Bobst Launches LibX (Browser Extension for Researchers & Scholars)

Bobst library has recently launched a web browser plugin which "lets scholars connect to resources offered by their library." According to a recent article published in Connect, NYU's Information Technology newsletter, "The NYU version of LibX allows you to:

• Access NYU's collection of books and electronic resources alongside search results in Google, Yahoo Search, Amazon, and WorldCat
• Highlight text on any web page and search for the highlighted term in NYU Libraries' resources; a simple right-click of the mouse enables you to search BobCat, NYU databases, WorldCat and more"

LibX also embeds an NYU search button in your browser, "making it a simple matter to conduct a keyword search of Bobcat for the desired item."

For more information on LibX, check out the full article, here: http://www.nyu.edu/its/connect/w11/libx.html

The LibX plugin can be downloaded from the library website, here: http://nyu.libguides.com/tools

Grad Students: Learning to Read Again (via Chronicle of Higher Ed)

Robin Nagle suggests our students take a look at the article "Learning to Read, Again," which was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education this weekend. It begins as follows:

Learning to Read, Again

By Gary Alan Fine

Academics take reading for granted. We learned to read in first grade, and those skills have served us well ever since. Like fish in water, we hardly notice the transparent medium in which we swim.

Writing is a skill that we are continuously taught, a skill that is graded. But reading is different. When academics have trouble understanding texts—and we do—the problem is usually with texts and with our background knowledge, not the act of reading itself. And when we do have a reading problem, we tend to medicalize it as dyslexia, suggesting that proper reading is normal and natural—especially for advanced scholars. That tendency is not particular to higher education, however. After the elementary years, schools pay little attention to the mechanisms of reading. We read as if all texts, even the most complex, were Dick and Jane.

Draper student to present at Stony Brook Manhattan Recycling Conference

Draper student Ji Hyun Lee will be presenting a paper entitled "Pastiche: Recycling Animals and Language in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake" on September 25th at Stony Brook Manhattan's upcoming Recycling conference.

The conference is being held by the university's Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and is open to the public. More information on attending can be found on their website. If you are a Draper student also presenting at this conference, please let us know!

Ji Hyun will also have an article appear in York University's Strategies of Critique. Her article title is "(An)Archiving after the Apocalypse: The Death Drive, Representation, and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilization in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz." The issue containing this article will come out at the end of the year, and a previous issue is available online at https://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/socj/index.

10 Tips on How to Write Less (via The Chronicle of Higher Ed)

An article of interest that Robin Nagle wants to share with the Draper community:

I urge you to read this. The author has loads of good advice about writing -- what it is, what it isn't, how to stress about it less, how to get more of it done. 

http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

-Robin

Three Books for Surviving Grad School (via NPR)

Draper's Director, Robin Nagle, would like to share the following: 

Help from an unlikely source? Three books for surviving grad school, courtesy of NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125856586&sc=nl&cc=bn-20100902