Columbia College Chicago
Library

Saturday, March 29, 2008

AEMM Library News is on hiatus

Since I'll be out of the Library for the foreseeable future on maternity leave, there will be no new posts to this site for awhile. As always, you can still contact the Library with any requests you have for new materials or any other questions. Take a look at the options available on the "For Faculty" page on the Library's web site or feel free to use the Ask A Librarian service anytime.

Happy springtime to all!

Monday, March 03, 2008

"Floored" documentary will highlight the end of the trading floor

From today's Chicago Tribune: The trading floors at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange close for good in the middle of May, marking the end of an era, and the end of a movie for filmmaker James Allen Smith.

In a feature-length documentary set for release later this year, Smith aims to chronicle the vanishing life and times of the open-outcry futures trader, highlighting the clash between technology and humanity, and the personal toll of progress.

If the film comes across as Smith intends, " Floored " will capture the incendiary thrill of trading hand to hand and profile the regular guys who became some of the business world's least-likely tycoons. These blustery masters of the free markets proved vulnerable when computers finally penetrated their sheltered club, and only a relative handful remain in the pits today.

Smith feels their pain.

Read the whole article HERE (stable link).

Link to the Tribune's site HERE (with some video clips from the documentary)

Friday, February 01, 2008

Spring Semester reminder from the Library

Dear AEMM Faculty—

Spring Semester 2008 is here! Please remember that the Library is here to help. A few things you might want to consider implementing into your courses:

Course Reserves
Place books or articles on reserve in the Library (or on the Library’s web site) so that they are available to your students. You can put required textbooks on reserve or optional reading. Just use the Course Reserves link located on the For Faculty page. If we don’t own a copy or you don’t have an extra personal copy, we’ll purchase one.

Embed the Library in your Oasis or other online course page!
Want to point your students directly to our proprietary business databases and other resources? I can send you a tailored widget that will showcase the resources you’d like your students to make use of for their assignments.

Link directly to articles from your Oasis or other online course page!

Avoid issues related to copyright and make your reading assignments seamless for your students by linking them directly to articles from newspapers, trade publications and popular and scholarly journals. Follow the instructions on this page or feel free to email me the citations and I will build the links for you.

Library instruction for your class

Have an in-depth assignment that you’d like the students to go “beyond Google” to complete? Consider scheduling an instruction session or contact me to discuss ways in which the Library can help. From company profiles to industry research to consumer demographics and beyond, we can help your students develop critical thinking and competitive intelligence research skills.

Assignment consultation

Don’t want to spend a whole class session in the Library but know that there are tools and resources that your students should be using for certain assignments? Contact me to discuss the assignment and how we can integrate some database and research instruction into it.

Questions about any of the above? Just !!!


There are many more ways that the Library can help support you and your students, so if you have questions please don’t hesitate to contact me. As the Library’s liaison to the AEMM department I am here to help connect you to the wealth of information available to you and your students through our books, videos, journals, research databases and other resources.

Good luck as we head into Spring ’08! I look forward to working with you—Celia

PS Please feel free to forward this post to adjunct or other interested AEMM faculty who may not have seen this. If you know of colleagues who should be added to the mailing list, just let me know.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

The Soap Opera Saga Behind Burt's Bees

From Sunday's New York Times' Business section. An interesting behind-the-scenes look at a once-small green brand that has now been bought by Clorox:

IN the summer of 1984, Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in Maine, picked up Roxanne Quimby, a 33-year-old single mother down on her luck, as she hitchhiked to the post office in Dexter, Me. More than a dozen years Ms. Quimby's senior, the guy locals called "the bee -man" sold honey in pickle jars from the back of his pickup truck. To Ms. Quimby, he seemed to be living an idyllic life in the wilderness (including making his home inside a small turkey coop).

She offered to help Mr. Shavitz tend to his beehives. The two became lovers and eventually birthed Burt's Bees , a niche company famous for beeswax lip balm, lotions, soaps and shampoos, as well as for its homespun packaging and feel-good, eco-friendly marketing. The bearded man whose image is used to peddle the products is modeled after Mr. Shavitz. Today, the couple's quirky enterprise is owned by the Clorox Company, a consumer products giant best known for making bleach, which bought it for $913 million in November. Clorox plans to turn Burt's Bees into a mainstream American brand sold in big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Along the way, Clorox executives say, they plan to learn from unusual business practices at Burt's Bees -- many centered on environmental sustainability. Clorox, the company promises, is going green.

But not even Clorox can sanitize the details of a fallout between Mr. Shavitz and Ms. Quimby that began in the late 1990s...

Read the whole article HERE

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Start the new year off with info on the music biz


Here's an excellent article on the music business. It appears in last month's Wired magazine and is written by David Byrne (who knows a thing or two about music and the business of music).