Happy Halloween!

What does Harry Houdini and the Protestant religion have in common? Find out more about this day in history.

Read up on some ghoulish myths and legends, watch spooky videos & find out who is said to haunt the white house at history.com.

Or, see which halls are said to be haunted right here on campus at Haunted Places in New York.

New York State Library Joins IDS Project

With the addition of the newest member to our Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project, SUNY Geneseo students will now have access to all the great resources available from the New York State Library. The IDS Project is a rapid resource-sharing system made up of 35 public and private academic libraries whose mission is to provide users with easy access to the information resources of the participating libraries.

Milne Library is proud to be a member of the IDS Project, providing our students with the resources needed to achieve academic success.

For more information visit Milne Library's IDS Frequently Asked Questions page.

The scoop on iTunes U

iTunes U is a dedicated area within the iTunes store featuring free content such as lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and campus tours. iTunes U was created in 2007 in collaboration with colleges and universities with the intent to give free access to educational materials.

Apple's vice president, Eddy Cue,notes that "Education is a lifelong pursuit and we’re pleased to give everyone the ability to download lectures, speeches and other academic content for free."

Content can be downloaded directly to an iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. iTunes U contains over 75,000 files from top universities, museums, and public media organizations from all over the world including; Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke and MIT.

A 2007 news article Is iTunes U for You? by MIT physics professor, Walter Lewin, sums up this new product well by noting, "Very few people have the ability to get a degree from MIT as students, so why not open the world to our best courses?"

For more information about iTunes U visit http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html.

Do you know where to vote?

Google just released a tool to help you find out where to vote. Just type in your address and a map and driving directions to your voting location is displayed. Click here to check out this useful tool!

This is an example of a mashup where two or more sources are "mashed" together to create a hybrid web application. In this case, a list of U.S. voting locations is mashed-up with the Google Maps web application. A great resource for finding and keeping up with the latest mashups is http://www.mashupsfeed.com/.

Check out Milne’s Collaboration Stations for your next group project!

Collaboration and group projects can encompass a major portion of a college student’s course work these days. Milne Library’s collaboration stations are a great way for groups to work on projects together. Why huddle over a small computer screen, when you can hook up your laptop to an a large LCD screen for easy viewing by everyone in your group? Feel free to check out a laptop from the Circulation Desk or use your own.

Collaboration Stations are located in the study area across from the Circulation Desk. Click here to see a video of how to use them.

Milne Library Hours for Fall Break

Milne Library will have reduced hours over fall break, starting Friday, October 10. Regular hours will resume on Tuesday, October 14.

October Break

Friday, October 10	7:30 AM - 4:00 PM
Saturday, October 11	Noon - 6:00 PM
Sunday, October 12	Noon - 6:00 PM
Monday, October 13	8:00 AM - 9:00 PM
Tuesday, October 14	7:30 AM - 1:00 AM

Milne Library Welcomes New Librarian, Tim Bowersox

Tim serves as Milne Library's new Information Delivery Services Librarian. He earned his MLIS from Kent State University in 2008 and is a 2006 graduate of the College of Wooster, with a B.A. in Philosophy. Prior to joining SUNY Geneseo, Tim was a Senior Library Associate at the University of Akron School of Law Library. Tim and his wife, Christine, who is also pursuing a Masters Degree in Library Science and a career in libraries, currently reside in Rochester.

Support Free Access to Information - Open Access Day

October 14th will be the world's first Open Access Day, with students and scholars coming together to support free access to scholarly information. It is sponsored by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for Free Culture, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS).

What is Open Access?

Most of the scholarly (and popular) journal articles (online and in print) that you use for your papers and projects had to be purchased from money in the Milne Library budget, supported by your tuition and state aid.

Some scholarly material is available for free to anyone. When this happens it is called "Open Access".

Open Access can take many forms. Sometimes all the content of a journal is available for free, sometimes just the older material is available for free. Sometimes authors can post a copy of their article online for free, even if the published journal article isn't available for free. A more detailed discussion of the different types of open access is available in this Wikipedia article.

For graduates of SUNY Geneseo and the general public - those who are not associated with an organization (like a university) that can purchase scholarly material - the only access they have to the scholarly literature is when publishers follow some kind of open access model.

Why does Open Access Matter?

Open access to scholarly material - especially in science, medicine, and technology - is vital to scholarly enterprise.

Without open access, many primary care doctors can't easily keep up with new developments in their fields.

Without open access, patients can't fully participate in the diagnoses and treatment of their illnesses.

Without open access, researchers have limited access to the work of their peers, limiting discovery and scientific progress.

Without open access, members of the public can't see the results of tax-payer funded research (which accounts for a large portion of scientific research).

What can you do?

1. Be aware of where your information is coming from. Is the journal article you need available via Open Access, or are you using resources that Milne Library has paid for. It can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference when you are on campus, since you are often automatically allowed access.

2. Thinking of publishing the research you did over the summer? Consider finding an Open Access journal (like those listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals), or retaining the copyright to your article so you can post it online (called "self-archiving").
3. Support the NIH public access mandate, directing NIH funded researchers to make their articles available online for free within 12 months of their original publication. The original directive, approved by congress in early 2008, may be under attack from for-profit publishers.

For more information about student involvement in the Open Access movement, see Open Students.