Encountering a book once owned, signed, or inscribed by a distinguished person, is in some way encountering the person who signed it or closing the distance to only “a few handshakes away”. Holding the very same volume, read by someone we admire, turning the same pages, can become a transformative and inspirational experience. Books such Read More

Scattered throughout Catholic University’s Special Collections are a range of resources related to the history of Mexico. We are happy to offer a new Library Guide to those materials. Here are a few of the highlights: The National Catholic Welfare Conference, forerunner of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, became involved in U.S.-Mexican affairs just after its Read More

A finding aid has been completed for the recently processed Papers of Fr. Paulinus Bellet, OSB, a distinguished Coptic scholar. These Papers are one of several important Coptic archival collections housed in the Semitics/ICOR Library. Fr. Bellet (1913-1987) was born in the Catalonia region of northern Spain. He became a monk of the Abbey of Read More

Last week, CUA Research Day had interesting research on mindfulness. As we all gear up (pay heed to that motion metaphor!) for the end of an academic semester, here are some readings on note taking and attention; mind mapping; and the art of slow! Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away And there are two hypotheses Read More

Join us on Friday, April 15 for the inaugural CUA Research Day! What do all the CUA Research Day presenters and poster participants have in common? They started with a question and they did research! The recently published Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015 findings include that while the discovery process has many access points, Read More

Scholarly communications can get bogged down in discussions of metrics, publishing models, open access,  promotion & tenure, and funder mandates. These discussions are important but miss that essential ingredient that makes the world spin and life worth living – passion! The first CUA Physics Department Colloquium of February featured Raffaele Resta, Ph.D. speaking on Are Polarization Read More

2015 is the four hundredth anniversary of the novel Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel Cervantes. This article by Arturo Conde (NBC News) Cervantes Don Quixote Has become a Handbook for Life likens Don Quixote to a superhero – “a man who created a new identity, made his own armored costume, and fought to Read More

There should be a course for this! Open Access does not mean free. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) defines Open Access as “unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse.” The Open Access movement founding is often attributed to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and Peter Suber has written and presented in detail about Open Access. Read More

Open access and social networking readings seem to be coalescing around the “idea” of reading carefully! The Pew Research Center documents that usage of social media is increasing.  Two other articles question whether social media or open access have any impact on scholarly communications. Social Media and Its Impact on Medical Research by Phil Davis Read More

US Department of Energy Public Access Plan was released on July 24, 2014. [Plan] The Department of Energy (DOE) has implemented their own Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (DOE PAGES – Beta) as a repository for federally funded research. In US Department of Energy Announces Public Access Plan (David Crotty, Aug. 4, 2014), Read More