Leddy Library News

It’s the Second World War, a German prison camp, and this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn’t really understand. The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. But he doesn’t know whether it’s an infection, whether it’s to do with malnutrition. He doesn’t know how to cure it. And he’s operating in a hostile environment. And people do terrible things in wars. The German camp guards, they’ve got bored. They’ve taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners lavatory while it was full of prisoners. He said he heard suspicious laughter. And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself.

This is the beginning of economist Tim Harford’s TED Talk entitled “Trial, error and the God Complex”.  Harford also introduces us to the remarkable Archie Cochrane in his latest book Adapt: why success always starts with failure.

If you would like to learn more about the life of Archibald Leman Cochrane, I’d recommend this brief bio from our Oxford Reference Online collection, which also contains the source of this definition of a Cochrane review.

Cochrane review n A systematic review of research into the effects of a healthcare intervention, designed to inform and guide practical decision making. A Cochrane review adheres to a structured format described in the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization established in 1993. [Named after the Scottish epidemiologist Archie L(eman) Cochrane (1909–88) who promoted the use of systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials]

Through the Leddy Library, you have access to Cochrane Reviews through Evidence Based Review via http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/ebm-reviews which allows you to simultaneously search the following:

• ACP Journal Club
• Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials
• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Cochrane Methodology Register
• Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects
• Health Technology Assessment
• National Health Service Economic Evaluation

It’s Friday and the last day of Open Access Week 2011 or, in the parlance of the day, #OccupyScholComm Week.

Why are librarians taking to the streets? Barbara Fister explains the current situation very well:

Here’s my version of an Occupy Wall Street cardboard sign. At my library, we’ve been seeing big price increases in two big journal packages that we really need. Again. This is what we’re paying for American Chemical Society journals

2010 – $29,705
2011 – $34,337
2012 – $41,741

This is what we’re paying for SAGE journals

2010 – $39,105
2011 – $41,442
2012 – $52,500

… I’m not upset that my budget isn’t growing. I’m upset that scholarly publishers think these price hikes are okay, that they can keep adding new journals to their title lists with the expectation that I will pay for them. I’m upset that big scholarly publishing is being run like a protection racket, and that both I and the faculty I serve are pawns in this game.

You can help us reclaim scholarly communication and make it available to everyone whether you are a professor, a researcher, a student or a librarian.

In honour of Open Access Week,  we’ve been highlighting videos that celebrate the efforts to make scholarship free, unrestricted, and online. If you’ve missed our previous videos, don’t worry as we have a short Open Access 101 video as one of today’s selections:

The above video was produced by Right to Research – a coalition that takes the student’s point of view when it comes to Open Access Publishing.

On that note, we want students to know that the The Leddy Library is working with other partners to make scholarly work free, unrestricted and online.  Notably, we host the following Open Access journals:

We support your right to research!

It’s day three of Open Access Week and today’s video selection is RiP: A remix manifesto from the National Film Board.

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film features appearances by:

• Gregg Gillis (better known as Girl Talk) an American musician specializing in mashup-style remixes, which often use a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create an entirely new track.
• Lawrence Lessig, an American academic and political activist, and a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. He is the author of Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
• Cory Doctorow, a Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction author. Doctorow is co-editor of the blog Boing Boing and is an activist in favor of reforming copyright laws. He is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Common themes in his work include digital rights management and file sharing.
• Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian musician and former Minister of Cultural Affairs who initiated pioneering programs in Brazil through a partnership with Creative Commons. As Minister, he sponsored a program called Culture Points, which gives grants to provide music technology and education to people living in poor areas of the country’s cities.[4]
• Dan O’Neill, an underground cartoonist and founder of the Air Pirates, a group which was famously sued by The Walt Disney Company for copyright infringement.
• Jammie Thomas, the single mom successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) at the Capitol v. Thomas case for Thomas’ illegal downloading. The single mother, who made US$36,000 a year, was ordered to pay US$222,220 in damages for making 24 songs available for download on the Kazaa file-sharing network.

The film itself is licensed under Creative Commons which means that you are so inclined, *you* can remix the movie.

Yesterday’s featured Open Access video was a short one clocking in at a minute. But if you have an hour between classes, we highly recommend suggest that you spend it watching Lawrence Lessig’s illuminating and entertaining presentation, The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge: Just How Badly We Have Messed This Up in honour of Open Access Week:

Lessig’s lecture was delivered at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland this April 2011 and the talk about is about open access to academic or scientific information but also covers Read/Write Re-mix culture with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Now in it’s fifth year, International Open Access Week is an opportunity for Leddy Library, as well as the greater academic and research community to continue to learn about and promote the potential benefits of Open Access.

Throughout this week, we’ll be posting videos about Open Access as well as related topics such as Creative Commons, and your right to remix! To start off, here’s a short one from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL):

Introduction to Open Access From CARL

Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher – which means authors no longer have the ability to redistribute their own work. CARL – in conjunction with SPARC, have created an Author Addendum that enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes that reflects Canadian copyright law.

Our hours for the weekend are the same but the Leddy Library will be closed October 10th for Thanksgiving.

FALL TERM HOURS
Tuesday Sept 6th ~ to ~ Friday Dec 2nd

Sunday 10:00am – 2:00am
Monday – Thursday 8:00am – 2:00 am
Friday 8:00am – 12 midnight
Saturday 10:00am – 12 midnight

October 10th ~ Thanksgiving ~ Library is CLOSED

The Leddy Library is in the process of updating its website to make it easier to use and explore.

To this end, we’ve re-designed our A to Z list of Research Tools to better showcase the over 300 research tools that Leddy provides to support research, learning and teaching on campus.

Not only that, we’ve added some extra plumbing to make it easier to remember and share what links connect you with these tools.

For example, if you wanted to share a great image library with the classmates that you are teamed with for an assignment, you can send them the link http://led.uwindsor.ca/artstor which will work both on-campus and off and from within CLEW.

And if you just want to send you team-mates a link to the page that describes this research tool, you could them the link http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/artstor which would bring them to this page:

October is one of the best parts of the year for baseball fans, and especially for Tiger fans this year. The playoffs are in full swing, and every swing of the bat or pitch thrown has more and more weight attached to it. If your team has not made the playoffs ( I am looking at you Jays fans), what better way to take your mind off it then to curl up with a great baseball book. The Leddy library has a wide variety of titles on the topic of Baseball, here are just a few of my favorites from the collection.

Dave Yott is an Invoicing clerk at the Leddy Library, and a lifetime baseball aficionado and Detroit Tiger Fan.

Few and Chosen; Defining Tigers Greatness Across the Eras by Lance Parrish
GV875 .D6 P37 2010

This book was written by the catcher from the 1984 world championship Tiger’s team Lance Parrish. Lance takes every position in baseball from catcher all the way to manager and ranks the top 5 Tigers at each position for all time. Although I might disagree with the authors decision not to include himself in the list of the top 5 Tiger catchers, I can appreciate his humility. An interesting reflection and comparison of the many great players that wore the old English D through the years, from the legendary players like Ty Cobb, to the forgotten heroes like Hoot Evers.

Moneyball:  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Micheal Lewis
GV880 .L49 2003

Micheal Lewis wrote one of the greatest books about the bond market in the 1980’s with his bestseller Liars Poker (another great read that the Leddy library has in its collection). In Moneyball he turns his attention to the game of baseball. It tells the story of the Oakland A’s embrace of non-traditional statistics to evaluate players, and how they were able to find inefficiencies in how baseball evaluated players to build a very strong team using a very limited payroll. This book is a fascinating insight into the world of statistics that drives the decisions of major league baseball teams. This book and A’s general manager Billy Beane’s philosophy have literally revolutionized how teams are built in the modern era.

Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big by Jose Canseco
GV865 .C313 A3 2005

Love him or hate him, you cannot talk about baseball in the so called “steroid era” without talking about Jose Canseco. When this book first came out he was ostracized by the baseball community for naming names at a time when Steroid use was still baseballs dirty little secret. Jose is no Shakespeare, but it is still a fascinating look into that era of baseball that he helped create.

Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso
PN6727 .S88 2007

If there is any pitcher from the history of baseball that I wish that I had the chance to see in person it would have been the great Negro league and MLB pitcher Satchel Paige. The stories of his baseball career and his lifelong fight against Jim Crow laws in the southern United States are recounted in this great graphic novel by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso. It is a great reminder of the great talent that baseball lost by its shameful segregation of the game in the 20th century.

You’re the Umpire; 139 Scenarios to Test Your Baseball Knowledge. By Wayne Stewart
GV876 .S74 2010

Baseball can often be a very weird and wonderful sport. Since baseball has been played for over 150 years it has had time to develop many complicated and nuanced rules. This book will test your knowledge of these rules by presenting you with real life scenarios from baseball history and making you guess what the right call should be. From the everyday to the unbelievable this book is a great read for any fan of the game of baseball.