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:
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).
Join us this upcoming Monday, October 28th and meet Stephen Kinzer, Author of “The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War.”
Click here to listen to his recent interview with NPR and don’t forget to RSVP to emily.brees@scranton.edu to reserve a spot! The event will be held at Brennan Hall in the Rose Room, 5th Floor.
For more information on Schemel Forum events, click here.
Last week, I was standing in my kitchen with the setting sun streaming through the windows, my hands wrinkled from twenty-minutes of washing dishes, and tears pouring from my cheeks and plunking down into the dishwater like rain.I was crying, really crying.I’m not talking about the silent whimpers that trickle from me while watching Titanic for the third time, I’m talking about genuine sobs; the kind that originates in the center of you and pull your heart out of your chest on their way up.
What was it that had me so upset?Revision.You see, weeks earlier I had sent my book off to my agent, confident that I had revised it for the last time.And I really, really thought I had.I spent weeks deleting, rewriting, and reshaping my book.I worked hard.I (sort of) neglected my children, missed a few meals, lived under piles of laundry, and fell completely behind on Boardwalk Empire.But when all was said and done, it was worth the sacrifice.I nailed it.I was in the clear.Publication was just around the corner, I was sure of it.
Then, on an ordinary Monday evening, the familiar DING! I’ve assigned to my agent’s email address yanked me from the dinner table and I dove for my phone.
I expected to read: I love it!I’m taking it out tomorrow to publishers.I love you!You are so talented, and you have great eyes.
Instead, I got: We are so close! But…
I was shattered.I stood in my kitchen with my hands in that soapy water and I just sobbed.Not because I had to rewrite the book again, but because I felt like a failure.As a writer, my very existence hangs on my ability to write and to sell this novel.I’ve dedicated my education to it, spent the better part of my daughter’s lives writing it, and promised my husband that our sacrifices would all be worth it.Now, I had nothing.No publication.No reward. Just that “but…”I hated that but.
Two days later in the Writing Center, I consulted with a student who had written a marvelous paper of which she was very proud.She beamed as she read it out loud and she had every right to swell with pride.The introduction was strong, the argument supported, and the organization was clear.But something was off.When I read the paper as a whole, it didn’t address the assignment.I chose my words carefully, as I always do with students.I asked her to interpret the assignment her instructor had given the class.I then asked her to tell me how her paper aligned with those instructions.She hesitated.She searched the paper. She looked at the ceiling.She scratched an imaginary itch on her left ear.“It doesn’t,” she said softly, “it doesn’t.”She was visibly shaken.She was defeated.It was as if she was the one with the tears in the dishwater and I was the big “but.”
As I explained the assignment and how she could address some of the larger issues, I was careful to point out all of the things she did well.This is a good paper, I assured her.You are a good writer.And I wasn’t lying.She was, by all accounts, a very talented student.She simply missed the mark on this assignment.She aimed left when the bull’s-eye was right.This misinterpretation of her assignment was not an indication of her abilities as a student.Just like my inability to properly construct a convincing arc for my protagonist’s best friend was not an indicator of my talent.We just needed to revise, to reshape, and to try again.The student left with tear-streaked cheeks and a much-improved paper, I’m sure of it.And that night I went home and began working on revision number 13,886 of my novel.
Revision does not equal failure.Revision is growth.I never understood those words more than when I became a novelist.My book has come so far from when I wrote the first draft.It’s a different book entirely.And with each draft, I learn and grow as a writer.I am more proud of my book today that I have ever been of anything.I pass this message along to my students, and it is a philosophy we hold dear in the Writing Center: The first draft is the creating, the shaping, and the imagining. The revision is where the real writing happens.
Bring us your creation. Call the Writing Center today at: 570-941-6147 or writing-center@scranton.edu
Trains magazine ranks The General as one of the 10 best train movies of all time. Buster Keaton’s extraordinary stunt work and the use of Civil War-era trains make this film a classic.
Don’t let the train leave the station without you! Join us for the International Film Series’ free presentation of The General at 7:00 p.m. Friday October 18th in Room 305 of the Weinberg Memorial Library.
This screening is being held in conjunction with the Lackawanna County Library System’s Scranton Reads program and is open to the public.
Please email sharon.finnerty@scranton.edu for reservations.
