Graduation just around the corner!

With graduation coming up fast, here are some interesting statistics pertaining to college graduates, as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics:

• In 1999-2000 (the most recent period reported) 84% of graduates with bachelor's degrees were employed one year after graduation, but only 52% had jobs closely related to their fields of study.


• Average annual salary of bachelor’s degree recipients employed full time 1 year after graduation, in 1999-2000, was $37,800. By field of study, the highest average annual salary reported was earned by engineering graduates: $51,100.


• Finland had the highest proportion of college graduates in 2003 of any country: 55.8 bachelor's degree recipients per 100 persons of the typical age of graduation. Australia had 54.8, and the U.S. had 33.4. Of the countries reporting, Mexico had the lowest total at 14.3, but the Czech Republic didn't do much better at 17.3.

Whatever the numbers say, we want to say Congratulations to our Graduates! We're very proud of you and wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Congratulations to 1st Annual Undergraduate Research Award recipients

On Friday, March 30, 2007, the recipients of the First Annual Louis J. Blume Library Undergraduate Research Award recipients were recognized at the Eighth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.


The awards recognize student researchers who demonstrate skill and originality in the application of library and other information sources in a research project.


The First Place Award of $200 was granted to Lucia Sobreviñas for her project, “The Role of High-Tech Industry Clusters in the Face of Globalization: Analyzing Austin and Guadalajara’s Journey Towards Siliconia.”


The Second Place Award of $100 was given to Claudia Lizbeth Valladolid for her project, “College Preparedness of Minorities and St. Mary’s University.”

Congratulations to Lucia and Claudia!

Good news and bad news for access to government information

The mission of the National Archives is to "...serve(s) American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage." And since these records are increasingly available only in electronic form, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducts regular harvests to capture this data for preservation. Their latest harvest of House and Senate public web sites happened between November 11 and December 11 of 2006. The more than 4,000,000 pages (42 GB) of information can be browsed or keyword searched at the NARA website.

In the bad news category, one might wonder if future historians might have trouble doing their research. Last month the AP reported that: "More than 1 million pages of historical government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol — have been removed from public view since the September 2001 terror attacks, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. Some of the papers are more than a century old. In some cases, entire file boxes were removed without significant review because the government's central record-keeping agency, the National Archives and Records Administration, did not have time for a more thorough audit."

Be Poetic in April!

Join us as we celebrate the beauty, music, and truth of poetry during National Poetry Month! Each April, schools, libraries, bookstores, publishers and individuals join the Academy of American Poets to celebrate poets and their poems.

The Academy of American Poetry, online at poets.org, offers several great ways to focus on poetry. For example, you can search poets.org any day of the year to find complete poems and short biographies of American and international poets. However, my favorite feature on poets.org is Poem-A-Day, a service where you sign up to receive a new poem by email each day of April.

The Blume Library offers online access to poetry as well. You can find complete poems when you search either the 20^th Century American Poetry database or 20^th Century English Poetry database. There are also hundreds of books of poetry and poetry criticism in our NetLibrary e-book collection.

For those of you who like to hold a book in your hands…the library also has a large print collection of poetry which can be located by searching the library catalog.

So take a little time to experience poetry this spring. And don’t forget to smell the roses too!