Penn State Great Valley Library Blog

Going Green: Big Ideas, Small Steps

The Delaware Valley Chapter of ACRL’s Spring Program will be held:

WHEN: Friday, April 24, 2009

WHERE: Penn State Great Valley campus, Malvern, PA

Featured speakers are:
Erika Linke, ACRL National President
Frederick Stoss, University at Buffalo

Afternoon session: The Green Library Experience: Building One, Living In One
with panel members Henry Pisciotta, Bruce Reid, and Ronald Servello, all from Penn State University Libraries.

Registration form available at: http://www.acrldvc.org/brochure/spring09b.pdf

Check out the Program blog at: http://acrldvcspringprogram09.wordpress.com/ for information on public transportation, carpooling, and other announcements.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter provide consumers with a venue for voicing opinions, allowing management an almost immediate gauge of their services and products. This change is on the verge of affecting the employee side of management as well. According to Wall Street Journal Blogger, Gary Hamel, today’s youth having grown up with Facebook, will expect management to communicate via social networking. Hamel sees this change as having the potential to affect how management deals with employees in twelve ways ranging from: All ideas having equal footing, to Contributions counting more than credentials, and even Hierarchies being natural not prescribed. For a complete listing of all twelve expectations along with Hamel’s reasoning, click on the link to http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-facebook-generation-vs-the-fortune-500/

If you are interested in knowing the latest information about populations in Pennsylvania you might want to consult the July 1, 2008 Pennsylvania County Estimates and the 2008 Metro and Micro Area Population Estimates released earlier this month by the US Census Bureau. Read more about this recent release in the PaSDC’s Research Brief, available online at:
http://pasdc.hbg.psu.edu/pasdc/data_and_information/briefs/RB031909.pdf

Penn State Researcher & Electrical Engineering Professor, Craig Grimes, leads a team which is working on a device that converts carbon dioxide into methane using water vapor and sunlight. Methane or natural gas is a common fuel. By converting carbon dioxide into methane at unprecedented rates, this sun-powered machine has the potential of reducing our carbon footprint (a contributor to global warming) as well as creating fuel. A provisional patent on this work has been filed. For more details read Penn State Live – Sunlight turn carbon dioxide to Methane at http://live.psu.edu/story/38108 .

The Reading Education Assistance Dogs (READ) program brings kids together with dogs to improve reading and communication skills. By taking therapy dogs to libraries and schools, READ provides gentle, loving animals to be listeners for kids. Launched in 1999, this comprehensive reading program is currently in place through out the country and is seeing student improvements in reading and communication levels. Bill Moyers described this program as something which “pierces the mundane to arrive at the marvelous.”
For more information click on the link to READ http://www.therapyanimals.org/read/

The federal report “Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2007; Graduation Rates, 2001 & 2004 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2007,” is available online at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009155.pdf