New Things, More Ways – Change Is Always Hard

It’s been an astonishing year in digital publishing!

What’s happening behind the scenes of those appealing e-books on your new e-reader? Look at events occurring right this minute in the chaotic world of reading:

• Authors and publishers are arguing — “What do you mean, you pay authors only a 25% royalty? My book is priced at only 99 cents!”

• Publishers are suing each other – “Hold it. You can’t publish that book as an e-book.” “Oh yes I can.”

• E-book publisher pricing tactics are being investigated — Is Apple getting commissions from publishers over e-book pricing for iPad? Is that illegal? The Justice Department will let you know.

• Authors are bypassing publishers (or are they?) because it’s the “age of self-publishing” — But authors must now deal with editing, formatting, cover art, metadata, and marketing by themselves.

• Publishers are thinking up new ways to steer the money back toward themselves — *Charging* patrons to borrow public library books will make it more inconvenient to borrow from the library instead of buying from the publishers. 

But changing times = new ideas, too!

• Hybrid Books — Use the QR code on the print book to access extra material about the book, including gorgeous color images that would be too expensive to print
• Make the print books really beautiful — One new direction for publishers is creating books that are also art objects
• Tell your friends! — Now there are many, many ways to tell the world about books you liked (e.g., the Goodreads app, which works with most e-devices). The more people you tell, the happier you will make the entire reading community!

Reads to Savor: Nurses & Doctors!

You’ve already seen our previous “Reads to Savor” posts about Actors and about Science Fiction. Another group of materials that might not spring to mind involves the heroic lives of medical professionals – something Hopkins folks actually know a lot about!

Here are some books by nurses and doctors whose passion for medicine have led to incredible experiences:

• Reaching Past the Wire: a nurse at Abu Ghraib (2007) — Read about Lt. Colonel Germain’s experiences at the prison during the Iraq war.
• Second Sight: Views from an Eye Doctor’s Odyssey (2011) — This Hopkins alum describes his work and his “flying eye clinic” for patients in developing countries.
• Becoming Dr. Q: my journey from migrant farm worker to brain surgeon (2011) — Be amazed by the life of JHU’s own Dr. Q (he’s also a marvelous speaker; don’t miss any opportunity to hear him).

Also, you owe it to yourself to see these films about Hopkins doctors, nurses, and med students. Follow Hopkins medical staff and students as they work with patients and live their lives at our world-famous hospital.

So, continue to kick up your heels during winter break and take a look at some of these cool reads and DVDs!

Five (Library) New Year’s Resolutions You CAN Keep

New Year’s resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. Here are 5 we can help you with!

• Find out who your liaison librarian is. Whether you’re a grad student and need to meet the librarian for your department, or an undergrad writing a paper on a particular subject, there is a librarian who is assigned to you.
• Set up your Interlibrary Loan account. Find a book we don’t own, or an article in a journal we don’t have? You can request nearly anything from our Interlibrary Loan department. And all you need to do is click on the Request Form and register.
• Configure your laptop to use in the library, for research and for printing.
• Start to follow MSEL on Facebook and Twitter.
• Start using RefWorks to organize your research.

Now you’ll have time for those exercise classes and cooking all those healthy meals!

MSEL Opens at 11 AM on 1/21

The library will open at 11 AM on Saturday, January 21 due to weather conditions.

MSEL in January. What’s Not to Like?

On the Homewood campus, January is a special time of year. There are fewer people on campus. Intersession offers interesting classes. Everyone is more relaxed.

A good number of people still come into MSEL, but it’s below the usual number during fall or spring semester. January 2011 saw 32,260 individuals go through our gates. For comparison the Nov 2010 gate count was 102,080 and April 2011 was 115,763.

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Where is Wikipedia?!

To protest two U.S. bills about online piracy and intellectual property, Wikipedia will black out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours. The English language version of Wikipedia will not be available for 24 hours, back online after midnight tonight.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261 and PIPA, PROTECT Intellectual Property, S. 968 are bills focusing on copyright protection in the online environment. While this is a laudable goal that most everyone approves of, Wikipedia, Google, and other groups feel the bills will lessen online freedoms.

If you’re interested in this, read the full text of the bills (see above links). Cruise the web and you’ll find tons of opinions about the protest and the bills themselves.

If you’re just not sure you can live for a day without Wikipedia, take heart! The library offers plenty of online resources you can use. We have many online encyclopedias, and our research guides also point to reference resources. You can always ask a librarian the question you would have asked Wikipedia.

Documenting American Culture: Historical Black Newspapers!

Are you studying the Harlem Renaissance? Or, are you writing a paper on the Civil Rights Movement? Or, on any aspect of our country’s history, for that matter! Check out the historical black newspapers in our collection for great primary sources documenting important events in American history and culture. We now have access to the New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993), Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002), Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001), Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003), and Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005). All these newspapers, along with the Baltimore African-American (1893-1988) and Chicago Defender (1910-1975), are cross-searchable via the ProQuest platform.

With these newspapers, you can find important primary source materials for African-American history. Several articles related to the African-American history, arts, politics and culture are available that can be easily downloaded in PDF format. Besides articles, you can also search for editorials, editorial cartoons, obituaries, comics, and other sorts of material. For example, you can find articles published in the 1950s related to Rosa Parks’ active participation in the rallies protesting injustice and inequalities against African-Americans. You can also read articles to learn about how Martin Luther King led the boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Likewise, there are many articles about Malcom X’s role as an ardent advocate of the rights of African Americans. Apart from these newspapers, you can also consult the Africana Studies and the History subject guides for additional scholarly resources, such as books and journal articles.

To supplement what you find in our research guides, there are many online resources available on the Internet for free. These include the African American Mosaic, African-American History Collections, African-American Sheet Music, Civil Rights Digital Library, African-American Women, Archives of African-American Music and Culture, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the New York Public Library’s Africana and Black History Collection.

Reads to Savor: Sci Fi!

As all you dedicated library blog readers know, we love SciFi (just take a look at the related posts listed below). If you share this passion, here are some tips to find good SciFi to read during break.

Finding Science Fiction

• Go to the “more search options” page and in the Subject line, put “science fiction” (don’t forget the quotation marks)
• Change the sort to Year if you want to see the newest stuff.

Uh-oh, more than 1,000 hits. Ah, there’s the problem — some of them are *about* sci fi and not sci fi itself. Let’s fix that: in the left column, click Topic. Now you can choose “science fiction,” “science fiction films,” “science fiction television programs” [now click More], “life on other planets,” and “human-alien encounters,” among others.

• Make sure to click the Back button for each search, because the Topic list changes every time, depending on your results
• If you want only books and not DVDs, click Format and then Book

Enjoy!

Nashville Cats

I just got back from a workshop in Nashville on assessing student learning (more about that later!), and now I can’t stop humming that song. A city immortalized by the Lovin’ Spoonful and Robert Altman has to be pretty cool, right? So to prepare myself, I decided to watch the movie again. What a great soundtrack and an incredible  cast!

The city has also been immortalized in fiction. Heart of the County lets you follow the intertwining lives of three aspiring country music stars, while Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light takes us back almost 150 years to experience the battle of Nashville as seen through the eyes of two twelve year-old boys, one a Confederate officer’s son, the other a slave.

But what about non-fiction? Movies and novels can only tell part of the story. What if I want an eyewitness account of the Battle of Nashville? Civil War Letters and Diaries has 29 documents that describe the battle from various viewpoints, including this one from Stephen Dill Lee, the youngest Confederate lieutenant general during the Civil War.

Now, about that assessment stuff. We teach a lot of research sessions–almost 400 last year that reached over 10,000 JHU students. How do we know how effective they are? Are we teaching you anything? Stay tuned to find out how we’re working to figure that out.

Look Who’s Blogging!

Our friends at the Johns Hopkins University Press! They’ve started the new year with a bang, I mean, blog. We’re adding it to our blogroll so we can keep up with all the doings of this wonderful press which gives us thousands of books and e-journals via Project Muse.

Put the RSS feed in your favorite feed reader and be sure to like the Press on Facebook and follow it on Twitter. Exciting things keep happening at the Press, including the news that e-books are being added to Project Muse. You have no excuse not to be in the know!

P.S. This is the oldest university press in the United States, founded in 1878. Take that, Harvard!