Staying in town this Holiday Season?

Jefferson Hotel, Richmond, VA – Christmas Eve 2007
Photo by Todd Feldman

If you are planning on staying in the Richmond area this holiday season, check out In Rich.com’s Holiday Guide’ 08 for a plethora of  things to see and do including:

• GardenFest of Lights – Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden
• Holiday Glitter – Monument Avenue after Midnight Walking Tour
• Maymont by Moonlight
• Music at Midday – Jefferson Hotel
• Richmond Ballet – The Nutcracker
• Tacky Lights Tour
• This Wonderful Life – Barksdale Theater, Willow Lawn

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday season!

The Future of the Internet III

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University recently released their lastest study, The Future of the Internet III.

From December 28, 2007 through March 3, 2008, some 578 Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded to survey scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total of 1,196 participants who shared their views.

Here’s an excerpt of prediction highlights:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. 
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

For more information on this study’s findings including views and predictions from various individuals and groups, checkout the following sites:

• Summary of the findings
• Full report
• Imagining the Internet  (More views & predictions)

Latest Recommended Readings

Check out the library’s Recommended Readings for November as well as our current list of New Titles in the Library. If you would like to suggest a purchase for the library, please click here to make your suggestions.

An Alternative to Print & Electronic Reserve Material

One convenient option for making reading material available to students through Blackboard is to create persistent links to full-text articles found in EBSCOhost or other library databases.  Some of the advantages of providing persistent links to articles are:

• Students do not have to come to the library. They can access articles anytime and anywhere.
• It familiarizes students with research databases. Linking provides students the opportunity to see and use the database without having the added responsibility of evaluating and choosing the information from the database.
• The responsibility falls on the database vendor to handle the copyright issues (e.g., to pay the copyright holder when there is a requirement for that to be done). You don’t have to go through the hassle of getting the necessary permissions to: place copyrighted materials in the library’s reserves, photocopy the material, or download the full article on your Bb course site.

Copying and pasting persistent links from EBSCOhost to your Blackboard course/s is very simple:

1. From your result list in EBSCOhost, click on the article title you are interested in. 
2. When the article appears, scroll down to Persistent link to this record.
3. Copy and paste the permalink into your Blackboard course.

For more information on creating persistent links from articles found in EBSCOhost or other databases, checkout the links below or contact the Reference Desk:

• Library Resources to Supplement Your Blackboard Courses
• Persistent Links & Copyright

My EBSCOhost

Next time you use any of JSRCC Library’s EBSCOhost databases, setup a free My EBSCOhost account.  With a My EBSCOhost account, you will be able to:

• Save searches, articles, and images to your own personalized folder.
• Login to your folder to access saved searches and articles. 
• Setup email alerts for searches. You specify the frequency and time period each search should run for.
• Setup RSS feeds for searches.

For further information, direction, or assistance in using My EBSCOhost, checkout the handouts or tutorial below or contact the Reference Desk.

• My EBSCOhost Account Help Sheet
• My EBSCOhost Folder Help Sheet
• A Smarter Search Experience with EBSCO 2.0
• My EBSCOhost Tutorial

Winter Celebrations Around the World!

Winter celebrations worldwide focus on the human need for light and spirituality- our Winter Holidays Resource Guide  provides fascinating articles from top library databases about the many cultural celebrations of our JSRCC students!

LIFE Magazine Photo Archive

Check out the newly digitized LIFE Photo Archive, a joint effort of LIFE and Google.  Search millions of photographs dating back to the 1750s to the present.  Most of these photos were never before published by LIFE and cover a plethora of people, places, events, sports, and culture throughout history.

Search tip:  When using Google Image Search, add the field limit - source:life after your search terms to search only the LIFE photo archive.
Example:  apollo 11 source:life

Cite it Right!

Need help citing your sources MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian style?  JSRCC Library’s Citing Sources web page provides numerous, helpful links to various formats & examples for citing sources including: MLA – Works Cited page; APA – Reference page; Chicago/Turabian – Notes & Bibliography page; in-text citations; and sample papers.  Also included are links to tools that help you create or automatically generate citations in the correct format as well as interactive citation tutorials and exercises. The Citing Sources web page link is also available from the JSRCC Library home page under Research Help. For personalized, one-on-one help with citing sources, contact the Reference Desk.  Our librarians are more than happy to assist you.

Ebook of the Month: Barack Obama

Check out NetLibrary’s December ebook of the month, Barack Obama,The New Face of American Politics by Martin Dupuis and Keith Boeckelman. 

“Written by Martin Dupuis and Keith Boeckelman, this book examines Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to fame and what it means for American politics. The roots of President-elect Obama’s politics and presidential campaign strategy are traced in this detailed political biography, ascending from his successful run in 1996 to represent Chicago’s South Side in the Illinois Senate, through his partial term as the junior U.S. senator from Illinois beginning in 2004, to his campaign for the presidency. Dupuis and Boeckelman analyze in illuminating detail the critical ways in which the political calculus so brilliantly deployed in Obama’s 2007-2008 national campaign was shaped by the lessons he learned from the successes and failures of his previous local and statewide campaigns.

With his election as the first black president, Obama has captured the world’s imagination because his story reflects many of the most positive beliefs that permeate American culture: that underdogs can triumph, that the American dream of success is open to immigrants and their children if they work hard, that racism is fading. He also appeals to Americans searching for common ground in an era of political division and hyperpartisanship and gives them hope that wealth, nepotism, and negative campaigning are not the only tickets to success in contemporary politics.”

For further information or assistance in using NetLibrary ebooks, contact the Reference Desk. You can also check out the library’s handout on creating  a NetLibrary account and basic getting started instructions.