In honor of our many veterans: This Honor Roll booklet from January 1945 lists 1,835 University of Scranton students and alumni who had served in the armed forces.
Find photographs, documents, news clippings, and more about the many veterans in the University community in our digital collections.
Did you know that the Library employs a large group of student workers? We really couldn’t function without them! Last spring, Library Supervisors met to brainstorm ideas for making others more aware of the important contributions of our student staff. In the coming months we will be “introducing” our readers to many of our students via this blog, concentrating first on those who will be graduating in May. We hope this “spotlight” of recognition will let our students know how much they are valued!
November 13, 2013 – 12:00-1:00PM in WML 305
As more wearable devices (Google Glass, Jawbone Up, Fitbit, the Pebble Watch, etc) hit the market, it’s important to understand what they do and how they are being used. At this session, Joseph Casabona (System Integrator & Web Developer) will answer those questions plus explain how they are being used in higher-ed.
There will be a live demo of Google Glass and more. A light lunch will be provided.
Sessions are open to all University faculty and staff, but seats are limited, so please let us know you are coming. You can register at www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration – under Technology on Your Own Terms.
The Pennsylvania Library Association (PaLA) held its annual conference in Seven Springs, PA, October 20-23rd. University of Scranton Librarian, Bonnie Oldham, was honored with an award at the conference. Two other University of Scranton librarians attended this year; Digital Services Librarian, Kristen Yarmey, and Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, Sheli McHugh.
During the annual business meeting for PaLA, University of Scranton’s Information Literacy Coordinator, Bonnie Oldham was awarded a Certificate of Merit for her continued contribution to the Association. Oldham has served on the board of College and Research Division of PaLA as well as the Northeast Chapter. Congratulations, Bonnie Oldham!
Yarmey presented a conference session titled “Capture all the URLs: First Steps in Web Archiving” where she discussed her work implementing Archive-It at The University of Scranton and how other institutions can begin to plan their web archiving projects. Yarmey also presented on a panel with other Pennsylvania librarians to discuss programs that support and highlight PA Forward‘s Five Literacies, focusing on Civic and Social literacy.
McHugh presented a poster session discussing survey results that analyzed how cataloging librarians use Twitter as a Personal Learning Network to connect with other catalogers. The survey also examined if their Twitter use can lead to higher levels of Social Capital, or sense of belonging to ones community.
For the past few months, we’ve been working on a giant digital collections project. Earlier this year, in preparation for the University’s 125th anniversary, we digitized 97 oversized scrapbooks, filled with newspaper clippings about the University, that were hiding in our basement.
There’s an immense variety of materials inside the books – some are dedicated to academics, others to athletics and alumni – and they date from as early as the 1890s to as recent as the 1980s. Some of the scrapbooks were in good shape, while others were falling apart:
What we’re working on now is processing and cataloging the digitized images, to make them easy to browse and search. While we’re only about a quarter of the way done, you can take a look at our progress by searching and browsing 9,000+ articles from the 20 scrapbooks currently available in our new University of Scranton Clippings Collection.
Note: Items in this collection are restricted to on-campus users only, but off-campus users will still be able to search and browse records for the articles.
We’ll be adding articles from the rest of the scrapbooks throughout the year, so check back often! You can also send questions or comments to us at digitalcollections@scranton.edu.
Last night the library held its most successful Game Night to date! A large number of students, staff, and faculty had fun playing video games and board games, enjoyed the free pizza, and even got to make buttons! The library holds a Game Night once in the Fall semester and once in the Spring semester, so if you missed out there’s always next semester! For a glimpse at some of the fun we had, see some of our photos here:
Students enjoyed playing Super Smash Bros.
Mario Kart:
Just Dance:
Our winner for best costume, Harley Quinn!
Don’t forget to check the blog and WML Facebook page regularly to find out about other exciting events hosted by the library!
Please join us at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday November 13, 2013 in Room 305 of the Weinberg Memorial Library for a free presentation of the drama A Screaming Man. Professor George Aulisio will lead a discussion following the film.
Set in Chad, A Screaming Man is described by Film Movement as the story of Adam, an aging former swimming champion, who is a pool attendant at a popular hotel. When the hotel is taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son, Abdel, leaving Adam humiliated and resentful. Meanwhile the country is in the throes of civil war. Rebel forces attack the government while the authorities demand the population contribute to the war effort. Can Adam and his family survive the changes that are breaking their world apart?
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun A Screaming Man is in French and Arabic with English subtitles and is the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
This event is open to faculty, staff, students and the public. Please email Sharon.finnerty@scranton.edu for reservations.
Today marks the beginning of International Open Access Week, a celebration of access to scholarship. Open Access is a movement in scholarly publishing which endeavors to sidestep or bypass the traditional barriers that block people from accessing scholarship. The most common barrier is the cost of subscription journals which are usually too expensive for individuals to own and have increasingly become a burden on academic libraries as well. Generally speaking, academic libraries and librarians consider open access to be a worthwhile or virtuous endeavor, because librarians are the people most aware of the ever increasing costs of scholarly journals. Librarians have long realized that under the current scholarly publishing model, libraries will not be able to sustain the journal collections that scholars need.
Open Access comes in a few different forms, but the common characteristic that unites all types of Open Access is that scholarship is accessible. That is to say, scholarship is not written in laymen’s terms or overly simplified, but rather articles that are made to be Open Access or articles published in Open Access journals are freely available to anyone with an internet connection. Open Access is more equitable, allowing all individuals to have the same access to the scholarship traditionally only accessible by those with the financial means to purchase multiple expensive subscriptions.
Since its inception, Open Access publishing has continuously been under attack. Some individuals do not recognize the value of Open Access publishing and tend to discriminate against publications in open access journals. Though this seemed to have been on a decline with Universities such as Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and UPenn signing open access mandates supporting scholars who publish in open access venues (http://roarmap.eprints.org/). However, the debate seems to be on the rise again with the rise of predatory open access journals. These journals seek out scholars encouraging them to submit materials to their “peer reviewed” journal, accept the articles without undergoing peer review, and then charge the author a publication fee (the-scientist). These journals are simply exploitative of the open access movement and do not truly represent the vast, high quality scholarship that is being published in legitimate open access journals.
Recently, a sting on “open access” journals published in SCIENCE has given the anti-open access cause some ammunition (sciencemag). However, the study is not without considerable backlash from open access proponents who have noted, among other things, that the sting was selective about which journals the author chose to submit and the tone of the article was misleading about open access in general (blogs.law.harvard; Peter Suber’s plus.google.com; scholarlykitchen). It is also worth noting that the source of the “open access sting” article (SCIENCE), is the same subscription based peer reviewed publication that published a fake article in the past. This is of course a similar peer review indiscretion that the sting article sought to illuminate (michaeleisen).
Predatory Open Access journals are a real concern to the advancement of open access publishing, but there are resources for determining which journals are legitimate peer review and which are predatory. The Directory of Open Access Journals is an index of Open Access Journals. Currently, the Directory is undergoing a reevaluation to assure open access journals found in the directory are all legitimate peer reviewed journals (doaj). In addition, Beall’s list of predatory Open Access Journals lists journals and publishers that the blog’s author, a scholarly initiatives librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, deems to be predatory in nature (scholarlyoa). However, it is important to note that the Directory of Open Access Journals was found to have a few predatory open access journals in its index, this is primarily the reason it is currently undergoing internal evaluation, and Beall’s list was found to list journals that deny publication to articles based on recommendations from peer reviewers. The best safety measure is to ask colleagues their thoughts about specific journals, research the journal and the articles that it has published, and consult a librarian for their recommendation.
It is true, there are open access journals which do not have high peer review standards and seek to exploit the movement. However, the same can be said for subscription journals as well. In and of itself, Open Access does not make a journal low quality. Though Open Access has a long road ahead of it, it is only going to grow from here. The ideals of Open Access are important to scholarship and will continue to rise as more scholars become aware of the goals of Open Access and become attuned to picking out predatory open access journals. This will take a considerable amount of time to fight the misconceptions that surround Open Access publishing (theguardian).
In closing, there is a reason libraries support the Open Access movement, it is because it is for the advancement of knowledge and it is for equality. For example, there have been position statements by the Canadian Library Association (cla), the Association of Research Libraries (arl), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a coalition of more than 800 libraries (sparc), and the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association (ala).
For more information on the specifics of Open Access please see the University’s research guide on Open Access (http://guides.library.scranton.edu/openaccess).
