September 2008 – Page 2 – JCCC Billington Library

Reminders and Thank Yous

Clicking the image will let you check out a video on LibGuides.

This has been a very busy month for our LibGuides site, and its only two-thirds over with. Currently, we’ve received 240 guide hits, more than the last two months combined! And while that’s not a lot of hits overall, keep in mind that LibGuides are not yet advertised on campus, or even linked from our Web site. All JCCC traffic has been from limited promotion on this page, and a few demonstrations to faculty and students They’re looking pretty good, and while plenty of people have begun updating, reformatting, and adding features, we’ve still got some fixing to do.

Here’s a page just for you readers: It is a LibGuide made for our Autism & Asperger’s conference coming up in October. As you can see, it is still being constructed, but it shows off some of the features that other LibGuides on our page haven’t used yet. You’ll have to follow the link because it is not available from JCCC’s libGuides homepage. Once it is complete, it will be listed, but until then, feedback is appreciated from our blog readers.

Book of the Day

There seems to be a big push to understand the Millennial generation on this campus. Millennials, formerly called Generation Y, are also the first generation of Digital Natives. Approaching the generation from that point of view, as having always been exposed to advanced computer technology since birth, may help “Digital Immigrants” (anyone born before) understand what its like. Me, I’m a Digital Native as well, and I’m currently reading our new book, Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. For professors, its good to understand something you may not be familiar with (because as stated before, I’m a faculty member who falls into this category, and more of us are coming). Students on either side of the age category might want to read this to either gain some insight into the younger generation or to understand perceptions of your own generation. I’m curious to see what others have to say.

(Comic) Book of the Day

in The Left Bank Gang by Jason, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are cartoonists instead of writers, talking animals instead of humans, and they decide to rob a bank together. This may sound odd, but this is comic-book creater Jason at work: a guy who goes by one name and wrote a comic book called I Killed Hitler. This comic book (or graphic novel if you have to justify it to yourself) is entertaining, insightful, and fun for the duration of its brief length. Billington Library actually has a pretty big graphic novel collection, so don’t hesitate to pick up a few more quick reads on your visit.

Book of the Day

As we push towards Banned Book Week Awareness, it is only right that I point at a book that has a real chance of provocation. Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Towards Racial Violence is such a book. Written by a Texas historian, Cynthia Skove Novels, this looks at how a group of immigrants in post-Civil-War Texas associated themselves with the culture of lynching in order to assert where they belonged socially. The awful effects of a society whose value has shifted to hate and violence has the potential to upset, provoke, and insight outrage, but perhaps this is where librarians end up on the battlefield. Of course, this book hasn’t been banned, or attempted to be banned, but maybe you can see where one might think banning it is a good idea.

Yes: The content of this book should upset you. It should upset you because it happened. But how do you learn from history if you ban the accounts from accessibility? Don’t hate the book, hate that it had to be written. By better understanding the value racial identity holds in this country, and by also seeing the difficulties immigrants have, do, and will face when becoming members of the United States, one can perhaps gain insight into a solution to this disgusting social tendency to find such an alliance. And if we’re lucky, future generations can prevent such set-ups from perpetuating.

Book of the Day

Who watches the Watchmen? Probably the store owners, unless they are the store owners. Those clocksmiths are crafty folks. But beyond the comic book joke, I’ll confess to thinking the folks at Swiss were up to no good when I last bought a watch and discovered it was rocking not one, but three faces. I don’t even know what to do with them. At all.

But it doesn’t stop with watches. Think about your oversized, 1990 cell phone. It answered calls. If you were really fancy, you could see the number that was calling you. Today, I use my cell phone to update this blog, navigate while I drive, watch the NFL Network, and listen to music.

What happened?

More importantly, why does it happen?

Behold! Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and how complex things can be simple), a great book by Jeffrey Kluger. Inisght into human nature, technology, and this fast-paced, utterly frustrating world we live in where we get what we want, how we want it, and then don’t want anything to do with it. If dealing with your complex, 3-faced watch has left you wondering where the time went, stop by the Academic Achievement Center and fill out the time management form. Maybe it will help you make that complex life a little more simple.

Book of the Day

When I was about 6, and my sister was 3, she woke me up from my afternoon nap to inform me that she was going to go to beauty school. I looked at her to discover that her first subject was herself. I kinda figured right then that she’d fail if she ever attempted cosmetology. I was wrong. In high school she started cutting other people’s hair for prom, and then out of high school went on to get her Illinois state certificate.

Today’s book, How to Cut Your Own Hair (or Anyone Else’s!) should be given to all little sisters before they attempt something foolish. It has picture guides for 15 haircuts covering men, women, and multiple hair types. I’m no hair cuttery expert, but any sort of guidance is better than some butchered self-attempts I’ve seen over time.. After all, I have 3 sisters.

Book of the Day

Well, football fans may have noticed that the Chiefs may have lost a game, but they somehow boosted everyone else’s chances of winning games this year. Me, I’m a Bears fan (stop booing), so I had a good night. One thing that could have made the night better for me? A Project Runway marathon.

I’m not kidding, I love that show. The one thing that always amazes me, though, is when they start nagging about each other, because inevitably, someone will try “draping”, and someone else will say, “Sally has no idea how to drape properly”. This will leave me staring at the TV thinking “Dude! You just drape it! How can that be hard?” Thousands of college kids adorn themselves in homemade togas for parties every year, and I guarantee you that few and far between have fashion design experience.

Hopefully this book will help me understand the world of draping. Well, more specifically, The Art of Draping. This is the 3rd. edition: That immediately tells me there’s more to this than I realize. Any need to revise an art like draping makes it immediately complex. And then, I open up to see a type of draping called a “hip yoke”. I’m guessing that isn’t slang for a really cool egg.

Okay, draping, you win. If you’re a fashion student, you may want to thumb through this. Because if you don’t keep up, one day you’ll be in. And the next… you’re out. (I love project runway!!)

Books of the Multiple Days

Things are certainly busy at the library, and I feel bad about missing a post or two. To make up for it, I’ll throw a few books up here. The first new book is God Save the Fan by Will Leitch. Sports fans may be familiar with him as the former editor of the Web site, Deadspin, but for those who aren’t: Deadspin became famous after challenging certain personalities within ESPN, and calling shannanigans on certain practices they have in sportscasting and athlete-coddling. The result? ESPN became banned from even mentioning Deadspin on air. Will Leitch takes on sports, media, and the big-business of team owners and administration. I’ve mentioned this book before, but Leitch and I went to the University of Illinois, and both lived in the same town (Mattoon, IL) as children, so I am a little biased. Great book either way.

missing piece cover

The next book is The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein. Simple illustrations and compassionate stories make up the bulk of Silverstein’s non-poetry work, but most are only familiar with The Giving Tree. This one, however, is a sequel. In the first book, The Missing Piece, a larger missing piece is searching for something to complete him. In this sequel, a Missing Piece looks for the momentum to carry itself on a similar journey, but equally as engaging.

And finally, to continue my nuclear paranoia highlighted previously: Broken Arrow: America’s First Lost Nuclear Weapon. Can you imagine the United States losing a nuclear weapon at the beginning of the Cold War, somewhere in the ocean between North America and the Soviet Union? Well it happened. A few pilots, realizing their Alaskan plane was going down, parachuted out, and set the autopilot to (hopefully!) fall into the middle of the ocean. It was found years later, miles from its predicted final destination, bomb in tact. It get’s weirder: there’s a crew member who was never accounted for. What happened? Does anyone know How scary is that?!

Anyway, there’s a few things you can look into for your weekend reading.

Book of the Day

What to wear, what to wear… I spent about 20 minutes a day asking this, and then 20 seconds once I got to college. Answer: Hoodie. Most recently washed pants. Now that I have a job, I’m about somewhere in the middle of that.

However! Mayhaps I should start consulting this book: Encyclopedia of Body Adornment. Not actually that much about clothing, the glossary has catchy terms like “flesh coil”, “orchiectomy”, and “tightlacing”. Sounds… Well, you can decide for yourself how it sounds. Pictures (including a color section of tattoos), definitions, histories. Educational, informative, and just enough ideas to make your mom flip.

Book of the Day

Spinning buildings! I can’t read a blueprint, but I love looking at building schematics. Combine that with an interesting history, full color pictures, and sketches from hundreds of years ago to today, and you’ve got quite the book. Revolving Architecture: a history of buildings that rotate, swivel, and pivot is a great book for reading, admiring, and holds an interest for anyone professional or amateur. I wish I could share some of these photos, but that’d be illegal. It is on the new book shelf for now, so thumb through it!