You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November, 2007.
Thank you to Michele Surat for the following review of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Submit your own review of a book in the library’s collection - jot down your review on an index card and drop it by the library or send a review to me via email.
This compelling novel is one to read again and again. The protagonist, Leo Gursky, lives in the present, longs for the past, and believes in the power of transcendent love. The reader moves back and forth in time with Gursky’s mind. The ending is both poignant and satisfying.
Want to make your web searching more efficient and flexible? Consider investing a little time consulting books about your topic before you search for journal articles and other information using a search engine or online database. Both reference books and books about your topic can help.
Scanning a condensed article about a topic in a reference book provides you with a foundational understanding of the topic, familiarizes you with key concepts and words associated with it, and highlights related sub-topics and/or significant events and people. This has a number of benefits…
- It creates a framework in your brain to organize ideas you glean from future reading.
- It helps you identify potential research paper topics within a broad topic (strands that create tension, controversy, or raise compelling questions).
- It provides you with a rich word bank of potential key words for searching.
Consulting a book focused on your topic (or an aspect of it) can also prove beneficial. Even if you don’t read the entire book, scanning the table of contents and index, and reading a few pages can shift your perception from viewing your topic as a list of facts or a timeline of events to seeing the story behind the topic (or the larger story of which it is part) and stories are one of the most natural ways to learn, remember, and convey information.
Of course, books can be found in lots of places - in print format on library shelves, in the Gale Virtual Reference Library, and in Google Books and similar places. You can search library shelves from your computer by doing the following…
- Click on the Catalog search @ MW in the Links menu on this page to search the MW library shelves.
- Go to the VCU Libraries page and click on the catalog search at the top to search their shelves.
- Go the the libraries tag in the dragonlibrary bookmark account (in the Finding Sources bundle near the top of the tags list) to find a link to search the shelves of your local public library.
Data, network, and information visualizations are increasingly popular tools in business, medicine, science, math, computer science, and the media. Here’s one that might interest those of you who enjoy chess.
From the VisualComplexity descripton of the site: “Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you. The goal … is not to make an expert chess playing program but to lay bare the complex thinking that underlies all strategic thought.” Try a game against the Thinking Machine to see it for yourself.
For more about visualizations, see the library’s visualization bookmarks.
Thanks to funding through the GSGIS Foundation, the student viewing station in the library has been updated. Some of you may recall the former viewing station: a 27″ television on a large media cart with no headphone connection and no associated writing surface - not the most conducive setup for watching a film you missed while you were absent (for you or students using the library at the time).
This unit has been replaced with a TV/Monitor that can be used not only to view films you missed in class during an absence (supporting up to three listeners at once), but also to plug in your personal laptop to collaborate with group members to create movies, presentations, and other multimedia projects for school assignments (application availability is limited to the software installed on the personal laptops of students in the group).
Teachers may also use this station for meeting with students about classwork and lectures they missed when that work includes PowerPoints or other presentations that are more meaningful with a combination of visual display and face-to-face instruction.
Please note that this unit is only a TV/monitor that can enhance viewing. It is not connected to a cable or TV antennae to receive channel signals, nor is it connected to the Internet or school network. Instead it displays input from computers, DVD players, and VCR’s plugged into it.
You might notice that the word cloud on the left side of the library blog has shrunk. In order to keep the cloud from getting too large, I refined the categories for posts. Words that used to appear in the category cloud (e.g. science, teacher, etc.) have been converted to tags which are searchable.
The MLWGS library research wiki launched on Friday, Nov. 9th. This space is intended to complement the library blog and pool the collective research expertise of teachers, students, and parents. Please read the guidelines and the page about wiki structure and tags before adding or editing pages, or adding a discussion thread. Everyone is invited to contribute. I’ve added a link to the wiki to the Links menu on the left of this main page.
I don’t know about you, but the reflection that Mrs. Chappell read this morning by her nephew Seth about how serving in Afghanistan changed his perspective on Veteran’s Day moved me to tears.
Seth’s description of his complex experience marked by fear, violence, boredom, beauty, and friendship is echoed in a poetry collection called Here, Bullet by Brian Turner, a young soldier who served in Iraq. Published in 2005, several poems from the collection are accessible online. If you’re interested in reading it, keep in mind that since the topic is war, some of the imagery can be disturbing.
In case you missed Friday’s announcement, MLWGS students and faculty selected Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card as the All School Reads book for 07/08. The Dragon’s Lair will have copies for sale in a couple weeks, and the library will have several copies as well as a copy of sequels and related books available around the same time (we already have one copy of Ender’s Game, but it is currently checked out).
Congratulations to the students, parents, and faculty on the All School Reads committee who worked diligently to organize this shared reading experience. I look forward to participating in the discussions after winter break.
You may have heard the rumors - and they’re true (I’ve confirmed them with Mr. Mudge). Read, the library dragon, will be making a discreet cameo appearance in Hamlet (surreptitiously tucked under the arm of one of the characters). Be on the lookout for him, but more importantly, go see the play! Shows are Friday and Saturday at 7pm, Sunday at 2pm. You can purchase tickets during lunch.
Occasionally when you click one of the links for a database from Thomson Gale, you get only a blank screen - even though the page loading status at the bottom of your browser window says “Done”.
If this happens to you, try going to Tools-Delete Browsing History. Delete your cookies, passwords, and temporary files, then hit the “refresh” button. Now click on the database link again. If this doesn’t fix the problem, alert me because there is probably a technical problem that I need to report to Thomson Gale.
