"Education is what you get from reading the fine print; experience is what you get from not reading it."-Unknown
 

Theatre in the Classroom (or, all the world's a stage.)

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the OLA (Oregon Library Association) annual convention, held in Seaside, OR. This event attracts public, college, and high-school librarians from all over the state of Oregon. One of the discussions I attended was titled "You Can't Teach A Thing if You Don't Have The Zing: Putting The Zing Back Into Library Instruction." The woman who led this presentation, Monika Antonelli, is a Librarian at North Texas State University. Monika also happens to have undergraduate and Masters degrees in theatre. She told our group that after earning the theatre degrees, she started work on a library degree because "she wanted a job!" Her presentation focused on the integration of theatrical techniques into bibliographic instruction, but the principles apply to any teaching situation. Some of the main "tools" we have as "performers" are controlled energy, controlled movement, eye contact, and vocal variety. We can control our teaching environment and ourselves, but students, of course, are the wildcard.

The use of theatrical techniques will:
· increase energy and confidence and enable more spontaneity
· enable full use of the voice, body, and environment
·  be more enjoyable for the instructor, and therefore more enjoyable for students
· help students retain more information

Monika shared her "power" move with us: begin a sentence and stop somewhere in the middle, take 3 steps forward, and finish the sentence. Try it; it draws extra attention to whatever you are discussing! Instrumental music was also mentioned as a useful device for setting mood prior to the beginning of class. Videotaping classes was mentioned as a way to improve your use of theatrical techniques.

Check with your campus LRC for music selections and assistance with videotaping, or borrow Teaching and Performing; Ideas for Energizing Your Classes. William M. Timpson, et al. 378.125 T33 1997 @RO.  Try some of these field-tested tips today. Why wait any longer to release the performer that is buried within?

Library Services Online

Reference Books: Some Old, Some New, But All Too Good To Ignore

Masterplots Revised 2nd edition. Edited by Frank N. Magill. R 809 M37 1996 @ S, C, RO.
The Masterplots concept provides fundamental reference data, plot synopses where applicable, and critical evaluations of a selection of world literature available in English. This expanded and updated version contains 1,801 plot stories and critical evaluations, of which 421 are new titles. This is a good place to look if you seek an overview of a particular work. Other titles by Magill include a survey of science, drama, long fiction, short stories, poetry and history.

Women in the Third World: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Issues. R305.42091724 E66 1998. @ RO. Timely coverage of women's economic and social conditions, legal and health issues, childrearing practices, workplace, education and literacy issues. Includes a bibliography.

The Way Things Work. David Macaulay. R 600 W39 1988, 1991 @ S, C, RO.
A comprehensive and entertaining guide to the principles and workings of hundreds of machines. Did you ever suspect that the principle behind the zipper also governed the building of the pyramids? Can you guess what links a car tire and a parachute, or a wheelbarrow and a bottle opener? A book for those with curious minds.

What has 20,000,000 words, 24 volumes, 6,000 distinguished contributors and 17,450 all-new biographies of the lives of the men and women who have influenced every aspect of American history and culture?

Yes! It's the American National Biography, the most contemporary and inclusive biographical reference source of its kind. From presidents to politicians, folk heroes to forgers, this set covers a remarkable range of lives. Beginning with the Viking explorers in the New World and current to 1995, the narratives are well written and reflect current interpretations of thousands of major figures.  Flip through its pages and see if you're listed. No? Well, maybe in the next edition. R920.073 A68 1999 @ S, C, RO.

1999 Edition: Portland Street Map

The Library recently purchased the 1999 edition of Thomas Brothers' large wall map of the Portland Metro Area. The 60.5 x 76 cm. map now hangs in the Sylvania LRC on the east wall of main floor hallway at the far end of the building near the photocopy machines. The grid areas on this standard map correspond to the 1999 Thomas guidebook of Portland street maps. The guide is available at all campuses. R912.7954 P67 @ S, C, RO.

Growth in Library Instruction at Cascade LRC

Cascade Campus LRC bibliographic instruction statistics are up! Our fall BI statistics are always strong - that seems to be the traditional time instructors bring a class to the library. However, our winter instruction totals increased dramatically this year. This winter, 518 students received instruction in the Cascade LRC, an increase of 225 students over last winter. The variety of classes we are seeing has increased as well; classes outside of the humanities are also starting to take advantage of the LRC.

We invite you to contact your local reference staff and arrange to bring your classes to the library. We can modify instruction to meet your specific needs or simply provide an overview of library resources. Hint: It's not too early to schedule Fall Term 99 visits.

Conference Report

Berniece Owen and Flora Lippert traveled to Detroit in April for the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

The conference included sessions on hot topics such as copyright, information literacy, library services for distant students, academic publishing, and program assessment. Full text of some of the invited papers can be found at <http://0-www.ala.org.library.pcc.edu/acrl/paper99.html>.

We worked hard, but it was fun too. After-hours activities included receptions at the Henry Ford Museum and the Museum of African American History, plus a dinner with colleagues across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

Reminder: Update Your Reserve Holdings

Get Connected to these Websites

Consumer Price Index Inflation Conversion Factors <http://www.orst.edu/dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/sahr.htm>

This site provides tables of Consumer Price Index inflation conversion factors for converting to current dollars for all years since 1800. In addition, it has graphs showing historical trends of price levels, movie prices, government spending, election costs, minimum wages, congressional pay, and other interesting items. There is a link to Columbia Journalism Review's Dollar Conversion Calculator which converts any figure since 1800 to recent year dollars. If you visit this site, you'll learn that an item you paid $10 for in 1978 cost $25 in 1988.

Invention Dimension
<http://web.mit.edu/invent >
This site features information on the history of invention as well as resources for future inventors. Anyone with an idea for an invention can discover what can be patented, what constitutes intellectual property, how to do a patent search and apply for a patent, and how to raise capital. Many links are listed under "Invention Related Links and Resources." Topics such as the history of flight and the "wacky patent of the month" are highlighted in "Invention Extensions."

Everything, Easy, and Free

This is the hype of the Web: no effort and everything you could want is there for the taking. But instructors are limiting the number of web sources they'll accept as sources for research projects. Why?

Consider the ease with which a web page can be created and uploaded to the web: no one reviews or approves it besides its creator. Pages can have inaccurate, out-of-date, or stolen information; they can be deliberately misleading or very biased.

Techniques to track a web page
 

• Check for the author's name. A "mail-to" link gives their e-mail address. What is the domain of the e-mail? .edu, .org, .com, .gov ?

• Search for the author's credentials. Try the author's name, or e-mail address in DejaNews, to see what newsgroups they contribute to, or, what others have to say about them. Try the author's name in Alta-Vista to determine if the author has created, or is mentioned on other web pages, or, has posted to a newsgroup.

• Read the URL (location). Is there a tilde (~) in the location address? This can indicate a personal home page. Delete from right to left and check each level of the URL to find out what the rest of the web site is like and perhaps, who the host organization is.

• Check date of the page. Try any hyperlinks. If most are not active, the page has not been kept up to date. In Netscape use View; Page Info to see last date revised.

• Search the popularity of the URL (Location)  Search the URL in HotBot, or Google to see how many pages have linked to it ("backlinks"). If a lot of other people refer to it, it may be a page with some value.

• Search key terms from the page, and its title in MetaCrawler, or SavvySearch. Does the page appear near the top of the result list? This will indicate if the author has been careful to submit the page to be indexed by various search engines

Techniques to evaluate for quality

Read the document.  Is it a document provided as part of a larger web site? What kind of page is it - a FAQ, a news-release, an editorial or opinion piece, a profile, an annual report, an advertisement, a table of data? Keep in mind that the reliability of the data is only as good as its 'publisher'.

Is it an article?  This would be a page that is provided as part of an ongoing publication. Who is responsible for it (journal, magazine, newspaper name, or publisher name)? If it is an article, it may have been through some review before being 'published,' and might be considered a more reliable source.

Look for documentation.  Are any supporting documents mentioned, or linked to? How complete are the citations? Has the page author violated copyright restrictions?

Determine purpose of the page.  Assume the author has an agenda, or alliances; try to figure out what they are. Are you being sold something? Is this truly independent, objective research? Something in between?

Beware of 'style over substance'.  Graphics and banner ads may make the page attractive; it might even seem interactive. But these alone do not ensure completeness or professionalism in the presentation.

Electronic Journals

You can't easily take them along to the beach, but electronic journals are becoming more a part of our lives. The LRC receives over 1000 journals in electronic form through our subscription to EbscoHost (http://www.pcc.edu/lrc/ebsco.htm). These are text only; there are no pictures or other graphics. With EbscoHost you can look up a topic and find either abstracts or full text of the relevant articles.

Sometimes, though, you know you are interested in a particular magazine title. We are starting to see some individual journals with full text access through their web sites. Many publishers offer some free articles (usually from the current issue), but archives are generally not available without paying. Because we have a print subscription to the British medical journal The Lancet (www.thelancet.com) we also have access to their electronic version. Through the end of 1999 we can also get the full text of Nature  (www.nature.com) online. Contact a reference librarian for login and password information.

The University of Houston library maintains a listing of established web-based scholarly journals that offer free access. You can find these links <http://info.lib.uh.edu/wj/webjour.html>.

EbscoHost's Top Ten

Many of you have used our full-text serials database, EbscoHost, which is accessible via the Web and also in the LRC. In the spirit of "Top Ten" lists, we thought you might like to know that in the first three weeks of Spring term the following titles were the "Top Ten" in terms of full-text articles printed. Are there any surprises?

Newsweek, Economist, Time, Lancet, U.S. News & World Report, Science News, Women's Health Weekly, Alberta Report (Canadian news magazine), Psychology Today, New York Amsterdam News.

The number of articles printed from the "Top Ten" was 1,348. Newsweek led the pack with 227 full-text articles printed. The New York Amsterdam News, one of the best known black newspapers in the nation, is celebrating its 90th anniversary in 1999. Users printed 70 full-text articles from this newspaper.

Copyright in a Digital World: Proprietors' Rights and User Privileges

In today's world of electronic communication, sharing information has never been easier. Unfortunately, this phenomenon also means it has never been easier to violate copyrights. We hope that the following information will provide some guidance to how you can avoid becoming a "contributory infringer" of copyright.

"Contributory infringement" is the act of linking or referring people to sites that contain infringing material. Examples of infringing material would be: 1) commercial full-version software you can download for free because the "demo timer" has been disabled; 2) full-text articles from an on-line journal that requires a subscription; 3) music from commercially available audio CDs, usually available as MP3 files.

Here's how easy it is to inadvertently become a contributory infringer. A student or colleague e-mails you a list of hypertext links to web sites. The top half of the list looks great and you don't bother to read the entire list. You save the e-mail, open it in Word, delete everything but the list, save it as an HTML document, and add it to your class web page. All of this takes less than 5 minutes, and because you didn't read the entire list, you are completely unaware that you just also provided a link to a "warez" or "crackz" site that was the last site on the list.  These two terms are used to describe the process of disabling the feature that makes demo versions of software stop working after a certain number of days. You've just provided a link to a software piracy site.

[Deliberate contributory infringement could lead to fines of $100,00 per software title plus the retail cost of the title times the number of students in your class(es) or department(s). Criminal penalties are also a possibility]

Many of you may ask, "But how do I know if the web page is illegal?" Here are some rules of thumb that may help:
1. First, the good news is that you are protected if someone falsely claims copyright and gives you permission to use something that turns out to belong to someone else.
2. Legal software sites will state their nature very clearly.
· "Freeware" sites usually state that you can use and distribute the software freely as long as you don't charge anyone else to use it.
· "Shareware" sites will state the nominal fee the developer would appreciate you paying once the demo period expires. There will be directions on how to pay and/or how to obtain a registration number or key code that will make the software work after the demo expires.
· "Commercial" sites usually are clearly identified with the software publisher, i.e., <http://www.macromedia.com>, <http://www.adobe.com>, etc. There will always be instructions on how to pay for a "registered" version of the software they allow you to download for a demo period. "Updates" are usually free; "upgrades" are not.
3. Full-text journals and/or databases usually have a copyright statement regarding permissible use of the material. Normally there will be a copyright statement somewhere on the page for each article; with luck, the author's or publisher's e-mail address will be available so you can contact them for permission to use the article.
4. Be suspicious of articles without copyright statements. Absence of the statement does not remove copyright protections.
5. Legitimate music sites will provide only a short clip to entice you to purchase the full version. If a full version of a song or CD is available, there should be a statement of permissible use. The same applies to any type of image, from clip art to graphic icons.

The most important safety tip is to slow down a little and take the time to think about what you're doing. The web page addresses below are additional resources you may find useful.

To find answers to frequently asked questions about PCC's Copyright Policy, see <http://intranet/printcenter/copyright.htm>.

The University of Texas has developed a very good on-line Crash Course in Copyright  <http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/cprtindx.htm> that is useful for standard copyright issues like: image, videos, words, songs, designs, layouts, illustrations, diagrams, charts, and graphs.

If you are interested in learning more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Educause (formerly Educom) has a page of helpful links:  <http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html>

Our Gang

In the coming academic year, Sylvania's Flora Lippert will take a one-year leave of absence to research the role of computers in libraries. Sharon Smith, currently at the Cascade LRC, will take over Flora's reference duties. A search is in progress to find a replacement for Sharon. Stay tuned for further developments.

Max Macias, Film Booking specialist, apparently has taken the theatrical saying, "break a leg," too literally. You'll see Max hobbling about the Sylvania LRC, nursing a badly broken ankle. He is (was?) a skateboarding enthusiast. Send chocolate!

Rock Creek LRC announces that Aaron Dunn has moved into the position formerly held by Dave Lippert. Aaron assists John Pergiel with audiovisual responsibilities and also helps at the checkout desk. You can contact him at 614-7266. Congratulations, Aaron.