrighted offerings are likely superior, coming from academic publisher content, content which Google Books cannot provide in full text due to copyright restrictions.

Topics like leadership, philosophy, psychoanalysis, computers, and globalization are not esoteric, yet Google Book Search delivers from zero to five percent of the number of titles available in the Peninsula College Library Catalog. I would say that is an accurate reflection of the real world, since Google has digitized less than 10% of the 86 million unique titles in WorldCat, titles that are available in libraries. Anyone limiting themselves to Google Book Search will miss more than 90% of the literature in existence.

Additionally, if a student does a default Google Books search (this frequently happens), instead of an advanced search with limiters, he or she would have to wade through the no-preview titles (no full-text), the “limited preview” titles (peek-a-boo full-text), the books published before 1920 and public domain books (not copyrighted), and the books in languages other than English, to find recent full-text titles in English (if Google Books has any).

Peninsula College Library does deliver the full-text. And, for the 30,000 e-books in our collection, students in the library don’t even have to go to the stacks... and even more full-text is available in print monographs after a short walk to the stacks.

Now, if a student wanted to find books to request on interlibrary loan, then a default Google Books search might be useful (although I would go with WorldCat, which has records for millions more documents: books, articles, theses, etc., and more search options, than Google Books).

For our students I think the Peninsula College Library is their best bet to retrieve full text, and WorldCat is best to identify titles for interlibrary loan that Google Books does not have.

Peninsula College Library is small but mighty… you might say it is a Google Books slayer.