What Some Students Have Said About Library Research

From the ACRLog a report on a "program featuring five of their students answering a variety of questions about using the library, their research behavior, and their use of technology".

HT Stephen Abram at Stephens Lighthouse

How to Handle All of Your Money

From the U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission comes a resource called mymoney.gov. This site has resources "from across the spectrum of federal agencies that deal with financial issues and markets."

Heading Out Into the Sun?

Here is a collection of articles and information on suntan products, sunscreens, and tanning from the FDA.

Ever Wonder About the Accuracy of Health News?

Here is a source that reviews news about health. According to the information on the Website Health News Reviews is about:

• improving the accuracy of news stories about medical treatments, tests and procedures
• helping consumers evaluate the evidence for and against new ideas in health care.

Persuasive Presentations

From the FastCompany website:osh Gordon, author of the new book Presentations That Change Minds has identified 14 core practices used by persuasive speakers in conference and meeting settings. Additional research shows that the top five practices are used by only half of business leaders surveyed.

The top five persuasive strategies:

• Sharing facts: 73.5%
• Offering a solution: 62.1%
• Sharing a new idea: 52.8%
• Telling a story: 51.6%
• Changing a perception: 50.9%

The remaining practices include humor, creating excitement, audience involvement, building trust, inspiration, building a financial case, creating an emotional appeal, getting competitive, and overcoming hostility.

Changing Nature of the Library Catalog

From a recent Library of Congress Report: "The library catalog is such an asset. Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of other discovery tools, and the catalog represents a shrinking proportion of the universe of scholarly information. The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift. "

Website to Rate News Coverage of Health Issues

Starting Monday, a new Web site plans to rate the way top newspapers, magazines and other media outlets, including The Associated Press, cover health issues.

Access to the site and its findings, HealthNewsReview, http://www.healthnewsreview.org/ is free and open to consumers.

It was created by University of Minnesota journalism professor Gary Schwitzer, who said the hope is the site will help consumers "improve their critical thinking about claims in health care."

A team of 20 reviewers from universities and clinics across the country will rate articles on a scale of one to five stars and post comments.

While Schwitzer said he thinks the quality of health care journalism is improving, it still sometimes falls short. He said stories sometimes fail to spell out such things as the availability of a new treatment or the strength of the evidence behind a new study.

Web Based Applications

Web based applicatons such as spreadsheets and word processors are becoming more common. Typically the applications are free. One such group of applications is produced by Zoho. The word processing and spreadsheet programs are free and they are working on other applications.

US Food Consumption Trends

Several reports from different agencies and organizations prsented ont he website of the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center.