October 9, 2009

Oh, by the way, October is National Information Literacy Awareness Month!

Giving this idea, around for several decades among librarians, a pre-eminent place on the nation’s calendar, the President issued the following proclamation.

Information literacy is not new to Sullivan County Community College; we’ve had an Information Literacy Program since 1992, and still going strong.  If you’re unfamiliar with the concept or the facts, visit our Information Literacy page on our Library Web site.  There you will find information for teachers and students alike, including a short bibliography on information literacy.

More Green Databases You May Have Overlooked

New since this past summer are two new databases devoted to all things “Green”.

Environment Complete, from EBSCO publishing, is a database containing full text for more than 680 journals and 120 monographs covering the following subject areas: green agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning and more.

GREENR, from Gale/Cengage Learning publishers, is an acronym for Global Reference on the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources.  This is a new online resource that offers authoritative content on the development of emerging green technologies and discusses issues on the environment, sustainability and more. GREENR is interactive and current, allowing users to navigate issue, organization and country portals. It’s a one-stop site dedicated to studying sustainability and the environment. GREENR has been provided by the publisher as a trial database for our college for fall of 2009.

(The third “Green” database in our collection, Green File, from EBSCO publishing, was described in this blog on April 1, 2008.  GreenFILE indexes scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports. This resource offers a unique perspective on the positive and negative ways humans affect the environment. Drawing on the connection between the environment and disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology, GreenFILE serves as an informative resource for anyone concerned about the issues facing our planet. The database contains nearly 300,000 records, full text for selected titles and searchable cited references for more than 200 titles as well.)

To find these databases start at the Library Home Page, and click on “Search for Articles”; then, on the list of “Article Databases by Subject”, choose “Green Studies”.

October 1, 2009

New Resource for the Study of the Visual Arts

The library is pleased to announce that it is currently subscribing to CAMIO—Catalog of Art Museum Images Online. This resource contains about 95,000 works of fine and decorative art that you can present in the classroom, download for research and study, and use to illustrate papers and other assignments. The content includes high-resolution images of photographs, paintings, sculpture, decorative and utilitarian objects, prints, drawings and watercolors, jewelry and costumes, textiles, books, installations, and architecture—plus audio-video and mixed media. Benefits of the interface include downloading high-resolution images, the ability to e-mail images and metadata for further study, and fast, powerful, Web-based searching. All content is rights-cleared for educational use. If you are not already familiar with this easy-to-use resource, try it by following this path: from the library’s home page, on the left hand column under “Find Resources” click on the link that says “Subject Resources”; then, the list of subjects will be brought up, and you will select “Art History” and click on the link to Art History resources; from the page of Art History resources, scroll down to the section that says “Image Databases”, and there you will find our link to CAMBIO.

September 18, 2009

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage!

From Sept. 15th to October 15th, each year, we celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, by proclamation of the President of the United States.  We honor Hispanic achievement and Hispanic traditions and culture: they are an essential part of the American experience.  Every year the library mounts a small exhibit of newer books about Hispanic life, culture and history, on the display shelves next to the library’s main entrance.  Please stop by and browse this selection; it is just a small sampling of the library’s book holdings on this subject, and includes everything from cookbooks with a Latin flavor to biographies of famous Latinos in the arts and literature, to books for children. These books may be checked out with your S.C.C.C. ID card, which is your library card.  Remember that more information about Hispanic heritage can easily be obtained from the library’s website, which connects you to a large collection of databases of articles from newspapers, magazines and journals.  Let us show you how to search these databases. You may connect to these databases 24 x 7 with your S.C.C.C. computer user ID and password.  And also remember that we have plenty more ebooks in our ebrary Community College Collection that you may access from on campus or from home that relate to this subject.  Look for the ebrary link on the main library web page under “Find Books”.