It's all about RefWorks!

Here comes Thanksgiving and papers and finals and ...

Well, we'll focus on that in just a minute. First, I just finished Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six following the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Lengthy title notwithstanding, this book came to us after weeks of enthusiastic recommendations from various directions, and after reading it, I can understand why. At its root, it's a science-fiction (SF) novel, a genre which doesn't always get the respect it deserves in certain quarters. Some forget that fantastic writers like Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, HG Wells, Mary Shelley, Michael Chabon, and Kurt Vonnegut (to name just a few) were or are all SF authors. That's without including Isaac Asimov, who alone occupies 9 of the 10 major Dewey classifications (except the 100s, philosophy and psychology) and ... well, that's another post. The point is that the SF label isn't sufficient justification for dismissal.

Liberation is a good example of SF that works well as a piece of literature on a par with The Road or Oryx and Crake; as the title makes obvious, this is the story of an America crushed beneath the falling dollar and the flight of foreign investors, leading to the bankruptcy of the government and the total collapse of American society. This results in an landscape that's been peculiarly changed; after the initial flurry of riots and small wars dies down, people are more or less intact but incredibly poor, so they make do with the junk left over from their former lives.

Families take up residence in stripped station wagons and spin thread for textiles on wheels mounted on car axles, children gather junk from the shore and refashion various useful multitools to hawk on the streets, a single individual gathers all the information from around the country and sends it out in weekly digests via telegraph, fiber-optic cable, and the few remaining American-owned satellites, and other small-but-brilliant indications of the ingenuity and vibrance that's still left even after the death of the government. There's no real political organization larger than, say, Asheville, North Carolina, the last place on the continent south of Canada that's still free. Economically, though, most of the financial activity in the former United States is run by the Aardvark, a criminal-turned-king who rules from New York and runs most of the revived slave trade.

Enter the Slick Six: a band of thieves before the collapse who pulled off unimaginably huge heists using the members' strange skills at accounting, electronics, information dissemination, being charming, being smart, and killing people. One of them was shipped off to jail -- literally, on a prison ship somewhere in the North Atlantic -- before the end of society, and when he returns, he finds himself determined to bring the Slick Six back together and bring down the Aardvark and end slavery for the second time in American history. Whether he's successful or not, of course, is a matter of perspective. It's a narrative that reminds me strongly of Thomas Pynchon and other authors who can easily occupy an entire page with a single sentence that can take you halfway across the continent before you realize the subject's been changed.

It's highly recommended, especially if you're worried about the economy. It's pure speculation, of course, but it's still a terrific read!

After that lengthy synopsis and brief digression on the nature of SF and its awful treatment at the hands of literary snobs, let's focus on something more practical, especially as the semester winds down: RefWorks. I'm going to do this all in a Q&A format, mostly because I'm tired of writing long narrative posts and because there are several questions common to each student encounter with RefWorks.

What is RefWorks?
Why, that's simple. It's a bibliographic content management system!

By which I mean, of course, that it can store all the citation information from the articles, books, Web sites and other sources you come across while you're doing your research, organize all those articles, and then automatically create a "Works Cited" list for you to insert in your paper or project. Or a "References" list or whatever else is prescribed by the style manual you're using (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).

Cue heavenly glow. Cue angelic choir. That's what I see in the faces of most of the students whom I introduce to RefWorks when I mention that last. It's crazy. I'll explain more about that later; suffice it to say that RefWorks does a lot of work for you while you're researching.

How do I find it?
Go to library.gallaudet.edu and look in the middle box in the top row on the page with a sort of burgundy/maroon-colored header bar that says "Research Help." You should see a link third from the bottom that says "RefWorks." Click on it.

Next, you'll see another page, this time with a bunch more links. This is the Library-RefWorks page. To go straight to RefWorks, just click the link at the top, the one saying "Link to RefWorks." However, if it's your first time, I do strongly suggest that you read the rest of the page.

Why? Well, we have two videos created by Jane Rutherford, one of our Instruction & Reference Librarians, that walk you through the fundamentals of using RefWorks; both videos are identical, one just has voice added. They are terrifically useful, and having them means I can skip the details here.

You'll also see a list of "Import Guides" along the right-hand side of the screen. These are important for two reasons. First, they relate to one of RefWorks' most useful functions, which is the ability to automatically transfer all citation information from the database articles of your choice right into RefWorks, saving you all the time it'd take to type a single reference into the online form provided by RefWorks. This is awesome.

Unfortunately, not all databases are created equal; each one transfers citations into RefWorks by different methods. This is the second reason why the import guides are important: they all include step-by-step instructions for getting citations into RefWorks for each database (including our catalog, ALADIN Discovery). Because of that, this is one window you'll want to keep open while you're doing your research.

Do I really need to create an account?
Yup. It's free, doesn't ask for much personal information, takes very little time, and is definitely worth it.

Okay, I kind of get what you're saying. But ... how do I really use it?
It varies according to your needs. Here's an example of the research process I'd use for articles by themselves:

1. Open RefWorks, sign in, and keep it open the entire time. Just leave it alone
2. Open the Library's RefWorks page (with the links to all the import guides on it) and leave that open, too
3. Get started on researching by picking a database
   
4. After deciding which database you want to use, go back to the list of import guides and open the one for the database you're using. Leave it open while you're searching.
5. Search and find whatever articles you'll need in that database
   
6. Follow the instructions on the import guide to get all the citations you want to use into RefWorks
7. Once the citations are in RefWorks, you get to decide what you want to do with the citations:
1. Leave them where they are (RefWorks puts them into the 'Last Imported' folder)
   
2. Put them into a folder specifically for this topic (you can create it before you start researching or do it at this point, using the Folders menu in the RefWorks menu bar)

For, say a book that doesn't come from a Consortium library (remember, RefWorks can work with information from ALADIN Discovery) or a Web site or, really, anything else, you'll need to create the reference itself. It's less of a pain than you'd think in RefWorks, though:

1. In RefWorks, open the menu named References and select "Add a new reference"
2. You'll see a big form full of what seems like hundreds of blank fields. Don't worry about those -- just look at the top of the form
1. Make sure that the right style is selected in View fields used by: drop-down next to the "Save Reference" button
   
2. If you want to put the reference in a specific folder, select that in the next drop-down
   
3. Now you'll need to figure out the Ref type. Fortunately, RefWorks' options are pretty straightforward; pick the one that applies
3. When you pick the reference type, the form will automatically reload with green checkmarks next to certain fields.
   
4. Fill in as many of the green-checked fields as possible
1. Those are the fields that will be used in whatever reference type and style you picked
2. If the information for a specific field simply isn't available (if your book has an author but no editors, for example), don't worry. A green check mark next to the field doesn't mean it's required, just recommended.
   
5. Once you've filled in as much as you can fill in, click on "Save Reference"
   
6. That's it.

Now for the grand finale! After you're done with all your researching, you can now create a reference list for your paper:

1. Click on Bibliography in the Menu bar
2. Pick your style (APA 6th Edition, maybe)
3. Pick the format you want the list to be in (usually "Word for Windows (2000 or later)")
4. Pick the folder you want the references to come from
5. Click on "Create Bibliography"
6. A page will come up, saying something like "Formatting ... " Just wait.
7. Then a download window will pop up. Save it to your computer first.
8. Open it and make sure it's complete and nothing's gone horribly wrong (computers can be funny, huh? Real funny)
9. Copy and paste away to your heart's content.
   

Wow. It really does make a reference list for your paper.
Yup. You okay?

Hello?

Wow.
Hello?

Well, anyway, it's a fantastic tool to have. It removes a lot of the strain involved in keeping track of large numbers of articles while you're working on your project or paper. And we provide it for free!

The only real downside to using RefWorks is the time it takes to learn a new way of doing things, figure out the interface, and get used to it all. Fortunately, it pays off big in the end.

If you have any further questions about RefWorks or could use some more in-depth training, feel free to get in touch with us to set up an appointment -- whether through e-mail at library.help@gallaudet.edu, via IM through library.gallaudet.edu, or by just plain old droppin' by.

That ends this week. This blog will be taking Thanksgiving off -- it could really use some turkey and stuffing -- so we'll see you again on December 4!

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Question of the Week
What are your hours over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend?
Here they are:

Tuesday, November 24: 8 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Wednesday, November 25: 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Thursday, Thanksgiving Day: Closed
Friday, November 27: Closed
Saturday, November 28: 1 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Sunday, November 29: 12 p.m. - 12 a.m.

a word about searching

Friday the 13th. Seems more appropriate for Halloween, but since that's on the 31st, I suppose that's out.

Let's see. I just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, the fascinating mind behind The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Again, there's sort of a historical basis in World War II, although the influence of the war is, of course, more strongly felt in Kavalier & Clay. It's the story of a pair of Jewish cousins -- one of whom, Kavalier, is a Czech refugee from the Prague ghetto in the earliest days of the war -- who become the creative team behind some of the most popular comic-book series of all time. The novel chronicles Clay's struggle with his own private issues while Kavalier ranges across the world in an effort to exorcise his own demons, only to end up losing almost everything and everyone who matters to him. Love blooms and offspring get involved, and a surprise twist at the end leaves you wondering what happens next ...

It's a fascinating, well-written book, full of terrific details and absorbing episodes (the bar-mitzvah scene, where Kavalier moonlights as a stage magician only to have his show interrupted by a real-life supervillain, is a page-turner par excellence). It does run fairly long at somewhere between 530-550 pages, but it's worth every paper cut.

Now, I promised you some real meat. Let's start with with the second-most fundamental aspect of research (the most fundamental aspect is, of course, the research question).

The keywords. Keywords are, basically, the words you use to search for stuff in a database or search engine, like ProQuest or Google. However, most databases work differently from Google. I can't emphasize this enough. Most people just find a database and enter any old term or phrase, like, "How many deaf people live in the United States?"

First, most databases won't look for the answer to the question; they'll look for articles that have any of the words that appear in the question. You'll get 22,363 articles that have "states," "live," "people," "the," "united," "how," "deaf," "many," and "in" in the text of each article. Not helpful.

That's why keywords are important -- they isolate specific concepts and allow you to put them together in a way that gets you what you want. Most people already understand this, so they sit down and start entering any old word. While that strategy sounds just as good a way to start as any, I see a lot of people staring at ProQuest or America: History & Life with no idea what to search for, because they've used keywords that sound good, but now can't remember which ones they've already used, or can't figure out what other keywords might work.

Try this instead:

• Get a blank sheet of paper
• Write your topic across the top -- "Colonialism in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island," for example.
  
• Take the important ideas out and split them up into different lists thus:
• Colonialism
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Treasure Island
• Grab a thesaurus or find one online -- http://thesaurus.reference.com is a good one. We also have some more specialized thesauri for certain academic disciplines; ask at the Service Desk for help finding one if you need it.
  
• Use the thesaurus to figure out synonyms that might work. Although old Robert Louis and Treasure Island are fairly unambiguous, "colonialism" might have a few different synonyms:
  
• Imperialism
• Manifest destiny
• Expansionism
• Come up with a few different ways that these words could go together, using:
• AND (if you want both words in the article)
• OR (if you want one or the other of two words)
• Quotation marks (for exact phrases)
• Truncation marks (also known as wild-card searches; look for a link to something like "Search Help" in the database you're using -- it'll tell you if you can use asterisks, question marks, or other punctuation marks to find variations on the keywords you want)
• Parentheses (so you can group words together and make smaller searches within the larger search)
  
• Thus:
  
• "Robert Louis Stevenson" AND (imperialism or colonialism)
• "Treasure Island" AND (imperial* or colon*)
• In this case, the asterisks are truncation marks, which means the database will look for words like imperial, imperialism, imperialist, colony, colonial, colonialism, colonialist, colonization, colonized ... well, and so on
  
• Play around with different combinations
  
• Search.
• Search.
• Search.
• ... and search some more.
  

The last four aren't jokes. This takes time, effort, and some fancy mental footwork. It's not easy. You'll have to search over and over again, often with tiny variations on the last search, fine-tuning the results you get back. Sometimes you hit a wall and have no idea where to go next.

I'll tell you where to go: the Library. IM us through the chat widget on library.gallaudet.edu, e-mail us through library.help@gallaudet.edu, or -- this is usually the best way to get things done quickly -- come on in and ask for help at the Service Desk. We're all old hands at searching through databases and are always, always happy to help out.

Really, searching and finding information for your topic is probably one of the hardest parts of working on a paper or project, second only to actually writing your paper or putting your project together. Part of this is because it becomes difficult to keep track of all the articles you've found and want to use; most students tend to print out every single article, write the important information they need for references on top of the first page, then lug all of it around.

There's an easier way: RefWorks. It's awesome; I'll go into more detail about it next week, so be sure to tune in.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend! I hear it may be the last warm-ish one we get ...

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Question of the Week
Why can you only check out reserve items for up to 2 hours?
Why is the sky blue? Why is the sun yellow? Why does the Planck constant add up to 4.13566733(10) x 10^-15 eVs? Well, that last one has an answer, so scratch that.

All facetiousness aside, though, reserve items have a time limit because that's the nature of reserve items -- they're on reserve because your professor wants them to be available to you when you need them. It's hard to accomplish that if we allow any students to check out a reserve item for more than 2 hours. That's also why those items can't leave the Library while they're on reserve. Everyone in a given class needs to have a fighting chance at those items, and the only way to accomplish this is to place some restrictions on their use and apply them evenly to everyone in the course.

This way, if a student really needs her professor's dissertation for class the next day, but it's unavailable, she can at least check ALADIN Discovery and see if it's due back soon enough for her to stick around and wait for it to be returned. In fact, I've seen some students check ALADIN Discovery, see that one of their classmates has checked out the book or movie they need, then literally search the Library for those classmates so they can ask to join the other student and use the item without needing to wait until the other student's done. It almost always works out pretty well.

October Library update

November. Already.

Let's segue from the shock of this realization (I've been here just about a year already!) right into a book I'm anxious to evangelize: Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.

I have to admit, my expectations really weren't where they needed to be for this book; I'd thought it'd be an easy read, a fairly straightforward semi-autobiographical tale written by a Chilean poet living alternately in Mexico and Spain. I probably should have known better.

It's a pretty tough book, one that combines many, many different narratives to provide an equally large number of angles on two central characters, Arturo Belano (sort of the author's alter-ego) and Ulises Lima, a pair of poets who start a movement in Mexico only to see it splinter, its über-Bohemian members fracturing into various occupations and lives. Belano and Lima also go on their own search for the mysterious Cesarea Tinajero, a female poet from the 1920s whose influence is legendary but whose body of work is nonexistent. They split up very suddenly for unexplained reasons and leave on their own individual journeys across the world and through various revolutions in a pair of mazelike stories that range from the 1960s to the 1990s. Along the way, you get not only the sense of those two lives, but also the lives of the people they touched, from itinerant apple-pickers in the south of France to Israeli criminals to Austrian pickpockets to Mexican poets to Ecuadorian revolutionaries. The book ends with, first, an old-fashioned duel undertaken on a Spanish beach under the cover of night, and second, a young would-be poet who finally reveals what happened on Lima and Belano's search for Cesarea Tinajero and the ensuing tragedy that split up our two main characters and jump-started their adventures.

It's heady and I'm still thinking about it. It's easily one of the best books I've read all year.

In the meantime, let's see what's been going on around the Library for the past month while we've been doing our Halloween recommendations.

The big thing on my mind involves our printers. Both printers are now up and running, except for the two computers that have been disconnected from the printers altogether. We're still experiencing a few bumps -- people are reporting intermittent connections, sometimes with one or both printers disappearing from the computer altogether, and some are even reporting that just trying to print is crashing their browser window, both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Rest assured, we are working on it.

We've also been hosting workshops during Common Time. Our first workshop was last Thursday. Hosted by Sarah Hamrick, our Director of Library Public Services, the workshop discussed the various ins and outs of copyright, which is an important topic to understand in general, but especially in college, where students are prone to borrow other people's work (like video clips or photos) in their projects. Yesterday saw our second workshop, where I discussed different ways to find images that are both free of watermarks and less prone to copyright issues, which can be used in your projects without worrying about the potential legal implications.

Next Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., though, come to room 1225 on the first floor of the Library to see Diana Gates, our Deaf Collection Librarian, talking about deaf biographies and how to find them! Highly recommended for anyone who's working in Deaf Studies and related fields, as well as just plain curiosity-seekers. The following Tuesday, November 17, at the same time and place, come see Patrick Oberholtzer discussing various research methods for the Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences program!

We are busy.

We also have a pair of new displays up to replace our Halloween-themed displays. I strongly encourage people to check them out; one is devoted to novels from around the world, encompassing such various countries as Somalia, Mexico, and Ireland (including At Swim-Two-Birds, which is a really fun read). The other one is a collection of short-story anthologies; they're great if you want to read a good story without committing your time and energy to a full-length novel. We've got short stories covering science fiction, thrillers, graphic fiction (comics and stuff), horror ... heck, we've even got baseball short stories.

We're also hard at work setting up our new acquisitions budget for 2010. Now is a great time to let us know if there are any books you'd like us to get! We'll start buying within the next couple of months, and our wish list is getting long.

Especially let me know if there's any specific fiction you'd like to have available here! Popular fiction is pretty unpredictable and buying for that area can be hit-or-miss. We'd love to know what people want to read for fun, and we do depend a lot on personal recommendations. Please do feel free to let us know if you want a particular book, author, or series.

In the meantime, we're getting very, very ready for the Fall semester to begin winding down. Thanksgiving's coming up, and it's one of our busiest times as students get started on their final papers and projects and gear up to begin studying for exams. Then after it's all over, we'll be into the sweet, sweet oblivion of Christmas break ... when we'll stay open except for the week-and-a-half around Christmas and New Year's. I'll go into more detail about our break hours in a few weeks.

Now that you're updated on what's happening around the Library, we'll get back into some more meaty stuff next week, including some research tips. Keep an eye out!

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Question of the Week
What's up with the Deaf Copy 1 room? You've mentioned it before and how I can only check things out for up to two hours and can't leave the Library? Why? What's its purpose?
I suppose you could see the Deaf Copy 1 room as sort of an ark of deaf-related materials. As has been mentioned previously in this blog, it contains the first copy of every single item you see in the Deaf Collection on the first floor of the Library (including films, periodicals, books, games, and other media), plus many more rare, one-of-a-kind items.

It's there because when people check something out, it sometimes gets damaged, broken, or outright lost. Our mission, in conjunction with the Archives, involves the collection and preservation of deaf-related materials, so the Deaf Copy 1 room ensures that we have access to a working, undamaged copy of all deaf-related items. This is why people cannot check out any materials from that room for more than 2 hours and those items can't leave the Library; we prefer to keep as much control over the whereabouts of all Deaf Copy 1 material in order to ensure its survival and to ensure that it's available for anyone who needs it and can't find it on the circulating shelves. Exceptions do occur but are extremely rare. Keep this in mind if you need something from that room and plan accordingly.

Patrick Oberholtzer's Halloween recommendations

Good grief. This has been the "fall" week -- a surprising number of trees have gone more or less bare on campus, and dead leaves are everywhere. Add on to that the annoying mist that kept coming down for most of the early part of this week, the weird temperatures (vacillating between "comfortable" and "chilly"), and the sheer anticipation everyone seems to feel for Halloween -- tomorrow! -- and you've got a recipe for a decently atmospheric horror novel. Or, at the very least, a mildly-amusing early-'90s teen flick.

Another thing to be scared of: Surveys! We're in the process of performing an intensive assessment of how the Library is serving its patrons, and are asking people to fill out surveys, either online (look at the top of library.gallaudet.edu for the green text that'll include a link to our online survey) or on paper (ask the Service Desk). Because we're going deep on this one, the surveys -- both on the Internet and in print -- will change on a regular basis, so keep checking back! We've also put up signs around all of our computers reminding people to fill out a survey.

Now for the main event; thanks to Patrick Oberholtzer, we now have the last list of Halloween recommendations in hand. He's a well-read guy with diverse tastes, so be prepared for a mishmash.

First up, we have The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

The haunting of Hill House is a major classic of horror literature. A paranormal investigator rents a huge, creepy old mansion, and invites some people to stay there in order to find scientific evidence of the supernatural. Unfortunately, he gets much, much more than he bargains for; the mansion is a member of that classic horror trope: Houses that are born bad. Everyone begins experiencing various supernatural events, but one woman encounters much more than the others, and ends up becoming possessed by the house itself. It's a very strange, very tense story.

Now, The lottery ... um, wow. It's not precisely a horror story in the traditional sense of the term, but ... well, I can't explain much more without giving away the ending; it's just that kind of story. It's about a town with a very interesting annual tradition. Let's leave it at that; just read it and you'll see what I mean.

The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James (via CLS from George Mason, as well as around the Web; a listing of the stories can be found at Wikipedia)
Relatively obscure, but it's a fantastic collection of both volumes of M.R. James' Ghost stories of an antiquary. Written around 1904, it's all fairly old-school horror, with the really scary stuff left to the imagination, as is the case with most of the really good examples of the genre. James wrote these stories specifically to be spoken aloud, which makes them even weirder to read. One bonus, incidentally, is that his stories are now public-domain (he died in 1936; the 70-year mark passed three years ago), and online versions can easily be found, even through the Wikipedia article linked above. James's stuff shares some characteristics with H.P. Lovecraft, one of the greatest and most well-known writers of American horror, although Lovecraft's scary stuff is much more explicit (heard of Cthulhu, the tentacle-faced monster that lies in the sunken city of R'lyeh, dreaming? Lovecraft sicked him up) and much weirder. Start with his classic, At the Mountains of Madness, and go from there. I plan to bring my own copy along when I check out the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad tomorrow.

The Shining by Stephen King
Both the book and the original movie. We don't have a copy of the book, but we definitely have the original version of the movie, which is, by the way, REALLY CREEPY. Most of the obvious scares seem kind of hokey, especially since it's been imitated and satirized since it came out in 1980, but the atmosphere is anything but dated.

Let's summarize before I go gushing about the "atmosphere." A writer with a wife, a son, and a drinking problem gets a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, this huge, beautiful ski hotel in the mountains of Colorado. Winters are harsh and the snow is deep, meaning the hotel gets completely cut off from the outside world for six months every year. Since it's such a large, expensive building and the weather is so extreme, it requires almost constant upkeep, so a live-in caretaker for the winter months is necessary. Unfortunately, the hotel hasn't had very good luck with caretakers; the isolation tends to drive them a little nuts, sometimes with tragic results, as in the case of the last guy who brought his family and ended up massacring them all. Still, our main character cheerily dismisses all of this as "just what he needs" -- a quiet place to work.

Unfortunately, things turn out to be extremely unquiet. Turns out there are other things living at the hotel, thanks to -- and this is another thing that's been copied endlessly in the years since the book was published, including by Stephen King himself -- an Indian burial ground underneath the hotel. In general, the movie is incredibly creepy mostly because of the hotel itself; most of the shots set in the building are performed in such a way as to lend the hotel its own character, and more than one film critic has said the hotel is the main character. It's a great movie, although not for the squeamish.

Okay, folks. That's all for this week. Next week, we'll return to our regularly-scheduled programming. Enjoy your Halloween! Go nuts, but be safe.

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Question of the Week
I've been in the Library a couple of times over the past week, and I noticed that Printer 1 is out of order, two computers can't print to anything, and that Printer 2 doesn't seem to work. What's going on?
Yes, it has certainly been a crazy week for our printers. First, Printer 1 will not be out of order for long; it's a simple problem that can be solved easily. Expect to see it up and running within the next few days.

As for those two computers, we've noticed that our public computers in general are experiencing unusually heavy demand, most often from people who are working on assignments and projects, some of which require a lot of printing for various reasons. This is fine, but students and faculty who just want to find a book or article quickly are having a hard time just getting to a computer at all. To that end, we've disconnected those two computers from our networked printers. The rest of our computers, including those in the Deaf Library Study Center in room 1220 and the lab in 1404, are still able to print just fine.

... Except, of course, for when the printer doesn't work. Yes, that happened this week, and yes, it was an inconvenience, for which we heartily apologize. Apparently, the software drivers installed on all of our computers for Printer 2 were updated recently, which led to some network-connectivity issues. ITS was kind enough to send one of their very capable people over to fix the problem on our end, and all computers (except for the two discussed above) should now be able to play nicely with Printer 2. Then, once the issue with Printer 1 has been addressed, things should return to something sort of resembling what passes for "normal" around here!

Jane Rutherford's Halloween recommendations

October seems to just be whizzing by. Already it's the 23rd, Halloween is next Saturday, and we've passed the midpoint of the Fall semester. Where'd all the time go?

Most of this month so far feels as though I spent it running around after people, books, and events. We're gearing up to start our next round of purchasing -- which means new books! If anyone has any requests, please don't be shy about speaking up; we're into giving people what they want.

In the meantime, I spent a little time talking with Jane Rutherford about Halloween. She claims not to be all that interested in Halloween (she's one of those people who insist on covering their eyes during the scariest part of horror movies, thus defeating the sweet, sweet purpose), but says that her favorite part of Halloween is the way all the kids dress up, both the cute costumes on the little kids and the ... weird costumes on the older kids. She also gets a kick out of the way trick-or-treaters ooh and ahh over the various trinkets and candy they see being dropped into their bags like they just got a million bucks, to say nothing of the candy that's left over afterwards.

To be honest, I kind of agree. Nothing's better than Halloween candy! Except maybe Easter ...

Anyway, as I said, Jane's not a big horror buff. She admitted to having only just read her very first Stephen King novel (Duma Key), and mostly prefers to read about Halloween itself. She specializes in, among others, education and children's literature, so bear that in mind as you read her list of recommendations -- they might come in handy for your own children!

Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History
A fun history of Halloween from the Druids through Colonial, Victorian, and 20th Century America.

All Saints, All Souls, and Halloween
Discusses Halloween (and similar holidays), including stories and activities.

Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (e-book)
A comprehensive history ranging from its Celtic origins in the night of Samhain all the way up to today's sugar-fest.

Holiday Readers Theatre
A cute play for Halloween, as well as others for different holidays.

The Holiday Dessert Book: Nearly 200 Delectable Treats for a Year of Celebrations
Basically a recipe book for desserts for various holidays, this includes some good Halloween treats!

Party Fun, for Holidays and Special Occasions; Parties for children
Ideas for Halloween parties, including activities and games.

Holiday Stew
A couple of cute poems about Halloween.

Life Doesn't Frighten Me
A poem by Maya Angelou, about scary things and accompanied with some amazing paintings.

The Spider and the Fly
Based on the poem by Mary Howitt, this book includes drawings that are not recommended for the arachnophobic.

Many thanks to Jane and her succinct summaries! Next week, we'll have Patrick Oberholtzer's recommendations. This is bound to be interesting. Enjoy your weekend!

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Question of the Day
I'm a student in the UK. I plan to visit the US in a month or two, and I'll be working on a project about the history of deafness in France for university. I know Gallaudet makes a lot of resources available online, but some of what I need is only available in print. Would it be possible for me to come in and see if you have what I'm looking for?
Absolutely. The Gallaudet University Library has a great deal of resources that are, more often than not, only available here at Gallaudet. This isn't true just for American publications; we gather everything possible from all over the world. We'll have plenty for you to work with!

We do allow visiting researchers to use our resources -- both from the collection as well as access to one of our public computers upon request. If possible, just give us some advance notice so that we know you'll be coming in and asking to use our equipment.

In the meantime, you can save yourself a little time by looking through our catalog beforehand; just head to library.gallaudet.edu, and begin your search in the search box under "Shortcuts to ALADIN"; you'll be asked to log in, but there should be another, smaller link to "ALADIN Catalog." Clicking on that should allow you to continue searching without needing to log in. You can use it to compile a list of items you might want to look at immediately upon arrival, giving you just that much more time to perform your research. Many of our rarer items are in the closed stacks; you can always ask a librarian to retrieve it for you. Others may be found only in the Archives, which you can contact by e-mailing archives@gallaudet.edu.

Laura Jacobi's Halloween recommendations

What an interesting month it's been ... and we're still only halfway through!

Midterms are coming up and so is Homecoming. We at the Library are as prepared as we can be for the onslaught, and you should be too -- expect long lines, full computers, and a crowded Library.

In the meantime, to relax a little bit and think about things other than the next paper or test, here's a list of Laura Jacobi's Halloween recommendations. She admits to having a distinct lack of enthusiasm about "splatter," but she still has some great taste. Read on to find out more!

The Day the Earth Stood Still
Laura first saw this movie at age 10, and cops to being unable to turn out the lights in a room without immediately running out for weeks afterwards. The story -- the 1951 version, anyway, not the recent remake starring Keanu Reeves, which is awful on general principle -- consists of an alien and his arrival on Earth for mysterious purposes. His presence frightens the people of Earth, who quickly turn from fear to anger, calling for violence. The only people to befriend him discover that he's actually here because the human race has developed atomic power to go with our own destructive natures, raising concerns among the various races of nearby worlds, who fear that our species will soon spread our unchecked aggression into outer space and into their own neighborhoods. Predictably, Klaatu gets shot and killed, with ambiguous results. It's one of the greatest classic films of all time, combining a morality tale with gee-whiz (for 1951, anyway) science-fiction effects. You'll be discussing it for a long time afterwards.

It's also got close ties to Washington, DC -- this article from the Post explains it all.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The irredeemably odd tale of a quiet, amiable doctor with secrets who does a little experimentation that brings out his wild side. You all know it -- nice guy drinks a potion, becomes big, nasty, beastly guy. But that's not the whole story! First, Dr. Jekyll wasn't as nice a guy as most apocryphal accounts might claim; he had his own secrets. Second, the story doesn't end on a very happy note at all. I'd explain more, but that might take away from the real tragedy of the ending. In general, this story is both very spooky and extremely thought-provoking; it forces you to ask about the nature of good and evil, and how much of either actually resides in each human being. Is Mr. Hyde evil in himself, or is he just the physical manifestation of something that was already present in Dr. Jekyll? Are they truly two separate people, or only two sides of the same coin? Either way, it's an immensely absorbing read.

We've also got e-book and graphic versions, by the way! The graphic version looks kind of like a kids' book, but the art is amazing and the story very faithful to Robert Louis Stevenson's original tale.

The Exorcist
The book, not the movie, that is. Nobody needs a movie with a book like this, though -- it's scary enough. If you're not familiar with the story, it's about a young woman who is possessed by a demon and the priests who try to help her. Regan MacNeil, a young girl who lives in Georgetown (right here in DC!), suddenly experiences a violent change in personality. After several attempts at psychological intervention fail and the girl becomes more and more diabolical, her mother decides it's time to call in the heavy artillery: the Catholic Church. A couple of priests get called in, they do their best, a whole bunch of really awful stuff happens ... and the girl is saved in the end. It's a fantastic book with tons of local connections -- even to Laura herself; the book is based on actual events that transpired in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, just over the District border, where she actually worked in the local public library many moons ago! You can even search for the actual Washington Post article about it in ProQuest Historical Newspapers -- "Priest frees Mt. Rainier boy reported held in Devil's grip" by Bill Brinkley, August 20, 1949.

Our lack of the movie version might be for the best, though -- Laura characterizes it as "gross." Unless you're into that sort of thing, which means it might be time for a psychological intervention of your own.

War of the Worlds
Another terrific alien classic! You might know it as "that flick with Tom Cruise," but it was originally a story by H.G. Wells, written in 1898 about a bunch of aliens invading Victorian England. That alone makes it a worthwhile read. Think about it: aliens among, you know, monocles and petticoats. The story starts with our narrator in an observatory, looking at Mars through a telescope in just enough time to witness several explosions on the planetary surface. Before he knows it, a large thing has landed in a nearby park. It turns out to be a space-going cylinder that holds an alien, which comes out just long enough to find Earth's atmosphere relatively unpalatable and darts back in. Attempts to communicate with it are met with vaporization by heat ray. More cylinders start landing, and the aliens start building Tripods, giant three-legged machines. A Martian plant, known only as "red weed" (it was probably not smoke-able, sorry), starts growing all over everything and suffocating all Earth life.

Eventually, the horror ends when all the Martians die, overcome by -- and this is where you see the true flowering of H.G. Wells' scientific genius -- bacteria. Pathogenic bacteria, rather; similar to the stuff that gives you a cold. Terrific story.

It also, thanks to Orson Welles and his dramatic skills, spawned a huge controversy around New York City and outlying areas when an adaptation was read over the radio for Halloween in 1938. The story had been rewritten as a series of news bulletins, and led people to think an actual Martian invasion was in progress. You can imagine the results.

The Turn of the Screw
This novella by Henry James is one I can't believe I forgot about. I read it when I was much younger, and it made me a little bit wary of looking out the window for a while afterward. It's the story of a young woman who gets hired as the governess to two creepy children -- cute, but creepy -- at the country home of their wealthy uncle. As the story goes on, you begin to wonder if the governess isn't slowly coming unglued; she starts seeing two people walking around the estate, whom nobody else appears to see, doing things that nobody else appears to know about. She finds out that her predecessor had a lover, and that they both died under very mysterious circumstances after spending a lot of time around the kids. She starts to wonder if the people she sees around the estate are their spirits and if the children might have had something to do with this ...

That wraps up Laura's recommendations! Next up, we'll have Jane Rutherford, who'll be able to add some truly interesting stuff from our collection of books for younger readers (think Hugo Cabret).

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Question of the Week
I was trying to find a book in ALADIN Discovery, but could only find a copy that was an "electronic resource." What's that?
That's an e-book. Basically, it's a full book that's been made available online. You don't need to go to the shelves to check it out or carry it around with you; it's available through the catalog anytime, anywhere with a working Internet connection. Some may be restricted in specific ways -- maybe only one person can look at it at one time, or you may only be able to read it for up to two hours at a time, and most of them will only allow you to print out a specific number of pages in a specific amount of time -- but they're tremendously useful. Most of them are searchable, and have a table of contents that you can use to navigate to specific chapters. If you know the exact page numbers, you can skip straight to those pages.

There are a couple of ways to get into an e-book through ALADIN Discovery: first, you'll see a link near the top of the record that says "Click here to access this book." If other libraries in the Consortium have the same e-book, you'll see several links in the same area, all reading either "Click here to access this book" or "Electronic book," all prefaced with two-letter codes. Ours is GA for Gallaudet -- that's the only copy you'll be able to access.

Another way is down at the bottom where you usually see call numbers and availability information. You'll see a line that says "Linked resources: An electronic book accessible through the World Wide Web; click to view." Click on that link and you're in!

Incidentally, you may see another line below that saying "Access restricted to current Gallaudet University members--Login required." This is only true if you're off-campus; if you're on campus, you should be automatically logged in and you'll go straight to the book without logging in. If you're off-campus, you'll have to log in the same way you do for all of our other resources -- last name, Library barcode number or Gallaudet ID number, Institution: Gallaudet.

Diana Gates' Halloween recommendations

Another week closer to Halloween!

I notice that our display tables have seen quite a bit of traffic, which is always nice! One thing I've been wishing I could do was put up the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, but, of course, all four books have spent less than an hour total in the Library since February. They're checked out pretty much constantly, which helps our circulation figures but is inconvenient when you want to use them to draw people over.

Still, things are looking good and, of course, our librarians have been thinking hard about their favorite scary movies and books. Today, we'll be hearing from Diana Gates.

Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
One of the best-known poets and writers of the macabre in American history, Poe is strongly associated with Virginia and Maryland. After being born in Boston, he grew up in Richmond and spent most of his adult life in Baltimore, where he died under mysterious circumstances and was buried.

Actually, his death was almost as strange as the stories he wrote; he was found wandering through Baltimore early one morning in October, delirious and wearing someone else's clothes. He died on October 7 -- 160 years ago this past week -- and nearly all the information on the medical investigation into his death was lost. Nobody's really sure what exactly it was he died from, why he was wearing another person's clothing, or what could have led to his wandering on that morning. Interestingly enough, one possibility that emerged soon after he died was "cooping": the practice of forcing someone to vote multiple times by drugging them into submission in order to rig an election. It sounds strange now, but was a popular theory for a long time after his death.

Whatever the cause of his death might have been, it remains unknown, which is fitting for the man who wrote stories like:

The Cask of Amontillado
A classic revenge short story in which our main character, having been insulted by his friend (how, we don't know -- the insult is never clarified), now plots his friend's death during Carnival, a time of celebration. The means by which he takes his revenge are truly horrifying: He lures his now-drunk friend into the catacombs below his house, chains him to the wall in an alcove, and slowly bricks up the opening.

The Tell-Tale Heart
This is the story that many people point to when they say that Poe invented detective fiction. In this story, the narrator kills an old man because he doesn't like the look in his eye. Really; the old man has a large blue eye that reminds the narrator of a vulture, slowly driving him mad until he finally kills the old man. After stashing the body under his floorboards and cleaning up the evidence, he gets a visit from the police, who say the neighbors reported some odd sounds. While the narrator is busy lying to the police, he discovers that he can still hear the old man's heartbeat under the floor. It grows louder and louder, making him crazier and crazier, until he finally confesses.

The Pit and the Pendulum -- Video by Patrick Graybill
A man who is captured by the Spanish Inquisition wakes up in a pitch-black room, where he discovers a pit in the middle of the floor while measuring out the perimeter of the room. What's in the pit? The story doesn't say, other than that water is involved. Still, he's so frightened that he blacks out and wakes up again, this time strapped to the floor so that only his head is capable of motion. He realizes that there is a very large and sharp pendulum swinging above him, coming closer and closer to cutting through his chest with each swing. He breaks free, but discovers that the walls have become red-hot and are moving inwards, pushing him closer and closer to the pit ...

The Black Cat -- Video by Patrick Graybill
This is the heartwarming tale of a man and his cat. He loves his cat very much. The cat is black. The man is an alcoholic. One night, unfortunately, this results in some truly horrible animal abuse, which leaves the cat without an eye. This changes their relationship; so much so, in fact, that the man, suffering in his guilt over what he's done to his cat, perversely kills it. That night, his house burns down, leaving the silhouette of a black cat on the one wall still standing. After the narrator moves his family into a new house, he discovers another cat very like his own, and brings it home. However, what he did to the previous cat only ends up poisoning his fondness for the new one, and, one day, the cat gets underfoot when he and his wife are going down to the cellar. He attempts to kill it (again), but his wife intercedes -- and he ends up killing her. He hides the body by bricking it up in the cellar, and discovers that the cat has gone missing. The police come investigating, and he nearly gets off scot-free, until, on the last day of the investigation, the police check the cellar and hear strange sounds behind one wall. They open it up to discover the wife's body -- and the cat, sitting on top of the corpse's head.

Still, all of his stories are tremendously creepy, and use all of the senses and all of the available details to set up a very finely-wrought universe of the strange and morbid. You can find all four stories (and many others, all equally terrific) in either Tales of Suspense or Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Incidentally, Baltimore is celebrating Poe's two-hundredth birthday all year, including the 160th anniversary of his death this month; you can find more information about the events being held here.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Another famous American writer Diana enjoys is Washington Irving, the guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. You might think you know the story, but here's what really happened, according to Irving: Ichabod Crane was a schoolmaster who came to Sleepy Hollow from Connecticut and fell in love with Katrina Van Tassel. Unfortunately, this put him in conflict with Brom Bones, who was also vying for Katrina's affections. Now, it was well-known that Ichabod was an extremely superstitious man, and there was a legend in the region that the woods were haunted by a Hessian soldier who had his head cut off during the American Revolution. One night, as Ichabod was on his way home from a party at the Van Tassels, he found himself pursued by a headless man on horseback. When the next morning came, he had vanished utterly from Sleepy Hollow, never to be heard from again, and Brom Bones ended up marrying Katrina Van Tassel. Although nobody knew what really happened to Ichabod, Irving noted that whenever someone was telling the story of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman, Brom Bones invariably looked very knowing.

Last of all is ... Deafula.

Yes. Deafula. The poignant tale of a human-vampire hybrid who must satisfy his lust for blood while seeking out his destiny, Deafula stands out as one of the very few (if not the only) deaf-produced vampire films created before the era of YouTube. Of course, it's also a hilariously cheesy movie, but who can resist the drawing power of a horror movie ... in ASL? We only have a tape available in our Deaf Copy 1 room, which means it can only be checked out for up to 2 hours and can't leave the Library -- but really, the Library's the best place to watch it; who has a VCR at home nowadays?

That wraps it up for this week. Many thanks to Diana, and we'll see you next week with some recommendations from the only local alien who could make a Xenomorph run for its life: Laura Jacobi!

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Question of the Week
I'm a member of the faculty, and I'm looking for a place to give a test to my students. Does the Library offer any special testing areas where I can do this, and maybe a proctor, too?
The short answer is no. The only service we provide for testing is space -- you're welcome to bring your students here for a test (the study carrels by the big window on Kendall Green in the basement are especially good for this purpose), but we don't have a specific location in the Library for it, nor do we provide any proctoring services.

Halloween's coming!

It's October!

The air is crisp, the sky is blue, and there are even some trees beginning to change color. Halloween has been sighted on the horizon, and we're ready for it; both display tables at the Library have been stuffed full of books about scary things (a few vampires, some werewolves, a couple of witches, and a movie monster or two, to say nothing of Stephen King and Anne Rice) and scary movies (slashers, zombies, aliens ... the list goes on). We anticipate the scary movies will go quickly, but since they're only allowed out for three days and horror movies make up a significant portion of our popular DVD collection, there's plenty to go around! Come by and check it out sometime -- unlike most of the characters on the display tables, we don't bite.

For this month, we'll be doing some asking around the Library for our librarians' favorite Halloween books, movies, and activities, mostly because I love Halloween and I don't mind using this blog to evangelize the joys of rubber masks and cheap polyvinyl costumes. Since we'll be doing some book reviews as a matter of course, I plan to take a break from the whole "What did I read this week" thing.

Let's start with my favorite Halloween movies:

Hocus Pocus
When 17-year-old Max's family moves from sunny L.A. to frumpy Salem, Massachusetts, he figures he's in for an eternity of stultifying boredom. Little does he know that Salem is home to the notorious Sanderson sisters, three witches who were hanged in the 17th Century for various horrifying crimes. With the help of his school crush and his younger sister, he accidentally brings them back from the dead and must thwart their plan to consume the souls of all the kids in Salem. And it's funny. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy play the Sanderson sisters and it's way too much fun watching them bicker and butt heads with the 20th Century.

Halloween and Halloween II
THE classic Halloween horror flicks! A twisted guy in a hockey mask terrorizes teenage girls, but unlike most slasher movies, it's actually a foray into some seriously messed-up psychological territory. Halloween is also the film that jump-started Jamie Lee Curtis's career and was instrumental in setting the standard for slasher films today, along with movies like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Evil Dead and Army of Darkness
Both movies are part of Bruce Campbell's Evil Dead trilogy about Ash, a store clerk with some pals who head up to a cabin in the woods and experience some disturbing occurrences tied to a particularly evil-looking book they happen across in the house. The first movie culminates in some seriously weird-looking scenes at night in the woods and feature a demonic possession that still freaks me out every time I see it. The second movie involves some time-traveling and a massive battle against the Deadite Empire. It's both incredibly cheesy and unbelievably funny. Bruce Campbell is known for his skill at combining horror with hilarity, and both movies represent terrific examples of this.

Shaun of the Dead
A brilliant movie about an apathetic slacker who realizes he's in the middle of a zombie epidemic about three days after the first news reports start warning people to sever the head from the spine. He ends up leading his roommate, girlfriend, girlfriend's best friend, girlfriend's best friend's boyfriend who's actually in love with his girlfriend's best friend, mother, and distant stepfather to shelter in the local pub. A lot of people get torn apart and eaten along the way, but it ends on a heartwarming note when the world finds out that zombies aren't so bad after all. It's one of the funniest movies you'll watch all month.

Boy Eats Girl
Yet another walking-dead movie, but this one is unique: it's Irish! I know, Ireland isn't exactly very well-known for its film industry, but this movie is pretty unusual. For one thing, the main character is the first person to die. This might sound like a pretty short movie, if not for the fact that our main character doesn't stay dead. He doesn't even realize that he's not alive at first, in fact -- he just wakes up the morning after he dies and has no idea what happened and goes off to school, with predictable results. People get bitten and turn into zombies, or they get eaten and turn into something resembling hamburger. Either way, it's a really entertaining movie.

Psycho and Vertigo
No zombies in either one, unless you want to count Norman Bates's mother. Psycho is the story of a young fellow who runs a motel off the beaten path and has a few odd habits, most of which involve his problematic relationships with the opposite sex. One of the indisputable horror-movie classics, bar none. Vertigo, on the other hand, is much more of a psychological thriller and is, more frankly, just plain weird. A detective with acrophobia gets hired by a husband concerned about his wife's behavior; the wife appears to be possessed by her ancestor. After a suicide attempt or two, things start to really get strange, and the end of the film is more or less fitting. Sorry to be so vague, but it's hard to explain the plot without giving away a few surprises.

What with my actually being a librarian and all, I'm sure you're expecting me to recite a few hundred pages' worth of scary-book titles. The truth is, it's been a long time since I was scared by a book; I caught on to Stephen King's shtick fairly early on (although his Bag of Bones is still a pretty well-done creepfest), and Anne Rice is a little too flowery for my taste. Edgar Allan Poe can't be matched for sheer weirdness and horror -- "The Cask of Amontillado" still makes me shudder -- but he can be a little dense for some light reading; the same goes for Dracula. Frankenstein, on the other hand, is more tragic than scary. Instead, I'm going to suggest the only recent book that's managed to send chills up my spine: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It's the story of a family that moves into a new house. The new house has something severely, severely wrong with it: It has an extra door. Normally, that'd just be an architectural quirk, except the door actually leads somewhere. This "somewhere" is hard to describe because most of this particular storyline after this point takes place in utter darkness. There are several different narratives in the book, all having something to do with the family's experiences, and the text itself gets experimental sometimes. There are plenty of fake footnotes citing documents that don't exist, whole pages blank except for a single word, other pages where the words spiral around the page, and other devices that can get kind of annoying after a while. I'm not fond of that part of the book, but when the story gets into the family's exploration of what's behind the door, it just gets creepier and creepier. You get to the point where you hope that blank walls stay blank, which sounds silly but makes sense after you read it. It's a fairly thick paperback book, so is a wee bit of a commitment, but one that pays off very, very progressively.

That covers my Halloween recommendations. Stay tuned for more from your local librarians!

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Question of the Week
I was working on one of the computers on the first floor, and one of the librarians asked for my ID. That's never happened before. What's up with that?
First, don't take it too personally. We've been noticing an increase in the number of people unaffiliated with Gallaudet using our computers for reasons other than deaf-related research. We don't allow it, but it happens pretty often anyway; sometimes a student will have a friend visiting from out of town who needs to use the computer and will give that friend their username and password in order to use one of our computers. Other times, someone will be working on a public computer and see that someone else needs to get on but doesn't have a Gallaudet-assigned username and password, so will log on for them.

This is pretty bad for a couple of reasons: First, giving out personal information like that is a lousy idea; that username and password gives access to quite a number of other things besides an on-campus computer. Second, it ties up a computer that should be used by a Gallaudet student who actually needs to do some work.

So we've started to be more assiduous about adhering to our policy on computer use. If we find anyone who can't produce a valid Gallaudet ID card, is logged on under a different name, or otherwise does not belong here, they will be asked to leave immediately. From this point on, it will be necessary for you to have your ID on you at all times when using the Library.

A good way to make searching our catalog easier

I feel like I'm overdosing on nonfiction a little bit -- I don't ordinarily read as much as I have in the past few weeks -- so I'm going to throw off the shackles of fact and history.

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon has precisely none of either. Pynchon's one of those authors that I've always kind of felt I should read at least once. His Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 come up fairly often in my conversations with fellow bibliomaniacs, so I figured that this was a good opportunity to give him a test drive with Vineland.

Vineland is the story of a woman named Frenesi Gates (no relation to our Diana) and her evolution from gorgeous radical to gorgeous filmmaker to gorgeous narc to gorgeous mother. You get the idea. The book is also about quite the handful of auxiliary characters: her hippie ex-husband, Valley Girl daughter, straight-arrow DEA lover, former ninja girlfriend, and her former ninja girlfriend's current ninja boyfriend. The smaller stories of Billy Barf and the Vomitones (a surfer-rock band), the Wayvone Mob family, a roving cult of ghosts suffering from severe karmic imbalances, a few visits from aliens and Godzilla, a television-addicted DEA agent with marvelous hair, and the Emerald Triangle's pot-growing underpinnings are interwoven throughout the larger plot, which takes the form of a series of reminiscences that hop all over the country and make it as far as Japan.

It's pretty outlandish, but the basic plot outline is this: Frenesi, having worked undercover for the DEA for 20 years, setting up drug stings, has vanished. Her lover, a high-ranking DEA agent under Reagan, has a slight insanity problem, and immediately reacts by invading the small town of Vineland, California, where Frenesi's ex-husband and daughter reside. This forces Frenesi's ex-husband, who hasn't seen her since their daughter Prairie (I told you he was a hippie) was a baby, to send Prairie away with the Vomitones until, quite by accident, she runs into her mother's former ninja girlfriend at a Wayvone Mob wedding. This sets off much of the story, as both women disappear into a commune of fighting Buddhist nuns somewhere in the Sierras and Prairie learns more and more about her mother's history and gets to know her through the stories her old friends tell about her. The book culminates in Frenesi's reappearance at a family reunion and the DEA agent's abduction by a deeply weird tribe of local Indians.

Could you follow any of that? I barely could. It's a super-entertaining read, though, which reminds me of a number of other writers I've enjoyed, like Tom Robbins, Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace ... well, the list goes on. Pick it up sometime and enjoy the ride!

Now that I'm off that ride, let's talk a little bit about ALADIN Discovery, our new online catalog system.

I've had a few weeks to get used to it -- even librarians have to adjust to new things -- and I've developed a habit that seems to make things much, much easier to find.

Since we set up the new catalog, people have asked how they're supposed to make their search more specific. There's only one box to enter their keywords, and this leaves them with two choices:

1. Figure out how to get the one box to include all the information they need to narrow the search down to the exact book they want, OR;
2. Just throw what they can think of in there and then sit back, slightly stunned at the sheer number of books they'll have to search through.

As it turns out, there's a third choice, and it's one that I'm making increasingly often. Check out the example to the right.

You'll see it on the far right-hand side of the results page. It's swiftly becoming the first place I go when I encounter a long list of search results even after selecting 'Gallaudet' from the Select Library drop-down menu. The number of results I got from the search I performed here, for instance, was about 70. Not bad, but who has time at this stage in the Fall semester to go looking through 70 items? However, if I were looking for a movie, clicking on the "Movie" link in the above list under Format cuts it right down to 6 items.

If I were looking for a book, it'd be time to check out the other possibilities. One of my favorites is by author. This has turned out to be one of the most useful options when someone comes up and knows only the title (which is usually something very generic, like "Land" -- there is a book called Land, which is all sorts of fun to find) and author; I just find the list of authors that appears in the right-hand column and click on "more," then scan the list until I find the author I'm looking for, click on that, and there it is.

Other ways you can use this listing of options (called "facets" in Librarianese):

• A general subject in a specific part of the world (say, child prostitution in Southeast Asia)
• A topic relating to a specific time period (telecommunication devices before 1934)
• Specific applications of words that are used in a number of contexts ("play" as a therapeutic methodology)
• Common forms that can cross genres (Detective fiction instead of histories of criminology or the biography of a detective)
• Recent works with the latest theories or best practices (Reviews of pharmaceutical intervention in the treatment of schizophrenia published within the last 3 years)

You get the idea. Those facets are incredibly useful and save a lot of time from going down the drain of repeated search attempts or slow scrutiny of pages and pages of search results. They make the search process feel more like a process, proceeding from the initial search to the first facet you see that will be useful, to the second (although usually you get what you need with the first facet), and so on until you find what you're looking for -- or don't, in which case you need to start over, but with a better idea of what keywords to enter next time. Things also tend to go a lot faster with this method, which comes in handy when you've got a slightly wild-eyed student standing on the other side of the counter with five minutes left before class.

That wraps it up for this week. Enjoy your weekend!

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Question of the Week
I was looking for a book on the catalog earlier this week, and I noticed that some of the results that came up for that book said "electronic resource." What does that mean?
Basically, that means the book is available as an e-book. In other words, it's totally online and can be accessed from anywhere.

However, there are a couple of catches. The first catch is that those books usually can't be downloaded. You can't save them to your computer. You can, however, set up a personal account that will enable you to save your favorite books so you can find them again, and even set bookmarks to keep your place. It's pretty neat ... but it does lead us to the second catch: Even if you have a personal account, you still need to go through ALADIN in order to access your books.

For example, one of our biggest e-book providers is eBrary, Inc. They have a website where you can go and log in and check out their library outside of Gallaudet. Unfortunately, they'll charge you for the privilege, which trips up a lot of people who head home somewhere off campus, log in to ebrary.com, and try to start reading the same book they've been reading here on campus; they won't be able to get in. The reason for this is simple: there are no free accounts on ebrary.com. You have to either pay for access yourself or be a member of an institution (like the Library) that does.

In order to take advantage of the Library's access (and we have quite a lot of it), you will need to go through ALADIN. You'll have to log in, find the e-book in our catalog, and then access the book from there. This is because when you log in to ALADIN and then access the e-book, our network will tell eBrary that you're part of Gallaudet and they'll let you in without a problem. Then you can log in to your personal account and you'll find everything just like you left it.

Meet Credo, your new best friend

Back in July, I was riding the Metro home from a game at Nationals Park (thanks to my boss, Sarah Hamrick, who is a true baseball fanatic; she doesn't care about winning or losing, if you can imagine that). I wound up sitting behind a mother-son pair, both of whom were reading books.

Now, I happen to be one of the worst kinds of Metro riders: I have no problem with looking over the shoulders of people in front of me to see what they're reading. In this case, the son was reading Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky, which looked interesting, so I mentally filed away the title. A couple of weeks later, I remembered that night and checked our catalog. Imagine my surprise when I found out we had it! So I checked it out and began to read it.

Rules for Radicals is sort of a primer for people looking to get involved in community organization, which also happens to be part of our Social Work program's curriculum (SWK 482: Social Work Practice III: Organizations and Communities). It's an interesting historical text in one way: It was published in 1972, a time of particular upheaval in American history. It's right around the time, in fact, that the word "radical" came to be associated not simply with union organizers and peaceful community protesters, but with more violent methods of social protest, such as those undertaken by the Symbionese Liberation Army (the folks who kidnapped Patty Hearst) and other organizations.

In Rules for Radicals, it's definitely the older association -- Alinsky is an old-school radical who was active from the 1930s all the way up the early '70s, and talks about the importance of communication, understanding your community's needs, and various tactics to, for example, get large corporations to accede to workers' demands or to persuade city governments to meet the needs of underserved minority groups. It's a thoughtful, funny book that also offers a new perspective on American history and how radicalism has had its part to play in the world we live in today; it sort of makes you reexamine things like the recent Obamacare town hall meetings that erupted in shouting and recriminations.

The book actually showed up kind of coincidentally: I found out last week from one of my good friends that the Free Library of Philadelphia -- where she works -- was to be shut down indefinitely as of October 2nd, because of a budget crisis. It's a pretty un-American thing, mostly because the first lending library in the US was established there by Benjamin Franklin himself in 1731 (The Library Company of Philadelphia). This news caused ripples as far away as Spokane, Washington. It was covered by the Huffington Post and BoingBoing (written by one of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow -- he wrote Little Brother, which I reviewed a few weeks ago).

The whole thing was pretty awful, but Rules for Radicals made me very curious about how the community would behave as October 2 drew nearer. Last night, though, the state legislature finally passed a bill that'll infuse more money into Philadelphia so the city can survive another year without massive service cuts. So that's okay.

Now that the giant sigh of relief has come and gone, I'm gonna introduce you to Credo Reference. We're all excited about this! We just got it set up a few days ago and had a guy from there come in and tell us all about it. Here's the basic concept: It's like Wikipedia, only better.

Let's clarify this claim a little bit. What Credo Reference does, basically, is work as a research database for hundreds of specialized reference books. Here's one book from each subject area covered by Credo:

• An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930
• The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists
• Encyclopedia of the History of American Management
  
• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition
• Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
• Cambridge World History of Food
• The CIA World Factbook (including customizable data tables)
• Encyclopedia of African History
• Who's Who in Gay & Lesbian History
• Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics
• Great American Court Cases
• A Dictionary of Literary Symbols
• Collins Dictionary of Medicine
• The Harvard Dictionary of Music
• Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
• Handbook of Forensic Psychology: Resource for Mental Health and Legal Professionals
• Chambers Classic Speeches
• Critical Terms for Religious Studies
• Atlas of the Universe
• Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs
• Encyclopedia of Computer Science
• McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms

That's the merest taste of the pages and pages of listed resources we now have access to. I say Credo is much, much better than Wikipedia, because Wikipedia relies on basically anyone who knows how to use a computer for its information, which makes it A) academically suspect (you have no idea what sort of unqualified laymen have had their fingers all over that article about coffee) and B) unverifiable in most cases (sources aren't always listed, which makes it difficult for you to go to that source and make sure that the information in the Wikipedia article accurately reflects it -- plus the whole process of verifying sources kind of defeats the purpose of Wikipedia to begin with!). Credo Reference is super-trustworthy and amazingly comprehensive.

Seriously. Try it. Go to library.gallaudet.edu, look for the link to ALADIN in the green header bar of the box labeled "Shortcuts to ALADIN," then when ALADIN comes up, click on "Databases by Title" in the top row, and search for "Credo." You're good to go!

Now that we've gotten the basic introduction out of the way ("Gallaudetian, meet Credo. Credo, meet Gallaudetian."), let's get into the nuts and bolts of exactly what Credo is good for.

First, it needs to be said that Credo is not a source of articles from academic journals! It's for reference only, like a dictionary or encyclopedia; the stuff you find therein (whether text, images, or videos) can be cited in an academic paper, though. For example, let's say you want to do some research on widely-used foodstuffs that have been found to have medical benefits and decide you want to look at caffeine. It's a chemical that has a lot of associated meanings, a ton of history, and some fairly complex chemistry.

One good way to use Credo in your paper about caffeine is by establishing what caffeine actually is right at the beginning -- whether a drug that's been instrumental in the rise of leisure fiction, a chemical that slows heart rate, or a medicine that can protect against most types of cancer; Credo can be cited in order to back you up. This also applies to basic biographical facts, summaries of important scientific theories, and descriptions of known mental illnesses, among other things. Still, you'll come across a lot of jargon -- highly-specialized vocabulary that may mean something different in different fields, or only actually be a word in a single field -- which can get in the way of actually learning something.

This is where you come across the second part of Credo's real utility: conceptual linking. By 'conceptual linking,' I mean something really simple: finding other words for what you're looking for that will enable you to both understand your topic better and find more information about it. In a lot of cases, a single word for a topic will only take you so far in your research; the best word to use is one that's part of the jargon in your field, but it's not always easy to figure out. Credo will help you with that, especially the dictionaries for terms used in various disciplines. It's a fantastic starting point for your research.

Credo also provides a feature called the Conceptual Map to help with this process. If you've ever used ALADIN Discovery and noticed the little web of words on the left-hand side of the screen that starts swirling around when you search for something, you'll recognize the Conceptual Map. Clicking on a word in the map centers it, and adds and removes linkages accordingly. Also, when you hover the mouse arrow over a given word -- but don't click on it -- a little box pops up that gives you the first few sentences of that word's entry in a given book. Caffeine actually yields a surprisingly large map that spans various psychological disorders, aspects of neurochemistry, the history of Honore de Balzac and European coffeehouses, and the "methylxanthine" family. So you click on "methylxanthine" to figure out exactly what it is. The entry you get to -- the one from Taber's Cyclopedia Medical Dictionary, of all things -- tells you some basic stuff: methylxanthines are stimulants that occur naturally in certain plants, and they have specific medical effects on the human body.

So far, so good. Now you can get started on finding helpful books and articles about methylxanthines, their recreational uses in the forms of coffee, chocolate, and tea, and their medical effects. Credo's gone ahead and made the process of searching for books and articles much easier: take a look at the sidebar on the left. The first thing that should pop out at you is the list of "Related resources." You see stuff like "Library Catalog" and "Academic Search Premier" (Ebsco).

Yes, clicking on one of those links will automatically take you to a search for "methylxanthine" in the linked resource. This means you get to a library book or academic journal article that much more quickly and saves you quite a bit of time and effort (although you will still have to do some actual legwork after this point).

Seriously. Try it. Learn it. Love it. Live it.

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Question of the Week
What happened to the stapler you used to keep by Printer 2?
It's broken, and we don't have a spare. This was an easy question!