Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

Robert Zatorre, co-editor of The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, will be on campus for a lecture on April 2.

Stop by the library for a look at some related reading now on display in the front window. Although this book and other closely related titles are currently checked out from Oberlin's library, you can find other copies available through OhioLINK.

Downtown bookstores offer copies of Zatorre's work, along with two other fascinating books for the general reader : Daniel Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music and Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain, by Oliver Sacks.

Read a chapter or two, even if you think you don't have time - it's good for the brain! Possibly even better if you take a break and sing or play an instrument in between chapters...

Spring Break is coming! Need access from off-campus?

The sun is shining and Spring Break is just one day away - surely a better outlook than yesterday's drizzle which became falling slush before the snow set in once again. I hope everyone who plans to leave campus for a well-deserved week of relaxation and recreation does that just - but if you must also squeeze in a bit of research and need access to our subscription resources (how could you go a week without reading Nature and Science online?), remember to visit this page for login instructions. Easier still, download the VPN client from the CIT web page and launch that for seamless access to everything the library offers online.

Birds of the World - on our shelves

We have now received 11 volumes of the acclaimed Handbook of the Birds of the World, published by the Spanish publishing house Lynx Edicions. This is a monumental work, gorgeously illustrated with color plates, and certain to be a valued source of important information for decades. We will continue to receive volumes as they are published, as a wonderful complement to the Birds of North America (available online and in print).

Read reviews of published volumes from various journals archived in the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center. Wikipedia provides a very nice overview of the set, complete with all contents of volumes published to date. The most recently received volumes are on display with the new books, others are in the reference section.

Image taken from the jacket cover of vol. 8: Broadbills to Tapaculos, illustrated by Frances Jutglar. Black-and-red Broadbill (Cymbirhynchus macrorhynchos).

African plants photographed and desribed in Aluka

Aluka.org is a new resource for the library, offering many digital collections at one site. Its mission is to build a "digital library of scholarly sources from and about Africa." Aluka is an international collaboration, bringing together in one digital resource materials that are archived around the world. Read more about Aluka and explore the plant database. Enjoy the picture of the day, which frequently highlights a plant from the archive, including the Pretoria African Plant Slide Collection, just one of many collections contributed to Aluka.

Dragons and Damsels! Flies, that is... in OdonataCentral

OdonataCentral, sponsored by the Texas Natural Science Center of UT Austin, is just about the coolest thing since a new insect order was discovered in 2002. If you are an Odonata enthusiast (and why wouldn't you be?) this will become a favorite way to view dragonflies and damselflies without leaving your keyboard. The distribution maps are searchable and interactive, so you can locate, within seconds, all reported occurrences of a given species within a certain locale. Give it a try! In addition to the maps, OdonataCentral offers hundreds of amazing photographs (Red Saddlebags is just one example of exquisite detail), detailed identification records, an extensive bibliography of journal articles with its own search interface, back issues of the journals Bulletin of American Odonatology and Argia, and a well-organized list of related Web sites.

Thanks to Dr. John C. Abbot, Curator of Entomology, Texas Natural Science Center of University of Texas, Austin, for making such a fine and reliable source of information openly accessible, and to all contributors of OdonataCentral for building the database. John Abbott is author of Dragonflies and Damselflies of Texas and South-Central United States, which you can borrow through OhioLINK.