Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Literature and the Child Conference

Thursday, Sept. 29 at the Library of Michigan, Lansing
Featured speaker Russell Freedman begins this all day conference with his speech, “Bring ‘em Back Alive – Writing Non-fiction and Biography for Young People”. The day concludes with Sandra Hansen's storytelling, bringing historic characters to life. Click here for registration information.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

2 Research Groups in Social Science Research Merging

From an article in Today's News, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 16, 2005

The Campbell Collaboration, an international organization that analyzes the quality of social-science research, is joining forces with the American Institutes for Research, the American Institutes announced on Monday. The Campbell Collaboration, founded in 2000, provides information about the effects of policy in such areas as education and crime.

The two groups already collaborate on the "What Works Clearinghouse," an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education that reviews studies of the effectiveness of educational programs and policies.

Link to Campbell Collaboration
Link to American Institutes for Research
Link to What Works Clearinghouse

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Educating Migrant Children

Yesterday, NPR ran the following story: "The U.S. Department of Education is developing new methods to track the children of migrant workers. School records can take weeks or months to catch up with migrant students, costing them valuable education time. The new system would streamline record keeping."

Click here to listen to this story.

Digital Futures programs at the PK Library

Earlier this year, CSPAN televised "The Digital Future", a series of eight discussions hosted by the Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, which examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. This series is being shown in the Purdy/Kresge Library on Wednesdays through the months of July and August. Titles of each segment, times and locations follow. For more information on the segment's contents, click here.

7/20 Universal Access to Knowledge, Kresge Auditorium
7/27 Quantum Computing, Kresge Auditorium
8/3 And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All? Purdy Simons Room
8/10 The Experience of Reading, Purdy Simons Room
8/17 Copyright Issues, Kresge Auditorium
8/24 Distribution of Knowledge, Kresge Auditorium
8/31 New Internet Concept: From the Library of Information to the Library of Things, KresgeAuditorium

Friday, July 01, 2005

New Online Tutorial for EndNote

Nandita Mani, a librarian at WSU's Shiffman Medical Library, has developed an online tutorial that introduces new users to EndNote. The tutorial takes about 25 minutes. Please take a look, and feel free to link this tutorial in your Blackboard site for your students.

http://www.lib.wayne.edu/shiffman/tutorials/endnote/index.html

ERIC "Documents" online submission form being tested

When ERIC eliminated the clearinghouses last year, they also eliminated the ERIC Document system. They are reinstituting a form of non-journal submission and publication for inclusion in the ERIC database. Following is the announcement from ERIC.

"ERIC is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Online Submission System (Beta) on the ERIC Web site. This system enables individual contributors to submit non-journal materials that will be considered for inclusion in the ERIC database. In order to continue the high quality, education focus of ERIC the submitted materials will be evaluated against the Screening Critera. As part of the Beta system, there is no established selection or processing turnaround time."

The web version of ERIC is available at www.eric.ed.gov

E-mail alerts for Current Publications in Education

Our database vendors are offering new services all the time. Did you know that you can set up an account in many of our databases, and save searches, and receive e-mail alerts of current publications and new articles published related to your saved searches?

These are generally called Alerting Services and here is just a sample of the databases that provide them:

ERIC, Physical Education Index and Sociological Abstracts through the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts interface

PsycINFO, Papers First, Wilson Select Plus, RILM Music Abstracts through the FirstSearch interface.

Health and Psychosocial Instruments, PsycARTICLES through the OVID interace.

ISI Web of Science allows all this plus citation alerts--you could get an alert when your article is cited in a journal indexed by ISI.

Plus--get table of contents alerts from a selection over 1,000 journals in ProjectMuse and ScienceDirect.

If you would like to make an appointment to set-up your own alerting services, give me a call at 313-577-4217 or send me an e-mail at ag6887@wayne.edu

SPOTLIGHT ON: Foreign Language teaching resources

Websites:
There are some very useful free websites available with excellent resources on foreign language teaching. Here are my top 3 picks:

Foreign Language Resources http://library.rwu.edu/subjectguides/foreignlang.html
This web guide from Roger Williams University Library links you to freely available sites in six european languages, plus additional links to comprehensive websites with activities and language guides.

iLove Languages http://www.ilovelanguages.com
A comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. The more than 2400 links at iLoveLanguages have been hand-reviewed to bring you the best language links the Web has to offer. Whether you're looking for online language lessons, translating dictionaries, native literature, translation services, software, language schools, or just a little information on a language you've heard about, iLoveLanguages probably has something to suit your needs. (website description). iLove Languages is the latest revision of the former Human-Languages Page and the Languages catalog of the WWW Virtual Library.

Ethnologue www.ethnologue.com
Ethnologue is owned by SIL International, a service organization that works with people who speak the world’s lesser-known languages. Its extensive searchable bibliography is a great place to find books on language for over 100 countries around the world. There is also an excellent country index.

New Print Books in the WSU Libriaries:
Dialogue with Bakhtin on second and foreign language learning : new perspectives / edited by Joan Kelly Hall, Gergana Vitanova, Ludmila Marchenkova. Purdy-Kresge Library P5 1 .H288 2005 http://elibrary.wayne.edu/record=b2936410

Connecting reading and writing in second language writing instruction / Alan Hirvela. Adamany Undergraduate Library P 53.27 .H57 2004

The writing lab approach to language instruction and intervention / Nickola Wolf Nelson, Christine M. Bahr, and Adelia M. Van Meter. Purdy-Kresge Library P 53.27 .N45 2004

New Electronic Books available through the WSU Library Catalog:
Before you access this book, you will need to download an ebrary reader. Go to http://site.ebrary.com/lib/anysite/Download

Designing authenticity into language learning materials / Freda Mishan.

New Online Videos:
To access, just do a title search in the WSU Library Catalog. Click the link under Click the link(s) below to connect. Scroll down on the page to the video titles. Click the small gold VoD icon to the right of the title. You will need to go through the FREE sign-up with your e-mail address and a password YOU select (please remember this password, the WSU library system does not maintain them). You can then view the video.

Teaching foreign languages K-12 workshop: Connecting Standards, Research and Practice. Episodes 1-8 / produced by WGBH Boston in association with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Teaching foreign languages K-12 : a library of classroom practices Episodes 1-30 / produced by WGBH Boston in association with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Using Google Scholar to link to WSU Full-Text Resources

Want to try something really amazing?

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you can install an OpenURL resolver that will link the citations from a Google Scholar search directly to WSU's SFX (and the full-text, if available).

Here's how.

First, you have to install the Mozilla Firefox browser on your system: http://www.mozilla.org/

Once you have installed Mozilla, open it and go to the Openly Informatics and download the OpenURL Referrer: http://www.openly.com/openurlref/

Now, you will need to set up the preferences (Linking Information) in the OpenURL Referrer Preferences box that comes up after you install, close Firefox and reopen.

Select the NEW PROFILE button and type in WSU as the profile name and click OK

Put the following in the Link Server Base URL box http://openurl.lib.wayne.edu:9003/sfx_local

Select OpenURL version 0.1

Select the Text button and type in WSU

Click OK

Now, go back to the Mozilla Firefox browser, go to http://scholar.google.com/

Type in a sample search. Try this one: "professional development" and teachers and leadership

You will see some of the citations have a bold WSU after the source citation. Click the WSU--SURPRISE!!

Educational Researcher journal available online.

Educational Researcher is now available online from Volume 30, Issue1 (2001) through present issues. It contains scholarly articles that come from a wide range of disciplines and are of general significance to the educational research community. Click here to view this journal: http://elibrary.wayne.edu/record=b2570104a

You can access by doing a journal title search in the WSU Library Catalog or by using the Online Journals E-Journal finder, linked through the WSU Library System homepage. http://www.lib.wayne.edu/resources/journals/index.php