February Is African American History Month

The Shaw Memorial-54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry  Regiment
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Websites
Library of Congress
New York Public Library
StonyBrook University
Thinkfinity


Borrow A Book From Our Display

February 1, 2012 - National Digital Learning Day

ALA Press Release

NEWS
For Immediate Release
November 29, 2011
Contact: Jennifer Habley

"AASL a core partner in celebrating inaugural Digital Learning Day

CHICAGO  – Building upon a growing movement, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), working together with the Alliance for Excellent Education and other national educational associations and organizations, is calling on school librarians to participate in the inaugural national Digital Learning Day on February 1, 2012.  Digital Learning Day will celebrate innovative teaching practices that make learning more personalized and engaging and encourage exploration of how digital learning can provide more students with more opportunities to get the skills they need to succeed in college, career and life. Learn more about Digital Learning Day at http://www.digitallearningday.org....

News Item-3M Releases An E-Book Collection Accessible From the Cloud

Accouncement by 3M of a new product for libraries:

3M™ Cloud Library

Patrons can now enjoy your e-book collection with wireless browsing and borrowing, and Internet-free reading. Our easy-to-use apps are available for most devices.

Browse anywhere, read anywhere.
With the 3M Cloud Library, patrons use personal accounts to access e-books on their devices. They can check out a book on an iPad®, take notes while reading on a PC, and finish the book on an Android™ phone. The bookmark feature works across all devices, so readers never lose their place. Patrons can read when, where, and how they want.

Click Here For More Information

                                                              Adam Hunger/Reuters

Tablets at a Best Buy store in Framingham, Massachusetts



January 22, 2012, 10:35 pm, The New York Times 

Tablet and E-Reader Sales Soar

By JULIE BOSMAN

"There was no must-have toy of Christmas 2011 — for youngsters, anyway.
For adults, tablet computers and e-readers were the gifts of choice, judging by a new report that indicates the number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January.
The report, which is expected to be released on Monday, confirms what book publishers say they have experienced in the last few weeks: a big jump in e-book sales after the holidays. A similar e-book boom came immediately after Christmas 2010.
The report, from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, found that the share of adults who owned tablet computers increased to 19 percent from 10 percent, with the same increase for adults who owned e-readers.
That was a sharp change from the period covering the middle of 2011 into the autumn, when the ownership of tablets and e-readers barely budged, the report said.
The increased ownership of tablets was especially pronounced among highly educated people with household incomes of more than $75,000. Almost one-third of people with college degrees now own tablet computers, the report said.
Women were heavier buyers of e-readers than men, a finding consistent with surveys that indicate women tend to buy more books than men.
The survey was conducted in November and December with 2,986 people aged 16 and older. Then, in January, Pew surveyed 2,008 adults 18 and older. Both surveys have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points.
The holiday season spawned a huge marketing and advertising push for the Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble’s latest color device, and the Kindle Fire from Amazon. While many consumers bought the costlier Apple iPad at $500, tablets from Barnes & Noble and Amazon cost less than $250, a more tempting price for a Christmas gift. Some black-and-white e-readers cost less than $100.
“Publishers are putting a lot of effort into e-books; apps developers are cranking out more and more tools for tablets; libraries and tech companies are making e-books easier to borrow,” Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, said in an e-mail. “So the ecosystem of these devices is making them more valuable.”"

E-Textbooks

Apple reinvents textbooks with new publishing platform

Published January 19, 2012, Associated Press

"Apple is launching a new version of its iBooks software, tailored to present vivid, interactive textbooks for elementary and high school students on the iPads.

IBooks 2 will be able to display books with videos and other interactive features, the company announced Thursday at an event at an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

It's not clear how Apple plans to get it front of students, however, since textbooks are subject to lengthy approval processes by states. Also, few students have iPads, which start at $499.
Apple also revealed iBook Author, an application for Macs that lets people create electronic textbooks.
Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years. Until recently, there hasn't been any hardware suitable to display the books, so e-textbooks have had little impact. PCs are too expensive and cumbersome to be good e-book machines for students. Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle have small screens and can't display color.
Tablet computers like the iPad, however, are both portable and capable of showing textbooks in vivid color.
Apple is also setting up a textbook section its iTunes store.
Among the launch titles will be two high school textbooks -- Biology and Environmental Science -- from Pearson PLC and five from McGraw-Hill. They will cost $15 or less, said Phil Schiller, Apple's head of marketing.
Schools will be able to buy the books for its students and issue redemption codes to them, he said.
According to biographer Walter Isaacsson, company founder Steve Jobs in the last year of his life was working to radically change the textbook market. At a dinner in early 2011, Jobs told News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch that the paper textbooks could be made obsolete by the iPad. Jobs wanted to circumvent the state certification process for textbook sales by having Apple release textbooks for free on the tablet computer."

The Scientific Process Adopts the Web 2.0 Social Media Publication Model

Cracking Open the Scientific Process

By THOMAS LIN  The New York Times, Science Times, January 16, 2012

Scroll over text to find active links 

"The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.
For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”
Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.
Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.
Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”
Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”
On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”
Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”
Facebook for Scientists?
“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.
Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.
A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.
The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.
Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.
ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.
In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.
Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.”
Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”
The Paper Trade
Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”
Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.
“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)
Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”
Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.
The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”
In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”
Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”
Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”
Science 2.0
Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”
Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”
Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.
“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”
Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.
“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.
Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.
“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.” "

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day-January 16, 2012

Active Websites

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (San Jose, California) 

Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute

National Memorial

National Park Service-Historic Site

Nobel Peace Price 1964

Mr. Andrew Pelosi--Social Studies Department--Debating the Role of the United States in the Age of Imperlialism

                       

                

                                     

Theodore Roosevelt (left)

William Jennings Bryan (right)                                          

                                                                                                                              

Library Resources
Gale Student Resource Center Junior

Virtual Reference Collection   

ABC CLlO American History   

Biography Reference Bank    
History Study Center
Proquest Historical New York Times
SIRS Researcher 

Online Catalog      

Academic Integrity      

NoodleTools Citations System
Citation Machine       

Websites
Best of History Websites-Early Imperialism
Debating US Imperialism
Great Debates in American History (Imperiliasm)
Reluctant Colossus: American Enters the Age of Imperialism
William Jennings Bryan: The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism

In this debate, students will be asked to defend whether or not the United States should have acted like an imperial power during the Age of Imperialism. 

Students are to use historical facts and/or primary sources to defend their position.  Each student must have an opening statement and give at least three reasons to support their position.  Students also need to show an example of what the other side would say in response to their argument.  We will be in the library Wednesday and Thursday and the debate will be in class on Tuesday.  Students will have only a few minutes to present their case, but must submit a typed argument including any documents used.

Mr. Thomas Worthington-----Social Studies Department----Comparing and Contrasting Presidents

Library Resources
Gale Student Resource Center Junior

Virtual Reference Collection   

ABC CLlO American History   

Biography Reference Bank    
History Study Center
Proquest Historical New York Times
SIRS Researcher 

Online Catalog      

Academic Integrity      

NoodleTools Citations System
Citation Machine       

Websites
The American Presidency Project
Miller Center: University of Virginia
The White House: The Presidents

 Comparing and Contrasting Presidents  

Overview: 
 President Theodore Roosevelt is considered, by
 many historians one of the greatest

presidents the United States has ever had. 
For this assignment, you will compare

 and contrast Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency
 with that of another prominent

president assigned to your group.

Factors to Consider: 

1. Role of the United States in the world during the individual’s  

    presidency

2. Leadership qualities of the person

3. Domestic initiatives

4. Economic climate of the country

5. General outlook of the country

6. Intangibles

Presidents:  

A. Thomas Jefferson

B. Abraham Lincoln

C. Woodrow Wilson

D. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

E. John F. Kennedy

F. Ronald Reagan

Task:   You are to create a 2-4 minute presentation that
compares and contrasts the achievements
of the two presidents you
were assigned.  You will need to find

            Six Documents that match up to the six factors
 to consider categories. 
 These documents should be used as evidence to
 help support your thesis. 

            ***After you make your comparisons, you should
 take a position as to which

            individual you think was the better president.

Assessment: 
 You will receive both a group grade, based on the presentation,
and an individual grade, based on work submitted.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

Emma Clark Library Has An App for That

Click Here For Acess To Emma Mobile Click Here For Access to Live-Brary.com (your gateway to eBooks) Emma Clark Library has an app for that Library embraces change and offers e-books, audio books, music and video to smart phones and computers

By Andrea Moore Paldy

	An iPhone screenshot of Emma Clark Library’s mobile app. Photo from Ted Gutmann

Village Times Herald

December 21, 2011 | 03:57 PM

In an age when the e-book seems to be gaining on the paperback and a person can access books, music and movies on a portable device, what does the future hold for the library, haven of physical media?

Ted Gutmann, director of Emma S. Clark Library, does not foresee the end of the library as we know it. "I don't think it's going anywhere too quickly," he said. "Regular circulation – books, DVDs and other physical items — are still quite strong."

Circulation statistics have continued to rise in the past several years and are, in fact, up 1 percent since last year, he said. That doesn't mean, though, that local libraries are not undergoing a digital evolution of their own.

Emma Clark patrons, for example, can download e-books and other online materials through Live-brary, a shared central database for county libraries. Those who access Live-brary through the Emma Clark website can download e-books, audio books, music and video directly to their smartphones, tablets and computers. The checkout time varies from seven to 14 days, for as many as five items at a time. When the media is due, it disappears from the borrower's cart.

Live-brary, which has existed as an online database for several years, began offering e-books a few years ago. However, it was when Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle became compatible with e-book software and more content became available that downloads soared. Emma Clark began publicizing the service on its website, with flyers in the library, in its newsletters and in local news outlets. Between August 2010 and August 2011, usage jumped 235 percent, with 10,861 downloads, Gutmann said.

"Patrons are taking advantage of what we're offering," he said, citing additional statistics showing Emma Clark patrons third in their usage of e-book services after Sachem and Smithtown libraries.

"It's bringing the library into the next century," said Ron Monroe, a user new to the availability of e-book downloads.

"We get a lot of questions," reference librarian Jennifer Mullen said. "There are many devices and with each one being different, we sometimes have to give instructions."

The Live-brary site lists compatible devices and provides step-by-step guidance for downloading materials. While the majority of users follow directions from the site, users can schedule an appointment with a reference librarian for additional assistance.

"We're expecting a lot of people to come in after the holidays," Connie Roberts, another reference librarian said, in anticipation of a wave of e-readers and other digital devices received as gifts. Roberts has observed, though, that those who download material continue to check out traditional books. Many use their e-readers for travel, she said, since it allows them to take along several books.

Patron Erika Heilmann was excited when she learned about the convenience of the e-book download service. "It will save me a million trips back and forth to the library," she said.

There is also news for those who continue to have a more traditional relationship with the library. The launch of Emma Mobile, a new library app, can simplify a variety of activities. Gutmann and his team designed the app to streamline borrowing, allowing library patrons to easily search catalogs, set up and check accounts and conduct title searches simply by scanning a book's barcode. The app also provides a calendar of events and sends notifications to a user's device.

Gutmann will tell colleagues about Emma Mobile at the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, D.C., in March.

"This is where everything is going," he said. "Our computers are going to be these handheld devices, so we want to be a part of that."

Ms. Heather Servedo-----Computer Literacy-----MLA Report Assignment

SIRS RESEARCHER TUTORIAL (CLICK HERE)

MLA Report Assignment

Write a 3 page research paper on a controversial issue. 

(No two students can have the same topic).

When you have chosen a topic please let me know before you begin your research.

Format paper using MLA format:  You can use Noodletools

12pts. Time New Roman, double spaced, left aligned.

Introduce topic in the first paragraph (4-5 sentences).

Print 3 on-line journal/magazine/newspaper articles from the VRC (Virtual Reference Collection)   See Mr. Miller for VRC  Informantion.
Mr. Miller, The Information Speciaist, will instruct the students in avoiding plagiairism,citation methods including NoodleTools,access to the online databases and eBook systems.