Local Fine Artist and former Mt. View High School Art Teacher, Ken Roth, will be exhibiting a show at the Rotunda Gallery June 23-August 28, 2008. An Artist’s reception will be held on Thursday, June 26, 4-7 pm.
 
Ken has titled the show, “Take Flight”, and it will feature a large body of work centered on birds. From monoprints, to pastels, to oils, Ken has sought to capture the nature, movement, color and form of various birds, from raptors to the house finch.

Wow!  That’s an interesting piece of news: Encyclopaedia Britannica to Follow Modified Wikipedia Model!  Apparently, Britannica’s latest decision in the midst of growing public perception that it’s becoming increasing irrelevant, is to change directions and use some of the practices of the wiki world (mainly following the example of its major competitor, Wikipedia), now accepting articles from the common people!  According to the article mentioned above, Britannica “is opening up its site to the crowd, but keeping the gates up against the barbarians as far as the official version of the publication concerned… Members of the company’s community of scholars and registered users will be able to post about new topics without intervention, but the company says all articles on new topics will be fact-checked and vetted before appearing in the main edition.”  So, there you go!  Want a sneak preview?  Here is the beta version of the new Britannica!

Along with this, I also want to let you know that our blog is going on vacation for the rest of the summer.  I wish you all a great, relaxing time and hope you’ll be back in the Fall visiting our library blog for many more interesting news!

Last year Web Worker Daily’s Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Information Overload offered great advice for people who have to be on the computer to accomplish their work, yet have difficulty avoiding the endless distractions that the Internet provides. (Can you say, Facebook, YouTube, IM, and ESPN.com and not lose your focus?)

So it’s finals week, and you don’t have time to read 21 tips, but every time you sit down to study, you first log on to your various accounts, respond to your friends’ messages, update your accounts and then look at the clock and discover an hour has gone by. Below, I’ve highlighted the parts of the tips most relevant for a finals week study session.  When you have time, take a look at the whole list. More than likely, you’ll recognize a couple of the time-wasting habits. Happy Studying!

4. Take control. Get into the mindset that you are the master of your information. It’s really about the mindset, because I think we’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that when there are emails in our inbox, we HAVE to read them… when people are IMing us, we have to respond. We don’t… Technology should serve us, not the other way around…

5. Shut down email. Again, email is a tool that you should use when you need it. You should not be a servant to it. As such, I suggest that you shut down your email when you don’t need it. Only go to your email when you want to use it, and don’t worry about responding to the messages in it right away, or even ever.

7. Set up a chat zone. Have a set period each day when you connect to IM… Don’t connect to chat at other times of the day, unless you really need to for a specific task.

9. Take mini-breaks. Even when you’re connected, you shouldn’t do it for hours at a time. Every 45 minutes or so, get up, walk away from your computer, stretch your legs, take a walk around your home or office. Or better yet, get outside, get some fresh air, and get a little perspective. It’s important.

10. Block distractions. When you’re connected but need to work, use a utility like Page Addict to track your time on different sites and block the distractions. This will allow you to do the work you need but not be tempted to check email or your feeds or your forums or what have you.

11. Learn to focus. While short attention spans and the ability to multi-task might be a feature, and not a bug, of the newer generation of web workers, there’s still value in being able to focus on one task for long enough to complete it or at least make a lot of progress on it. It’s actually a skill that can be improved with practice. To learn to focus, turn off all programs and close all tabs except what’s needed to complete the task at hand. Set a timer for 10 or 20 minutes [Click here for a free online timer], and try to focus on getting the task done. When you feel yourself being pulled away, stop and pull yourself back. This ability to focus can make you a lot more productive.

19. Work disconnected. An alternate strategy to having a disconnected period each day, see Tip 8, is to disconnect each time you need to work on an essential task. Pull the information you need off the web, disconnect, do the task, and the reconnect if you want. But working in a disconnected mode will help you concentrate and take control of your time.

I love this new database we just subscribed to! The Global Road Warrior (funny name, don’t you think?) is a guide for individuals traveling abroad or companies doing business in foreign countries.  As a Greek myself, I checked to see how accurate this database is for information it provides about my own original country.  My favorite section to explore was “Society & Culture.”  Here is one of the “Stereotypes of Greeks as accepted by Greeks “  I found in that section  - I thought you might appreciate it!

“There are two types of people in the world: Greeks and people who wish they were Greeks.”

By golly, quite true!

This database even has a section for “Essential terms,” important words to use when you travel to the country.  Ok, now practice …“Den katalavéno”;  in Greek it means I don’t understand! This expression may come on handy if you plan on visiting my country soon.

Short notice, but a great event:
Benjamin Ajak, co-author of They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
Monday, June 2nd, 6:30 p.m.
Pinckney Center for the Performing Arts

This school year, some high school students read a book. It was They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky the true story of Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng and Benjamin Ajak. When just boys (all three were not yet eight years old), their villages were destroyed and they were torn from their families. They became three of thousands of “lost boys” whose “journey would take them over one thousand miles across a war-ravaged country, through landmine-sown paths, crocodile-infested waters, and grotesque extremes of hunger, thirst, and disease.” More than half of these lost boys died. This book is the story of three who managed to survive.

The students from Denise Silfee’s COIC high school class were so deeply moved by the book that they decided to take some action. Specifically, they worked to bring one of the authors here to Bend, to share his story, raise awareness and hopefully inspire faith in the strength of the human spirit.

COCC is sponsoring the event which will be at 6:30, Monday, June 2nd at the Pinckney Auditorium here on campus. The library has ordered extra copies of the book, so come on in and pick one up if you want to read the story yourself. We also have some videos you can check out. For more background, check out some of these sites (all found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Boys_of_Sudan)

Lost Boys of Sudan, official IRC website.
Lost Boys from the Red Cross.
Photojournalist’s Account - Images of Sudan’s displaced
God Grew Tired of Us - Excerpts from a documentary about the Lost Boys
Lost Boys Program Fresh Ministries’
Sudan Emancipation & Preservation Network (SEPNet)
Alliance For The Lost Boys
Sudanese Lost Boys Association of Australia
“Do Not Forget The Lost Girls of Sudan”, Refugees International, February 11, 2002.
Gabriel’s Dream A charity dedicated to securing education and dental care for the lost boys.
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky Official book site
Hope for Ariang, “Lost Boy” Gabriel Bol Deng’s project to build a primary school in the Bhar El Ghazal region
Lost Boys of Sudan, documentary film

Not surprisingly, more than a few students have noticed the exorbitant cost of textbooks lately. In fact both the Student Public Interest Research Group (SPIRG) and the U.S. Department of Education backed studies on the issue (see SPIRG’s Exposing the Textbook Industry or Department of Ed’s Affordability of College Textbooks). Both studies found that the average student spends about $900 a year on books, that prices have been increasing at rates that greatly surpass rates of inflation and that the textbook industry has contributed to the problem. Students have been saddled with these expenses for years, but many have decided they’re not going to keep meekly shelling out their money without taking some steps towards change.

Check out SPIRG’s Campaign to Make Textbooks Affordable. Here you will find tons of information, specific steps you can take to improve the situation, and maybe most urgently, the article Five Ways to Save on Textbooks Now, Three Ways to Lower Prices Long Term. Among the useful tips, you will find a link to the non-profit student-to-student site Campus Book Swap which does have some active COCC listings, but could only benefit from more COCC students registering to buy and sell their books directly to each other.

Before you sell those books, check out some of these ideas to see if you can do your part to make textbooks more affordable, not just for you, but for all those students out there struggling to afford their education.

So, in my recent May 6 post,  I showed you how to look for and request books on a topic of interest using Summit.  Now, let’s work together to see how you can find articles!  

Academic Search Premier is one of the main databases students use to find articles in journals and magazines.  As a matter of fact, students seem to really like this database because of the simplicity of its interface and its ability to retrieve full-text articles (full-text means that you can retrieve the text of the article right on your screen)!

Here is how you may get to this database on or off-campus:

-          Start with the COCC Barber library web page.

-          Under “Articles & More: Databases,” select  All Databases and hit Go.

-          Academic Search Premier is listed first.  Go ahead and click on it!

-          After you press on Continue, you enter the database and you are ready to search!

Now notice that a search using the phrase “birth order,” similar to the one I described on May 6, will give you more than a thousand of results!  You see, compared to books, articles tend to focus much more on very specific topics.  As a consequence, a broad topic such as birth order tends to produce hundreds and hundreds of results on any possible issue that may relate to the subject area.  That’s why it’s always a good idea to start thinking of ways you may need to narrow down when your database search gives you way too many results.

For example, here are some searches you may try on the topic of birth order: 

birth order and intelligence

birth order and first born child*

birth order and psycholog*

Did you notice the * symbol in these last two searches?  Well, this is a clever way to tell the database that you want it to search for all possible endings of a word (child, children; psychology, psychological, etc, etc)!  Also, the “and” between your words tells the database to look for ALL of these words simutaneously.

Next, in the list of your results, you get article citations with the indication HTML Full Text or PDF Full Text.  This indication means that you are able to retrieve the article right on your computer screen!  Isn’t this cool? Hooray!  No need to take a trip to the library! If an article is NOT available full-text through the Academic Search Premier database, you will see the link Request this item through interlibrary loan, which you may use so that we can get this article for you from another library (this is called “interlibrary loan,” a completely free and wonderful service!). 

Try a few other searches yourself!  What do you think?  Aren’t students right when they say they love Ebsco’s Academic Search Premier?

Students—Strut Your Sentences!
Thursday, May 22, 2008
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
COCC Library, Second Floor Reading Room

For Students Only! COCC and OSU-Cascades students take center stage for this season ending finale of the Word Café. From slam to sestina, fiction to non—Come show what your sentences are made of!

Audience members welcome too. Enjoy light refreshments during this free evening and give readers a round of applause.

For more information contact 541.330.4381 or email info@thenatureofwords.org

Librarian: Hello there! I notice you seem confused and lost.  Can I help?

Student:  Yeah, I am lost.  What happened to all the shelves in the reference section?

Librarian:  We’re moving them around and eliminating some of them in order to make more room for computer stations, large tables, and group study areas.

Student:  But this is supposed to be a library!  Where are all the books, microfilm, and other materials going?

Librarian:  We will still have all those things available.  But we have noticed that more students are coming to the library to get work done either alone or with others– not just to look things up.

Well, that’s how it goes with some of the conversations we are recently having at the reference desk…  Despite the noise on some days, no, this not exactly a construction project for our Barber library!  We are simply trying to find new ways to make our library space more usable and inviting to you, students, by rearranging our stacks, collections, and computer workstations!  Have any ideas to give us?  Are there needs you want us to address in our space rearrangements?  If so, please don’t hesitate to email your suggestions to thovekamp@cocc.edu!  Will be looking for your feedback!