Scholarly Communications News

Since the Hope College Open Access Policy went into effect last October, there have been a number of developments in the push for open access, some good, some not so good. This is a recap of recent events related to open access and scholarly publishing.

  • The Library joined the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI). This is a group of North American institutions that have passed open access policies. It is similar to Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), which is primarily a group of European institutions.
  • Research Works Act (HR 3699) Attacks Open Access. On December 16, 2011 the Research Works Act was introduced by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and co-sponsored by Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY).The bill contains provisions to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded researchand effectively to revert the NIH’s Public Access Policy that allows taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online.If enacted, it would also severely restrict the sharing of scientific data.The bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,of which Issa is the chair.
  • The Bill is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Copyright Alliance.While the Association of American Publishers endorsed the RWA and lobbies for it in the name of its members, a number of AAP members have issued formal statements opposing the bill including: MIT press, Council on Library and Information Resources, Penn State University Press, University of California Press, Nature Publishing Group, the Association for the Advancement of Science, the Modern Language Association, and the American Institute of Physics.
  • Elsevier Changes Policy. This year Elsevier made a major change to its publisher agreement, which now prohibits authors affiliated with institutions or agencies that have open access mandates to deposit copies of their articles into an open access repository unless their institution signs a very restrictive agreement with Elsevier. Wiley has adopted a similar policy.
  • Open Letter Condemning Elsevier. On February 6, 2012, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) sent an open letter to the Chairman of Elsevier condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermines open access. COAR represents 80 institutions from 24 countries throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America.
  • Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). On February 9, 2012, Senators Cornyn (R-TX), Wyden (D-OR), and Hutchison (R-TX) and Representatives Doyle (D-PA), Yoder (R-KS), and Clay (D-MO) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies.
— Kelly Jacobsma

Winter Break Hours

snowflakeVan Wylen Library will have slightly different operating hours during winter break that are as follows:

  • Friday, February 10: 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.;
  • Saturday, February 11: Closed;
  • Sunday, February 12: Closed;
  • Monday, February 13: 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.;
  • Tuesday, February 14: 8 a.m. – midnight.

Enjoy your time off!

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

Altered Book Display

From now until Feb. 24, the display cases on the first floor of Van Wylen will feature artwork created by the students of Stephanie Milanowski’s Design II class. For this project, students took old books and used them to make a variety of designs, including a tea cup, a shoe and a circus tent.alteredbook

While a student at Rhode Island School of Design, Milanowski studied under Jan Baker, who has an interest in book arts. Baker assigned her students to find a used book and transform it.

dog-bookMilanowski used pages from a book about dog ownership and attached them to rawhide chips and a choke chain collar. “That project stuck with me over the years because it encapsulated so much of what ‘graphic design’ is all about–directing attention and establishing a mood through text, images, rhythm, visual organization, paper, ink, adhesives,” Milanowski said. “I think it is a great project to start the semester off with in Art 205. Students discover tools, materials and techniques they never utilized in their work before–all while visually communicating a message.”

One book in the display will be chosen by a jury to be part of the Hope College Van Wylen Library Artist Book Collection. This collection began last year with Karly Welke’s winning entry featuring needles on the cover of a needlepoint book.

Van Wylen has materials related to altered books and artists’ books in its collection if you’re interested in learning more on the subject.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

40 Years at Hope College

120120dstaffrecognitonIn 1972, Hope College looked significantly different than it does today. Several buildings including the Dow, DePree and the Maas conference center were not yet part of Hope’s landscape. Hope’s entire library collection was housed in Van Zoeren. It was during this time that Dawn Van Ark came to be an employee of Hope College.

“I graduated from Hope College and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life as a psychology major,” Van Ark said. “My cousin pushed me into the library knowing there was an open position, and I had always wanted to work in a library, so it worked out.”

vanzorenlibrary0002Van Ark has worked in acquisitions for the library ever since. Much has changed in the library since she first began, including its location. Van Wylen library opened immediately next to Van Zoeren in 1988, a strategic location that allowed for the possibility of future expansion. Library floors need to be strong to support all the books in the collection, and Van Zoeren, being a former library, had these capabilities. However, advances in technology have made storage concerns less of an issue.

“When we built (Van Wylen), it was before e-books,” Van Ark said. “We now have a vast collection of electronic books and journals, which makes a big difference in what you need shelving for.”

The biggest change to occur in Van Ark’s 40 years with the library has been the manner in which patrons find books. Before computers became prevalent, Van Wylen, like all other libraries, had a physical card catalog that included the information you now find on HopeCat. Van Ark was one of the people that helped put information such as title, author, and subject headings on the cards for every book in the collection.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the working atmosphere Van Ark has come to appreciate during her time here.

“Hope has won the award for being one of the best places to work for several years, and there’s a good reason for it: they treat their employees like people, not assets.”

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

Visiting Writers Series: David Cho and Heather Sellers

cho_photoOn Jan. 31, the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series will feature two of Hope College’s English professors, David Cho and Heather Sellers.

David Cho came to Hope in 2008. He was born and raised in Chicago and earned degrees from the University of Illinois, Purdue, and the University of Washington. His creative and scholarly works have appeared in journals such as Amerasia, Many Mountains Moving, and Theology Today. In 2010, Cho’s chapbook of poetry Song of our Songs was published. His most recent chapbook Night Sessions, published last summer, was nominated for the 2011 National Book Awards.

Sellers_photoHeather Sellers has taught at Hope since 1995. Her memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, released in 2010, gained much national attention and was featured in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and O, the Oprah Magazine, where it was a book of the month pick in November 2010. Sellers has several other books published, including three volumes of poetry, three books on writing, a children’s book, and a short story collection entitled Georgia Under Water, which was a Barnes and Noble Great New Writers selection.

You can find many of their works available in the libraries Featured Collections on the 1st floor. Cho and Sellers will present a reading at 7 p.m. on Jan. 31 in Winants Auditorium in Graves Hall. In addition, a question-and-answer session with Cho and Sellers will be held at 3:30 p.m. in the Herrick Room on the second floor of DeWitt the same day.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

Image Collections @ Hope College

A new resource is now available online to help you get a glimpse into Hope College’s past. In addition to print collections in the Joint Archives of Holland and Van Wylen, the library now has a digitized collection of many images of life at Hope in a database called Image Collections @ Hope College. This resource currently has over 400 images in Student life, History of Science, and Nykerk Cup Competition collections.

Students_at_NykerkChristine Cho, a Metadata Librarian at Van Wylen has been working with Geoffrey Reynolds from the Joint Archives of Holland to add historical images to Image Collections. Currently, Cho is using Envisioning Hope College, a collection of letters written from A.C. Van Raalte to Phillip Phelps in the early years of Hope’s existence, to help prepare another collection of historical images for inclusion in the database.

Though Image Collections @ Hope College is in its early stages right now, eventually the site will have even more image collections that will be helpful to students. One collection that is planned is a group of images from the history of Holland.

“Hopefully we get a lot more content up there, so students find it useful for their research and faculty can also use it in their teaching,” Cho said.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

Beware of the "You Loop"

When teaching students about Internet research and how to think critically about sources that can be found freely online, we librarians may at times sound like broken records, giving repeated “warnings” followed by a list of tips on how to scrutinize and evaluate web content. Who wrote this piece? Is it credible? Why?Does it cite any sources? Etc. It is not that we want to discourage students from using the Internet as a legitimate research tool, but rather we simply want to make perfectly clear the fact that not all sources drawn from this seemingly omnipotent portal to information hold the same weight. Broken record or not, I will continue to emphasize these things to students as they are profoundly important to both scholarly and personal research.

But, there is more…

It is a common misconception that, at any given time, when you “Google” something, the results will be the same for everyone, everywhere, pulled systematically from the same vast, universal pool of available information. In The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, political and Internet activist, Eli Pariser explains some of the ways in which online searching has drastically changed in recent years.For example, in December 2009, Google began using “fifty-seven signals—everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before—to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you’d like. Even if you were logged out, it would customize its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.” Just as sites like Amazon and Ebay offer suggestions based on your prior purchases, Google now tries to feed content (not just advertisements) to you based on your web browsing history and personal interests as they are perceived, or “guessed,” by an algorithm.Sure, in some circumstances, being told “if you liked _____, then you most certainly will like _____” is convenient and helpful in making decisions, but what does this mean in the context of real Internet research?In the “filter bubble,” the curiosity of the genuinely inquisitive researcher may be radically curbed. Do you want information that is relevant to your query or just relevant to you?

Pariser refers to this personalized cycle of information access as the “you loop” in which we are all at risk of becoming broken records, fed the same kinds of search results, over and over again in our own comfortable and familiar “filter bubble”―a virtual information echo chamber.According to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, “most people don’t want Google to answer their questions …They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”This sounds to me like something I would like a cool new app on my phone to do, not my Google search results when delving into a serious research question.However, with the way things are going, Schmidt predicts “it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” Now, more than ever, it is imperative that we stress the importance of looking beyond the first page of results produced by a Google (or whatever) search. Many times I have heard people misinterpret their ability to get results fast as proof that they are a good researcher. Efficiency ≠ good research skills.

This adds an entirely new element to the practice of critically analyzing our Internet search results.When the “filter bubble” becomes too small and the “you loop” too tight, many topics may eventually not stand a fighting chance at being thoroughly researched online. Indeed, the apparent dearth of information reporting alternate viewpoint of an issue (the stuff floating outside your bubble) and the abundance of information that mirrors the position of the researcher could alone be enough evidence to infer, “More people agree with me than disagree — I must be right!” Ignorance is bliss, isn’t it? The first step in countering this is simply knowing that now, perhaps more than ever, a single Google search will not suffice, and not just in the context of academic research. Pariser warns, “If identity loops aren’t counteracted through randomness and serendipity, you could end up stuck in the foothills of your identity, far away from the high peaks in the distance.”

So, where in the present information environment can one still find “randomness” and serendipity”? Well, the library, for one. Take a look at the American Library Association Code of Ethics. Librarians are committed to building and maintaining balanced collections and helping users navigate information in a completely neutral manner. Most libraries (ours included) don’t have “liberal” or “conservative” sections, only “subject” sections in which librarians will be more than happy to help you navigate or set you free to explore. If you want information on a particular topic, we’ll always do our best to help you find it, but don’t be surprised if in the process we come across something you never would have thought of or even thought we would own or be able to access.

Check out Pariser’s TED Talk in the video below.He explains this all much better than I have here, first in the context of facebook and then moving on to Google searches and online news providers.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Related: SEE HERE. I came across this just today (weeks after I originally wrote this post)

– Todd Wiebe, Research and Instruction Librarian

Landscapes by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek

On exhibit in the first floor of Van Wylen Library is a unique gift of Chinese landscapes by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. This edition of Chinese landscapes is a private personal edition published around 1962 and personally inscribed in 1976 to George Zuidema, who recently donated his edition to the library. It includes 24 landscape lithographs. The paintings depict the serenity of nature and Chinese culture, an interesting contrast to the tumultuous life of Madame Chiang.

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek took up painting around 1953, relatively late in life. She first exhibited her paintings at the age of 102 in January 2000 at the World Journal Art Gallery in New York and in February 2000 at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.IMG_0387Mayling Soong was raised as a Christian and graduated from Wellesley College in 1917. She later married Chinese nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek who led China during World War II but fled China in 1949 to set up his government in exile in Taiwan after losing a civil war to the communists. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek took a leading role in nationalist politics and was influential with the U.S. government. She became the first Chinese and only the second women to address a joint session of Congress, where she sought to increase support for China in the war against Japan.

timecoverIn 1937 Life magazine claimed that she was “probably the most powerful woman in the world,” and she graced the cover of Time Magazine in 1931, 1938 and 1943. She died in 2003 at the age of 106.

The Van Wylen Library has many books about Madame Chiang Kai-Shek including:

The library’s collection also contains writings and speeches by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and recordings of her addresses to Congress. For more information, see the Hope College press release.

Christmas Music

christmastree11Looking for a way to stream ad-free Christmas music? Consider using the Naxos Music Library. This online music library allows users to stream music over the Internet from over 60,000 classical (and some popular) albums.

While Naxos allows you to listen to individual songs or entire albums, you can also create a playlist to listen to music from a variety of CDs. Click on the “Playlist” tab, and after you’ve created a free account you’ll be able to search the entire Naxos library for Christmas music and develop your own playlist from their recordings. Just contact the library if you have any questions about how to do this.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger

Pizza at the Cup and Chaucer

pizzaThink you’ll need a study break during finals week? From Dec. 11 to Dec. 14 in the evening, the Cup and Chaucer will sell 12″ thin crust one topping pizzas for $7.00. You can add additional toppings for 50 cents each. Available toppings are extra cheese, pepperoni, sausage, ham, pineapple, red pepper, green pepper, onion, mushroom, tomato, green olives and black olives.

The cashier at the Cup and Chaucer will take orders between 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. and pizzas will be delivered on the half hour. You must pay for your pizza when you order it. Your delivered pizza cannot be eaten in the main part of the library, but you’re welcome to sit in the Cup and Chaucer and enjoy your food.

— Bethany Stripp, Library Student Blogger