Staff and Faculty Authors ~ We Know You’re There!

Did you write a book and forget to tell the rest of us?  For some of you, the secret is out.  President Kathryn Jeffery announced in convocation that Jeff Knorr, Jan Haag, and Steve Cirrone had books just off the press.  Congratulations!  Library staff would like to highlight your literary accomplishments.   We are in the process of adding these and other books by SCC authors; search for books by author or title in LOIS.

                            

How about the rest of you?  Are your books listed in LOIS?  Please tell us what you wrote; we’d like to give you a little air time, too.  Your work will be featured in an upcoming library display!

Three New Book Magnifiers in the LRC

SCC Library users will find three brand new book magnifiers on the second and third floors of the Learning Resource Center, thanks to funding from the SCC Disability Resource Center.  These machines are primarily for patrons with low vision, but anyone who needs magnification for reading or writing will find them useful.

The “Clarity Tablemate” magnifiers feature:

• a sharp 17” high contrast LCD screen
• a tilt feature to position the monitor for optimal viewing
• easy to use controls for focusing and contrast adjustment, and a one touch power switch

You will find two enlargers in the west study area of the second floor of the library, one near the third floor information desk, and one at the back of the third floor.  (New users, please ask for assistance.)

Happy Open Access Day! (What’s Open Access?)

October 14, 2008 will go down in history as the first annual Open Access Day. Which might prompt a few questions: namely, what is open access, and why should we care?

Groups of scholars and librarians developed open access (OA) publishing as an alternative to the conventional model of academic publishing. In the traditional system, scholars submit their work to academic journals, who then assume copyright ownership, publish the work, and sell or lease the content to libraries and other entities–often for enormous sums of money.  OA content, by contrast, is freely available over the World Wide Web, and costs no more to read than this blog.

OA publishing is still a marginal enterprise, but it has increased in volume and prestige in the last few years. Peer-reviewed OA journals published by the Public Library of Science have earned an international reputation; Harvard University adopted a policy encouraging their faculty to make their scholarship freely available; and the National Institutes of Health now require anyone accepting one of their grants to submit any resulting article to its freely accessible full-text database, PubMed Central (a policy that is currently under attack in Congress).  Community colleges are getting in on the action by promoting OA textbooks.

Interested? Check out some videos celebrating open access, or

• read an overview of OA “for beginners”–either very brief or more thorough
• browse the Directory of Open Access Journals to find free scholarly content in your field
• subscribe to Peter Suber’s blog, Open Access News
• learn what’s behind acronyms such as SPARC and CCCOER
• read Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal“–a proto-OA manifesto from way back in 1994

Exercise your Freedom to Read

The SCC Library is celebrating banned and challenged books throughout October with an exhibit on the second floor.

• A challenge is an attempt to remove material from the library in order to restrict the access others have to those materials.
• Banning is the actual removal of materials from the library.

Which books were challenged most often in 2007?  Come to the second floor of the library and find out.  Send your students.  Borrow a few of our banned and challenged books and judge for yourself. You can also visit the American Library Association’s page on Banned Books Week to investigate the issues further.

Freedom to Read poster

Unloading your books—Responsibly

From time to time, you might get an e-mail like this one:

Dear Professor,

Thanks for taking the time to read this email.

I buy and sell textbooks from professors such as yourself.  I sell these books on the used market.

If you have some books you would like to sell, please let me know your availability next week.  That’s the week of October 6th.  If you have any availability on Monday and Tuesday that would be great.

Now, you have the right to sell your own books, whether to senders of unsolicited e-mail, bookstores, or eBay.  But if you are looking to unload textbooks, you can do so in a way that directly benefits students:

• You can donate desk copies of current SCC textbooks to RISE (located in AJ 7) and to the SCC library reserve collection.  Students use these textbooks to stay in school.
• You can donate recent (non-current) textbooks on SCC curriculum topics to RISE.
• You can donate non-current textbooks to the SCC library.  Books that are not added to the collection benefit students through the library book sale.  (Please call 558-2377 before donating materials.)