Library Now Has Project Muse

If you haven't yet noticed the Muse icon on the bottom of our library homepage, please take notice! Project Muse might be considered the "front-end" of JSTOR, both non-profits starting about the same time with Mellon Grants. JSTOR covers full text back issues of many humanities/social science type academic journals. Project Muse carries the full text, current issues of many of the same journals.

This is a great boon to the humanities faculty who have, till now, not had the convenience of lots of full text humanities journals available to them online. Great for students doing papers too. JS

Here's what Project Muse says about itself:

Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers.

MUSE began in 1993 as a pioneering joint project of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at JHU. Grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed MUSE to go live with JHU Press journals in 1995. Journals from other publishers were first incorporated in 2000, with additional university press and scholarly society publishers joining in each subsequent year.

Today, MUSE is still a not-for-profit collaboration between the participating publishers and MSEL, with the goal of disseminating quality scholarship via a sustainable model that meets the needs of both libraries and publishers. At this time, Project MUSE subscriptions are available only to institutions.

How Google is Making Us Stupid

Worth a thoughtful read.
"It is hard to conceive of a more succinct description of what might be called the Google Society, convinced it is on the verge of a bright, shiny, networked utopia linked by huge virtual libraries to all civilised wisdom even as it reduces its culture to machine-generated lists of what everyone else is looking at, so stupid that it does not realise how stupid it is."

http://www.themonthly.com.au/excerpts/issue9_excerpt_001.htmlBy Gideon Haigh

Copyright Guidelines Chart

http://www.mediafestival.org/copyrigh.pdf

Instructors, if you are planning for your fall classes, this chart might be useful. It is slightly old, 2001, but most of the components are the same. I will have to do some research to see if there have been any updates, but I don't think there are.

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the U. S.
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm
If you wish to print or publish on the Internet the works of others, this chart will help you decide whether the copyright police can throw you in the clink.

js

Confused by Science Info?

Welcome to the club! The Libraries have a large number of science databases. The Web is full of others. How do you know where to go first? So much depends on what you are looking for. Amy and I did some workshops for the undergrad research students this summer and have developed several webpages to help them. Maybe they can help you too:

• UCUR Technology
• UCUR Chemistry
• UCUR Biology
• UCUR Sciences & NSF-REU

But here's a list I just ran across in Gary Price's Resource Shelf Newsletter that enumerates and annotates the "free" sources of science information on the web. No one place has it all. If you must be comprehensive, then you need to utilize all of the possible places where information is stored. Spending time doing this background research can save you lab time and maybe even lives.
A Quick Look of a Few Free Science Search Tools (Scirus, Live Search Academic, Google Scholar, Scitopia, Global Science Gateway, and More)
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/07/09/a-quick-look-of-a-few-free-science-search-tools-scirus-live-search-academic-google-scholar-scitopia-global-science-gateway-and-more/
or http://digbig.com/4tfcx
js

Identity by Design and NYPL Digital Gallery

I've been thinking a lot lately about design. A new beach house. No money to furnish it. Lots of catalogs, magazines, HGTV and websites have me imagining possibilities. The title of this site grabbed by attention. Identity by Design. How we define ourselves by our clothing and furnishings has always intrigued me. The pictures and text of this Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian exhibit are incredible inspirations. Be sure to click the arrows on the right side of the screen to get the full exhibit--I missed them the first time around. js
http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/identity_by_design/IdentityByDesign.html

Also try the incredible images from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. You can even purchase framed or unframed digital copies of these images.

[From the Scout Report]

Death by PowerPoint

I'm back from a week off -- and totally exhausted. Here's a link that Sue Medina of Network of Alabama Academic Libraries sent last week. It illustrates everything I believe about most PowerPoint presentations:
http://i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=23724

On the serious side of this issue, Edward Tufte, the guru of visual information, in this excerpt from his book (The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint) talks about the implications of the use of PowerPoint in technical communication:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1