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Instant
Message Your Questions to Regent Library
Beginning in December 2006, anyone with an IM account through AOL, Google Talk, MSN or Yahoo will be able to instant message their research questions directly to a Regent University librarian. The screen name to send questions to is: RegentULibrary. Research assistance via IM or email is available from Regent University Library every day except Sunday. Telephone and in-person assistance is also available seven days a week. For a detailed list of reference hours and services, please see: http://www.regent.edu/general/library/services/reference/.
_____________________________ E-audiobooks
now available via NetLibrary
Regent students and employees have access to NetLibrary through the Electronic Resources page on the Regent Library website (direct link at http://tinyurl.com/y5mlnx). Desktop users
must use Windows Media Player version 9.0 or higher, Whether you’re looking for a diversion during your commute,
exercise routines, or holiday travels, we trust you will find
e-audiobooks a helpful addition to the library’s online collections. Nancy
Pearcey Enlightens Listeners Rather than a formal presentation, Pearcey opened the floor to questions and discussion. A reception followed the book talk during which Pearcey signed
copies of her book and met with members of the audience. Inside
the Library The Foreign Language Collection
Undergraduate
Research How can I tell if an article is peer reviewed? Peer reviewed (also “refereed” or “scholarly”) articles are published papers that have been reviewed by at least one expert in the relevant discipline to ensure that the work meets certain standards of professional scholarship. Peer review serves both scholarly publishers, who use the process to screen submitted papers for publication, and researchers, who gain assurance that the content of an article is derived from scholarly inquiry, not opinion and conjecture.Peer reviewed articles are important because they constitute the fundamental medium for scholarly dialogue and the dissemination of new research. It is for this reason that professors often require students to cite scholarly, rather than popular or general sources in their papers. The Library databases make finding scholarly articles easy by simply selecting this limiter on the search screen. Suppose, however, you already have an article and need to know whether or not it has been peer reviewed. Generally, the appearance alone will give a strong indication as to whether or not it is scholarly. If it is, it will almost certainly have citations or a list of references. There may be a note about the author’s credentials. The tone of the article will be addressed more to other scholars and researchers than to the general reader. In order to know with certainty, however, if an article has been peer reviewed and is an acceptable source for a scholarly paper, you need to know the journal in which it was published. You can then check an issue of the journal or its website. If the journal is refereed, it should list its editorial board and include some information about its review process. Another quick way to find out if a publication is refereed is to look it up in Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, available in through the Library databases. Ulrich’s is a comprehensive directory of periodicals that includes important publication data with each record. Here is a screen capture of the record for The Leadership Quarterly:
Note the circled symbols in the legend and to the left of the title indicating that this journal is peer-reviewed. Determining
the acceptability of sources for your scholarly papers requires
only a little detective work,
which can be
accomplished even without actually possessing the periodicals
in question. As always, if you still have a question about
the credibility of any source, the Library’s Reference
Department is ready to assist you. Collection
Spotlight--America
Alone: The End of the World as We Know It,
by Mark Steyn
If Dr. Robertson has identified the rising sun of Christianity
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the brightest and
most significant trend in the world today, writer Mark
Steyn has spent the past several years warning of what
might be called its negative corollary: the possibility
of a new Dark Age in much of Europe. In his new book,
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It,
the author synthesizes his writings on the subject into
a devastating
description of a European future characterized by what
he calls “the Four Horseman of the Eupocalypse:…Death—the
demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed; Famine—the
end of the lavishly funded statist good times; War—the
decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and
demographic factors will bring; and Conquest—the
recolonization of Europe by Islam.”
Civilizational exhaustion, of course, is the crucial factor, and the one that makes addressing the first two so difficult. For Steyn, it is also so connected as to be nearly synonymous with the post-Christian reality in most of the West: an entirely present-tense culture liberated from obligations to ancestors or descendents. In one poignant passage, Steyn quotes John Lennon’s nihilistic reverie “Imagine” as perfectly embodying the ethos of post-Christian man: “Imagine there’s no heaven…imagine all the world living for today…imagine there’s no countries…nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” It would seem to be stating the obvious to suggest that over the long run, Lennonist Europe will be no match for a fierce, primal force like radical Islam. Doom-mongering is standard fare in the publishing industry, so when a book comes out predicting imminent catastrophe, a healthy skepticism is well called for. What makes America Alone so convincing and gives his argument its force is the author’s profound sense of the fragility of civilization and the dynamic force of history, which is always moving. “Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide who and what we are is worth defending.” Is a new European Dark Age based on Islamism (and the
revival of fascist parties this development will bring)
inevitable? A deep sense of pessimism pervades America
Alone, and Steyn seems to regard Europeans to
be like the sailors in the Odyssey who, having tasted
the lotus-fruit
(post-Christian hedonism), became “unwilling to take
any message back, or to go away, but they wanted to stay
there with the lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus, and
forget the way home.” Steyn is not without hope,
however, and toward the end offers a ten-point program
for countering the ideology of Islamism and jihad. In the
end, however, what is needed most of all is will and confidence
that our ideals and way of life will prevail. “To
see off the new Dark Age,” writes Steyn on the concluding
page, “will be tough and demanding. The alternative
will be worse.” Congratulations to Dr. Leanne Strum and Mark Zillges for presenting their case study,
Past Issues
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The advantage of IM over email is that it allows real-time online
conversations. AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and Google all provide free IM
and email services to anyone who registers. IM users can also send
messages from their cell phones or from any computer with an Internet
connection using a website like Meebo.com. For more information
about IM, please see this Wikipedia article:
Regent
University Library is offering e-audiobooks for download
via NetLibrary. Now you can listen to classic novels, mysteries,
biographies, or the Bible from your PC or portable music player.
A significant portion of this audio collection also includes
foreign language materials by Pimsleur Language Programs, so
you could even try learning Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew or Spanish
on the go.
Musicmatch
Jukebox 8.2 or higher, or Winamp 5.0 or higher. Downloading
and listening to an e-audiobook from NetLibrary requires a license,
which automatically downloads the first time you open an e-audiobook
file. This license allows you to copy the file to two portable
music players, and is valid for 21 days. Apple computers and iPods
are not supported, but a number of 
On
November 15th, the University Library was privileged to host
a book talk and signing with Nancy Pearcey. More than 95 readers
came to hear Pearcey talk about her book, Total Truth:
Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, as well as share
some of her background, philosophy, and positions on various
issues.
If
you are looking to expand your linguistic horizons, then be
sure to visit Room 214 and browse through our ever-expanding
foreign language instruction collection. For the Divinity student who has mastered Biblical Hebrew and Greek and is in need of a new challenge, we have modern 
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