Final stages of research

Sophomores have papers due in history and English. Second period was a little dicey around here.


Pick a citation format, any format...


Is this right? Nile experiences NoodleBib goodness.


Waiting for the printer, which generally signals the end. At least for awhile.

Every book its reader

We all look for different things in our books. On today's request shelf, there's an introduction to Dakar Wolof, an urban mixture of Wolof (a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania), French, and Arabic that is spoken in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The book was written in 1966 to help train Peace Corp volunteers. Another student requested a book called Abracadabra! Secret Methods Magicians & Others Use to Deceive Their Audience. Author Nathaniel Schiffman reveals all, including how to pull off the amazing levitating woman trick.



Today's little shout out to Ranganathan's third law.

Go to the library to check out a ... person?

That's right. At the Living Library in London, you can borrow a person for a 30-minute chat. The idea is to "take out a prejudice" and, through conversation, examine your stereotypes. The website doesn't tell us much, but an article written by David Baker, one of the human "books," does a nice job describing the process and the purpose.

"The human "books" on offer vary from event to event but always include a healthy cross-section of stereotypes. Last weekend, the small but richly diverse list included Police Officer, Vegan, Male Nanny and Lifelong Activist as well as Person with Mental Health Difficulties and Young Person Excluded from School. I was there as Gay Man.

In the catalogue we had been tagged with the kind of negative attributes that readers might expect to encounter. Male Nanny was down as "twee" and "child molester". Police Officer was filed under "corrupt". Mine included "very well dressed" and "has some sexually transmitted disease", though thankfully there was no mention of Barbra Streisand."

and...

"First out were Social Worker ("naive") and Immigrant ("wasting resources") and then Muslim ("beard") was borrowed for a quick chat, presumably about bombs and his attitude to women. The rest of us tucked into the sandwiches and pretended that we weren't at all worried about being, almost literally, left on the shelves."

Who would you check out? What stereotype would you represent if you were a human "book"? Would you be sad if you were left sitting on the shelf?

Clean reading

Here's another reading "environment" I find intriguing. The bathtub with book shelves from Antonio Lupi can be all yours for a mere $17,300.



Hmmm. Somehow it seems less practical than the book case bedroom or stairs. {via}

The music link

I've just finished reading The New Policeman, by Kate Thompson (Fiction T374n), one of our recent acquisitions. Briefly, everyone in Kinvara (Ireland) is aware that time seems to be flying by at a faster and faster rate. When J.J. asks his mother what she'd like for her birthday, she asks for more time. Soon after, a neighbor shows him how to find a parallel world where time stands still -- sort of. The people there are also experiencing a leak in time. As J.J. investigates, he uncovers secrets about his family's past and, at the last moment, uncovers the identity of the new village policeman.

Music plays a huge role in this book, as characters in both worlds are musicians. At the end of each chapter, Thompson inserts transcribed traditional tunes as well as three of her own compositions. Go to her website to hear some of these tunes, as well as a short reading by the author.

Sophomores take over the library

And they are way too gleeful about it.

It's National Library Week, woo-hoo!

Especially because the American Library Association has created some fun (but-with-serious-punchlines) videos to celebrate. Below are a couple of my favorites. All of them star Shad Kunkle and are shot at Morton College Library in Cicero, Illinois. Do you suppose those cute little jelly creatures are his too?

Plagiarism, what? Here??

English teacher Suzanne Linder has written a very thoughtful open letter to students on the recent rash of plagiarism she is seeing in her classroom. Though I usually try to keep things light here, I feel compelled to reflect on her message. Some thoughts in no particular order:

• In my experience, plagiarizing (or cheating) well generally takes at least as much effort as doing the actual work in the first place. In other words, if you copy and paste directly, or even paraphrase, you are probably going to get caught. Just as the Internet has made it easy to plagiarize, the Internet has made it easy to catch plagiarizers. I guess the temptation overrules common sense.
  
• Why don't we use one of those plagiarism detection services that are so popular in schools and universities these days? A bunch of reasons (disclaimer: my reasons). First, these services assume guilt. All papers are typically filtered through the service before the teacher sees them. I can hardly think of anything more antithetical to Uni's culture and ethos (then again, isn't plagiarism also?). Second, they require that students turn over their intellectual property and private words to a third party. Third, they cost schools lots of money that is desperately needed for real educational purposes. And when plagiarism is typically easy to identify, why pay to have it detected? I could go on.
  
• It's true that some assignments seem to invite plagiarism. When there's no analysis component, when no true inquiry is required, when it seems like all that's being asked of a student is to parrot what they find. Some in my field have issued a call to "ban the bird units" like these. I find, however, that Uni teachers don't assign too many bird units. They do ask for thoughtful synthesis and analysis. They also have high expectations and they care about their students. So what gives?
  

Food fight

Via Joyce, I learned about the following clever stop-action video Food Fight: An Abridged History of War, by Stefan Nadelman. Nadelman delivers his own spin on wars from World War II to the present day, using the foods of the countries in conflict to illustrate the stories.



If you get stuck figuring out all the conflicts, check his site for a breakdown of the battles and a cheat sheet connecting foods and countries.

Japanese-flavored library-ness

This morning I was marveling over the upcoming debut of the Library War anime series, the action comedy drama adapted from Hiro Arikawa's novel about the struggle to preserve libraries when a new law threatens to stifle freedom of expression in the not-to-distant future. {via} Even in Japanese, the two-minute, 43-second promotional video and the 15-second commercial make sense. When I asked Emily for translation help she told me about Read or Die, a series of novels, manga, and TV anime episodes that portray an alternative British Empire whose continued existence is guaranteed by the British Library. This means the Library, besides having traditional library functions, is a political force with branches all over the world. It has agents with special powers who fight book-related crime and terrorism, and seek out rare works for the Library. Sweet.

I think both of these books-turned-anime efforts beat the heck out of the strange phenomenon that is the Japanese game show Silent Library.

Much ado indeed

It's Tech Week for the play, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Cast members are expressing their exhaustion in various ways:







Good thing opening night is tonight. You can bet I'll be there.

Baby day at the library

Last Friday we had a couple of special visitors. Jenny, our graduate assistant from the last two years, brought in 7-month-old Zoe. Their visit coincided with a visit from Davian, Runelle's great-grandson.





You can see "before" pictures of Zoe here and here.