Daily Archives: April 30, 2015

Penn State Wilkes-Barre holds Undergraduate Research Day

DSC_0248

On April 29, 2015, Penn State Wilkes-Barre hosted its first Undergraduate Research Day. The event, which was co-sponsored and supported by the Wilkes-Barre campus and the Penn State University Libraries, consisted of 61 posters created by 107 students, highlighting their research this semester. Students, faculty and staff converged in the campus’s historic Hayfield House to share, learn and admire the results of their scholarship.

The event was the brainchild of two Penn State Wilkes-Barre faculty, Renee Rosier (biology) and Timothy Sichler (engineering). Rosier had organized a smaller event in 2014, limited to her own students. Rosier and Sichler mentioned their hopes of growing the event in 2015, while talking to Jennie Knies and Megan Mac Gregor, librarians in the campus’s Nesbitt Library. These four became the official “Planning Committee” for the event.

The committee created a website, which served as a resource guide for participating students, highlighting best practices for poster creation and discussing research techniques. Knies and Mac Gregor taught two heavily-attended workshops in the Nesbitt Library, reinforcing the process and techniques for effective poster creation. Fourteen faculty members on campus encouraged their students to participate in the event, representing every discipline on campus (including biology, math, electrical engineering, English, information technology, rehabilitation and human services, and surveying engineering).

DSC_0233

Thirteen volunteers from among the faculty and staff evaluated the posters based on three criteria: content, display and oral presentation. All of the students who participated in the event were professional, enthusiastic and eager to discuss their projects. In the end, a poster highlighting research centering on improvements to the Wilkes-Barre campus: “Expansion of Penn State Lehman Pond for the Benefit of Students and Wildlife Proposal,” by Stephen Jesso and Vanessa Robbins (faculty advisor: Dr. Christyne Berzsenyi, English), took home the first place award. Three honorable mentions were awarded to: “Campus Thoroughfare,” by Carlos Candelario, Greg Copelli, Bryan Flynn, Mark Rowe and Mike Vadas (faculty advisor: Christyne Berzsenyi, English); “Proposal to Complete/Restore PSU-WB’s Fitness Path,“ by Bryan Whiting (faculty advisor: Dr. Christyne Berzsenyi, English), and “3D Printing of Senior Project satellite,” by Jimmy Cosgrove, Mike Gentile, Danny Leighow and Mike Wright (faculty advisor: Timothy Sichler, engineering). All of these posters, plus additional eight top-scoring submissions will be displayed in the Penn State Wilkes-Barre’s Nesbitt Library through the end of 2015 and on the Undergraduate Research Day website. In addition, students have been encouraged to deposit their posters into Penn State’s ScholarSphere repository service.

Feedback and response to the event has been overwhelmingly positive. Plans are already underway for Undergraduate Research Day 2016. — Jennie Levine Knies, head librarian, Nesbitt Library, Penn State Wilkes-Barre

 

DSC_0226

Penn State Faculty Senate passes open access resolution

University Pa—The Pennsylvania State University Faculty Senate passed an open access resolution at its April 28meeting that could greatly broaden the reach of scholarly work produced at Penn State.

 

The Senate Committee on Libraries, Information Systems and Technology (LIST) proposed the “Resolution on Open Access to Scholarly Publications” to encourage faculty to deposit their scholarly work in ScholarSphere, support the principle of open access to research results, review rights retained by authors in publishing contracts and consider publishing their work in reputable open access journals that make their contents freely available online.

 

“I applaud the Penn State Faculty Senate for passing the Resolution on Open Access because it underscores Penn State’s commitment to actively disseminating critically important scholarship globally. The resolution represents a major milestone for visibility and access to Penn State research and scholarship moving forward,” said Barbara Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications.

 

Scholarsphere is a repository service launched in 2012 by the University Libraries and Information Technology Services. Students, faculty and staff at Penn State can use the service to collect their work in one location and create a durable and citable record of their scholarly materials. These materials can be discovered and accessed online.

 

Publishing and Curation Services, a unit of the University Libraries, offers scholarly journal publishing for University departments, societies and student groups. Using Open Journal Systems software, the Libraries are able to host online scholarly journals. In addition, this unit provides guidance to publishing scholars and editors at Penn State and advises faculty and researchers on author rights, copyright, fair use and publishing contracts.

 

The passing of the resolution follows an earlier vote by University Libraries faculty to embrace open access principles when publishing their scholarly articles. Under the Open Access Policy, passed into legislation at the February Library Faculty Organization meeting, each University Libraries faculty member grants to Penn State permission to make available his or her scholarly articles. The policy preserves the right of library faculty to publish where they wish, but also encourages authors to take advantage of open access opportunities whenever feasible.

 

“I think the Open Access resolution was something long overdue because of the importance of helping to provide more scholarly works on a global scale, and I am happy to see Penn State join the list of universities working in this positive direction,” said Galen Grimes, associate professor of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State Greater Allegheny, and LIST committee chair.

 

The first vote in favor of open access within a university faculty in the United States took place in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2008. Other faculty organizations, both nationally and internationally, have followed suit, endorsing institution-wide as well as department or college-wide initiatives. Institutions where the entire faculty body has voted in support of open access include the University of California, Cornell, Princeton, Duke, and the University of Kansas.

 

For more information on open access at Penn State, visit the University Libraries Publishing and Curation Services website or e-mail ul-pcs@lists.psu.edu.

Art professor’s journals chronicling four decades of journeys featured in new exhibit

BrentWilsonExhibit

Visual journals chronicling Penn State art education professor Brent Wilson’s four decades of journeys across North America, Europe, Egypt, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Brazil will be on display from May 15 to September 13, in the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library. “Brent Wilson: Journals and Journeys Too” will feature art journals from the Wilson archival collection, housed within the Penn State Special Collections Library.

 

The 90 art journals contain a wealth of visual and written records documenting Wilson’s travels from the 1980s through 2013, where he taught, conducted research and lectured in many countries and in the United States. They chronicle his visual and verbal responses to national and international professional conferences, his eight years as head evaluator for the Getty’s discipline-based art education regional professional development institutes and his time spent in Washington preparing “Toward Civilization,” a report to the president and congress on the status of arts education, in 1988. In addition, the journals highlight the struggles involved in developing an art structure for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

 

The journals reveal the outlines for books, book chapters, journal articles, diagrams and rudimentary theories. There are plans for thousands of paintings and sculptures and draft pages for artist books. They contain hundreds of pages of playful collaborative drawings made with children—graphic conversations that Wilson describes as “third-site pedagogy.”

 

“My journals are filled with schizophrenic, unrestrained images surrounded by mostly pedestrian prose and a few poems—they show my attempts to make a profession and a life more interesting than they would otherwise be,” says Wilson. He says that while it is difficult to pinpoint the time he first became a journal keeper, he began writing little notes in his sketchbooks and began drawing pictures in his datebooks as early as 1979. Over time, he became fascinated by what sketches and sentences could say to one another, and their dialogues became a daily preoccupation.

 

Wilson taught in Penn State’s art education program from 1974 until 2004. During his tenure he pioneered the study of children’s image making in natural settings and developed a paradigm-changing theory relating to how children learn to draw by borrowing images from popular culture. Among his research interests were the study of language used to describe and judge works of art, the assessment of art educational outcomes, the extra-structural dimensions of art teaching and the nature of child art.

 

Wilson was the principal art consultant to the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Art from 1967 to 1982. He drafted the National Endowment for the Arts “Toward Civilization: A Report on Arts Education” and worked as an evaluator for the Getty Trust between 1982 and 1996. He is the recipient of the National Art Education’s Manuel Barkan Award and the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Educational Press Association (both shared with Marjorie Wilson). He received the Edwin Ziegfeld Award given by the International Society for Education in the Arts and has been invited to give Studies in Art Education and Lowenfeld Lectures in recognition of his research. In 1988, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the National Art Education Association and in 1989 was named the organization’s Art Educator of the Year.

 

Three special events will be held in conjunction with the exhibition:

  • The Brent Wilson Gallery Talk, on Friday, June 5, at 3:00 p.m., in the Special Collections Library;
  • An online Digital Journal Website demonstration, on Thursday, July 9, at 2:00 p.m., in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library and
  • The Art Education Graduate Student Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 2, at 7:00 p.m., in the Special Collections Library.

 

For more information about the exhibit, the Wilson archival collection and access to digital journal images, contact University Archivist Jackie R. Esposito, 814-863-3791 or mailto:jxe2@psu.edu.