Credo Reference

The Blume Library recently started a subscription to the Credo Reference database. This rapidly growing resource currently encompasses 446 full-text reference titles with over 3 million entries from 70 highly-respected publishers integrated in a robust search engine.

Credo Reference includes many unique interactive features such as dynamic table functionality for world, state, and county statistics, an interactive world atlas, flash animations, videos, poetry/literature readings, over 700 music files, and a critically-acclaimed concept map. It also contains more than 200,000 images from all subject areas, over 200,000 audio pronunciations, and a citation formatter in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats for all articles.

Library Journal included Credo Reference as one of two general reference resources selected among its 2008 Best Reference List.

Search Credo Reference for authoritative background information as you begin researching your topic!

Fall Election 2009

Did you know that there are 11 Texas Constitutional Amendments on the ballot? These propositions pertain to a variety of issues including private property and eminent domain, property taxes, research universities, veterans, and more. More information about each proposition, as well as pro and con arguments, is available at the League of Women Voters of Texas web site.

Friday, October 30, is the last day of Early Voting in Texas. The early voting site polls will be open until 6pm today and Wednesday, and will be open 8am-8pm on Thursday, October 29 and Friday, October 30. A generic sample ballot for Bexar County is available at the Bexar County Elections site. It also has information on where to vote, how to generate your personalized ballot, early voting, and several additional information sites.

And if you can't get to the polls this week, Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Polls will be open from 7am-7pm. See the the Bexar County Elections site to find your local polling site.

Last fall, nearly 60% of registered voters in Bexar County voted. Predictions are that less than 6% of registered voters will vote this time around. Will you become informed and help change that statistic?

The Internet is here to stay, so why not start making more efficient use of the technology to share research data? That’s precisely what the Open Access movement is all about!

For years and years, scholars have conducted research, written reports, and submitted them to journals for publication. These journals would choose which articles to print and then publish an actual issue of a journal. To recover their costs for printing, paper, editorial work, etc., these journals would charge a fee to anyone who wanted that issue or a subscription to all issues printed in a given time frame.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s. The Internet has made its debut and everyone is trying to cash in, including journals and publishers of journals. Even today, readers are often asked to pay to access the electronic content of journals and to pay to obtain a print-copy of the journal. Often the print journal is published but the content is not available online for 6-18 months. Libraries who want to serve their users best, buy a print subscription to journals (so the users can read the most recent news), but then later buy the electronic content (because we know you’d rather do your research online). In effect, libraries and users are charged twice for the same information, just in different formats. If the research was conducted using tax payers’ money, then the reader is paying three times for data that he/she funded by paying taxes!

The Open Access movement argues that if tax payers funded the research, the results should be freely available or available for a very moderate fee. The Association of Research Libraries has reported that journal subscription costs have risen four times faster than inflation since the 1980s or roughly 260%, while libraries’ budgets have been decreasing, not just in relation to inflation but literally.

The Internet has brought about a dramatic change in the way business and life is conducted. Why shouldn’t publishing follow suit? Those who support Open Access want to free scholarly research from the shackles of traditional publishing models and provide it for everyone to access and use. The Student Statement on the Right to Research proclaims, “Scholarly knowledge is part of the common wealth of humanity." They further state that Open Access democratizes access to research.

The display in the Blume Library is meant to introduce students, faculty, and staff to the Open Access movement. The international Open Access community has declared this week, October 19-23, 2009, as Open Access Week. Won’t you join the growing community of Open Access supporters?


Check out these organizations for further information.
Open Access Week

JISC [Joint Information Systems Committee]

Public Library of Science

Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition

Students for Free Culture

President Declares October National Information Literacy Awareness Month

On October 1, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation declaring October National Information Literacy Awareness Month. The proclamation recognizes all Americans' needs to acquire, evaluate, and effectively use information in any situation.

The proclamation was the result of a campaign by the National Forum on Information Literacy, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. 1989 was also the year when the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy issued its report.

The proclamation's goals dovetail with the American Association of School Librarians' Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning and the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

How high? How low? How far?

Ever have to settle a friendly wager about which mountain is higher or how big the country really is? There's one handy government web page that can answer these questions and many more of interest to any geography geeks: the USGS' Elevations and Distances in the U.S. I used this particular resource the other day when I needed to pin down some geography trivia for my personal blog. The question was the elevation of San Antonio, subject of a dispute between me and my husband.

I found the range of 505-1000 feet above sea level for San Antonio's elevation. (Unfortunately, my husband's guess beat mine.) So what about other Texas cities? The website gives elevations for the 50 largest cities in the country, a list which contains 6 in Texas:

• Houston is at the bottom, elevation-wise, with a "variation" of 0 to a whopping 83
• Dallas: 390-686
• Austin: 406-1080 (the biggest variation, which would come as no surprise to Austin-area bike-riders)
• Fort Worth: 513-766
• El Paso: 3695-4080...wow!

El Paso's city elevation has a ways to go to catch up with the state's highest point, though, Guadalupe Peak, at 8,749 (see left). Texas is far behind the big boys, elevation-wise, though. The highest point in the U.S. is Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, at 20,320. Mt. Whitney, in California, at 14,494' barely beats out Mt. Elbert in Colorado, 14,433', for the highest point in the lower 48. But we Texans shouldn't feel too inferior—we're head-and-shoulders above Florida's high point of 345!

What about the lowest point? In Texas it's sea level anywhere along the Gulf coast. For the country, the lowest elevation by far is Death Valley, in California, at 282' below sea level. The only other state with a below-sea-level mark is Louisiana, namely New Orleans at -8'. That's why hurricanes are such a worry there.

The web page doesn't only deal in highs and lows. An unusual section gives various locations that can claim to be the center of things. Where is the "Heart of Texas," really? According to the USGS, the geographic center of the state is in McCulloch County, 15 miles northeast of Brady (where my parents were married, so my Texas bona fides run pretty deep!).

What about the center of the country? Depends on whether you're looking at the lower 48 or the whole 50. Answers are Lebanon, Kansas, and Castle Rock, South Dakota.

And we're talking about a pretty big country, no matter how you measure it. The USGS reckons that from Maine to Hawaii we're 5,859 miles wide. And from the southern tip of Texas due north to the Canadian border is 1,602. Our southern boundary runs for 1,933 miles, and the northern (lower 48 only) for 3,987. From sea to shining sea, indeed!

All kinds of other fun facts are lurking on the web page. And it's available gratis from your government. So you don't even owe anyone a cut next time you use it to win that bet or ace that trivia contest!

International Literacy Day: The Power of Literacy

Today, September 8, is International Literacy Day. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, first proclaimed International Literacy Day in the mid-1960s.

Worldwide, 776 million, or one in five, adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women while 75 million children are out of school. Literacy is a human right that is at the heart of basic education for all. It is essential for eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy.

In this technological age, many educational institutions are taking literacy beyond the basics to Information Literacy (or Information Competency or Information Fluency). Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. Work with us at the Louis J. Blume Library in developing and refining your information competency skills!

Find yourself with a map...

What can't you find on a map?

I'm one of those people who can spend hours looking at an old map, seeing where rivers start and end, looking for oddly-named towns, and wondering what I'd see if I took one of the little back roads instead of the interstates. Our current government documents display area highlights some of our tangible maps and sources for online maps from the government.

The U.S. government produces a lot of maps, for many different purposes. The Library receives a few of these in paper form that you can check out and use in class presentations, or scan to use in papers. The larger maps in the Library's collection are kept in a special case on the west wall, main floor. Here is more information about this collection, including a complete catalog, as well as links to sources of online maps.

A voluminous collection of smaller maps from the CIA is kept in a notebook in the documents stacks, at this classification number: PREX 3.10/4: . Why am I not surprised that the Central Intelligence Agency is so into maps?

Thousands more maps from government agencies, as well as other cartographic sources, are available online, of course. You can see some of the government sources, and some map examples, if you look at the mini-posters on the end panels of the display.

Sometimes these online maps come with gee-whiz searching and zooming features. An example of this kind of map site is the Library of Congress' American Memory.

The more recent maps we have from the CIA have online equivalents that you can find through the Library's catalog or at this site provided by UT Austin's Perry-Castañeda Library. Here is a small version of the centerpiece map in the display, an extremely informative map of Iraq. (You can see a zoomable larger version of this map here.)


Ask a Reference Librarian for assistance in finding and using the maps and atlases in the Library's collection or online. Get lost—and found—with maps!