Category: Newsletters

By Prof. Maura Smale
2012 will go down in the books as a banner year for open access scholarly publishing. Spurred on by years of publishers’ rising prices and widening profit margins, academics around the world signed on to the Cost of Knowledge boycott and pledged to stop submitting articles to and reviewing for journals published by Elsevier, one of the largest scholarly journal publishers (http://www.thecostofknowledge.com). The Research Works Act, a bill that sought to roll back mandates from federal funding agencies that require the results of taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available online, was abandoned by its sponsors after it was revealed that Elsevier had donated to both Representatives’ campaigns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act). And the Open Access Hulk debuted on Twitter, keeping us informed (and entertained!) about open access happenings all year long (http://twitter.com/openaccesshulk).
Continue reading “What’s New with Open Access?”

By Prof. Maura Smale and  Prof. Tess Tobin
Two floors, about 40,000 square feet, 362 seats at tables and carrels, sixty-three computers, and five group study rooms: these statistics describe the student workspaces of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library. As we write this it’s finals week at City Tech and the library is full of students: in nearly every chair studying and reading, in lines four or five bodies deep at the computers printing final papers and assignments. If you’ve been in the library lately you’ve probably noticed that we’re humming with activity. While of course we’re busy during exam time, we’ve also seen the library more crowded throughout the semester as our student population has increased over the past several years. Continue reading “I like coming here, because when I go home, I get distracted easily: How Students Use the City Tech Library”

By Prof. Keith Muchowski
Whatever your subject, the library’s databases offer numerous resources for your classroom and research needs. One of the most innovative — and least known — is Alexander Street Press’s American History in Video (AHV). AHV contains over 1,600 hours of streaming footage, including documentaries, archival film stock, newsreels and other moving images. You can create customized clips. Even better, screening rights to these sources for classroom use are included and encouraged. Video can even be embedded in such platforms as Blackboard for use outside the classroom. A short list of what you will find includes the full award-winning Ken Burns’s The Civil War series, original Thomas Edison footage of immigrants landing at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century, and Universal Newsreels’s coverage of Babe Ruth’s 1948 funeral. Many films have been transcribed, making the videos easier for classroom use and discussion.  AHV brings the country’s history to life. I encourage you to take a look at American History in Video and discover for yourself everything it has to offer.

By Prof. Darrow Wood, Chief Librarian
1. We have not become obsolete. Over the past twenty-five years, we have made continuous improvements to better serve the college. We carved out a full-fledged electronic classroom and two smaller areas for student or faculty classes, workshops, and meetings. But the question still remains for us, how will we reconfigure our existing spaces to better meet theindividual and group research and study requirements and habits of our students?
2. Dependent as we are on CUNY Central offices for support, and as our students and faculty
deserve an up-to-datediscovery system that allows database searches across library holdings in all media, when will City Tech and all CUNY students and faculty have first-class access to CUNY library resources upon which funds in the multimillions are spent annually?
3. Our library faculty and staff work with and are supported by one technician and part-time support. In the future, will we work more closely with administrative or technical professional staff who are not librarians, who are not faculty?
4. Interdisciplinary courses are on the horizon at the college. Will the Library Department be a partner in new curricular offerings? With which disciplines and courses will information
literacy be a natural fit?
5. How do we entice, lure, cajole, encourage, persuade, browbeat or otherwise force students to take advantage of what we have to offer? How do we build some of that necessity or urgency into the curriculum, perhaps via the so-called flipped classroom?
6. To what extent will we move from classroom teaching about accessing databases or other resources to workshops or tutorials on best uses of the devices and platforms on which access takes place?
7. The mind/body problem: how do we best build our physical library and our virtual library into a cohesive structure?
8. How do we develop a new “sabermetrics” which instead of bean counting brings meaning and results to our “return on investment”? Will we develop that ourselves or will it be imposed by others?
9. How do we keep up with new technologies best suited to the needs of academic libraries?
10. A question for all: Five years from now the printed book will be dead; Google will do research for you on your hand-held; and the library will have no physical presence save for a website (think of the Cheshire Cat). True or false?
For our faculty this discussion never ends and never will.
Special thanks to Prof. Ian Beilin for a lively discussion which helped focus my
thinking.