News for Library Users

The Soloist — Steve Lopez

June 29th, 2009

The Soloist -- Steve Lopez

Image by ellenmac11, used under the Creative Commons license.

What would you ordinarily expect to happen when a journalist from the Los Angeles Times walks past a homeless man? Probably very little. But in journalist Steve Lopez’s case, a lot happened. And the events that unfolded from a chance meeting between Lopez and Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a homeless man in L.A.’s Skid Row who possesses both musical talent and mental complications, is the subject of The Soloist.

In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot about The Soloist. This year’s book in common is a deeply personal story of an “unlikely” friendship (to borrow the book cover’s word). It is also a piece of commentary that covers such diverse topics as the place of the arts in a society, the role of journalism in informing a population about their world, the issues homeless people face (in L.A., though the same issues appear in other cities as well — the current issue of the News & Review has the following story from a woman who was homeless in Chico), and the most effective methods for treating mental problems in a society’s members. As a result, this book touches upon a whole range of different disciplines — whether you are majoring in journalism, psychology, social work, music, or are just curious about Lopez’s experiences with Nathaniel, this book will touch upon your life and experiences from some angle.

We have The Soloist in the Meriam Library, and the Butte County Public Library also has copies of both the book and the audiobook recording. The DVD of the movie based upon the book, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx, will be released in August of this year.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

The Soloist -- movie

Image by Geoff Livingston, used under the Creative Commons license.

ProQuest Digital Microfilm on trial through July 2, 2009.

June 2nd, 2009

Microfilm newspapers are going digital. ProQuest has introduced Digital Microfilm, which offers users online access to scanned newspaper microfilm. Digial Microfilm is not a database — the newspapers cannot be searched, but are viewed  in the same way that microfilm is viewed, only online. Also, coverage is not historical, meaning there is no archive. (Coverage begins in 2008.) Titles currently available include the Sacramento Bee, LA Times, Orange County Register, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

June 2 proxy change for accessing restricted library databases from off campus

June 2nd, 2009

Error 404

Image by CyboRoZ, used under the Creative Commons license.

The software that permits off-campus CSU, Chico users to access the library’s databases has been updated. Why should you care?

If you have bookmarks or URLs (Web links) in documents or syllabi which point to library databases the beginning of the URL (i.e., proxy prefix) has changed so that the five characters :2048 have been removed from the URL:

FROM
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=
TO
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=

For example:

1. The old URL to the CountryWatch database was:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.countrywatch.com/ip/
The new URL is:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=http://www.countrywatch.com/ip/

2. The old URL to a journal article in Academic Search was:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3008927&site=ehost-live
The new URL is:
http://mantis.csuchico.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3008927&site=ehost-live

Currently both prefixes work but after May 31, 2009 the old proxy prefix ( http://mantis.csuchico.edu:2048/login?url= ) will no longer function. To avoid broken links please update your URLs.

For assistance call:
Student Help Line - 898-HELP (4357)
Faculty Help Line - 898- 6000

Women’s education in Afghanistan — an NPR report

May 11th, 2009

Afghan girl

Image by Advocacy Project, used under the Creative Commons license.

Though it (ironically) doesn’t mention Greg Mortenson, NPR recently ran a report by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, titled Despite Dangers, Afghan Girls Determined To Learn. Ms. Nelson offers many powerful stories in her piece, both about the desire for education among Afghan women and girls, the positive benefits it can bring, and the challenges that accompany it — challenges brought by forces opposed to education for women. Among other things, she writes that

Public education is among the many casualties of the growing war in Afghanistan, and the threat of violence is especially acute for Afghan girls. Parents, who in the past did not allow their daughters to go to school because of societal taboos, are once again keeping them at home because of the threat of attacks by militants wielding acid or worse.

But many girls are refusing to give up their schooling — no matter what the cost.

Afghan girl at school

Image by Advocacy Project, used under the Creative Commons license.

Nelson continues:

There is another option for the girls of Kandahar.

In the walled courtyard of her parents’ house in Kandahar, 17-year-old Marzia Sadat teaches a Dari language course. Her students, who range in age from 14 to 40, all wear their opaque burkas in class on a recent day, guarding their anonymity against Western visitors.

The 10-month course is similar to secret classes Afghan girls attended during the 1990s, when educating girls was banned under the Taliban. But now, the effort is sanctioned by the Afghan government and funded by international groups like the World Food Program and the Canadian International Development Agency.

Afghan supervisors, who asked they not be taped or named for fear of reprisals, say they started about 200 of these in-home courses two years ago.

Students from our school in Afghanistan

Image by thechildrenofwar, used under the Creative Commons license.

There is an accompanying audio piece here.

Article written by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. Blog post contributed by Aaron Bowen.

Global Health on trial through June 30, 2009

May 5th, 2009

In an effort to assist in the battle against swine flu, CABI is making their Global Health database freely available to the public over the coming weeks.  Global Health is known as the definitive international public health database. It contains abstracting and indexing of information related to public health and veterinary research, with coverage back to 1910. CABI has also made available a “swine flu dashboard“, which brings together information from information from CABI, the Center of Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

LexisNexis Congressional Research Digital Collection on trial through May 15

April 22nd, 2009

The Meriam Library has been given trial access to the LexisNexis Congressional Research Digital Collection. This database contains Congressional Research Service reports and Congressional Committee Prints. These reports are intended to provide Congress with information related to policy making, covering a very wide variety of topics. The documents are prepared to be objective, unbiased, concise, and easy to read. Each document is in fully searchable PDF format, with subject indexing terms. Coverage dates for the trial are 1830 to present for the Committee Prints, and 1916 to present for the Congressional Research Service reports. There is a subscription option to this database for coverage of 2004 to present.

A social network without the Internet

March 26th, 2009

friends

Image by L Lemos, used under the Creative Commons license.

I just saw this in today’s International Herald Tribune and wanted to share it. Anand Giridharadas writes

Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.

Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.

A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village — ambient sociability, one might call it — harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.

They don’t do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.

They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn’t dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.

And what do the Internet’s social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.

This is not about deep bonding… Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present…

I found this comparison of residents of a village interacting with each other to friends on social networks engaging in the same types of interaction fascinating. It goes right to the heart of scholar and futurist Marshal McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Many people who engage in social media may find this to be true, given that they can simultaneously be a part of a social network to connect to people they know AND be aware that they are part of a networking and communications movement. But in Giridharadas’ example, the messages people communicate to each other are not dependent on a technological medium. They are based simply on face to face interaction — which certainly represents a medium of communication, but not a technological one. Divorcing the medium from technology invites the question of what exactly a “social network” is — must it be a technological medium such as Facebook or MySpace, or can a conversation among vilagers represent a social network?

friends

Image by freeparking, used under the Creative Commons license.

Giridharadas’ example also gets at the notion of a core group of friends as opposed to a larger group of “weak ties,” or “loose connections” — people that a person knows but is not close to. (Weak ties are a common type of connection that one makes through an online social network). Following from research by Putnam (2000) and Granovetter (1982), Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University writes about weak ties in her article The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. My colleage Fred Stutzman, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, and Danah Boyd at Microsoft Research New England have also written about these different types of connections. In the case of the village, it sounds like a group of people who maintain weaker ties — multiple neighbors as a community offering unsolicited advice rather than offering in-depth council to only a select group of friends. But communities of this nature can be very tight knit too, strengthening the weak ties to the point that they may not be too far off from being viewed as close ties. In the case of this village, the strength of the ties between community members is a open question — whether they are merely weak ties, or strong ties that emerged through a community networked structure.

I just wanted to take a moment to share Giridharadas’ article, as well as these two thoughts based upon it.

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

Works Cited:

Granovetter, M. S. (1982). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. In P. V. Mardsen & N. Lin (Eds.), Social Structure and Network Analysis (pp. 105-130). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Readex U.S. Congressional Serial Set on trial through April 23, 2009.

March 25th, 2009

The Meriam Library has been given trial access to the Readex U.S. Congressional Serial Set. This database contains the same information found in the Lexis Nexis Serial Set posted below. The difference is the user interface used in each company’s database platform.

Lexis Nexis U.S. Serial Set Digital Collection on trial through April 19, 2009.

March 23rd, 2009

The Meriam Library has been given trial access to the U.S. Serial Set Digital Collection. This is an online collection of reports and documents either produced or ordered by Congress, as well as Presidential communications and information related to treaties. Coverage is from 1789 to 1969.  This important collection of historical documents in now available online, and can be searched using keyword or index terms.

Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach test

March 9th, 2009

Watchmen and philosophy

White, M.D. (2009). Watchmen and philosophy: A Rorschach test. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

You watched the movie this weekend. Now check out the ideas that went into it. Coming soon to the Meriam Library, Watchmen and philosophy offers insights from different scholars on the philosophical concepts that went into the original graphic novel and then into the film. The chapters in this book examine such questions as how best to exercise checks and balances over those who wield power, whether one can justify murdering millions in order to save billions, or what challenges a superhero faces as s/he tries to live a normal life in public (a topic which, as it turns out, is also discussed in another book, The psychology of superheroes). If you enjoyed the movie or the graphic novel, be sure to check out this new addition to the library!

Contributed by Aaron Bowen