Fair Use and YouTube

Posted on January 24, 2008 by kyle

Ahh, the joys of copyright. We deal with it everyday, whether you utilize e-reserves or download music to your iPod (hopefully in a legal fashion). But did it ever cross your mind that when you laughed at the Dramatic Prairie Dog for the millionth time (or one of the many remixes) that the creator of the videos may have violated the law by using copyrighted material? I know I didn’t think about it.

According to a report from American University’s Center for Social Media, parodies of copyrighted works may actually fall under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. The full report, entitled Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, features the work of communications professor Pat Aufderheide and law professor Peter Jaszi – they contend that the new works and their ability to stimulate dialogue afford them protection under fair use. What do you think?

original story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed
link to full report from the Center for Social Media

Thanks to Joyce for the link!

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Books on the Go

Posted on January 23, 2008 by kyle

In the world of constant moving from place to place, whether it’s from your dorm to the classroom or from the house to the office, we spend a lot of time traveling. For some, the commute is as short as ten minutes, while others take an hour to get where they need to go (don’t even get me started on the supercommuters). The back-and-forth eats up a sizable chunk of our day.

What if you could expand your horizons while you go about the daily grind? Have you tried multitasking? I don’t recommend putting on make-up or talking on your cell phone while driving, but listening to an audiobook isn’t bad, right? The Library is the place to go for filling the void that is commuting. We have plenty of popular titles available on CD, and we just got more in MP3-CD format (information about the format and what it means for you). For your convenience, below are catalog searches for locating our audiobooks.

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New Stuff Tuesday – January 22

Posted on January 22, 2008 by kyle

A Brief History of Accounting

More Than a Numbers Game:
A Brief History of Accounting
by Thomas King
HF5616 .U5 K53 2006
New Book Island, 2nd floor

In honor of the fact that I start my journey into accounting with Introduction to Financial Accounting, I thought that this book was appropriate for New Stuff Tuesday.

King, treasurer of Progressive Insurance and a native of Racine, uses More Than a Numbers Game to fill the void in the thousands of accounting texts published since Luca Pacioli wrote the first one in 1494. According to the reviews, he’s done a pretty darn good job of it too. The textbooks students and professionals utilize on a daily basis address the how-to part of compiling balance sheets and analyzing financial statements. King’s book confronts the why’s of accounting and examines six issues important to accountants and the managers, investors and other consumers of financial information: inflation, volatility, intangibles, debt, options and earnings. This text would serve as an excellent primer to understanding the reasons for the way accounting has evolved and what the future holds for the profession.

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Senior Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. @UWW Jan. 23

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Barbara

Senior Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. will speak in the Irvin L. Young Auditorium at 3:30 p.m. on January 23rd. This is the 22nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Event on the UWW campus, and you’re all invited!

The Honorable Sterling Johnson, Jr., has been United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York since 1991, where he presides over a heavy workload of cases on criminal and civil matters. His previous experiences include a stint as a marine and service as a police officer, Judge Advocate General (United States Naval Reserve), and Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City. More of his background is available online at the web site of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Perhaps his most widely publicized case is his 1993 finding that the detention of Haitian asylum seekers due to their HIV status at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, without access to legal counsel, visitors, telephones, etc. was unconstitutional. To learn more about this case and the issues involved, you could use some of the Library’s databases:

An additional brief summary, with a note about the subsequent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Federal government’s actions and links to related resources is provided online by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Also in honor of MLK, you may want to check out the tall display case in the Library’s lobby.

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New Stuff Tuesday – January 15

Posted on January 16, 2008 by kyle

Book Crush

Book Crush:
For Kids and Teens
Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Interest
by Nancy Pearl
Z1037 .P35 2007
New Book Island, 2nd floor

Have you ever been so into a book that you couldn’t put it down? Maybe so into the book’s characters that you had a little crush on one of them? It may not have happened recently (unless you’re a Harry Potter fan), but maybe when you were younger. I read a lot as a kid, and today’s featured book brings back some memories.

Nancy Pearl, a rock star in the library world (seriously, she has her own action figure), has written a follow-up to her popular Book Lust aimed at younger readers that haven’t found out about ‘lust’ yet but are still in the ‘crush’ phase. Pearl recommends over a thousand books for children and teens, grouped into 118 lists to strike their fancy, whatever they’re into at the moment.

Who could use this book? This would be great for our budding teachers for putting together lesson plans or classroom displays. Parents with children under 18 would also find this useful to try to engage their youngster in the wonderful world of reading.

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Snowflakes at the Library

Posted on January 11, 2008 by kyle

picture of denise with snowflakes

I’m not sure how everyone feels about the ridiculous amount of frozen precipitation that we’ve gotten already this winter, but did you see the size of the snowflakes falling down last night? They were HUGE.

Conveniently enough, we also had some large snowflakes in the Library. After reading one of the campus department newsletters, Dianne was inspired to host a snowflake contest. Library staff designed some excellent and creative snowflakes that were on display for all staff to then vote. Not surprisingly, Joyce won top prize and Denise (pictured at right) came in second. Those two win everything around here – they took top honors in the staff chili cook-off last year.

Congratulations to the winners! Maybe next year we’ll have the blog readers vote…

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Community Borrower Cards

Posted on January 11, 2008 by kyle

A piece of business before we get to the fun for Friday.

The Library has changed the prices of the Community Borrowers effective January 1, 2008. The price has increased to $10 for one year or $25 for three years. Check out the Community Borrowers section of the Borrowing Policies page for more information about the program, loan periods and other details.

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New Stuff Tuesday – January 8

Posted on January 8, 2008 by kyle

Gaining Advantage in Videogames

Cheating:
Gaining Advantage in Videogames
by Mia Consalvo
GV1469.34 .C67 C66 2007
New Book Island, 2nd floor

When you see the word cheating on a book in an academic library, you probably think of crib sheets, secret signals during exams, or plagiarism. In this case, we’re talking about cheating in the digital environment – videogames.

Consalvo, associate professor of telecommunications at Ohio University, examines the cultural history of cheating in the context of videogames and the birth and expansion of an industry catering to gamers’ willingness to ‘beat the game.’ Her introduction uses a situation which perfectly exemplifies why some people cheat and others don’t: knowing about a gift before opening it. In her opinion, it takes the surprise and excitement away from receiving the present. She goes on to explore how players define cheating and the gaming community’s feelings and reactions to said devious actions. The author contends that the way in which we use videogames reflects ethics in other areas of life, not just the digital world.

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What a Beaut!

Posted on January 4, 2008 by kyle

It’s Friday! Time for fun and procrastination!

Check out Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries for a journey around the world of amazing places with lots of books. Some people may argue that librarians would be the only ones interested in this, but look at the architecture and design in which the culture and history of civilization have been preserved by these libraries. It’s astonishing to be taken back in time with the classical European libraries or glimpse at the future with the modern American libraries.

Thanks Carrie for the link!

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Manage personal libraries/Find good books

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Barbara

Is your personal library out of control? Don’t know what you have? Or are you looking for recommendations for the next book to read from others who like the same genre? Got some spare time before spring semester starts? LibraryThing may be what you need!

Controlling your personal library:
Creating an account is easy and free. Add titles to your online library and tag them (assign words or phrases to describe them) for easy control and retrieval. Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life). If you don’t want to share your library’s contents you can make it private.

Getting recommendations for books to read:
Either use the “Book Suggestions” tab to enter a title you own/love, and the system will suggest other titles to you, or search for books by authors, titles, or tags (words or phrases assigned to books by readers). Tags run the gamut from “vampire smut” to “string theory,” and with more then 21 million books entered so far, there has got to be a good book in there for you!

For more information, see About LibraryThing.

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