By Melissa Rayner
Happy Birthday, America! To honor the soldiers who gave so much in order to defend the American flag, I’d like to take a look back at the history of our stars and stripes, using Smithsonian Collections Online as our guide.
Academic
New Reports and Enhancements to DemographicsNow
Posted on June 30, 2015
Both DemographicsNow! and DemographicsNow! Business and People have new tools and new EZ reporting great for start-ups and small business.
Enhancements to DemographicsNow include the following:
- New EZ Report: Sizing Your Market— Calculates the market size based on geography selections and expenditure variables to see which local areas may have a need for a certain type of business.
- User inputs up to 25 geographies and a customized Census Area Projections and Estimates (CAPE) variable tree with current year estimates and 5 year projections.
- The output report contains:
- Bar chart comparing the average expenditure ($) of user selected geographies
- Number of households in the geography
- Average expenditure per household
- Market Size
- Users can now save and upload report templates with custom variables.
- Users can edit report titles that display on the preview screen and the downloaded version of a custom report.
- Link to CAPE variables spreadsheet.
- Thematic coloring default turned off.
Google Sign In and Tools Available within Gale In Context Resources
Posted on June 25, 2015
Exciting News! Now available through Gale’s In Context suite of products is the ability for students to seamlessly login using Google Account credentials. The Gale In Context products that will provide this new Google functionality include Biography, Canada, Opposing Viewpoints, Science, Student Resources, U.S. History and World History. Now a Google for Education* partner, this new relationship supports Gale’s efforts to evolve from a traditional library content provider into the ed tech space by providing the educational technology, instructional tools and content to help our users be successful in school, work and life.
Read moreGoogle Sign In and Tools Available within Gale In Context Resources
In Other News: Race
A look at a current news item through the lens of different titles available on GVRL to find research inspiration.
By Michelle Eickmeyer
A fair skinned woman with a weave claims to be black. A white kid with twisted views killed nine innocent blacks while attending a Bible study. The president said the n-word. A lot of people are talking about a flag. The last two weeks have been filled with conversations of race and what it means in America.
Student & Instructor Perceptions on Libraries and Research
By Jennifer Albers-Smith
When it comes to student and instructor perceptions about academic libraries and research, some interesting insights are revealed – as well as lot of questions.
In spring 2015, Gale’s parent company, Cengage Learning, issued its Engagement Insights survey to some 3,000 students and nearly 700 professors, gathering feedback on different topics including how both audiences valued the library, how they often they took advantage of its resources and more.
Read moreStudent & Instructor Perceptions on Libraries and Research
Celebrate with Gale: 800 Years of the Magna Carta
By Bethany Dotson
The Magna Carta, proclaimed at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, is 800 years old this week. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter of Liberty, is the document that King John signed, accepting restraints on the monarchy. It remains a cornerstone of modern English and American law. During the American Revolution, “the English used the Magna Carta to support their claim of parliamentary sovereignty, whereas Americans distilled from it the principle of ‘no taxation without representation.’”[1]
It’s no surprise, then, that using Term Frequency tool in Gale Artemis: Primary Sources, searching through the 26 collections currently cross-searchable in this experience (including Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the Making of Modern Law collections, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, and more), I was able to isolate a surge in the popularity of the term “Magna Carta” in documents published between approximately 1749 and 1796. The high point? Fifteen out of the 16,490 documents in Artemis: Primary Sources published in 1767 contain this term.
New Titles Added to the InfoTrac Collections in May 2015
Posted on June 11, 2015
The titles below have been recently added and can be located in the mentioned InfoTrac product using Basic or Advanced Search forms. Titles can be found via Browse Publications within two weeks. For complete coverage information please see the product title lists.
Read moreNew Titles Added to the InfoTrac Collections in May 2015
Feminism in Cuba: New Content Added
By Bethany Dotson
With the re-opening of U.S./Cuban diplomatic relations—and the recent failure of the fourth round of negotiations—Cuba is experiencing a new wave of interest from intellectuals and the general public alike.
With this interest in mind, Gale has added new supplemental content to the Archives Unbound collection Feminism in Cuba: the journal Minerva, Revista Quincenal Dedica a la Mujer de Color, or Minerva, Quarterly Journal Dedicated to the Woman of Color, published between 1888 and 1914. Cited in recent academic publications as diverse as Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), Between the Lines: Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2011), Cuba’s Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750-2000 (Indiana University Press, 2015), and Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Minerva is useful not only for its study of feminism in Cuba but also for Afro-Cuban nationalist ideology and identity, racial politics and culture in the Cuban Republic, and much more.
In Other News: Caitlyn Jenner & Gender Identity
A look at a current news item through the lens of different titles available on GVRL to find research inspiration.
By Michelle Eickmeyer
When Bruce Jenner sat down with Diane Sawyer, he openly discussed a battle he has been fighting for most of his life. And on 24 April, he let the world in on his secret: Bruce Jenner, American hero athlete and reality pseudo-star, is transgender. Though Jenner is an actual stranger to most of us, many people do feel that they know Bruce. They may have seen him on TV, or on a magazine cover. They may have rooted for him all those years ago as he seemed to embody America’s battle against the USSR. Because of this unique position and circumstance, Jenner’s revelations and transition are special. For the first time, perhaps ever, most of the country (if not the world) can truly say they know someone who identifies as transgender. On ` June, the world said goodbye to Bruce, and hello to Caitlyn Jenner. She is who she has always been, and is now sharing her battle to be herself, and her appearance, with the world.
Caitlyn is the most recent in a growing list of main-stream transgender people. In 2007, Candis Cayne turned heads as Billy Baldwin’s mistress for 11 episodes on ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, marking the first time a trans character appeared for more than a single episode on prime time American television. Chaz Bono began his transition in 2008, after suffering for years with the press. Laverne Cox, one of the stars of Orange is the New Black, became the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time Magazine (May 2014) for an article titled “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Andreja Pejic (Instagram) was the first transgender model to appear in Vogue magazine while Hari Nef (Instagram) signed with modeling agency IMF earlier this year, a first for the powerhouse agency. There are others, famous and not, making changes every day.
Less 1/3 of 1% of the U.S. population identify as transgender (Source). Historically, this group is the recipients of an extremely disproportionate amount of violence, 20% of murders and 40% of violence by police. (Source) More recent statistics for the first quarter of 2014 show that 10% of violent crimes were committed against trans kids under 18. Kids.They were beaten, stabbed, stoned, shot, hanged, strangled, and dismembered. (Source) Sometimes by strangers; sometimes by family. Too often, they kill themselves.
In Other News: Bribery
A look at a current news item through the lens of different Gale electronic resources.
By Michelle Eickmeyer
Boy, oh boy. American’s have an interesting relationship with soccer. For decades, soccer has held an unyielding grip on, well, every other country in the world. Though there have been the exceptional fanatic interspersed, soccer has largely remained relegated to a kid’s sport. Yes, most children play soccer. No, most adults couldn’t name 4 teams. Until 2014. (See my previous post here.)
During the 2010 World Cup, held in South Africa, 34% of American’s watched at least some part of a match. And we didn’t watch too much. (Source) But in 2014? We were ready. A lot of us watched, and we watched a lot of the matches. Thirty-nine percent more of us watched 33 percent more. (Source)
Why is soccer’s time “now” in America? One theory is that all those kids who grew up playing soccer, are now adults and are putting their time and money where their hearts have always been. Another believes American’s have begun to embrace the opportunity for a “great and exciting” game to end with a very low score.
When the U.S. led the charge to investigate corruption within FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, it raised a few eyebrows. Why is America getting involved was asked by several people, but with varying tone. ‘You don’t even like soccer’ on one side, and ‘finally but how come someone who cared more didn’t step up a long time ago’ from the other. The most frustrating response, in my opinion — as an American who likes soccer — was from Russian president Putin who said we were once again meddling in world affairs which were not our concern and somehow tried to get Edward Snowden involved. (Source) That is the sole statement I have read expressing this (paranoid?) opinion; let’s leave it alone. Other voices from around the wold have been more supportive, including this BBC article.
Obviously, no one at the DOJ consulted me when they planned this action, but there are several reasons which make it easy to understand how/why we chose to act when others did not. We like a fair fight. We aren’t afraid to say no or ask tough questions, even if we have to ask them of our friends. We don’t like being taken advantage of. And, perhaps most importantly, we can sometimes see things differently because we don’t have years of “just accepting it” like many other countries.