Partly to make sure that I still know how to use a scanner, and partly just for fun, I scanned this old painting of mine. I painted it while studying medieval literature, at a time when I was just beginning to be fascinated by hagiography and virgin martyrs. The subject of the painting turned into a cross between a martyr and a fairy - perhaps confusing, but I like the colors.
Museum Anthropology Review, edited by Jason Baird Jackson (who is also the editor of the print journal Museum Anthropology) is now available online and through open access. Museum Anthropology Review is not the first scholarly journal to go open access, but because of it's strong peer-review process and experienced editor, its open access launch is the start of an important experiment. Will it turn out that there is a viable publishing model for open access, peer reviewed scholarship? It is probably to early to tell, but Libraries struggling to pay increasingly high subscription fees will be paying attention to this one with fingers crossed. You can read more about the journal's open access move here.
The open access journal looks great so far, with a very clean and attractive WordPress layout. The entire contents of volume 1, issues 1 and 2 are available in both html and pdf formats. Take a look at the journal online and, if you like what you see, consider registering as a reader so that Museum Anthropology Review can count you among its supporters.
While at the ALA Midwinter conference in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, a colleague recommended EveryZing (http://www.everyzing.com) as a useful tool for finding online media. Now that I've finally had some time to look at it (and now that I've heard some happy ravings from other librarians who work with communication studies), I'm very excited to share it with students and faculty. Need to find examples of news coverage on presidential candidates' environmental policies? EveryZing will hook you up. EveryZing can show you clips from major as well as local news channels on hundreds of topics, and it allows you some nice facets - News and Politics, Business, Technology, 2008 Presidential Election, Entertainment, etc. - to help narrow your searches.
Go play with it now. It's fun, useful, and free.
And thanks to Catherine Michael of Ithaca College and to Ken Liss of Boston College for inspiring me to start zinging!
I have been a very good girl, and my colleagues in the libraries have been very good as well. We've all been so good, in fact, that I thought I'd send a rather substantial list this year.
We would like,
Yesterday, a mystery package showed up at my doorstep - the best kind of mystery package, since it had a book inside. After wondering briefly who would have sent me such a nice advanced readers' copy of There's No Place Like Here, by Cecilia Ahern, I realized that I have managed to snag on of LibraryThing's early reviewers books. Huzzah! I get to review fiction! I'll post the review here as soon as I've finished it for LibraryThing. Incidentally, Ahern has a degree in journalism, so this is very nearly work-related.
It's taken us a while to get there, but WSU Libraries are moving our home page into WSU's new web template. The new look will go live in early January, and will look pretty much like this:
As you can see, the move to the new template pretty much mimics what's on our current home page. The Libraries' Web Working Group is also currently working on an in-depth redesign of the web site that will involve more content and organizational changes. We want to make sure to get that redesign right, so we're taking it slow, but there should be more positive changes in our web site's future.
I hope you like the new look. We think it's a big improvement.
