Let’s Talk About It: Muslim Journeys

All of the Muslim Journeys events below will be held in Concordia University’s Buenger Education Center.

1.       September 26, 2013, 7:00 pm:  Immigrants and Spiritual Pluralism in America and The Experiences of a Muslim Immigrant. 

Dr. Butler, author of Religion in Colonial America, will provide us with historical background on the development of religion in America.  He reminds us that we as a people have always been religiously diverse; religious pluralism is a central part of what defines us as Americans.  As each new wave of immigrants settled in our communities, new challenges for understanding these new belief systems presented themselves.  The First Amendment and the unique protection it provides nurtured a “spiritual pluralism unlike that found in any society on either side of the Atlantic or Pacific” (Religion in America, p. 141). 

Dr. Bruce Corrie will then present a few demographic highlights of immigrants in our own community.  Dr. Corrie will then introduce Dr. Odeh Muhawesh, CEO and successful business leader from Plymouth, Minnesota, will then tell of his experiences as a new immigrant to the Twin Cities.  Over the past 26 years, Dr. Muhawesh has founded several very successful businesses and established a strong record of growing revenue and developing competitive products for software and service companies.  He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Theology from International Theological Seminary, specializes in theology and modern Middle Eastern history, teaches at the University of St. Thomas and is an associate of their Muslim-Christian Dialogue Center. 

The remaining programs will be book-talks based on the following titles.  Dr. Debra Beilke and/or Professor Theresa FitzPatrick will introduce the book with a short summary and a few readings followed by an opportunity for us to discuss the book.  When possible, this will be followed by the personal story of an immigrant from a Muslim county and/or a panel discussion by our students. 

2.       October 2,  10:30 am: In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar,

3.       November 12, 7:00 pm:  Persepolis:  The Story of aChildhood, by Marjane Satrapi

4.       February 11, 2014 7:00 pm:  House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,  by Anthony Shadid

5.       March 5,  10:30 am:  BrokenVerses, by Kamila Shamsie

6.       April 8, 7:00 pm:  Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi

For more information, see this link: http://libraryguides.csp.edu/muslimjourneysbooks

 

 

Recent court decisions of interest to libraryland

Updates on some recent court decisions:

The Google Books lawsuit:  Years ago, Google started the “Google Books” project, an effort to scan 130 million books from libraries worldwide by 2020 (you can read more about it and its relevance to libraries here).  There was no controversy about Google scanning pre-1923 books no longer under copyright, but some objected to Google scanning out-of-print books that were still protected by copyright law.  Just recently, “a panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Circuit Judge Denny Chin prematurely certified a class of authors without first deciding if the ‘fair use’ defense under U.S. copyright law allowed Google to display snippets of books.”  (from Reuters)  John Dvorak, writing at PCMag.com, comments: “This is not over yet. The Author's Guild is going to sue Google over the fair use standard. This should, once and for all, give us some definitions of fair use that we can all benefit from. As far as the Author's Guild is concerned Google abuses its scans by letting people read snippets of the copyrighted books.” (link to his piece here)

Apple E-Book lawsuit:  Not long ago, Amazon.com had priced new e-Books at $9.99, and had a virtual monopoly on the e-Book market.  This led Apple to work with publishers so they could overcome this advantage using an “agency [pricing] model” (mentioned on this blog here).  Just recently, the U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan “sided with government regulators' contention that Apple joined five major book publishers to gang up [on] Amazon.com in a price-fixing conspiracy that caused consumers to pay more for electronic books.”  Words of the late Steve Jobs influenced the federal judge in determining that “Apple Inc. milked the popularity of its iTunes store to form an illegal cartel with publishers to raise electronic book prices.” (from the A.P.)  Apple denies any wrongdoing, and Ankur Kapoor, antitrust lawyer for the law firm Constantine Cannon, thinks Apple may win its appeal. He contends that Jobs may have simply understood the industry dynamics and cut smart deals – and that he did not necessarily get all the publishers to agree to raise prices, a practice known as "horizontal price fixing" (from A.P. article and Joab Jackson at Computerworld.com)  

Image credit:  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60588258@N00/3293465641 

Articles linked to in post:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/01/uk-google-books-idUKBRE9600MA20130701

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421377,00.asp

 

http://www.jsonline.com/business/national/ny-judge-apple-conspired-to-raise-ebook-prices66794269e4244c6f97d4a1fc1b7e68bf-214894741.html

 

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240704/US_antitrust_ruling_could_temper_Apple_39_s_revolutionary_zeal

Using PubMed? Enter From The CSP Library Site To Take Advantage Of Our Full-Text Holdings

PubMed is a great place to do research on medical and health sciences topics. The PubMed interface provides a lot of added value with its Related Citations area and its use of MeSH Subject Headings, which provide a controlled vocabulary that you can use to conduct more thorough and authoritative searches. But there are also many links that are unclear, difficult to understand, and which lead to dead ends or sites asking you to pay for content. You don't have to pay for the content! And now, the CSP Library offers integration with its full text holdings on every single PubMed citation in the form of our Get It button:

Look for the following button in the top right corner of your screen:

When you hit the Get It button, the citation you're interested in will be searched against our full text holdings for a match. When a match is found, a link to the article will be provided. When no match is found, use the "Request via InterLibrary Loan" link to place a request via a prepopulated form which our InterLibrary Loan staff will work to fill from surrounding libraries. InterLibrary Loan requires a one-time registration process the first time you use it.

Most importantly, in order to search in an environment which has this CSP-specific functionality, you must use the link for PubMed provided at the Library's Website!!! It is a custom URL which includes info which identifies us to PubMed and includes our Get It button. Find it on our Databases lists and in our Health and Science Subject Guides.

The direct URL is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?otool=mncustplib

Know your library rights? What does the Library Bill of Rights mean?

This post is written by Concordia librarian Nathan Rinne.  What follows is only meant to represent his own view.  Part of our library's mission statement is "evaluate information and its sources critically" and this post is done with just that in mind.


In the United States, we have a Bill of Rights, which is the first 10 amendments to the American Constitution.  Among other things, they guarantee a number of personal freedoms, or rights. 

Since 1939, libraries also have had a Bill of Rights!  Actually, that is not completely true.  The American Library Association – the main professional organization of librarians with whom many libraries affiliate – has their own “Bill of Rights”.  The Library Bill of Rights is their own statement of ethical principles, and does not have the force of law in any sense (and unlike the U.S. Bill of Rights, it has undergone a number of revisions, some more significant than others, since its first appearance)

So what is the LBOR today?  Well, it is quite nice and compact.  Here are 4 of the 7 principals (all can be seen here):

I.             Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.

II.            Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

III.           Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment….

IV.          A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views…

 Here is how librarian Char Booth sums up the LBOR into five core values:

I recently looked into the history of this document – particularly on the topic of academic freedom – and discovered that views such as these only begin to really appear in libraries in the 1930s…

Take the issue of censorship (discussed in III).  This is American Library Association President Arthur E.  Bostwick in his inaugural address at the 1908 ALA Annual Conference:

"Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them."  It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature… Books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting the author to imitate them, the public to produce, the bookseller to exploit.  Thank Heaven they do not tempt the librarian.*

 My how the world has changed!   But has it really changed that much?

What do I mean?  I say that because if we really want to know what someone believes, we watch what they do.  I think it is clear that libraries are still very selective about what they obtain, even if the "sins" may or may not change. 

It seems to me that perhaps persons in the past may simply have been more aware of what they really believed and practiced about such issues.  Librarians like to emphasize the importance of critical thinking.  But how willing are we to subject the LBOR itself to stringent critique? Are librarians really eager and willing to not exclude any materials because of the views of those contributing to their creation (#1)?  Do they really try to provide materials and information presenting all points of view (#2)?  What could “a person’s right to use a library should not be …abridged because of… age?” possibly mean (#4)?  Are these statements even good as ideals (or an “aspirational creed”) – much less practical guidelines?

More often than not, it might seem that libraries more or less function like “neutral” tools that help persons do what they want to do.  But what else is happening here?  More questions than those above could be asked as well, and I think it is good for all of us – not just librarians – to think critically and deeply about such matters.  If you think the LBOR sounds great, I recommend the book above as a good place to start considering the deeper issues at play here.

FIN

*-American Library Association. (2010). Intellectual freedom manual. Chicago: American Library Association.

Images:

James Madison Bill of Rights $5 commemorative gold coin from  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Madison_Bill_of_Rights_$5_commemorative_obverse.jpg

Char Booth's summary of the Library Bill of Rights: http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=2282

International Affairs Resources Available for Trial from Columbia University

Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAOnet) - Unique source for theory and research in international affairs. It publishes a wide range of scholarship from 1991 onward that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.

CIAO is also a widely-recognized source for teaching materials including original case studies written by leading international affairs experts, course packs of background readings for history and political science classes, and special features like the analysis of a bin Laden recruitment tape with video.

Trial ends: June 28th

Trial Some Cutting Edge Anatomy & Physiology Visualization Resources

Stat!Ref's AnatomyTV is a high-tech, interactive online tool which provides a detailed and accurate model of human anatomy. It contains over 5,000 3D anatomical structures, clinical slides, dissections, MRI scans, and animations which can be rotated 360 degrees and to which you can add or remove layers of anatomy. These all have links which can be shared.

Also available on the Stat!Ref platform is Anatomy & Physiology Online, which is composed of learning modules which make use of the AnatomyTV visualizations and which are easy to integrate into existing curriculum.

In addition, the Stat!Ref platform also offers access to eBooks and electronic journals in the health sciences.

The actual subscription would be assembled out of individual parts and modules, but in our trial we are providing access to everything that's available. Provide feedback to Health Science Liaison Karen Brunner - brunner@csp.edu (651) 603-6309 - and include info about which modules and content areas looked most useful.

Trial ends: July 5th

Copyright wars: the Entertainment strikes back?

Libraries like to pay attention to what is happening in the world of copyright law.  I have noticed that what is happening “outside” of the law per se is interesting as well. 
 
A few weeks ago on NPR’s All Things Considered, Audie Cornish had a short piece on how some Internet service providers and entertainment industry trade groups cooperated to launch the Copyright Alert System (CAS), a non-government program instituted to discourage piracy online. 

How does it work?  When a movie or TV show is being swapped illegally, the program traces back to who is doing it using their IP address.  As New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann, explains, things start off quite gently:

“So it starts off very mildly. [if the person is looking for people who are downloading or uploading really complete copies of works] all [the program does] is throw up a pop-up window to say, hey, we saw what you're doing there. You know, there's this thing, copyright law, you really should be aware of it.”

He goes on to further explain how the “six strike system” might escalate in the case of more stubborn pirates:

“So after you get past the first two steps, they make it a little more serious by making sure they have your attention. So now they need you to acknowledge that you've actually seen the warnings. So you go to a kind of mini copyright jail where you have to actually click through to say I've seen this. It's kind of like when you're at the airport using the WiFi there, you have to click through the terms and conditions before you can get online. And part of this is building a record so that people can't say, I had no idea what was going on.”

Grimmelmann talks about how a variety of disciplinary or punitive measures might be taken against repeat offenders: blocking sites, making it harder to download, cancelling internet service, etc.

Internet privacy groups have their concerns about this, but I, for one, don’t see how this kind of activity can be avoided.  Grimmelmann seems to concur when he says, “I don't think education about copyright will do that much, but the sense of you are being watched might.”

That said, as I check the latest on this news (here, here, and here) I see that some folks have tried to test the “CAS”, and have found it to be “asleep at the switch” (most likely because it is unable to handle all the internet traffic).

I’m guessing bigger and better guns are coming. Even if “it only offers a Band-Aid to a very serious problem that needs to be addressed through legislation” (see here)