Blue Note Sounds a New Note

The Jazz Music Library from Alexander Street Press now includes recordings from Blue Note records, the recording label known for high-quality albums from the beginning of the jazz age through the 1960s and beyond. With these new online recordings now available to the NU community, you can listen to Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Dexter Gorden, Art Blakey and more!  These are for the most part digital remasters, so for the true aficionados out there, you may need to come to the library and seek out the Solomon Jazz collection on vinyl, but for your classes or for listening pleasure, these are convenient gems of a true American classical art form.  Enjoy!

Friday Five: Animal Planet

For some reason, or maybe because I’m just more attuned to it for some reason, a lot of science news this week had to do with the animal world. 1. Compared to animals, humans don’t actually travel around much.  A team of NU researchers is finding that human movement is highly predictable and pretty restricted.  Their results, which were based on cell phone gps data (they swear it’s anonymized) were published this week in Nature Physics and a summary is available on the NU News site. 2. Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed new book “Freedom” has arrived at Snell. A realist novel in the spirit of Tom Wolfe, it is the story of a dysfunctional family trying to navigate the shoals of 21st century America.  One of the protagonists is an environmental lawyer and much of it is set in and around the environmental movement.  Oprah’s just chosen it for her book club (despite the fact that Franzen has dissed her book club taste in the past!). 3. This week PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology reports on the demise of the tiger and a way to ensure its survival through the protection of its breeding grounds. 4. When it comes to eating animal products, the Annals of Internal Medicine reports that there’s a big difference between low-carb diets high in animal products and those low in animal products.  Those low in animal products resulted in lower mortality from all causes. 5. Science News reports that an ancestor of the virus that causes AIDS has been present in monkeys for 32,000 years!

New Directions

      We have a number of new students blogging for Snell Snippets now; among them are Rachel Holt, Michelle Beiter and Joe Bober, all recent hires in the Advancement office. Brendan Ratner, also work study, will continue to blog, and who knows who else will come on board. As long as everybody makes sure to keep us updated on Library news and events, in particular the Meet the Author Series, we should be good.          I am glad to be introducing these new contributors and sad to say that this day (Friday, the 17th) is my last day and that this will be my last post on this blog. All questions about the blog should from now on be directed to Karen Merguerian (g.merguerian@neu.edu) or Maria Carpenter (m.carpenter@neu.edu). Thanks everybody who has contributed throughout my time here, and keep posting. –Damon G

Print station changes in October!

YOUR PRAYERS SHALL BE ANSWERED!!! No more waiting 5-20 minutes because printing in the InfoCommons is backlogged. No more waiting on a huge Instant Print line for 1 page. No more unnecessary cover sheets that waste paper. WIRELESS PRINTING! More specs to come, but get pumped for this. Printing will never be the same again. Coming soon to a library near you!

Killing Time author John Hollway kills it at Snell!

To begin, let me say that if you missed this author talk with John Hollway, you missed something pretty special. The passion coming from both John and his audience was intense and a lot of important issues were covered. For those of you who were unable to make it but want to experience the presentation, try checking out the Library’s Meet The Author YouTube channel, where all previous Meet The Author presentations are uploaded for you to enjoy. This talk will be added shortly.

John’s telling of a true story about a man being unjustly sent to death row and then released 18 years later evoked many questions, one especially important one being, “If it happened to him, how many others are there?” Not only that but how many we don’t know about. When I thought about this, I kind of had a flash and thought of the film Law Abiding Citizen and how the justice system doesn’t actually provide justice under many circumstances. After hearing everything about the story, I wouldn’t doubt a movie on this book will come out in the very near future with a lot of the same themes, maybe less time killing people though.

The civil case for negligence damages for this particular victim of the justice system is heading to the Supreme Court later this fall, so keep an eye on the Facebook page, “Killing Time by John Hollway and Ronald M. Gauthier” for more info. Be sure not to miss out on future Meet The Author events by checking back on the blog or going to the Library’s News & Events page.