The Chronicle of Higher Ed’s The Wired Campus blog featured a post last week about a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning and how libraries were not included. The question posed to “e-learning experts” was What are your Top 10 tools for your own personal learning or working and/or for creating, delivering or supporting learning? I personally think that the Top 100 respondents focused more on the technical production of the e-learning experience, not the inspiration or the intellectual, research-driven component of e-learning. As was pointed out in the comments, the majority of the experts don’t work in academia, so they may not have access to a research library.
I think that they should ask students the same thing. I would expect slightly different results. What do you think?
direct link to Wired Campus post, “A List Without Libraries“
Who doesn’t like free stuff? If you’re a fan of classical music, then you’ll love free weekly music downloads from Alexander Street Press. It’s like the Single of the Week on iTunes - they select a work from their Classical Music Library each week that is available to everyone to download for free. You can even sign up for an e-mail alert to remind you to go download the new stuff. Not bad, eh?
Just a heads up - we subscribe to several of ASP’s electronic offerings, such as North American Women’s Letters and Diaries and Black Drama, but not the Classical Music Library - that means you won’t be able to search/browse for other music. But enjoy the free music!
Everyone has seen those online Orbitz ads disguised as games - you know the ones where you have hit a home run or throw a football at a target? I have to say that I do occasionally play them (sometimes longer than I’d like to admit). It’s all in the name of promoting their product or service. Well, database vendors are no exception. Wiley Interscience has developed a few fun games to play that help to get their products out there. First, there’s Ms. Stackman, where as the Librarian, you must move around the library to help patrons get to computers before they get you. Try it, it’s not as easy as it sounds. If you figure it out, let me know how you did it. Then there’s Stack Attack, which is kind of like Tetris, only with the titles like Elements of Information Theory and From Genes to Genomes as your building blocks. My best score is 312. Can you beat it?
Ms. Stackman and Stack Attack from Wiley Interscience
New(er) Stuff Tuesday? Well, yes. The reason that today it’s new(er) instead of new is because I’m featuring Global Market Information Database. Global Market Information Database (GMID), at first glance, is new to the Library’s electronic offerings, but it is really a reincarnation of Market Research Monitor. The newly revamped GMID contains over three million demographic, economic and marketing statistics for over two hundred countries back from 1977. Furthermore, we now have access to country profiles and consumer market sizes for many products across over fifty countries. All of this extra content will very nicely supplement the consumer reports previously available in Market Research Monitor that have been rolled into GMID.
Global Market Information Database from Euromonitor
Project MUSE has announced the availability of a new journal through our subscription. Comparative Drama, published by Western Michigan University, is “devoted to studies international in spirit and interdisciplinary in scope.” The Library houses print copies of previous issues, back to volume 7 (1973).
Comparative Drama via Project MUSE
JSTOR, one of the major online scholarly journal archives, began a similar venture devoted to scholarly resources from and about Africa. The project, named Aluka, recently added another collection entitled Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, which focuses on liberation movements in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. As a subscribing member of JSTOR, the University Library has a free preview of Aluka through the end of the year. Please take the time to check out this valuable resource.
Aluka from JSTOR
The University now has a campus-wide subscription to the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education!
To access the subscription while on campus, you can go directly to the Chronicle’s web site at http://chronicle.com. If off campus, connect via the library EZProxy using the following link.
Access is free and open to all UWW faculty, staff and students.
You are encouraged to subscribe to Academe Today, The Chronicle’s Daily Report. Anyone can sign up to receive this free e-newsletter once they have created a Chronicle account. Visit their website for more information and to start the sign-up process. You will also find a listing of all available e-mail newsletters and how to receive the Chronicle headline service via RSS feeds.
Highlights of coverage in addition to what you are familiar with in the paper version include:
- Daily Web updates on the latest news in higher education.
- Searchable archives of back issues. Unlimited access to every news article and essay published by The Chronicle since 1989.
- Online access to The Almanac of Higher Education, an annual report from The Chronicle since 1995. View data, demographics, enrollment, staff salaries, tuition fees, test scores, and more state by state.
- Regular updates on current grant opportunities.
- Several thousand of the best job opportunities in the academic world, updated daily.
- Career advice and counseling, for beginners and experienced academics alike.
- Employer profiles providing in-depth information for job candidates.
- Essays and opinion articles from all issues of The Chronicle Review.
- Participation in online discussions about issues and controversies featured in The Chronicle.
- Licensing revenues and patent activity at universities from fiscal 1994 to present.
- Listings of forthcoming events in higher education.
The subscription is made possible through funding support from Interim Chancellor Telfer.
As yet another way to keep you connected with the Library, I am pleased to announce our flickr account! Flickr allows users to upload photos and share them with friends, family, or the whole world, depending on which level of security you choose.
While we haven’t figured out flickr’s full potential for the library, it’s still pretty nifty. Check it out and actually see what we have to offer.
The Library is pleased to announce our newest electronic resource, SRDS Media Solutions! If you’ve taken a marketing or advertising class, you may already be somewhat familiar with SRDS. The company publishes titles critical to advertising and marketing, containing information about circulation, media profiles, advertising rates and much more. We previously received these titles in print, but the electronic subscription will replace those copies.
The online version greatly resembles the print edition. Through our subscription, you’ll have access to the following titles: Business Publication Advertising Source®, Consumer Magazine Advertising Source®, Direct Marketing List Source®, Newspaper Advertising Source®, Radio Advertising Source® and TV and Cable Source®.
Have you used SRDS publications before? What information did you get from them? Try the online version and let us know what you think!
SRDS Media Solutions
Do you know what Ask?Away is? Then Ask?Away Awareness Week is for you!
Here at UW-Whitewater, we call it Ask-a-Librarian, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know. Ask-a-Librarian allows you to get help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We participate in a consortium of libraries all over the world to offer this service available whenever you are. If you’re up pulling an all-nighter and you get stuck while doing research, then there’s a librarian to help you (they’ll probably be in Australia because we’ll be sleeping).
The hours in which the librarians at Whitewater are online are posted on the Ask-a-Librarian page. You can start chatting or send us an e-mail from this page.
