EBSCOhost Launches New App for Android, iPhone

EBSCOhost recently launched a mobile app for Android and iPhone, making it much easier to find and read articles on those devices. The app is fairly intuitive, and reproduces many of the features of the regular version, including saving and e-mailing articles, and limiting to a specific journal or date range. By default, the app searches all of EBSCOhost’s databases simultaneously, so users who are looking for information from a specific discipline may want to limit their search to a specific database, a list of which may be found by clicking on settings, at the bottom of the page.

Users should be aware that the EBSCOhost app does not use natural language, meaning you will not retrieve useful search results if you simply enter a string of search terms. For example,

mitt romney south carolina retrieved only 42 articles

mitt romney and south Carolina retrieved 711 articles

There are a couple of minor flaws in this app – the autocomplete feature under settings does not seem to work, for example. Neither does the button for re-sorting search results by publication date.

Nonetheless, the EBSCOhost app is a welcome development, and is far preferable to using the regular version of EBSCO on your smart phone.

To install the EBSCOhost app on your Android or iPhone, go to any EBSCO database through the SJ Libraries home page, such as

Academic Search Premier

Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click New! EBSCOhost iPhone and Android Applications. This will prompt you for your e-mail address, to which EBSCO will send a key and instructions for downloading the EBSCOhost app.

 

SOPA-PIPA and getting past a “series of tubes” understanding of the internet

info graphic on change of Congressional position by ProPublica.org

As a follow-up to the earlier entry,  SOPA and PIPA were pulled from congressional vote in their current form. The sponsors of the bills acknowledged that a more nuanced discussion is required prior to putting more legislation forward.   To get an idea of what the critics of the old legislation would like to see addressed in new talks and legislation, a  CNN-Panel discussion addressed the lack of understanding that proponents of the old bill had, and questioned the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed solutions in the old legislation.

“Activists talked about the potential consequences if the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are approved by Congress. Both pieces of legislation are similar and target Web sites that commit or facilitate online piracy.”

Although the panel convened before the vote was pulled, their discussion points offer an overview of what major concerns would need to be addressed in any future legislation.

Speakers:
Markham Erickson, Partner, Holch & Erickson LLP, and Executive Director, NetCoalition
Michael Petricone, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, Consumer Electronics
Association
Mike Masnick, Founder and President, TechDirt
Casey Rae-Hunter, Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition
Christian Dawson, Chief Operating Officer, ServInt

 

Will YOUR site be * Censored* ?

If you are wondering why some sites are blacked-out today, or why some sites have blocked out their logos/name, it is in protest regarding bills in congress which are aimed at stamping out piracy / protecting intellectual property (a good goal) but proposing to do it by way of censorship and/or surveillance (a questionable means). There are a number of petitions going around, but for a little more info on why there is such an outcry, here are a couple of quick, reliable resources:

The google graphic shows the variety of people and organizations who oppose the bills and why; and offers the opportunity to add your name to their petition. The American Library Association has put together a quick reference guide to explain the PIPA, SOPA and OPEN Acts (pdf).   It indicates who initiated the bill and where the bill would impact free speech and/or free enterprise.

…the ALA deplores any legislation that would incentivize and likely increase surveillance of online activity promoted by these bills.  These bills, if passed, would likely blanket Internet activity with an immediate chilling effect – on first amendment free speech rights, intellectual freedom and privacy rights, among others.

 

 

RefWorks 2.0

As mentioned in a previous August post, RefWorks has a new interface as of 2012…RefWorks 2.0.

Current users may notice some changes in layout, and some improvements in functionality;  find out what’s different/new.

New users can get a Preview of what RefWorks 2.0 can do for you as a citation manager.

Want to learn more about RefWorks on your own? RefWorks webinars and tutorials can get you going; our RefWorks LibGuide can also help answer questions.

If you prefer to learn in person,with a librarian, stop by an StJ Libraries Workshop or make an appointment with your librarian.

 

Plagiarism in a Web2.0 World – Why caring about citations is worthwhile

The plagiarism stories that get the most coverage in the news revolve around authors [e.g.: Markham, Viswanathan],  journalists [e.g.: Blair,  Marr] , politicians [e.g.: Senator Biden,  Minister Guttenberg ],  or academics [students to Harvard Professors]  — these cases seem especially newsworthy as they are folks who “should know better.”   Thus, it is more than a little disconcerting when the Chronicle features an article that essentially says we should give up on being “obsessed” with citation in academia.

While we may be familiar with publishing companies pulling novels after discovering plagiarized plot-lines and passages, or universities pulling degrees from plagiarized theses,  it is worth noting that it is often not the editors nor professors, but the reading public, who are “discovering” the plagiarism.  Of course plagiarism is not limited to the written word, but also to paintings, photos, music-sampling, methodologies, etc.  Web Search engines and software like Turnitin make it easy enough to discover these cases,  and the social web allows for quick dissemination of these accusations — whether list-servs, discussion boards, blogs, Facebook or twitter.  It seems that although we shouldn’t be obsessed with citation mechanics, the functions of proper citation are appreciated by the public at large…so let’s not give up on our StJ students quite yet.

The Libraries and the LEAD program have worked together on a plagiarism workshop in the “Academic track” of the LEAD program. Many student-leaders might struggle with their own academic writing, but they also co-ordinate their organization’s correspondence, write newsletters, update news on Facebook/twitter pages etc.  LEAD and the libraries try to help these students avoid the pitfalls of poor research, poor citation, and copyright infringement in a social-web world and to  “understand the impact that technology could have on organizational [and academic] communications, not only in terms of both the commission and the discovery of plagiarism, but in the quick dissemination of ill-researched information or mis-information. We also thought they also needed to be aware that the “re-mix/mashup” mentality among students could have ethical and legal ramifications for organizational leaders who have official publication venues” (Maio & Shaughnessy, 2012).

The LEAD plagiarism workshops are scheduled twice each semester, but if you would like to request a workshop for your department or club, we stand ready to help out anytime, with this topic, or to help you tailor a workshop session for your class/group.

For more information on the LEAD certificate program, visit their site.

For more information on the Libraries’ resources about plagiarism and citation consult our LibGuides on Plagiarism, Proper citation (why we cite) , RefWorks (how to cite), Turnitin (how unitinentional plagairism can be identified) the relationship between copyright and plagiarism, creative commons, and why plagiarism still makes news!

(Forthcoming 2011).   Maio, N and K.G. Shaughnessy. “Promoting Collaborative Leaders In The St. John’s University Community”  Libraries and student affairs in collaboration.  Hinchliffe, Lisa Janicke and Melissa Wong, eds.  Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries.

 

Influential Books — Dr. Diane Paravazian

Summer – a time for catching up, relaxing, exploring, starting new projects, or perhaps completing work in progress.  Reading, of course, is key in all of these.  With this in mind, we asked some faculty members at St. John’s about books that have influenced them personally or professionally.

Dr. Diane Paravazian, an assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures and president of the Metropolitan New York Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French, writes:

When reflecting on an action, a decision, a challenge or a subject of relevance to a particular moment of my life, I often turn to Michel de Montaigne for he placed great importance on one’s judgment and felt that “our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.” Considered by many as the inventor of the modern essay, Montaigne lived in a period not unlike our own age of information. There was in his time, the Renaissance, a sudden explosion of information and knowledge, especially from Greek and Roman antiquity, which was made accessible by the invention of the printing press. There were wars, religious divisions, and diseases such as the plague which killed nearly half of the inhabitants of the city of Bordeaux, where Montaigne served as magistrate in the Parliament. At age 38, Montaigne retired from public life and devoted himself to reading, contemplation and writing. He compiled the thoughts of major writers and with each edition of The Essays, gradually added more of his own reflections and experiences, developing them organically into a self-portrait. As Montaigne saw himself as an average specimen of a human being, his self-portrait, he thought, could serve as a study of mankind, the human condition. Indeed, the subjects of his essays cover so many aspects of being human: solitude, sleep, glory, fear, liars, virtue, cruelty, death, sadness, custom, books, repentance, cultural diversity and many others. His famous essays, “Of Friendship,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of the Education of Children,” “Of Coaches,” have a great deal to teach us today. As one of his biographer and translators, Donald Frame, has put it so well, Montaigne’s “greatest attraction for most readers is that the book reveals a man and that the man becomes a friend and often another self.”

 

Banned Books Week – Exhibit and challenge

The Queens campus library is kicking-off “Banned Books Week” with a challenged book exhibit on the 4th floor of St. Augustine Library; the display cases feature the top 10 titles from the most-challenged books of 2010 and a sampling of the 20-most-challenged novels of the 20th century.

Copies of  some of the books that made these lists are also available for check-out as well; see the bookshelves behind the 4th floor information desk (where you will also find our “leisure reading” books, part of the McNaughton Collection.)

Tote and T-shirt, Challenge map and QR code for contest

The Libraries are also hosting a virtual  “Challenged Book Challenge” where we ask you to indicate the reasons why books made it onto these most-challenged lists.  Participants in the challenge can be entered in a drawing for either a “Free your mind, read a banned book” t-shirt or a “I read banned books” tote bag, just provide some contact information on the last question of the challenge (click picture at left for enlarged photo).

We will be posting answers to the challenge questions next week, on our Banned Book/Intellectual Freedom LibGuide,  and hosting discussions on banned books, intellectual freedom and the social justice issues surrounding information access over the following two weeks, so save the dates now: Thursday October 6, from 2-3 pm and Wednesday October 12, from 5-6 pm.   Discussions to be held in St. Augustine Library, Room 305; All readers and discussants welcome!

Caution: The 10 most-challenged books for 2010

Caution: top-most-challenged novels of the 20th century

 

Influential Books — Dr. Roderick Bush

Summer – a time for catching up, relaxing, exploring, starting new projects, or perhaps completing work in progress.  Reading, of course, is key in all of these.  With this in mind, we asked some faculty members at St. John’s about books that have influenced them personally or professionally.

Dr. Roderick Bush, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, writes:

Black Reconstruction in America was written when W. E. B. Du Bois was  developing a new analysis of the world and the place of Black people in it inspired by Marxism and the world socialist movement, but transcending those movements in a manner that few could fathom at the time.  He was advocating a new strategy for social change on the basis of reconceptualizing the lessons of the past strategy of the NAACP.  Second it should be noted that the original title of the work was “Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America” (Lewis 2000:361).  Du Bois argues here not only against the intellectual apologists for slavery for the humanity of Black people, but undertakes a much more radical transformation of the intellectual landscape by a dramatic reshaping of our intellectual understanding of the shape of the social world, and the place of Black people in it.

Black Reconstruction in America reflects the most sophisticated analysis of the world capitalist system as a historical social system till that time and for the next 40 years when intellectuals associated with the national liberation movements in the periphery and with the New Left in the core states themselves began to assimilate the lessons that Du Bois had articulated in Black Reconstruction.   Like no other work of that time the book captures that particular moment as the  beginning of the quest of the United States for hegemonic status in the world-system and the implications of  that strategy for democracy within the U.S. and world racial order.  Thirdly Black Reconstruction addresses is the issue of revolutionary agency of the Southern rural strata which contradicts the Marxist dogma about the industrial proletariat against a so-called rural peasantry, and the Leninist dogma about the revolutionary party as the necessary transmitter of revolutionary ideas and methods of organization to the working class.

 

Influential Books — Dr. Laura Snyder

Summer – a time for catching up, relaxing, exploring, starting new projects, or perhaps completing work in progress.  Reading, of course, is key in all of these.  With this in mind, we asked some faculty members at St. John’s about books that have influenced them personally or professionally.   

Dr. Laura Snyder –  an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department  and past president of the  International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science — writes:

One book I find myself returning to is George Eliot’s masterful Middlemarch.  Written in 1871-2, this epic novel charts the years leading up to the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832, which initiated sweeping changes in the political and social structure of Britain.  Like all great literature, Middlemarch is a book to return to again and again.  In different periods of my life I have been struck by different facets of this book.  As a high school student, hoping to become a writer, I was amazed by the quality of the writing, the way that Eliot drew the reader into the age she depicted so vividly.  In graduate school, while beginning to work on Victorian era philosophy of science, I took note of the way in which science, and the new knowledge burgeoning in the time, is both revered and feared by the characters.  And most recently, when I reread the book after suffering the loss of a close family member, I was most drawn to another theme of the book: human relationships, and the way that passion can lead either to perdition or salvation. 

 

“myJSTOR” down on 9/9 & 9/10 – but search/export/email working

We have had a recent advisory from JSTOR, but it shouldn’t be too much of a disruption for our JSTOR regulars.  But do note, that if you normally export/email  a number of  articles at a time from JSTOR using  the “save my citations” feature, you will need to adjust during this time-period … you can still export/email articles individually or in bulk by using the “export Citation” link  or “email citation link”

“On Friday, September 9 and Saturday, September 10, JSTOR will be performing site maintenance that requires a “read-only” period for these two days. During this scheduled maintenance, users will be able to search, browse, and access and download PDF files for content in JSTOR. They will not be able to save citations, reset passwords, create or update MyJSTOR accounts, or purchase articles.”