Preserving HOPE

Poder Latino AIDS/HIV training session, ca. 1995 The Library’s Archives and Special Collections Department is happy to announce our newest social justice collection, the historical records of HOPE, the Hispanic Office of Planning and Evaluation, Inc.. HOPE was a community-based organization established in 1971 to offer services and programs to benefit Massachusetts’ Hispanic/Latino residents. A wonderful addition to the Archives, the HOPE collection furthers our mission to collect and preserve the records of the Boston-area social justice organizations that serve under-represented communities. HOPE was a leader in creating innovative programs and services. In the mid-1970s, HOPE Talent Search was established to assist low-income youths in Boston and surrounding communities to stay in school, complete high school, and seek advanced or post-secondary education. During the 1990s, HOPE established Poder Latino (Latin Youth Power), a program to train Latino youth as peer educators about health promotion and disease prevention with particular emphasis on sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS/HIV. Another innovative program, PLENA (Padres Latinos Educando Nuestros Adolescentes/Latino Parents Educating Our Youth), trained volunteers to educate their own parents and family members on health issues. In 1995, HOPE established the Pedro Zamora Center, a peer center offering support services to Latinos and family members living with AIDS/HIV. HOPE promoted civic engagement and leadership development through its HOPE “Proyecto PLAN” Community Leadership Development and HOPE YouthPLAN and CommUNITYPLAN programs.  It also operated a computer-learning center and offered training classes to the community. HOPE worked closely with schools, cities, state-run organizations, and local non-profits until its closing in 2011. To learn more about HOPE’s contents or if you’re interested in our other social justice collections, please visit the Archives website.

JoVE: Science in Motion

Work by NU Professor on JoVE

Work by NU Professors Jing Xu and Mansoor Aniji on JoVE

Have you ever slogged through an experimental protocol, trying to understand exactly what the authors did in the lab?  Have you ever tried to learn about research methods in other disciplines, just to get bogged down in terminology?  Now there’s a more visual alternative. The library is pleased to offer access to JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments.  JoVE publishes professionally produced and edited, peer-reviewed video demonstrations of experiments filmed in research laboratories. This revolutionary resource allows students and researchers to watch experts perform techniques before attempting experiments themselves.  Just getting started in the lab?  JoVE has a Basic Protocols section where you can learn everything from microscope care to Western blotting. JoVE also features video articles from NEU scientists in the departments of Bioengineering, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. We invite you to check out JoVE, and let us know what you think!

Not Sure Where to Start? New in Arts & Humanities Reference Overviews from SAGE

Encyclopedias and handbooks provide excellent ways to get an overview and start your research project. (Think of how you use this encyclopedia, probably every day.) To help give context to large research questions, the Library has just purchased a collection of encyclopedias and handbooks from SAGE Reference. You’ll find answers to questions like: You can search or browse the SAGE Reference collection, and find more resources through our Arts and Humanities subject guides. If you have any comments, let us know here or via email.

Celebrate Open Education Week – March 5-10, 2012

Today’s News@Northeastern featured a “3Qs” interview with our Dean of Libraries, Will Wakeling. The focus was open access to research, and Will specifically highlighted Open Educational Resources (OERs).  Development of OERs involves remixing resources that are openly available in order to create learning materials that don’t cost students anything. The average college student paid $700 a year on textbooks in the 2009-2010 school year; given that the price of college textbooks is said to be increasing at four times the rate of inflation, that amount is likely higher today. So, it’s no surprise that the need for affordable course materials is becoming critical. Legislation such as the College Opportunity and Affordability Act has placed limits on textbook publishers, but prices are still high. MIT was a pioneer in the OER field with their Open CourseWare system, which debuted in 2002. It offered anybody, anywhere, the opportunity to access MIT course materials for free – a radical concept at the time. Since then many other institutions around the world have also established OCW programs, as well as an international consortium. That consortium is now sponsoring the first global Open Education Week, “to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.” Events are taking place around the world this week – many being hosted as online webinars. I encourage you to check out their schedule of events! How do you think Northeastern can play a role in the development and adoption of OERs? Leave your thoughts in the comments section…

Learn a Language with the BBC

In my role as the librarian for Foreign Languages and Literatures, I get questions all the time from people who are looking for materials to help them learn a foreign language. So I’m always on the lookout for free online resources to which I can direct people. One that has just come to my attention is the BBC’s Languages site. This site offers a wealth of free language lessons and tools, for a variety of languages. You can watch videos, see vocabulary lists, subscribe to phrase-a-day RSS feeds, sign up for email tips, and more. It seems to have the most content for French, German, Italian, and Spanish, but there are 40 languages for which they at least offer lists of useful phrases. So, if you want to do some language prep for your study abroad trip or your international co-op (or spring break!), you may want to see what the BBC has to offer you. You can also check out my subject guide for Foreign Languages & Literatures for other helpful language links. And buena suerte / bonne chance / viel Glück / good luck with your language study!