Recommended Resources

There is a correction to a previous blog posting, regarding content in Naxos Music Library. Naxos will not be adding the catalog of Smithsonian Folkways recordings to its online service. The previous posting (10/22) has been removed.

At this week’s LIS annual planning day we’ll be spending some time thinking about the future of our work in the context of the future of higher ed. The following two articles have just recently been published and offer some views on the challenges ahead. As you can imagine, technology is a huge driver in the current evolution of education and pedagogy, and as a result, LIS does and should have a role to play.

David Faldet’s excellent new book, Oneota Flow, mentions an obscure pamphlet titled Ramblings on the Upper Iowa River that we keep in the Preus Library Rare Book Room. Published in Decorah around 1890 it features several vintage photographs and a brief text describing the beauty of the region and its charms.

Last week a patron from Des Moines stopped by the library and asked to see the volume. Unfortunately the pamphlet was hard to locate that day and he returned to Des Moines disappointed.

The Naxos Music Library: Jazz is now available for up to 10 simultaneous users. Over 2,300 albums of classic jazz, blues and R&B from some (but not all) of the most important record labels of the 1950s, 60s, and beyond can be streamed to your computer. Labels represented include Milestone, Prestige, Riverside & Original Jazz Classics.

The Luther College Course Catalog for 2008-09 is now available online at www.luther.edu/catalog and replicates the printed version of the catalog. Greg Vanney in Publications and Kristi Haindfield in the Registrar’s Office maintain the information and are able to make changes for next year’s publication through the SmartCatalog software. SmartCatalog software is able to produce a printer-ready copy of the catalog for the next printed publication. Faculty, staff, and students should use my.luther, search for sections, for recent changes to course information and offerings.

Luther College now has access to the content of journals included in JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences VI Collection.

“With a minimum of one hundred twenty (120) titles, the Arts & Sciences VI Collection will extend JSTOR’s coverage in disciplines across the social sciences, with clusters focused in economics, education, linguistics, political science, and area studies.”

Here is a list of the new titles currently available (http://www.jstor.org/action/showJournals?browseType=collectionInfoPage&s...), more will be added during 2009-2010.

It will be a few weeks before bibliograph

Luther College on iTunes U launched late yesterday. Currently, we have 41 tracks available for download. We will continue to add content as more becomes available and word spreads. The iTunes search hasn’t indexed us yet, so the best way to access our site is through the Luther launch page: http://www.luther.edu/about/itunesu/index.html.

Luther is mentioned in this Chronicle article about the decline in land-line use.

Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines

The Gazette, a newspaper serving the area around Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, recently ran a story about a new policy at Iowa State University: The institution will make students pay to have land-line telephones hooked up in their rooms. Given the triumph of cellphones, we would have thought that this was old news.

The past few days I’ve found myself grumbling about why a couple of websites weren’t showing information in the way I wanted to see it. After some digging around, I discovered that the information I wanted was buried in the code of both of these pages, in one way or another, but wasn’t visible from the browser!

So, in a fit of frustration, I decided I was going to teach myself how to write a Greasemonkey script.

Several people have asked about how to find articles from journals using the new Library Research website. Let me count the ways:

1) Using Encore, our new research and discovery tool. The Research page uses Encore as its default search. Along with searching Magnus (the library’s online catalog) if you enter a search term in the Encore search box (and you are on campus) that term is also sent to the Academic Search Complete, JSTOR and Project Muse databases.