Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Penn State Great Valley will host a weeklong slate of activities from Feb. 20 to 23 to mark National Engineers Week. Penn State Great Valley is one of hundreds of engineering societies, government agencies, corporations, businesses, and universities hosting events during National Engineers Week, which was founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers. The campus will celebrate with the following activities:

— Monday, Feb. 20: 5 to 6 p.m., “Career Lessons Learned,” Joe Trench, executive vice president, Maritime Systems and Sensors, Locked Martin Corp.

— Tuesday, Feb. 21: 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., Engineering and Information Science Information Session for those who would like to learn more about engineering and information technology degree programs and certificates at Penn State Great Valley; 7 to 8:30 p.m., “Coming of Age in the ’60s,” an evening with award-winning poet Sonia Sanchez, brought to the public by the campus’ Diversity Action Council;

— Wednesday, Feb. 22: 2 to 3:15 p.m., “Health Systems Engineering,” Dave Cowan, executive-in-residence, Institute for Health Systems, School of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology; 5 to 6 p.m., meet the authors of “Antipatterns: Identification, Refactoring and Management,” Philip Laplante, associate professor, software engineering, Penn State Great Valley, and Colin Neill, associate professor, software engineering, Penn State Great Valley,

— Thursday, Feb. 23: 5 to 6 p.m., student and faculty mixer, during which participants can celebrate the conclusion of the week’s events in the main lobby with faculty members and students.

Ongoing activities include a poster session by faculty and engineering videos in the lobby of the Safeguard Scientifics Building.

All events are free to the public. For information, call (610) 725-5382.

University Libraries is pleased to announce that MultiSearch is now available under Articles and More on the LIAS homepage http://www.libraries.psu.edu

MultiSearch is a new search tool available from the Penn State Libraries. It enables users to simultaneously search various combinations of databases and resources, and then receive the results in a unified display. At any stage, users can link to the native interface of any resource to use advanced search features or services offered directly by the information provider. A special feature, MySpace, enables users to customize their search environment, create a local catalog of findings, save search histories, and define and schedule alerts to inform of relevant new materials. MultiSearch is a component of MetaLib™.

A recent reorganization will change Nancy L. Eaton’s title of dean of University Libraries to dean of Libraries and Scholarly Communications at Penn State. In December 2005, Provost Rodney Erickson announced that the Penn State University Press would report to Eaton. The new organizational home was based on recommendations of Eva Pell, vice president for Research and dean of The Graduate School (to whom the Press reported); Eaton, dean of University Libraries; and Sanford Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press. Erickson stated that it will create a stronger collaboration that will serve the faculty and the University well into the future.

Historically, the University Libraries have been represented on the editorial board for the Penn State University Press. Activities of the last several years forged even stronger relationships between the two units, including joint establishment of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing; a jointly published reprint series; collaborative digitization projects; and development with Cornell University Libraries of electronic journal publishing software (DPubS).

“This collaboration will put both units in a position to partner with faculty in the utilization of emerging information technologies to provide new alternatives for the dissemination of research and scholarship,” Eaton said.

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On Tuesday, 31 January, IEEE will implement a maintenance release to the IEEE Xplore digital library. As a result, users will experience approximately three hours of downtime on that date, between 10AM and 1PM EST. IEEE has also posted a message on the IEEE Xplore home page to alert your users to the downtime.

This release adds more convenient links to request permission to reuse content, links to publication home pages from tables of contents and search results to improve navigation, and other updates.

Penn State Information Technology Services (ITS) has announced that an important security patch was issued by Microsoft on Jan. 5 for the following Windows products:

Windows XP,
Windows 2003 and
Windows 2000 (SP4).

This patch addresses a Windows Metafile (WMF) vulnerability identified in late December. Both Microsoft and the University urge all affected computer users to apply the patch immediately. The patch addresses a defect in the software that allows images to be viewed in Windows. The vulnerability is such that full control over a computer could be achieved by a remote intruder — for any purpose. A computer that is not patched can become infected if the user is tricked into viewing a malicious image, or automatically without the user’s knowledge when he or she is viewing/previewing certain image files (depending on the browser/viewer in use). Active exploits that target the vulnerability have occurred worldwide and some instances have been identified at Penn State.

Read the full story at http://live.psu.edu/story/15394

“Welcome to the Benjamin Franklin web portal: a comprehensive, one-stop site that includes carefully curated educational resources, Franklin’s own writings and proverbs, and tens of thousands of websites scattered throughout cyberspace. Befitting this founding father’s leadership in establishing the country’s first public library, this free site, in honor of his Tercentenary, is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.”
http://ben.clusty.com/

Did You Know: 18.7 million watched Penn State in the Orange Bowl
Friday, January 6, 2006
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Did you know… Penn State’s triple overtime, 26-23 victory over the Florida State Seminoles in the Orange Bowl was the most-watched television program in America on Tuesday night, according to Nielsen Media Research? The contest drew an estimated 18.7 million viewers. Penn State is no stranger to large national viewing audiences, either. According to Fiesta Bowl records, the Nittany Lions’ win over Miami in the Jan. 2, 1987 Fiesta Bowl — which gave Penn State its second national title — was watched by more than 52 million people, remaining to this day the most-watched college football game in history. By comparison, 34 million watched this year’s national title game between Texas and USC.

http://live.psu.edu/story/15325

Penn State Great Valley earns top business school accreditation
Tuesday, January 3, 2006
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Malvern, Pa. — Penn State Great Valley’s master’s degree programs in business administration and leadership recently earned accreditation from The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), effective Dec. 19. Founded in 1916, AACSB is the premier accrediting organization for educational programs in business administration. Only 15 percent of business schools worldwide — including four campuses at Penn State — have achieved this level of excellence.

To become accredited, business programs must meet a wide range of quality standards relating to strategic management of resources, interactions of faculty and students in the educational process, and achievement of learning goals in degree programs. During the multi-year process, Penn State Great Valley was visited and evaluated by business school deans with detailed knowledge of management education, applying accreditation standards that are widely accepted in the educational community.

“Penn State Great Valley has been meeting the educational needs of working adults in Greater Philadelphia for four decades,” said Diane Disney, chancellor of the campus. “We are indeed gratified that the quality of that education has been officially recognized.”

Penn State will be holding an open house for prospective students on its Great Valley campus from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 5.

http://live.psu.edu/story/15283