American Heritage, Glad We Knew Ye

Buried within the May 17, 2007, New York Times (Arts section) appeared the news of the regrettable suspension, and possible termination, of the American Heritage hardcopy magazine edition. Effective with the June-July issue the publication will be on indefinite hold, according to editor Richard F. Snow. A simultaneous announcement appeared at the publication website from Frederick E. Allen, editor of AmercanHeritage.com and managing editor of American Heritage. The Forbes owned magazine will continue to maintain a web-based edition for the time being. A full archive of past issues, along with other online only features, may be found there.
American Heritage, founded in 1954 by three ex-Life Magazine staffers, remained advertisement free until 1982, when economic realities forced abandonment of the policy. Costs were met through steep subscription fees – - $10.00 per year payable in installments. Covers were hardback and clothbound with color paintings on front. That format endured until 1980 when hardcover editions became optional for subscribers only. In spite of the shift to advertising acceptance, the magazine failed to prosper except for a high point in the mid-1960’s. It was sold to Forbes in 1986, bounced back for a time, but by the late 1990’s was faltering again. According to Scott Masterson, a Forbes vice president and president of American Heritage, the magazine experienced a further downturn in the post 2001 magazine business environment and has had difficulty recovering its business fortunes. Despite a mid-decade refocusing of appeal toward the baby boom generation, Forbes has “been carrying us for a while,” said editor Snow.

Aficionados of American Heritage ( “everything a magazine of popular history should be.” according to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) would do well to consult the full May 17, 2007, New York Times article by Charles McGrath, “Magazine Suspends Its Run in History.” It is as much an overview of this history magazine as a whimsical profile of current editor Richard F. Snow.

The New York Times is available in full text through the USC Aiken Library databases, or you may consult your librarian.

Posted by Tom Hobbs, Reference Librarian, USC Aiken Library

Spying on the Home Front

TV worth watching.

Tonight the PBS Frontline series will present a program titled Spying on the Home Front that examines the changes in government surveillance of American citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The program highlights a number of cases where citizen right to privacy and other constitutional protections are being eroded. The combination of new laws enacted in the wake of 9/11 and powerful information technologies have substantially increased the government’s surveillance capabilities. The confiscation of book store and library circulation records and warrantless electronic phone tapping are just some of the activities that are undertaken in the effort to protect our security.

For more about tonight’s program which airs locally at 9 pm on channel 13 SCETV and to watch a program preview, visit this site.

If you can’t catch tonight’s program don’t worry. Frontline does an excellent job of archiving their programs. You should be able to watch it from their website soon.

The Day the Music Dies

If you’ve ever browsed the offerings at Shoutcast.com (http://shoutcast.com/), then you already know about the wonderful diversity of free music and other programming streams available on the web these days. These web broadcasts are commonly referred to as Internet Radio or e-Radio, but they’re not really radio in the traditional sense. Since the signals are broadcast over the web, you can access services from all over the world from any computer that has a decent Internet connection. There are large corporations like Yahoo and AOL involved in this industry, but there are also many not-for-profit, small business, and academic institutions participating as well. For example many college radio stations like WUSC – the college radio station at USC Columbia – are now streaming their programming. One of the best known net radio stations, RadioParadise http://www.radioparadise.com is run by a husband and wife team out their home in Paradise, California.

Unfortunately, this fledgling industry in the United States may soon be killed in the crib. The death sentence is scheduled for 15 July 2007. That’s the date set by the US Copyright Review Board to increase copyright royalty fees paid by these internet radio stations to prohibitively high levels. Curiously, the rate increases are much higher for the smaller independent sites. This new regulation will essentially force most broadcasters in the United States to shut down their operations.

The good news is that bills have been introduced in both the US House and Senate to overturn the CRB ruling. Just yesterday in fact the Wyden-Brownback Internet Radio Equality Act was introduced in the Senate. A large coalition of organizations is fighting to overturn the ruling. Find out more by visiting http://www.savenetradio.org. However, the very powerful RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is working hard to keep the CRB ruling.

If you support or are opposed to the legislation to overturn the CRB ruling, get involved by contacting your members of Congress. For info on how to contact your members of Congress, visit http://tinyurl.com/yr9jaq.

Zotero Spanks Endnotes

Dear students and other scholars,

Are you still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser? Well, here’s yet another great reason for you to switch to Firefox, the award winning, free, open source web browser. Firefox is available for download here. Firefox offers hundreds of add-on programs that extend the functionality of the web browser. One of the best of these is a reference management program called Zotero. With Zotero, you’ll probably never again need to endure the tedium of referring to tools like the APA, Chicago/Turabian, and MLA style manuals for your term paper projects.

Installation of Zotero into Firefox is quick and simple. The site to download and install Zotero is here.

Zotero lets you build personal reference libraries for your various research projects from online catalogs, online periodical databases, commercial booksellers like Amazon.Com and Borders.Com, and regular web pages. It “senses” what type of research resource you are using (e.g. a book, article, newspaper, government document, video, blog entry, etc.) and upon your instruction it gathers all the bibliographic information and formats it according to your style manual preference. If you wish, you may add notes to build an annotated bibliography. Bibliographies can easily be exported to your favorite word processor, html, and other formats.

Zotero (http://www.zotero.org) is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Washington University. Zotero was designed to combine the functions of traditional reference management software like Endnotes (a $299 commercial product) with the new technologies of the Web. Zotero is only available for FireFox 2 and greater. So if you use Internet Explorer, you are out of luck.

View a demonstation of Zotero here.

Compare Zotero’s features with other commercial and open source reference management software programs here.

Posted by Paul Lewis, Government Documents Librarian, USC Aiken Library paull@usca.edu