Txtng : the Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal

“Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing – and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.”
[Oxford University Press]

A reminder of an upcoming workshop of interest to MA and PhD students:

Phinished! How to Access Completed Dissertations & Theses

Wondering what a PHinisheD dissertation looks like? We now have access to tens of thousands of dissertations online from universities throughout North America and beyond. Learn to search for dissertations completed at UBC and elsewhere by program, topic or advisor. Then download the full text. We’ll use this guide: FAQ: Dissertations and Theses. And we’ll look at the website www.phinished.org for a bit of practical advice.

Wed 19 Nov 2008
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Koerner Library : Room 217
The session is free, but sign up here.

You’ve likely heard about RefWorks, the online citation management tool that allows you to save references for your research paper from online databases such as AnthropologyPlus and Google Scholar, and then formats your paper in the citation style of your choice. Perhaps you’ve had a chance to get started with RefWorks, but need some help in using its many features.

This Wednesday is your chance to find out more! Come to Koerner Library for a RefWorks session from 10:00am-312:00pm.

Workshop is free, but please register here.

Karen Hinton of Proquest will be offering training on the suite of Community of Scholars (COS) research tools the UBC Library, in partnership with the UBC Office of Research Services, has recently acquired on behalf of the UBC community.

When: Tuesday, November 4, 2008; 3:00 – 5:00pm, Koerner Library, Room 217.
Register for the session here.

The COS suite of research databases includes the following:

COS Funding Opportunities, the world’s largest compendium of available funding sources, with more than 25,000 current opportunities for grants, fellowships, and awards

COS Scholar Universe, an editorially controlled, keyword-searchable database with nearly 2 million profiles of scholars.

COS Papers Invited, a database of calls for papers for conferences and journal special editions.

COS Expertise, a profile management system that enables institutions to keep track of their faculty’s expertise and research work, with first-person profiles maintained by the faculty themselves.