Talking in the Library

K-State Keepsakes: K-Hill

26th in the Series

(View of K-Hill from Bluemont Hill, October 2010)

When asked to describe what the Manhattan area might look like, it can be assumed that strangers to the "Little Apple" with images of Dorothy and Toto dancing in their heads would never conger up descriptors such as scenic hills,tree lined streets, flowing rivers, and large lakes.  But wait, there's more!  A "mountain" high enough to adorn large white concrete "KS" letters to look over a valley is also part of the landscape, letters that proclaim, "'Hollywood,' California ain't got nothin' on Manhattanville!"

So how did a monogram gain the tradition of standing watch over a college town?  You have to go back over a century to find a trace of such an idea when in 1908 a battle ensued over the side of Bluemont Hill (east of campus and north of downtown) between those supporting the placement of the letters KSC and others who insisted that an A for agriculture had to be included.  Therefore, shortly after KSC first appeared on Bluemont Hill, objectors replaced the S with an A, making it KAC.  The nocturnal switcheroo of letters by their supporters even included a KSAC version on the slope.  However, the stone changers soon abandoned their causes leaving the opportunity for Prospect Hill across the Kansas River on the other side of town to become the permanent home for K-State's initials a few years later.  Bluemont Hill did not go neglected; it became the home for "MANHATTAN" in 1927.

What's better than 100,000,000 guinea pigs?

200,000,000 guinea pigs, of course. Well, unless you are the guinea pig, which is what these books seem to be implying.

What's even more interesting? We have four (yes, I counted, four!) editions of 100,000,000 guinea pigs: 1932,1933,1935, and  1937.  AND we have four (again, yes, four) copies of 200,000,000 guinea pigs. All I can envision are the poor expository writing instructors in the 1930's reading argument paper after informative paper after investigative paper about the toxins and dangers of hair dyes and shortening.

Thanks to Lydia and Brent for finding these gems! And, Lydia? You can stop giggling now. Honestly, any time now.

Open Access Week 2010: Creative Commons

Yesterday Molly Kleinman shared with us some of her insights on copyright and Creative Commons. If you haven't heard of it before, Creative Commons is this cool thing that doesn't replace copyright but works alongside it. These licenses help content creators release their work "some rights reserved" instead of "all rights reserved".

One of the really cool things about the Creative Commons website is that has a portal that can help you find content with "some rights reserved". Whether you're looking for images, video, music, or text, this website will help you find it. OAW2010

So, once you've found something with a Creative Commons license what can you do with it? That's where you can let your creativity shine through. Maybe you want to add music to a video? Or a photo to your website? Or try your hand at remixing music? The possibilities are endless.

Open Access Week 2010: Taking the high and golden road

Universities have confronted a crisis of ever-growing magnitude for the last generation. No, not whether or not the football BCS is a workable method for determining a national champion, but rather spiraling prices for scholarly journals, the lifeblood of scholarly communication. Journals prices have increased far faster than the inflation rate, and the appearance of new journals for new sub-disciplines has only exacerbated the problem. Libraries have been constantly cancelling journals to make up the shortfalls, and book budgets have been decimated for the same reason.

Open access--the free, online dissemination of scientific research results--helps point toward a way out of this intractable mess. Given how recently the concept of open access was articulated, it astounds that the Directory of Open Access Journals, a large but hardly comprehensive list, documents the existence of over 5,000 open access journals across the academic spectrum. Commercial publishers have responded by offering new business models that allow articles even in expensive journals to be published open access, which means that by 2008 about 20% of scholarly articles were available freely online, trending upward. This is known as the golden road of open access, where articles are available via open access from day one of publication.

While in the sciences there are both established infrastructure and funding models to allow researchers to publish open access, the same cannot always be said for the social sciences and humanities. One often hears, particularly in the humanities, that there are in fact a dwindling number of publishing outlets as smaller and more marginal publishers and publications cannot make the leap from print to online and thus fade from view. Someone needs to step in and create the infrastructure, and given libraries' collective experience with the journal publishing market, our relationships with our faculties and campuses, and our acute sense of the financial trap of increasing prices and decreasing budgets, we are well suited to step in and get involved.

To that end, in late 2007 the K-State Libraries founded New Prairie Press to support journal editors both at Kansas State and beyond. Currently, we have three titles in production, with several more in the works for late 2010 and early 2011. Anyone looking for a home for a new open access journal, or looking for ways to increase the readership and findability of an existing print title should feel free to contact us (info (at) newprairiepress.org). We do not charge for these services, yet offer an attractive array of support and marketing services.

Noise on Hale 1st Floor

We're having a bit of construction on the first floor Hale the next couple of days. If it gets a bit too noisy for you, stop by the Help Desk and we can suggest some quieter places to study.

Open Access Week 2010: K-what?

K-REx. K-what?

K-REx stands for the K-State Research Exchange, which is K-State University's Institutional Repository. Items in K-REx are available through Open Access, which you've been hearing a lot about this week. These are items that are available freely, without subscription or other access fees that you or your library may otherwise have to pay. Which means that really, K-REx is our way of showing the world some of the cool things that K-Staters have done. Items in K-REx really do get seen from all around the world, by people in nearly 200 countries. So, what are our most widely viewed items in K-REx?

Top Five most widely viewed Electronic Theses, Dissertations, and Reports:

• Matthew Vanden Boogart's "Uncovering the social impacts of Facebook on a college campus" has been viewed 2614 times.
• Shana Ryan's "Master's flute recital" has been viewed 1231 times.
• Christopher Nichols "138 years of the clarinet - program notes for a master's clarinet recital of works by Reger, Smith, Donizetti, Muczynski, and Schumann" has been viewed 1095 times.
• Deisy Y. Corredor's "Pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass" has been viewed 767 times.
• Rosemary William Eustaces' "Factors influencing acculturative stress among international students in the United States" has been viewed 723 times.

OAW2010
Top Five most widely viewed Faculty works:

• "Carcass disposal: A comprehensive review" by multiple authors has been viewed 1559 times.
• "Sensory characteristics of ice cream products in the United States and Italy" by Kelly R. Thompson, Delores H. Chambers, and Edgar Chambers IV has been viewed 644 times.
• "A way of seeing people and place: Phenomenology in environment-behavior research" by David Seamon has been viewed 445 times.
• "Using the theory of planned behavior to explore restaurant managers support for employee food safety training" by Kevin R. Roberts has been viewed 427 times.
• "Effect of planter speed and seed firmers on corn stand establishment" by S. A. Staggenborg, R. K. Taylor, and L. D. Maddux has been viewed 389 times.

Open Access Week 2010: What Open Access Means to K-State

This week we're celebrating International Open Access Week . Earlier we talked about what open access is and why we should care. Today, we want to talk about why it's important to K-State.

One of the main reasons to support open access to scholarship is that it helps support the mission of our university. The Mission Statement of Kansas State University states that research and other creative endeavors are an essential component of our mission and all faculty members contribute to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge. It further states that as a land-grant institution, it is our mission to translate knowledge and basic research into applications that address public needs.

This sounds great, but here's the rub. Much of the knowledge produced by K-State faculty is published in journals that often are only available to those affiliated with research institutions that can afford the high subscription costs. These cost and distribution barriers prevent access to those in the state and around the world who might benefit from it. If instead, the research was made freely available on the web there would be broader dissemination of results and the potential to increase the number of people seeing and reading it. This in turn increases the probability that more people will make use of and build on the research being done here.

Open access also provides benefits to K-State faculty and researchers. All authors hope that their work will be widely read and cited, and have an impact in their discipline. Work that is openly available is more likely to be found by others through Google and other search engines giving it a higher probability of being read. In fact, the Open Citation Project provides a growing number of studies that indicate research that is openly available is read and cited more often. So add it up - more openness helps increase the reach and impact of K-State researchers while helping to raise the profile of Kansas State University.

You can easily make your work at K-State openly accessible by depositing it in K-REx, a digital archive of scholarly works produced at K-State. Our goal is to "connect your research to the world". Contact us at k-rex@k-state.edu for more information.

Open Access Week 2010: What is Open Access and Why Are We Celebrating?

October 18-22 is Open Access Week, and each day this week Talking in the Library will feature a new post covering a different aspect of Open Access (OA). So, what is OA and why is it worth making such a fuss about? OAW2010

The basic premise of OA – that all research should be freely accessible online – is a very important matter for students, faculty, universities, and libraries. Many students are surprised to learn libraries must pay thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars per year for a subscription to a single research journal. These journals contain results of research projects and provide essential information for students, faculty, and researchers. If libraries can't afford to subscribe to a journal, those who need the information might not be able to get it. Starting to see the problem?

OA is a different way of looking at information, particularly information as a commodity. Should research funded by taxpayers provide the basis of a business model for commercial publishers? Isn't the public that funded the research entitled to it's results? Yes, OA is radical, but it holds a lot of promise. Consider these benefits of OA:

• Undergrads will have an easier time finding information for term papers and other projects;
• Graduate students can make their dissertations readily available to other interested researchers and potential employers;
• Faculty can increase awareness of their research programs and find potential collaborators;
• Universities and libraries can trim costs for journal subscriptions and foster their goals of disseminating information.
• Journal publishers can benefit from the increased attention and "discoverability" of OA articles.

With all these benefits, OA is catching on, as evidenced by over 5000 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Students and faculty can also deposit their work in open access repositories like the K-State Research Exchange. The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a major proponent of and a good source of information on OA. Make a point to visit these sites (and to re-visit Talking in the Library) to learn more about OA during Open Access Week.

Seeing Orange?

Next week, you may see a lot of librarians walking around in bright orange t-shirts, some bright orange posters, and Talking posts with bright orange banners like the one above. We're not celebrating Halloween early, and we haven't all suddenly become Texas Longhorn fans.  Here's what we're up to.

K-State Libraries will be taking part in the international celebration of Open Access Week with a variety of activities next week, including an open forum and a lecture. Open Access' favorite color is orange, for reasons unknown to us.  We might have chosen purple instead.  

The open forum will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 19, on the second floor of Hale Library, in the area with all the mobile whiteboards.  Invited speakers will talk briefly about what open access means, and how it affects things important to you like textbooks, research results, and how you participate in your own education. We'll have three faculty members who have been pre-screened for interestingness, plus your student body president, Danny Unruh. They'll talk, and hopefully you'll talk back! The forum is a come-and-go affair, stop by even you can't be there at 2:00 or can't stay the whole time.

In addition to Danny, we'll have:

• Michael Wesch, associate professor of cultural anthropology
• Christopher Sorensen, a university distinguished professor and Cortelyou-Rust distinguished professor of physics
• Dale Askey, e-publishing librarian and director of the New Prairie Press

Then, on Thursday, Molly Kleinman will present "The Beauty of Some Rights Reserved: An Introduction to Copyright, Publishing and Creative Commons" at 2 p.m. in the Hale Library Hemisphere Room. Her talk will focus on the impact of copyright law on the lives of faculty, researchers, librarians and students, who are all users and creators of copyrighted material. It will provide an introduction to common copyright issues and the Creative Commons concept.

Finally, in addition to the forum and lecture, we'll have a series of posts right here on Talking and a bunch of information and videos going out on our Twitter account (@kstatelibraries) so even if you're not able to join us, you can still participate virtually.  Watch this space for posts with bright orange banners, or subscribe to the Open Access category with your feed reader. 

Combat Stress: Redefining the "Wounded" Warrior and Family, Thu 10/14 at 1 pm

What: Combat Stress: Redefining the "Wounded" Warrior and Family
When: Thursday, Oct 14 from 1 pm - 3 pm 
Where: Hemisphere Room, 5th Floor, Hale Library