Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

Today's learners exist in a digital age. This implies access to, and use of, a range of Social Web tools and software that provide gateways to a multiplicity of interactive resources for information, entertainment and, not least, communication. This report looked at access to digital technologies and their use. One interesting aspect of the report was the key finding that 'information literacies, including searching, retrieving and critically evaluating information from a range of appropriate sources represent a significant and growing deficit area (Text adapted from Australian Policy Online). Read the full report here

Canadian Author wins International Booker Prize

Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize. Munro was competing against 13 other authors including Australian two-time Booker winner Peter Carey and Briton James Kelman.
The award is given every two years to a living author for an entire body of work that has contributed to fiction across the world.
Her first collection of stories, Dance Of The Happy Shades, published in 1968, won the Governor General's Award, Canada's literary prize.
Her success was followed up by Lives Of Girls And Women (1971), which won a Canadian Booksellers Association award.
In 1980, The Beggar Maid was shortlisted for the annual Booker Prize for Fiction and her stories frequently appear in publications such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Judges on the panel stated "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.
To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

A short and candid interview with Alice, discussing the reasons she became an author follows:

For more information on Alice Munro see: the Wikipedia entry Alice Munro

For availability of her books please go to our Library catalogue and do an author search for munro a.

Features of EndNote X2

CSU staff and researchers have been using Endnote for a few years, but the newest version EndNote X2 has now been made available at CSU. Endnote X2 offers various new and upgraded features which include: improved compatibility with Windows Vista; Smart Groups that automatically group records according to your criteria; and date stamping of records that allows you to identify when a record was added and when it was last updated.

Library staff are able to offer you support and advice when using Endnote. Check out some introductory information, as well as some more advanced information, here.

Knowledge at your Fingertips

Wolfram|Alpha is the new computational knowledge engine from the makers of Mathematica. Setting itself the lofty-goal to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. With the aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."

While Google searches for websites that show the information you need, Wolfram|Alpha actually understands the information on these pages, and collates it for you, displaying all the data that it considers relevant.

For example, do you want to know how many US dollars, you can buy for $10 Australian dollars? Wolfram|Alpha will tell you straight up. Plus it will tell you the past 12 months exchange history, current exchange rates against other major currencies, and more.

Want to know the local temperature when David Beckham was born? Wolfram|Alpha finds out the birthdate, birthplace, and then looks up weather charts based on this information. Wind speeds, level of cloud cover, humidity, sunlight intensity is all displayed.



Or perhaps you want to know if the burgers really are better at Hungry Jacks? Wolfram|Alpha can tell you that too. Dietary information such as calories, fat content, sodium levels etc are all at your mercy.

For the studious types, Wolfram|Alpha also links to the source of its information, so you can ensure it's validity, and also to make referencing easier.

So check out Wolfram|Alpha, and let us know what you think.

State of the World's Mothers Report

State of the World's Mothers Report

Australia is the third best place in the world to be a mother, a new global report that rates the wellbeing of mothers and children has found.However the research from Save the Children reveals a less rosy picture for children, whose wellbeing was ranked 27th out of the 43 developed countries surveyed across the globe. (Text adapted from Australian Policy online). Read the full report here

CSU Library Reftracker service temporarily unavailable

CSU Library receives various online requests from staff and students via the Library's Reftracker service. These requests include Ask a Question and Book a Librarian requests, as well as Suggest New Material, Website Feedback, and general comment submissions.

The service will be unavailable from 9.00 am – no later than 3.00 pm on Sunday 17 March 2009 (AEST), to allow for maintenance on the server that runs this system. It is hoped that the downtime will be considerably less than the projected 6 hours.

If you have any queries, please contact the Library, if necessary by another means. Contact details for all campus libraries are available at
http://www.csu.edu.au/division/library/about/contacts

We apologise for any inconvenience.

The World Digital Library

UNESCO and The Library of Congress have joined forces to create The World Digital Library. The 60 million dollar joint effort will allow libraries and musuems across the globe to share valuable cultural and educational data with anyone who has Internet access. With funding from sources including King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia and the Carnegie Corporation in New York, more than two dozen institutions have contributed content that covers nearly 200 countries.

The Library is a compendium of some 1,200 high-resolution digitized files that allows users to zoom in on ancient documents and archival photographs. It also contains a sophisticated search tool that allows users to browse by keywords, time period, place, type of item and the institution which contributed it. Finally, it provides descriptions of all materials in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish — the official languages of the United Nations), though many of the documents, books and other components appear in their original languages.

The database contains some old favorites, like the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as well the constitutions of numerous countries. There are also gems like the first printed edition of the 16th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, and a journal kept by a Venetian scholar who accompanied Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage around the world.

Photography is the strong suit of this collection with images ranging from a photo-panoramic view of Constantinople to a photo of George H.W. Bush as a senior on the Yale baseball team meeting Babe Ruth in 1948 to a photo of a traditional Chinese bride.

Multimedia options are a little bit more difficult to come by, but some impressive ones that stand out include one of the earliest recordings of "Amazing Grace" and the Marseillaise. For visual stimulation, try a late 19th-century short film of a Holy Week procession in Spain from the great Lumière brothers.

Power interruption in Thurgoona Learning Commons Thursday 14th May

Due to lighting reprogramming being conducted in the Thurgoona Learning Commons on Thursday 14th May, an interruption to power supply is expected between 7am and 9am.

This interuption should not effect Library Services however computer facilities will not be available in the 24 hour zone during this time.

Google's New Toys

Having staved off the threat of Cuil, Google is beginning to roll out a new set of search tools in their quest to deliver the perfect search.

Google Search Options allows users to refine, filter and view results in a different way. Want to limit your results to the past 24 hours? No worries. Want to limit your results to forum postings only, or video content? You can do that too. Google Wonder Wheel also allows you to dynamically narrow your search, using a smart keyword generator. Just click on the 'Show Options' link on the results page.

Launching within the next month or so is Google's response to the ambitious WolframAlpha search engine, Google Squared. Google Squared takes data from the web, and presents it to the user in the form of a spreadsheet. In the market for a new 'medium sized car'? Google Squared will provide you with comparison of 'medium sized cars' based on any criteria that it can find on the web. Prices, colour availability, engine size etc will all be instantly comparible and presented for you, without doing the leg (or finger) work yourself.


The perfect search? Time will tell.

EndNote – what’s that?

CSU staff and researchers can use bibliographic management software called EndNote to help them manage their references and documents. References can be imported directly from many of our databases, from Google Scholar and from the CSU catalogue, and the full text versions of articles can be stored with the references.

EndNote X2 is the latest version and it became available at CSU on the 8th May. Check out installation and operational information here.

Revisiting the Past

The Australian Newspapers Beta service is up and running with access to a number of historic Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954.

This ambitious project from the National Library of Australia will see all out of copyright newspapers digitised and available online in full-text under the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. Currently there are over 3.3million articles available from 26 newspapers, with more being made available daily.

Articles that have been digitised are fully searchable, by keyword, publication, date, state of publication etc. Users of this service can contribute by correcting errors in articles, and by adding tags resulting in greater search functionality.

The Australian Newspapers Beta can be accessed through the CSU Library Catalogue.

Looking for the Business Review Weekly?

CSU Library regularly collects statistics from the website to give an indication as to what our users are seeking and requesting. Our statistics for April 2009 show that many of our users have been trying to locate online articles from the Business Review Weekly (BRW), which up until now has been available only in print.

The good news is that Library has recently purchased a subscription to afr.com, the exclusive source of full-text articles from Fairfax Business Media publications including The Australian Financial Review and Business Review Weekly, as well as over twenty other Fairfax news and information sources including the major Fairfax dailies and even The New York Times.
afr.com also includes a range of financial charts and investment tools.
Archival coverage extends as far back as 20 years. Publications and dates of coverage include:

• AFR Smart Investor from December 2005



• The Age from January 1991



• Asset from June 2001



• The Australian Financial Review from September 1987



• BOSS from April 1999



• Business Review Weekly from January 1989



• The Canberra Times from September 1996



• The Illawarra Mercury from July 1997



• The Newcastle Herald from September 1997



• The Sun Herald from June 1987



• The Sunday Age from Jan 1991



• The Sydney Morning Herald from September 1986



• The New York Times Last 30 days
  

Please note that the terms and conditions for use of this database only permit printing one copy for your personal use. Downloading or sharing articles with a third party is not permitted.

Business Review Weekly can be accessed online from the catalogue record, while afr.com can be found under media databases on all of the Library subject database pages.

Reporting and comparing school performances

'Nationally comparable data about school performances should be reported to the public, but should not be used to create league tables' according to this paper. Text adapted from Australian Policy Online. Read the full ACER report here

Swine Flu - What You Need To Know

Due to the recent global outbreak of Swine Influenza (H1N1), EBSCO and DynaMed have made information about Swine Influenza free to institutions throughout the world. The DynaMed topic on Swine Influenza consolidates information from multiple sources for health care providers to stay current with recommendations for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating patients with flu-like illnesses during this outbreak.

This resource is updated daily, and provides updates on alerts from the World Health Organization as well as information on Causes, Risk Factors, Prevention, Treatment and more.

Go to the Swine Flu resource here.