Scholarly Communication

Affordable Textbooks? You Have Options!

According to this New York Times article, college students spend between $700 and $1000 per year on textbooks. Yikes! I was an English major in college, so I was lucky to be able to find at the library many of the works we studied. But for those gen ed courses, it killed me to have to spend as much as $50 for a textbook at the bookstore (I know, it seems like nothing now…), especially since I knew I wouldn’t want to keep the book and would be lucky if I could get a third of its value back by selling it back to the bookstore afterward. At the beginning of each semester, students swarm to the Research Assistance desk for help finding copies of their textbooks in the library. Sometimes they luck out, often with a slightly older edition, but we don’t generally purchase textbooks for our collection because a new edition comes out each year, and, well, they’re expensive. Given the choice between spending $200 on a textbook that might be used by one class, for one semester, and putting that money towards, say, an online resource that would be used by the entire campus, you can see why we usually don’t choose the textbook. (We do always ask faculty to consider putting copies of their textbooks on reserve, though! Here’s our full policy on textbooks.) The textbook publishing industry thrives on producing a new edition every year, and encouraging professors to adopt that new edition for classroom use instead of the older edition that’s often nearly identical. Until very recently, publishers reaped huge profits by bundling what are called “ancillary materials” with textbooks — you know, the CDs, the study guides, the stuff you often don’t use. They packaged that stuff with the textbooks in order to justify charging a much higher price than the book alone would cost. However, in July 2010, a bill introduced to the Senate in 2007, Senator Dick Durbin’s College Textbook Affordability Act, finally went into effect. Among other things, it requires publishers to offer for sale just the textbook, as well as the “bundled” version with all the other stuff included. If you don’t see a non-bundled version of a textbook for sale at the bookstore, talk to your professor! After all, even though the publishers are now required to offer them for sale, you can bet they’re still marketing the bundled versions to faculty. You can also check out sites that allow you to rent textbooks by the semester or shorter periods of time — they’re kind of like Netflix for textbooks. That NYT article linked above will point you towards some of these sites. I haven’t had any personal experience using them, so I can’t vouch for them, but I hear good things. There are also growing collections of free online textbooks — take a look at this list of provider sites. Our own mathematics professor David Massey has even written a free online calculus textbook! Interested in getting involved in the movement for affordable textbooks? Try starting here.

Redefining “Institutional Repository”: The Quiet Revolution

Earlier this summer, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an eye-catching article on digital repositories, using the University of Nebraska’s outstanding repository as its main example, as well as highlighting IDEALS at the University of Illinois and Harvard’s DASH repository. The Chronicle titled this article “Digital Repositories Foment a Quiet Revolution in Scholarship.” The revolution, we are given to understand, is that institutional repositories (or IRs) are finding their greatest successes in providing access to a previously untapped wealth of knowledge. And it’s a quiet revolution because these resources aren’t necessarily the most flashy — they’re the so-called grey literature (unpublished papers produced by institutes or research centers, conference proceedings, etc.) and the unique materials held by an institution that are not duplicated in the way that traditional library holdings are. An IR can provide global access to materials that might otherwise stay hidden in someone’s file cabinet — that is a revolutionary concept! Here at Northeastern, our Archives and Special Collections department has developed digital collections that spotlight its unique materials. And IRis, our digital archive of Northeastern’s intellectual output, provides access to materials that might otherwise remain unseen. We are actively developing these and other digital library services in order to expand the global reach of our collections. I read this Chronicle article and thought, someday I’d like Northeastern to be highlighted as a shining example of how digital repositories can change the way we gain access to information. So, let’s take on the quiet revolution and make some noise! What kinds of material would you like to see in IRis, in our online archival collections, and in our growing digital library?

Citations, Quotations, Notations…Frustrations

Remember when before EasyBib you actually had to know what citation convention you were using and actually format your citation yourself? If you’re like me, of course you don’t, because we grew up in the computer age. Regardless, citations are a crucial function to the scholarly process, and withholding due credit (not citing your sources) or even citing incorrectly is frowned upon to the extent of expulsion for plagiarism. Some of the new features on EasyBib have made this process even easier by automatically citing sources based on article titles, and giving a much wider range of citation formats and documentation options. Unfortunately, you still have to cite within your actual text manually, a process that is known to be arduous and often time consuming…until now (for those of you who didn’t know about this before reading my blog post). Available through on the Self-Service tab of MyNEU, by clicking into Software Downloads you will find the answer to all things citation related. The program named EndNote, aptly puts an End to all of your Note-ation problems (I try to be funny… it usually never works). Straight from EndNote themselves…

“Millions of researchers, scholarly writers, students and librarians use EndNote to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs in any language, and create bibliographies and figure lists instantly. Instead of spending hours typing bibliographies, or using index cards to organize their references, they do it the easy way—by using EndNote” (Endnote).

See the citation convention I used there? All thanks to EndNote! Some other cool functions include automatic paper formatting, template extensions, online reference searches, customizable export options, and more. So, while EasyBib may be a great tool for citations, the software provided by Northeastern will make sure you aren’t stuck in Snell Library all night.

Questions? Ask a Librarian!

Did you know that you can Text a Librarian for answers to all of your library or literature questions? All you have to do is text your question to 66746 and begin your message with the word husky. You can also get answers at the Reference Desk  by calling (617) 373-2356, or visiting on the second floor of Snell Library during these hours:
Mon-Thurs: 9:00am – 9:00pm
Fri: 9:00am – 6:00pm
Sat: 12:00pm – 5:00pm
Sun: 12:00pm – 8:00pm
Coming to a Snell Librarian with your questions guarantees that you’ll get put in the right direction, and they often go above and beyond the scope of their job to assist you in whatever project you have.

Our own Discovery channel

In response to user requests for an easy-to-use integrated search option, Northeastern University Libraries are pleased to provide Discovery, a single interface by EBSCOhost that allows several databases and Northeastern’s catalog to be searched at one time. This search tool is a ‘one stop shop’ for users to begin their research. Northeastern will explore the impact of the tool over the course of the academic year. Northeastern University Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources, Amira Aaron, says, “We wanted to provide a more streamlined way for our community to discover information in multiple resources, including our local repositories and open access content. Northeastern students know EBSCOhost and by introducing Discovery we are able to provide additional content and include our catalog, all within a familiar environment which means an easy transition for students, faculty and staff.” Northeastern will work with EBSCO in the next several months to add its digital archive and local digitized content to Discovery, providing even more content from the single search interface – creating a truly custom collection. The ability to pull these additional resources together was another reason for selecting a unified tool. Aaron says, “A unified tool will provide our users with as much content as possible from our discovery service and eliminate multiple silos of information, while improving access to our rich collection of electronic resources.”