Library News

This Week: Meet Authors John J. Siegfried, John Hollway

The Meet the Author Series will kick off this Tuesday, September 14th, with John J. Siegfried. He will be speaking on Better Living through Economics, which he edited. The book is a study of how economic reforms over the past fifty years have helped to raise the standard of living in America and to make the country prosperous. The event will be co-sponsored by the Department of Economics and the NU Bookstore. The following day, Wednesday, September 15, will feature our second event, with another John, the journalist John Hollway. He will be discussing his book Killing Time, which he co-authored with Ronald M. Gauthier. The book describes the Death Row sentence of John Thompson, a black man convicted of killing a rich white man in New Orleans. Thompson insists he is innocent, and eventually two Philadelphia lawyers step in to the case, ultimately proving his innocence. This event is co-sponsored by the NU School of Law, the NU Bookstore, and NU Phi Alpha Delta. Both Better Living through Economics and Killing Time will take place in 90 Snell Library at noon. The third John featured this week will be John Coltrane, whose annual memorial concert takes place this Saturday. Before the concert, on Thursday the 16th from 6:00-8:00 pm in the Amilcar Cabral Center of the NU African American Institute, the Library is co-sponsoring a symposium and book-signing for the recent release of John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. Unfortunately, John Coltrane himself, who has been dead for some forty-three years, will not be making it to these events. Yet this is a great opportunity to hear a panel of Coltrane experts moderated by NU music professor and jazz composer Leonard Brown, who organized the concert and edited the book. The talks are free and open to the public and refreshments will be served. For further questions about any of these events, please contact Maria Carpenter at m.carpenter@neu.edu. For campus directions, click here.

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.

Northeastern in the News: $12m fund for homeland security research

Northeastern was recently mentioned in the Boston Globe, in a story that reports a donation of $12 million dollars given to the school to build a homeland security research facility on the Burlington, MA campus. The donor is former engineering student George Kostas, who  graduated in 1943. The resulting facility could potentially change Northeastern’s status amongst other universities in terms of defense and military research. This is a field the university has been advancing in for the past two years. Now, if we could just get a donation such as this for the library…we could hire a plethora of people and cancel all Sales Force meetings for the next few years.  Read the full article here.

ScienceDirect Mobile App from Elsevier is Here!

Want to access full-text scientific articles from one of the world’s largest scientific, technical, and medical information providers, but not near a computer?  You can now access Elsevier ScienceDirect content on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad with a new free app available in iTunes. The only thing you need to get started is to register on ScienceDirect.com.  You will have to do this while on campus, but after that you will be able to use the application anywhere. As part of the registration process you will need to create a username and password (different from your Northeastern username and password) and provide Elsevier with your Northeastern email address.  Your Northeastern email address is used to verify that you are a member of the Northeastern community. Try it out and let us know what you think, either here or in the comments!

Try It: Mergent WebReports

The library is now offering a chance to try Mergent WebReports through September 30, 2010.  After you’ve used it, let us know if you found it helpful. Mergent WebReports is an online database that allows you to access a vast archive of corporate and industry related documents. WebReports contains more than 180,000 documents covering over 100 countries and industries using an easy to navigate and reliable system. This database trial includes the Digital Corporate Manuals and the Digital Municipal & Government Manuals, going back to the early 1900s.