Please join the Reference Department in honoring Diana Shelton for her 30 years of service to the UW Libraries and wish her well in retirement. She will be missed!

England’s Observer Music Monthly (OMM) published a list of the 50 greatest music books ever this week.

Number one: Hellfire by Nick Tosches, hailed by OMM for his brilliant writing about Jerry Lee Lewis:

Hellfire’s extravagantly descriptive opening chapter is worthy of any great American novel you care to mention, recreating the night that ‘The Killer’ laid siege single-handedly to Elvis’s Gracelands mansion. With a head full of booze and God knows what chemicals, and a Derringer on the dashboard, he repeatedly rams his Lincoln continental into the wrought iron gates, hollering ‘Tell him the Killer is here!’

Check out the rest of the list, including a definitive story of the blues, and a history of the indie music scene in America.

Nature is hosting a formal inquiry into peer review in the scientific publishing process. Their approach is twofold.
First, the editors describe the debate:

The web debate contains a range of perspectives about peer review from those who believe it is working well, to those who prefer other options. What is the value of peer review, and how does it ensure quality? What are the ethical concerns? Are there viable alternatives, either technical or in terms of management of the process? And above all, what is the scientists’ experience of the process, either as authors or as reviewers themselves?

And then they describe the trial:

In Nature’s peer review trial, lasting for three months, authors can choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field may then post comments, provided they are prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process will be closed. Nature will report on the results after the trial period is over.

The trial presents an interesting opportunity to use online social networking capabilities to change the world of scholarly publishing. New contributions to the debate are added weekly, and readers are encouraged to weigh-in with their thoughts on the value of the traditional peer review model.

The folks at NPR take their summer reading seriously and they’ve provided loads of great recommendations this year.

Susan Stamberg offers “swell books for summer loafing” from three independent booksellers. Alan Cheuse promises to transport you to other lands, even if you aren’t traveling further than Vedauwoo this summer. And Karen Grigsby-Bates recommends a delightful list that ranges from new fiction to (my favorite) food writing.

Happy reading and happy loafing!

Laramie is celebrating Bike to Work week. If you missed the free bike tuneups on Monday, now is the perfect time to learn to tune your own bike. Once that bike is tuned and ready to go, it’s time to hit the trails!

This is a movie you’ll be telling your friends about the next day. Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog’s look at the life of Timothy Treadwell, a man so passionate about Alaska’s bears that he lived with them every summer until his death.

Speaking of movies that get people talking, if you haven’t yet seen the most talked about movie of 2005, now is the time. Brokeback Mountain is based on an Annie Proulx short story from her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories. All of the stories in the collection have the same lyrical spareness and spot-on dialogue of Brokeback Mountain and make excellent summer reading.

Interested in books, dvds, or cds that are not available from UW Libraries? Try out Prospector and enjoy borrowing privileges from a huge network of Colorado libraries.

Easy steps to ordering items from Prospector:

1. Search for what you want.
2. Click on “request this item”.
3. Indicate that you are affiliated with Wyoming libraries.
4. Enter your name.
5. Enter your social security number in the barcode field.
6. Press submit.
7. Await email notification that your item has arrived.

Unlimited fun!

Note: this is a Beta test of the Prospector service… log-in procedures may change slightly this summer. Please let the staff at UW Libraries know if you experience trouble using Prospector.

Promising first novels are always a treat, and Memoirs of a Muse by Lara Vapnyar doesn’t disappoint. Her tale of Tanya, a Russian emigre in New York who becomes a novelist’s muse, has been called “Atwoodesque” by Booklist and “a wonderfully fresh portrait of the romantic imagination and its inevitable collision with reality” by Publishers Weekly.