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This year the library participated in a group project with eight other college and university libraries to enhance state holdings of items on Special Education. Moraine’s area of concentration was Special Education in Higher Education. New items include:

“Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts”

“Disabled Students in Higher Education: Perspectives on Widening Access and Changing Policy”

“Exceptional Teaching: Ideas in Action”

“Towards Inclusive Learning in Higher Education”

“What Really Works in Special and Inclusive Education”

There are sixty-one new titles in all. For the full list of titles and authors, editors or producers, contact Joe Mullarkey x5293 or mullarkeyj@morainevalley.edu. The proposal for the project can be viewed online at: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-serv/coll-man/FY08proposals/Special_Education.pdf

Several of our library’s most used article databases come to us on the EBSCO platform. Over the summer, EBSCO has updated their interface to include some new features. The feature I like the best is the new display for search results which shows articles, images, options to limit by source type, and options to limit by subjects. The displays for RSS feeds, search alerts and saved searches are also easier to see and use. You can link to articles, or to searches. Here is a link to a search about Darfur and the United Nations.

When you click on it, notice the images to the right, and notice that link that says “alerts/save/share”, which gives you links and options to post to books marking sites. The following databases are from EBSCO and can be accessed on our online database page:

•  Academic Search Premier
• Business Source Elite
• Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition
• Newspaper Source
• Psychology & Behavioral Science
• Regional Business News

The University of Georgia Libraries have created the Civil Rights Digital Library, which includes online video and numerous resources.

I wanted to pass along some resources on the tragic earthquake in China:

• China Earthquake from the BBC
• EBSCO Search on Chinese Earthquake (MVCC ID required from off campus)
• Googel News Search

Well, the news was a flutter with discussion of last night’s earthquake. If you missed it, take a look at: Midwest Quake Felt Far and Wide from CNN. By the way, I was told that today marks the 102nd anniversary of the San Francisco Quake & Fire of 1906.

Here’s some info forwarded to our library from the Illinois State Library Federal Depository Library Email List:

Information on this morning’s earthquake near Bellmont, Illinois can be found at the following site: Earthquake summary from U.S. Geological Survey. This site deals specifically with this morning’s earthquake and includes links to maps, and a site called Did You Feel It?, where you can report whether you felt the earthquake.

Other Earthquake Information Resources

• United States Geological Survey, 1993. Central United States Earthquakes. Denver, CO: A map of historical earthquakes superimposed on a satellite image.
• Wheeler, Russell L. and others, 2003. Three Centuries of Earthquakes: Earthquakes in the Central United States, 1699-2002. USGS Geologic Investigations Series I-2812: Shows the distribution of earthquakes in the Central United States, focusing on Illinois and Indiana.
• California Seismic Safety Commission, 2005. Homeowner’s Guide to Earthquake Safety. Sacramento, CA
• Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2005. Earthquake Safety Guide for Homeowners. Washington, D.C.: The Agency. 38 pages

For those of you REALLY interested in earthquakes, you may want to stop by the library and grab The encyclopedia of earthquakes and volcanoes by David Ritchie

This one is for you historians & biologists…

The Complete Works of Darwin

This site contains Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

Cambridge University Libraries has put this out for free.  What a great service!

This is a useful resource to pass along, Open CR provides free Congressional Research Reports on a range of topics.  Here’s a piece from the about section:

A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology through the cooperation of several organizations and collectors of CRS Reports, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.

If you go to this site, enter a search, and they might have a useful report on your topci.

The Web is growing at such a rate that no search engine, not even Google, can search the entire Web. As the Web grows and different technologies come into existence, it becomes increasingly useful to have a whole range of search tools in your bag of tricks. Remember, each search engine uses its one search algorithms (rules), so trying more than one search engine will help you see pieces of the Web that you may miss if you just stick to one search engine. Here are a few to send along and try out.

General Search Engines

• Ask: hardly a “new” search engine, and with its marketing, you may know this one. Ask works to provide many cool add ons that are worth checking out.
• Gigablast: Their “freshness” dating helps ID how long content has been on the Web.
• Clusty: Clustered results help organize and lead to other sources.

Meta Search Engines: These are tools that search multiple search engines, so that you can jump between them and compare results.

• Zuula
• Truboscout
• Intelways
• Travando

Specialty Web Tools

• Flashearth: This one is cool. You can search a number of different geo tools (like Google maps) at once. You can then select from different images and maps depending on what you need.
• BookSearch x 3: Search the three big book search tools at once (Google, Amazon, MSN)

Thanks to Greg Notess for discussing these resources on his blog and at the recent Computers in Libraries conference.

Today marks 40 years since the tragic, assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and yesterday marked the 40th anniversary since King’s Mountain Top Speech. This was one of the most powerful speeches in US history. Here is a clip of that speech from Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now program:

If you’d like to learn more, you may want to check out the classic Eyes on the Prize documentary series from our library. Or, you may want to take a look at the many resources in the library on Dr. King.