This new program is managed by a company called Terracycle. Rather than sending this waste to the landfill, they recycle it into new consumer products like faux lumber and park benches. As if that’s not good enough, for every item we collect, the Office of Sustainability will receive $0.02 to be used towards sustainability-related expenses like incentive programs!

Here at the library we don’t just recycle pens—there are a number of other recycling initiatives within the building. You can also leave batteries in the M-level copy room for one-stop recycling. All trash bins throughout the library are now grouped with recycling bins to make doing the right thing the easy thing. And on Q-level we even offer composting for your coffee cups, food scraps, etc.

We’re always looking for new ways to be sustainable. If you’ve got any ideas, please add them to the comments below.

So, we’ve gone ahead and revamped our Museum Studies Research Guide! The new guide features a main homepage with information of interest to anyone – from seasoned museum curators to those who are totally new to the field. Then, two tabs of the guide focus on a particular audiences: participants in the Homewood program or folks who study or teach in the AAP program. Each of those subpages is tailored to the academic needs of that particular program.

Since so many museum professionals and students in the field are interested in rare books and archival materials, we also have a tab that links to Special Collections and Archives. One last tab, yet to be populated, will give us a place to showcase student projects that highlight museums and curatorship. Stay tuned for that!

If you have recommendations on how we can improve this guide even further, please leave a note in the “leave a comment” area below or send an email to Ask-a-Librarian!

Social Explorer is an online research tool that provides quick and easy access to decennial census data from 1789 to 2010 and the Religious Congregations and Membership Study. The interface is much easier to use than that of the new American FactFinder. In addition it has annual updates to the American Community Survey. If the data exists, Social Explorer can create reports and maps at all geographic levels.

SimplyMap is web-based mapping and data analysis software that allows you to use and interact with complex data, in order to create profession-quality thematic maps and reports using extensive demographic, business, and marketing data. In addition to the basic software and data, the library has included the following components: Dun & Bradstreet 30 Million for business listings, the Simmons Data package and the Nielsen Claritas PRIZM. From the welcome page you can create a personal account that allows you to save your work. The library’s subscription allows for five concurrent users, so please remember to logout when you are finished.

Have fun — try them out!

To get into the proper frame of mind, read Howard Jacobson’s inspiring article published recently in the online edition of The Guardian (U.K.). If you find the essay convincing, turn next to one or more of the numerous Dickens biographies our library owns to fill you in on the twists and turns of the author’s fascinating life. For example, did you know that after an extended visit to the United States in 1842, Dickens wrote American Notes, making him one of the earliest notable (and not especially complimentary) observers of our national experiment?

Ultimately, though, you just have to read the novels themselves—of which there are more than 20—to really “get it.” Try Bleak House, a riveting story of the destructive power of the legal machinery on people’s lives, skeleton-filled closets, class prejudice, selfishness and unbounded generosity–and laugh-out-loud satire. It even includes one of the first modern-style detectives in the inimitable person of Inspector Bucket. David Copperfield, considered the most autobiographical of the novels, is another gem. Still with us? Then try the real litmus test: give some of the ones you read in school another try, such as Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. You’ll be surprised at what you missed the first time around.

If you’d rather dip your toe in more cautiously, try some of the better video productions from our library’s collection, your local public library, or your favorite streaming video download service. You won’t be getting the full Dickens experience, though, even with the best of these.

The closest thing to an official website for this historic birthday is Charles Dickens 2012. The site contains a wealth of information about relevant TV and radio programming, exhibitions, dramatic productions, musical tributes, festivals, and the latest literary criticism. To add to the fun, New York City’s Morgan Library has mounted an exhibition celebrating the event, and its online exhibition support pages include a digital facsimile of the first edition of A Christmas Carol.

• the movement away from print to online journals,
• the Open Access movement,
• and a new emphasis in peer-review.

eLife will be an Open Access life sciences journal that hopes to compete with Cell, Nature, and Science. The Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Society will support eLife for 3 – 5 years, until they develop a business model that will allow them to support themselves. eLife expects to publish its first issue in 2012.

Beyond starting a new OA journal, the editors of eLife are taking a slightly different approach to editorship and peer review.

eLife will not have professional editors; all editors will be working researchers. In the press releases, editor-in-chief Randy Schekman indicates life science researchers are dissatisfied with professional editors. Here’s an interesting response from a professional editor.

Usually peer reviewers receive a manuscript and review it on their own, in isolation. eLife wants to make discussion a part of the peer review process. They envision using an asynchronous secure site for these discussions. They hope for a consensus among reviewers and editors, and a reply to the author within a month. Because this will take more time than the usual review process, eLife will be paying their reviewers.

2012 looks to be an interesting year for publishing!

Only Elsevier?
The boycott makes three charges against Elsevier. These charges can be made against other large academic publishers. Why was Elsevier chosen? Probably because it is the largest publisher, earns the largest profits, and has a large presence in public debates about the changes in academic publishing. Just understand that Elsevier is not unique in its actions. UPDATE: Read Elsevier’s response here.

Background
STEM academic publishing has been in a ferment for quite some time. The serials crisis, the technological changes in authoring and publishing, Open Access, Creative Commons, and more funders requiring openly accessible articles have drastically changed the landscape.

Recently
OSTP recently posted responses to a request for information about public access to scholarly publishing. They are considering applying a version of the NIH Public Access Policy to other government agencies that fund research. The NIH policy requires articles based on NIH funding to be freely and openly accessible on the Internet within 12 months of publication. Elsevier (and other publishers) are supporting an opposing bill, the Research Works Act.

The Argument
Here’s the short version of the academics’ argument. Publishers do not pay the academics to author or peer-review the articles; funders and universities pay for that. Publishers do pay for copy-editing, managing peer review, and web hosting. These are not insignificant expenses, but they shouldn’t make the journals so expensive that libraries can’t subscribe to them.

What keeps all the researchers from moving to the new Open Access publishing outlets like PLoS or BioMed Central? Among the reasons are human inertia and the reliance on journal reputation in the promotion and tenure process. Academics created the boycott webpage to start the conversation about the changes they’d like to see in the publishing world. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Links
(I will try to keep these links updated. Elsevier hadn’t put anything on its website when this was posted. UPDATE: Elsevier’s response here.)

• Elsevier – My Part in its Downfall by Tim Gowers in Gowers’s Weblog
• Elsevier’s Publishing Model Might be about to go up in Smoke by Tim Worstall in Forbes
• Why Boycott Elsevier? by Kevin Smith in Scholarly Communications @ Duke
• As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends its Practices by Joel Fischman in Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education
• Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics by Josh Fischman in Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education
• Mysteries of the Elsevier Boycott by Rick Anderson in The Scholarly Kitchen
• The Elsevier Boycott – Does it Make Sense? by Kent Anderson in The Scholarly Kitchen
• The Research Works Act: Is it Time for a Rally to Restore Sanity? by David Crotty in The Scholarly Kitchen
• Will Academics’ Boycott of Elsevier be the Tipping Point for Open Access — Or Another Embarrassing Flop? by Glyn Moody in TechDirt
• Thousands of Scientists Vow to Boycott Elsevier to Protest Journal Prices by Jop de Vrieze in ScienceInsider

February is the National African American History Month during which we celebrate the contributions of African Americans to American history. Throughout this month, various events such as exhibits, talks, cultural programs, lecture series, book signings by authors, etc. are held to celebrate African Americans’ traditions, history, customs, and culture. The JHU Office of Multicultural Affairs will inaugurate this month’s Opening Ceremonies with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Convocation Speaker Cedric Jennings. There are also many local events which have been planned for this month. The Enoch Pratt Free Library is hosting an African Dancing and Drumming event performed by Nazu Dance Company and there are other events that may be of interest to you. Besides the Pratt Library, you can visit the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture for special events and exhibitions.

Need more information on other local events? The African American Heritage & Attractions Guide published by the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association lists several festivals, historic landmarks, cultural heritage attractions, tours, etc. If you are in Washington D.C., you may want to check out the events at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. As you continue reading this post, I recommend that you take a few minutes to listen to this melodious song, Unforgettable, by Nat King Cole.

Apart from these, there are a number of digital collections that are freely available online. They include the African American History Collection from the Maryland Historical Society, the Images of African Americans from the Nineteenth Century and the African American Women Writers of the 19th Century from the New York Public Library, the African American Artists Collection from the Art Institute of Chicago, African Americans in Aviation Flickr set from the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, the Black History Month Flickr set from the State Library and Archives of Florida, and the William H. Johnson’s World on Paper Flickr set from the Smithsonian.

Hughes was a prodigy and a Renaissance Man in an era when those terms were not frequently applied to people of color. He entered the literary world with a bang in 1921, at the age of 19, when his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published in the anti-racist periodical The Crisis, then edited by W. E. B. DuBois. When his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926, the poem was dedicated to DuBois. It was not the first time that Hughes was associated with prominent men: in 1925 he worked for Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the “father” of African American history (it was Woodson, in fact, who started Black History Month); later that year, while working as a busboy, he was “discovered” by the poet Vachel Lindsay. (And now you know how the Washington, D.C. eatery and bookstore Busboys and Poets gets its name.)

Despite these mentors, Hughes was more often the subject of critique than appreciation in the 1920s and ’30s. In fact, he sought to distance himself from the middle-class aspirations of “Talented Tenth” redeemers like DuBois. In his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in The Nation in 1926, he declared that a lot of what counted as culture for his African American peers reflected deep down a desire to “act white.” His own artistic aim, in contrast, was to celebrate “the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised!” So in his poems in The Weary Blues and later collections like Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Hughes uses dialect, depicts boisterous Harlem scenes and lets his characters hang loose. He was raked over the coals by Black critics for “holding up our imperfections to public gaze.”

Hughes got famous as a poet, but he also wrote novels, memoirs, plays, books for children and non-fiction works like A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956), a popular and accessible history equally suitable for the library or the coffee table. Accessibility was also a distinguishing characteristic of his beloved “Simple” stories from the 1940s and ’50s, which starred Jesse B. Semple as a kind of Harlem Everyman—a wise-fool witness to America’s changing social morés.

Hughes wasn’t content to be “just” a writer, however; he used his celebrity-hood as a platform for the exploration of vexing political issues. Hughes was a Communist sympathizer in the 1930s, a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper during the Spanish Civil War, an ardent Pan-Africanist and civil rights activist. Post-humously, he has been seen not only as a civil rights hero and artist who opened up new avenues of African American expression, but also as a possible gay icon. Hughes’ sexuality continues to be debated by biographers. It would have been difficult for him to be either “out” or “allied” in his time, but if he were alive today, it’s easy to imagine that the man so used to living on the edge, pushing every envelope, would have embraced yet another civil rights challenge.

You can start with the McNaughton books on M Level. This is a small up-to-date collection of popular, contemporary fiction (and non-fiction), in a convenient browsing area. Check out the McNaughton DVD’s right next to it.

If you want to get to “serious fiction”, the library’s general collections hold thousands of volumes; from medieval romances to 21st century experimental fiction. The hitch is – there is no single place in the stacks where you can find it all. Our books are arranged by Library of Congress call number. This means you have to look more or less by country. German fiction, Italian fiction, British fiction, and American fiction will each have a different call number, and thus a different location.

What to do? Here is a handy guide to call numbers for the most contemporary fiction in 16 national categories. They will all be on D Level, and all in the Blue Label section. But from there, you will need to look in the various call number ranges. Here they are in a nutshell:

American: PS 3550-3626
British: PR 6050-6126
French: PQ 2660-2686
German: PT 2600-2688
Italian: PQ 4860-4926
Russian: PG 3475-3490
Latin American: PQ 7000-8560
Spanish: PQ 6651-6726
Caribbean, African, Indian: PR 9205-9570
Chinese: PL 2261-2979
Japanese: PL 782-866
Hebrew: PJ 5050-5055.51
Korean: PL 989-993
Canadian: PR 9199.2-9199.3

So next time you’re looking for a good read, go exploring on D Level! Or ask a librarian. We are always happy to share our reading tips. In fact, that might just be another blog post.

Ready or not, the Spring 2012 semester begins today. Remember, you’re not in this alone – MSEL is here for you. Here’s some stuff you should know as you venture forth:

Come on in! The library’s open 24/7 for Hopkins folks and people from other academic institutions (academic ID required); 8am-10pm for guests from the general public. Need more detail? Here ya go.

Don’t forget to seek help when you need it! Check out the general library website, our subject research guides, and our Ask-a-Librarian page to see when a research librarian is available in-person or online.

You’ll need to check out lots of books, of course. Here’s information about what’s available to you as faculty, grad students, undergrads, alumni, and guests.

But, wait, there are other things you can check out of the library, too! Lockers to store your treasures, locks to protect your laptop, Ethernet cables available at the Circulation Desk to get hard-wired to the Internet, DVDs for your film class (or for a study break…we won’t tell!), to name a few.

Curious about construction updates for the Brody Learning Commons? Read the BLC blog, too. It’s growing by the minute!

Oh, and consider attending one of our library workshops to learn about research tools and strategies that will help you get that next A. They’re great!

Hmmm… does that about cover it? If not, just ask us! And, there will be a constant stream of breaking news from us via Twitter and Facebook.

Cheers to a great semester!