The Research and Instruction Librarians (Barb Bolser, Cindy Fuller, Joe Hardenbrook, and Amanda Pippitt) are busily preparing for this semester's research instruction sessions. The librarians will spend the equivalent of one week's worth of class time with each of the 28 sections of CWRR2 during the semester. Research instruction focuses on how to retrieve and evaluate information using the Library catalog and other databases, and how to evaluate material retrieved from print resources, databases and the Internet.

This semester also marks the introduction of the Information Literacy Skills Assessment. The off-sequence CWRR1 classes are the first set of students that will be doing this pre-test, and then they will complete a post-test as they exit CWRR2 next fall. Students' knowledge of library and research skills will be measured through this assessment. The aim is to find out what information literacy skills students possess as they begin college and then to measure what they learned.

Last semester the librarians conducted research instruction sessions for 50 sections of university courses (including all 29 sections of CWRR1). In addition, the librarians visited all 29 sections of the University Seminar to acquaint students with the library.

By the way, an article in the the January 20, 2006 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the ideal first-year library research instruction program as being something very much like what we have at Millikin!

Food, anyone? Though we do not want to have food on books in the library, we do have books on food. More specifically, two fairly recent additions to our collection cover the topic of food & genetics, although they take entirely different angles on the topic.

 As you might guess from the title, Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto-the Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest, is about genetically modified foods. The author, journalist Peter Pringle, uses a balanced approach in describing the arguments of the big agriculture corporations, environmental anti-biotech groups, and government. Pringle neither acclaims nor blames any one entity in the biotech wars, and gives a fair representation of the current issues, in language that non-scientists can understand.

Another very interesting book about food and genetics is Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. The author, Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobiologist and nutritional ecologist, discusses how genes affect our digestion and food preferences, using native Americans and those of Mediterranean descent, as but two examples. This author too writes for non-scientists, yet clearly gets his scientific points across to the reader. For those interested in the hot topics of food and genetics, I heartily recommend these two books. Bon appetit!   CFuller