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Library & Archives > Blog

Advice regarding the treatment of College Freshman. From 1495.

August 27, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Whenever searching through primary source documents, you never know what you might find.  One can only imagine the circumstances surrounding the issuing of the following statute, prepared by Leipzig University in 1495, but the folks at the Ask The Past Blog were good enough to dig it up for the world to see:

“Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen.

Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, torment, harass, drench with water…, throw on or defile with dust or any filth, mock by whistling, cry at them with a terrifying voice, or dare to molest in any way whatsoever physically or severely, any, who are called freshmen, in the market, streets, courts, colleges and living houses, or any place whatsoever, and particularly in the present college, when they have entered in order to matriculate or are leaving after matriculation.”

Leipzig University Statute (1495). From Friedrich Zarncke, ed., Die Statutenbücher der Universität Leipzig, (Leipzig, 1861), 102. Translation adapted from Robert Francis Seybolt, The Manuale Scholarium: An Original Account of Life in the Mediaeval University (Cambridge, MA, 1921), 21-2, n.6.

Image

Perhaps at least one of these freshmen are concerned about somebody “crying at them with a terrifying voice.”

Feel free to contact the librarians or archivist for assistance with finding primary source materials for your papers and presentations!

Filed Under: Archives

The Library Tour

August 21, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Dove in the window seatA tour is a great way to get to know the library and the people who work here. I took one of the college’s newest residents, Dove, on a tour this summer. He got to see one of our new spaces, the browsable DVD collection, and tried out some technology. Being a 21st century bear he opted for the scanner rather than the copy machine, but couldn’t resist the record player. Dove also checked out his first book, got help with some research and found pretty much every comfortable napping study spot available. You can see Dove’s full tour on our Facebook page.


Pamela

Filed Under: Library Building

Now Hiring: Library PFP position, Instructional Media Fellow

August 20, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

pfp-advert

The SMCM Career Development Center has a fantastic Professional Fellowship Program for interested sophomores, juniors, and seniors. You can get a great internship-like experience at a greater pay rate ($10 / hour) than your average student worker. Last year, the library’s PFP student, Taylor Robb-McCord, started work on a new video series: The SMCM Library in 60 Seconds. This year, we’re looking for a new PFP student to continue the series and put their own creative spin on it.

We’re calling our PFP position an Instructional Media Fellowship. You can learn more about it on the CDC website, but here’s a brief description:

The library is seeking a creative student interested in video production or advertising to help develop the “SMCM Library in 60 Seconds” video series. The fellow will develop instructional videos promoting library services and resources to the SMCM community.

To apply, email me, Veronica Arellano Douglas with your

  • resume
  • cover letter describing your interest in and fit for the position as well as your cumulative GPA and
  • contact information for one faculty/staff reference.

You can also call (240-895-4265) or email me with questions about the position!

Filed Under: Library People Tagged With: instructional media fellow, PFP Program, smcm library in 60 seconds, video

Summer Reading 2013 has ended

August 20, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Thanks to all the readers who posted reviews on our Summer Reading blog. Don’t forget to pick up your prizes!

Filed Under: Events

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

August 12, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Dresden Files Turn CoatHarry Dresden is a private investigator in present day Chicago. He is also a wizard. Taken together, these two facts tell you almost everything you need to know about the Dresden Files series. Really, the only other relevant information is that the books are fun to read. In this particular installment Harry is heroically and possibly stupidly defending an old nemesis, the warden Morgan, from the wrath of another set of nemeses, the White Council of Wizards, while trying to keep the collateral damage amongst the non-supernatural denizens of Chicago to a minimum. There are also vampires, werewolves, a skinwalker, a hard-boiled Chicago cop named Murphy, and what is apparently a sentient island of some sort. All in all, it’s an excellent breezy page-turner.

Availability: USMAI or COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Recommended

Filed Under: Summer Reading

Too Awesome Not to Share

August 9, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

As Celia mentioned in her last post, librarians have a long tradition of upholding library users’ privacy. It’s in our professional Code of Ethics!

We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

Code of Ethics of the American Library Association (last amended Jan. 2008)

We’re quite good at making sure that library users’ records and web browsing sessions are kept private (or not kept at all), and have a great history of standing up to legislation we see as infringing on users’ right to privacy (see the NYTimes article in which we receive the now infamous radical militant librarians label, then see us put it on a t-shirt). In general, people love us for this, but people also love social media, online shopping recommendations, and seeing what their best friends just bought on Etsy. There’s a weird conflict between the kind of privacy people say they want and the kind of privacy infringement they’re willing to put up with in order to have a personalized online experience. Libraries have largely stayed out of it, but recently I came across this really cool initiative that seems to have a good balance of user privacy and personalized recommendations.

Behold, THE AWESOME BOX:

sometimes things are awesome

This project is the brainchild of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and is being implemented at not only Harvard but a select group of public and academic libraries in the U.S. The concept is simple: Think something is awesome? Return it to a special “awesome box” or flag it with an “awesome bookmark” and library staff will scan it and have it magically appear on that library’s Awesome Page. What you read remains private, but you now have a better sense of what your fellow-library-goers are reading, watching, and listening to throughout the year.

Plus who doesn’t need a little awesome in their day?

What are your thoughts on the Awesome Box? Would something like it fly at St. Mary’s?

Filed Under: Musings Tagged With: awesome box, harvard library innovation lab, privacy, Social media, virtual presence

The Likeness by Tana French

August 7, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

The LikenessEarly one morning, police detective Cassie Maddox is called to a murder scene. When she arrives she is horrified to discover she looks exactly like the murder victim, Lexie. Next, the cops on scene all decide not to notify the victim’s nearest and dearest, but instead report Lexie as injured and recovering so they can send Maddox undercover in her place to investigate the crime from the inside and the plot carries on from there.

If you can accept the assertion that Maddox is capable of imitating Lexie so well that she can successfully fool the woman’s four best friends/roommates and the even more outrageous assertion that any cop anywhere would think this was a legitimate investigation technique, this is an excellent mystery. French has a genius for writing wonderfully evocative characters and beautiful prose. This mystery was much longer and more rambling that is usual in the genre, but it was a great pleasure to read.

Availability: SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Recommended with Reservations

Filed Under: Summer Reading

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

August 6, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Righteous MindThe Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is an interesting take on how humans make moral decisions. The book’s thesis has two main points. Firstly, humans make moral decisions via instinct and then use reason to rationalize their decision after the fact, which the author amusingly illustrates using the metaphor of a rider (reason) carried along on the back of an elephant (instinct). Secondly, humans evaluate moral behavior using six different foundations (care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation) rather than judging behavior solely on whether it causes harm to anyone or anything. Haidt argues that the weight a person assigns to each of the foundations is closely correlated with that person’s political affiliation. This argument goes a long way toward explaining how two people from opposite sides of the political spectrum can each leave a debate legitimately convinced that they occupy the moral high ground and that the other person is morally depraved.

The book is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive study, so don’t expect any judgements on what ethical behavior actually consists of. However, it is a pleasure to read and very clearly written. Haidt concludes each chapter with a scrupulous summary highlighting his main points so that the material is easy to understand even if you have no background in ethics, philosophy, or sociology.

Availability: SMCM Library, COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Michelle Milne, Assistant Professor of Physics
Rating: Highly Recommended.

Filed Under: Summer Reading

The Library, the Surveillance State, and You

July 29, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

This has been the summer of surveillance.  The Edward Snowden affair, the Bradley Manning trial, and WikiLeaks have dominated the news and prompted lots of conversations about privacy and surveillance.

surveillance- amera

How much privacy are we guaranteed?  How much do we need?  How much do we willingly give up?  Did the events of September 11, 2001 change how we must think about the right to privacy?

All of us who use retail bonus or frequent customer cards, or have bought anything from Amazon know that our purchasing habits are well-known.  Many of us willingly offer up all kinds of information about ourselves, including photos, on Facebook and other social media.  But – in these examples we control what information we put other there (or at least we think we do).

How do you feel about finding out that the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on all of the phone calls you have made.  What information?  Metadata.  What are metadata?  We librarians thought you’d never ask!  Metadata are pieces of information that describe or help locate other information.  In the library authors’ names or titles (or even individual words in titles) are types of metadata.  So are the descriptor words we use to describe the content of an article or book.  The metadata you have been reading about in the news includes lots of information about the phone calls you make, but not the actual conversations you have had.

But there is metadata about you, too, if you have every borrowed something from the library.  We can tell how many SMCM undergraduates borrowed SMCM books, we can tell how many times a particular book or DVD has been loaned, but most libraries scrub the specific data about who borrowed a particular book.  In fact, the Annotated Code of the State of Maryland states that your library record is confidential and not subject to scrutiny even by a Freedom of Information Act request.

The USA Patriot Act changes all that in some ways.  It says that the FBI can require us to given them information about what you library materials you have borrowed (if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court gives permission) and that we are not permitted to tell you that you are being investigated.

We think what you read, or watch, or listen to, is your business.  Does it matter to you?  Would it matter to your employer that you have been reading about how to get unions into a workplace?  Would it matter to the government that you have been reading about anarchy?  Should it?

The librarians’ code of ethics has been based on reader confidentiality since 1939.  Some of the metadata can be very useful.  We want to know if that book on anarchy has been borrowed 5 or 15 or 50 times in the past ten years.  But we don’t want to know who has been reading it.

Keep your eye on the surveillance debate.  This is about more than which brand of frozen peas you bought, or the banana slicer you purchased on Amazon, or the book on socialism you borrowed from the library.  In the meantime, we’ll keep working hard to protect your privacy.

 

Filed Under: Musings

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

July 29, 2013 by Amanda VerMeulen

Ender's Game Ender’s Game is a science fiction novel set in Earth’s future. To protect earth from  being attacked by aliens. The government designed a plan to breed geniuses in search for the perfect child to save planet earth. A young brilliant boy by the name of Ender lives with his parents and two other siblings. All three siblings are highly intelligent, though vastly different in genetics. Ender is a sensitive boy, his brother cruel and controlling and his sister a peacekeeper. Though Ender’s brother and sister were exceptional and wanted to join the government military training courses, the government only selected Ender for what was to become the transformation of his mind and body.

Availability: SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Cheryl Colson
Rating: Highly Recommended

 

Filed Under: Summer Reading

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