nov07a.indd David Free N e w s f r o m t h e F i e l d Columbia University Libraries opens human rights archive The Center for Human Rights Documenta­ tion and Research (CHRDR) at Columbia University Libraries, along with the Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Net­ work, the University of Texas Libraries, and the Center for the Study of Human Rights, hosted a public conference October 4–6, 2007, entitled “Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Re­ search, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Jus­ tice.” The conference provided a forum for discussion of issues related to the creation, archiving, access, and use of human rights documentation. The conference also marked the formal opening of Columbia’s human rights archives for public access. CHRDR is the offi cial re­ pository for the archives of Amnesty Interna­ tional USA, Human Rights Watch, Committee of Concerned Scientists, and other major international human rights organizations and supports the community of teachers, researchers, and law and social justice advo­ cates working in the multidisciplinary sphere of human rights. Visit CHRDR’s Web site at www.columbia. edu/library/humanrights to learn more about the center’s activities, archives, and research resources. The entire proceedings of the con­ ference, including video of each presentation, will appear on the site in the near future. New features from WorldCat.org OCLC recently added enhanced social func­ tions to WorldCat.org in order to increase networking between library users around the world. A new social bookmark op­ tion lets users add library­owned items to bookmarks at popular sites, such as Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. Enhanced citation management tools allow users to generate citations for their personalized lists of WorldCat­cataloged items in one of five common citation styles: APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, or Turabian. Users also can export lists in their preferred citation style. Exported citations can be saved locally in HTML, Rich Text or RIS format, and are compatible with Endnote bibliographic soft­ ware or the RefWorks research management Web tool. 3D scanner may save vanishing languages from extinction Fragile field recordings of American Indian speech and song gathered in the early 1900s may be saved for future generations through breakthrough technology supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Ser­ vices (IMLS). IMLS is funding the research and development of a 3D optical scanner through a $507,233 interagency agreement with the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The project will preserve and increase access to Native American sound collections at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, along with other collections across the country “The 2,700 wax cylinder recordings held by the Hearst museum are jewels in a trea­ sure trove of early recordings that we hope will be rescued,” IMLS Director Anne­Imelda Radice said. “Saving the delicate recordings literally may keep alive some of these Na­ tive American languages.” Nationwide, there are approximately 20,000 Native American fieldwork recordings on fragile wax cylin­ ders, the earliest method of recording and reproducing sound. Other rare recordings, including speeches of historical figures and a wide range of fi eld recordings of folk music, linguistic, cultural, and anthropological materials, would also benefit from the technology. The new 3D system builds on a 2D system also developed by the Berkeley Lab called IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), which gathers digital sound from grooved discs (flat recordings such as traditional 78 rpm shellac disc records) by illuminating the record surface with a narrow beam of light. The flat bottoms of the groove—and the spaces between tracks—appear white, while the sloped sides of the groove, scratches, and dirt appear black. The computer turns this information into a digital sound fi le and corrects areas where scratches, breaks or wear have made the groove wider or nar­ C&RL News November 2007 622 http:del.icio.us http:WorldCat.org http:WorldCat.org www.columbia ACRL announces ALA Midwinter Meeting workshops ACRL will offer three professional develop­ ment workshops in conjunction with the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadel­ phia. All workshops take place on January 11, 2008. • “Assessing Learning Outcomes in Programs Large and Small: A Hands-On Approach” (Friday, January 11, 2008, 1–4:30 p.m.): This workshop will provide hands­on experience for each step of an assessment process that is based on the ACRL “Informa­ tion Literacy Competency Standards” and the American Association for Higher Education’s “9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning.” Learn how to create indi­ vidualized rubrics, hear about the collection of student work for assessment, find out how to use the rubric to assess learning, and how to change instruction to improve student­ learning outcomes. Presenters: Sue Phelps, reference librar­ ian,Washington State University­Vancouver; Karen Diller, associate library director,Wash­ ington State University­Vancouver • “Injecting Fun into Library Orienta- tion: How to Engage and Capture your Students through Interactive Presen- tations” (Friday, January 11, 2008, 1­4:30 p.m.):This workshop will help you discover how both students and librarians can have some fun with library orientation sessions. Experience two innovative and interactive methods that have been used at British universities.These techniques—“The Cepha­ lonian Method” and “Library Bingo”­ will be presented in the same way as you could use them with students. Evaluate these methods and assess whether they would fit into your library environment, as well as understand the learning theories that underpin them. Presenters: Jacqui Weetman DaCosta, in­ formation literacy librarian, College of New Jersey; Nigel Morgan, subject librarian, Cardiff University (Wales) • “Using Organization Development to Create a ‘Work Place of Choice’” (Friday, January 11, 2008, 1–4:30 p.m.):This workshop will demystify organization devel­ opment! Find out what an Organization De­ velopment (OD) professional actually does on a daily basis. Learn to distinguish between human resources, OD, and staff development. Using real examples of enhancing commu­ nication and improving the climate in your organization, you will do the work of an OD specialist by taking a climate survey and by creating some guidelines for communication responsibilities in your organization. Presenters: M. Sue Baughman, assistant dean for organizational development, Univer­ sity of Maryland; Elaine Z. Jennerich, director, Organization Development and Training at the University of Washington Libraries. Complete details about ACRL professional development preconferences are available online at www.ala.org/acrl/events (click “ACRL @ Midwinter”). Registration materials are online at www.acrl.org (click “Events & Conferences”). The advance registration deadline is November 30, 2007. For more information, contact Margot Sutton Conahan at msutton@ala.org or (312) 280­2522. rower than normal. IRENE then “plays” the file with a virtual needle without damaging or destroying the original media. The technol­ ogy was adapted from methods used to build radiation detectors for high­energy physics experiments. Library Assessment Conference call for proposals The Association of Research Libraries, the University of Virginia Library, the University of Washington Libraries, and the Conference Planning Committee recently announced the call for proposals for the second Library Assessment Conference: Building Effec­ tive, Sustainable, Practical Assessment, to be held in Seattle, Washington, August 4–6, 2008. The conference goal is to support and nurture the library assessment community through a mix of invited speakers, contrib­ uted papers and posters, workshops, and engaging discussion. Presentations for papers, posters, and panel discussions are sought in all areas of library assessment, including digital libraries, teaching and learning, methods and tools, return on investment, and usability. The plan­ ning committee is especially interested in con­ November 2007 623 C&RL News mailto:msutton@ala.org http:www.acrl.org www.ala.org/acrl/events I can’t live without . . . This tool has changed my life! No longer do I waste precious minutes of the reference interview scurrying back to my office for a Web site saved on one computer. Gone are the days of digging through badly designed sites for an obscure document I encounter once in a blue moon. This social bookmarking tool lets you store, organize, and share online bookmarks so they are accessible later—from any location. With del.icio.us, it doesn’t matter if I’m at the circulation or reference desk, or at a conference in Kalamazoo. I just log in, get the bookmark, and find the answer. You can even download a plugin for your browser and add URLs to your del. icio.us account with one click. del.icio.us makes this reference librarian’s mouth water.—Maureen “Molly” Knapp, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-New Orleans . . . del.icio.us del.icio.us Peace Studies,” a repository of pri­ mary documents covering the peace and social justice efforts of the col­ leges and their affi liated religious institutions. The collection contains diaries, minutes of church bodies and organizations, correspondence, pamphlets, newspapers, and periodi­ cals from the 1700s to 20th century, covering the work of the Society of Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren. The collection currently includes tens of thousands of pages, and with a full compliment of searchable meta­ data and full text, the interface pro­ vides extensive access to the material. Most documents are presented in PDF, which can easily be downloaded. The archive is available online at r e p l i c a . p a l n i . e d u / c d m 4 / i n d e x _keplow.php?CISOROOT=/keplow. The archive is a part of a larger project, “Plowshares: A Peace Studies Collaborative by Earlham, Goshen and Manchester Colleges,” which is funded tributions that show how assessment results by the Lilly Endowment. More information have been used to improve library services on the overall project is available at www. and add value to the user community. plowsharesproject.org. Complete details on the conference, along with submission information, is avail­ Boston Library Consortium and Open able on the conference Web site at www. Content Alliance to provide digitized libraryassessment.org/. The deadline for books proposals is February 1, 2008. The Boston Library Consortium, Inc. (BLC), an association of academic and research li­ NetLibrary reaches 150,000-title braries located in Massachusetts, Connecti­ milestone cut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, NetLibrary, an OCLC division and platform recently announced a partnership with the for digital content in libraries worldwide, Open Content Alliance (OCA) to build a achieved a ground­breaking milestone Sep­ freely accessible library of digital materials. tember 20, 2007, when it became the fi rst BLC will offer high­resolution, download­ eContent provider to offer 150,000 full­text able, reusable files of public domain materi­ eBook and eAudiobook titles to academic, als from all 19 member libraries. Collective­ public, special, and school library users. The ly, the BLC member libraries provide access 150,000th title to go live was ECOhouse: A to more than 34 million volumes. BLC is the Design Guide by Sue Roaf, Manuel Fuentes first large­scale consortium to embark on and Stephanie Thomas, published by Else­ such a self­funded digitization project with vier in 2007. OCA. BLC’s digitization efforts will be based in a new scanning center, the Northeast Re­ College libraries create digital peace gional Scanning Center, housed at the Bos­ studies archive ton Public Library. Earlham College, Goshen College, and Man­ BLC’s digitized books will be hosted by the chester College libraries have partnered to Internet Archive and available for indexing create “The Plowshares Digital Archive for by any search engine in accordance with BLC C&RL News November 2007 624 http:libraryassessment.org http:plowsharesproject.org http:del.icio.us http:del.icio.us http:del.icio.us http:del.icio.us and OCA’s philosophy of open access to digitized content. Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Ar­ chive, expressed pleasure that “many great libraries are weighing the alternatives and choosing to go open instead of putting public domain material under perpetual restrictions.” For more information, visit BLC online at www.blc.org/index.html and OCA at www. opencontentalliance.org. WGBH opens vault The WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA) recently launched the Open Vault, a free video resource to enhance classroom lesson plans and students’ independent study. The archive offers access to over 500 streaming video clips and more than 1,000 interview transcripts drawn from WGBH’s award­winning programming created be­ tween 1968 and 1993. Topics range from desegregation and busing to the Cold War to interviews with and performances by leading dancers, writers, and poets. The Open Vault includes clips drawn from programs such as New Television Workshop, an experimental video art series that supported the creation and broadcast of experimental works by artists from 1974 to 1993; Say Brother (now Basic Black), an African American public affairs series with programs from 1968 to 1982; War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, a 13­part series that examined the origins and evolution of nuclear competition between the United States and the Soviet Union; and Vietnam, A Television History. Visit openvault.wgbh.org for more infor­ mation about the Open Vault. Duke University Press launching eBooks Duke University Press has entered a part­ nership with ebrary to host and deliver a new eBook product, the e­Duke Schol­ arly Books Collection. The new product is due to be fully released in January 2009, with a pilot program taking place in select libraries during 2008. Using the ebrary platform, Duke will distribute the new collection directly to the academic library community under a perpetual ac­ cess model. ASERL selects virtual reference partner Association of Southeastern Research Li­ braries (ASERL) has selected the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science (USC/SLIS) to support ASERL’s Ask­A­Librarian Online Chat Refer­ ence Service for 2007–08. The program pro­ vides more than 100 hours of online chat reference service per week to the students, faculty, and staff at eight ASERL institutions, including College of William & Mary, Mis­ sissippi State University, University of Ala­ bama, University of Central Florida, Univer­ sity of Memphis, University of Mississippi, University of North Carolina­Charlotte, and Virginia Commonwealth University. “It is a great opportunity for our students to gain experience with the provision of real­world virtual reference services,” said Feili Tu, USC/SLIS assistant professor and the primary investigator of the project. “In addition, research will be conducted to examine how effectively students provide virtual reference services, as evidenced by application of knowledge and skills learned from the USC/SLIS curriculum.” The project is offered as a paid intern­ ship program for master’s level library and information science students. Each semester, several student virtual reference staffers will also be enrolled in the school’s Internship in Library and Information Science course, which gives students opportunities to dem­ onstrate competencies acquired during their programs of study. For more information about ASERL’s Ask­A­Librarian service, visit www.ask­a ­librarian.org. We want your news! Are there exciting things happening at your library? New online collections or archives? Renovation projects? New and innovative services? Share your news with colleagues across the world in C&RL News by submitting your library news and press releases for possible inclusion in “News From The Field.” Send your library news to David Free at dfree@ala.org or 50 East Huron St., Chi­ cago, IL 60611. November 2007 625 C&RL News mailto:dfree@ala.org http:librarian.org www.ask-a http:openvault.wgbh.org http:opencontentalliance.org www.blc.org/index.html