Foreign Policy's Beach Books for Wonks

Foreign Policy's June 10th issue includes a nice list of books (fiction and non fiction) suggested by FP "favorite contributors" - this link will go to a one-page listing of the suggestions. Once you have a few titles, look them up in WSU WorldCat then its time to pour the lemonade and start reading! On my list? Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (the current "one book one Twitter" selection),  Swamplandia, and a re-reading of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (and then I have to finish Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies...and read Physics for Future Presidents (WSU's Common Reading book for next fall, and then...) 

College Students and Information Overload

Alison Head and Mike Eisenberg (Of the University of Washington's Information School) head Project Information Literacy, the source of the info in this Seattle Times op/ed. From the opinion piece: "'Or, as one student in social sciences we interviewed told us, "College is about knowing how to look at a problem in multiple ways and how to think about it analytically — now, that's something I'll use in my life.'"

College students eager to learn but need help negotiating information overload |

Zotero Class: June 14th (Managing Your References/Citations)

Upcoming Drop-In Zotero class
Tuesday, June 14th 1pm-3:30pm, Terrell 105 (just inside from the CUB tunnel)

More later in the summer? Contact me if you'd like to set one up.

Also, if anyone is interested in EndNote as an alternative, my colleague Jane Scales teaches those classes (see summer schedule below). Sign up here 

What's Zotero? 

Collecting, Managing and Citing Reference Resources with Zotero:

A Hands-On Workshop

This hands-on class will introduce you to Zotero, a free, open source alternative to reference manager systems such as EndNote and ProCite. Zotero allows you to easily save webpages and articles found in library subscription databases such as Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, JSTOR, and PubMed, as well as bibliographic details, PDFs or other files, comments/notes, and indexing terms. Saved PDFs are searchable. When you are ready to write, you can use Zotero to integrate your references into your work in many citation styles using MS Word or OpenOffice. References can be backed up, and can be shared between computers and even with other people over the Web.

National Academies Press Goes Fully Open Access

The National Academies Press is an amazing resource - it publishes the work of the various National Academies - organizations of academic and other experts (some WSU faculty ahve been elected to various National Academies). Its not all sciency science, either - their publications include many that are social science-oriented, or interdisciplinary (some general topic categories include Behavioral and Social Sciences, Conflict and Security Issues, and Policy for Science and Technology). They have made a good chunk of their works available at no cost in the past, and are now extending the policy to their full catalog. This is quality stuff.
 

"There's no such thing as a know-it-all." (via Indexed)

via Indexed