First Peer-Reviewed Journal Makes On-Line 'History'
by Carol Olechowski
A new online electronic journal published by the Department of History is making it possible for Internet visitors to hear history, as well as read about it.
The Journal for MultiMedia History, accessible at https://www.albany.edu/jmmh, is unique because its articles and essays include video clips, photographs, slides, and even audio that enhance the reader�s understanding of the subjects presented.
The first issue, which went online Nov. 16, features articles about a 1939 dairy farmers� strike in Heuvelton and Canton, N.Y.; the consumer culture and its impact on American women; and Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Items about the use of information technology in the teaching of Islamic civilization and about the construction of a website for student research projects are included, as are reviews of CD-ROMs, digital videodisks, websites, films, and videos. Links to websites of possible interest to readers are also provided.
Doctoral student Susan McCormick, who serves as the Journal�s managing editor, terms her involvement with it "a labor of love." Work on the project began nearly a year ago, when she and founding editors Gerald Zahavi and Julian Zelizer invited submissions from their colleagues in the history field. The impetus McCormick explains, stemmed, in part, from "a need to present multimedia historical scholarship" in a scholarly, entertaining, and interactive format instantly accessible to thousands of readers all over the world.
"People tend to see historians as mired in the past," observes McCormick, who assisted Zahavi in the website�s design, "but in terms of communicating with one another and in presenting the fruits of their scholarship, many historians have been leading the way."
For example, since much of the article about the dairy farmers� strike is based on oral history, actualities or audio recollections of participants recalling the strike are included. Photographs vividly illustrate the story. A click of the left mouse button on a footnote leads the reader to the bibliography; another click on "Return to text" brings him or her back to the passage in which the footnote was contained.
"To our knowledge, while there have been many electronic journals that have come online in the past few years, this is the first scholarly journal that is peer reviewed and presents history in this way," says McCormick. "In addition, with the Internet, there is an advantage of timely publication."
Zahavi, whose history courses include ones on oral and video history and documentary production, an aim was to "use all these tools � old and new media � to promote pedagogy and present our research in a new and exciting way. It was time for us to bring this information to a broader audience."
He, co-editor Julian Zelizer of the departments of history and public policy, and the rest of their staff felt they had "a lot of material that will appeal to people on different levels." Their audience includes not only other history scholars at the university level, but secondary-school teachers and students, and the general public.
The Journal, which received start-up funding from the University�s Office for Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of History, boasts a distinguished editorial board. Its members include Stephen Brier of the City University of New York (CUNY), who, along with another Journal board member, Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University, co-authored and co-created the ASHP award-winning 1993 CD-ROM Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914; and Richard Hamm, an associate professor of history and public policy at Albany.
Other Journal staff include history department graduate students Mollie Marchione, Danielle McMahon, and Edward Knoblauch; and work-study students Lynette Viviel, Andrea Lewis, and Kurt Tullar.
One of the challenges for Zahavi and Zelizer and their talented staff will be "educating the people who do the research and produce the articles to incorporate audio, video, and graphics into the text. We�re attempting to tantalize our readers."
Efforts have been successful thus far. McCormick notes that the publication received 4,000 hits in its first week, from people in Japan, Ireland, Britain, Australia, Canada, and throughout the U.S. It has also generated "very positive mail from people who have already adapted it for use in their courses, or who want to contribute."
Initially, the Journal will be published twice a year, in the fall and in the spring. Continued response will dictate whether the publication schedule changes to include a third, and possibly a fourth, issue annually, plus a CD-ROM that individuals and institutions could subscribe to and use as a permanent archive."
Zelizer is confident that one of the Journal�s original goals has already been fulfilled. "We wanted to present scholarship of the highest academic standards on the web through multimedia resources. That�s why the Journal for MultiMedia History is so distinctive. Making peer-reviewed scholarly publications in the history field available to such a wide audience is very important to the mission of this journal."
Karen Hitchcock Part of National Faculty Review Project
by Mary Fiess
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is planning to release in January a report entitled "Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future," that is a comprehensive review of faculty employment policies and trends in U.S. higher education.
President Hitchcock is a member of the Policy Council that provided direction for the report, one of the 13 university and system leaders on the council.
The report is the result of a year-long process led by AASCU and known as the Faculty Policy Review Project. Representatives from across the spectrum of publicly funded colleges and universities focused on three critical areas: faculty employment policies, faculty development policies, and faculty review policies.
While the project�s three work groups reaffirmed most philosophies and many practices regarding faculty, they also recommended many new approaches. The report will detail their recommendations.
"A major goal of this project is to help assure the development of a faculty that will meet society�s demands in the 21st Century," said Hitchcock.
NSF Grant Lends Greater �Scope� to Biological Research
By Greta Petry
Colin Izzard and John Schmidt, professors in the Department of Biological Sciences, have received approval from the National Science Foundation for a $433,891 grant to purchase a confocal laser-scanning microscope.
What is a confocal, you may ask? It is a special form of light microscope, which eliminates out-of-focus light coming from planes above and below the plane of focus of the microscope. The out-of-focus light otherwise obscures the sharply focused image of the specimen. This microscope and image analysis system will be purchased for the University�s cell, molecular and neurobiologists whose work focuses on cell adhesion and movement, gene expression, protein function and localization, and neural development.
Izzard and Schmidt expect to have a confocal installed by the end of the Spring Semester. Izzard, an expert in optical microscopy and imaging techniques, has directed the short course in optical microscopy and imaging at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., since 1988. Schmidt has been director of the University�s Neurobiology Research Center since 1987.
Schmidt said the NSF grant, along with an allocation of $185,954 from the University�s Division of Research, allows the University to purchase, install and operate equipment important to the future direction of the biology department and emerging trends in biology. The confocal, or CLSM, allows scientists to better study thick biological specimens, whereas current equipment offers a sharp image of only very thin specimens. In thicker specimens this sharp image is obscured. Izzard said, "It�s like looking out of a screen door at the garden in your back yard. There is an out-of-focus haze." While there are two microscopes in the region that come close, the University�s confocal will be the first up-to-date point scanner in the Capital Region.
One other improvement of the CLSM system is that it will allow University biologists to examine individual growing neurons in whole live embryos of zebrafish, for example, instead of just a piece of the embryo in culture. This is critical to the advancement of knowledge for those such as Schmidt, who study organisms as they develop the functional wiring of the nervous system.
The new equipment will also include: the ability to record movements of cells using video cameras and time lapse recorders, an ability to store digital images on computer disks, or CDs, and transfer them for processing and analysis to a second work station, and the ability to print publication-quality color micrographs.
The work of Albany biologists will be enhanced in many ways. For example, Ben Szaro, who manipulates gene expression in embryos, will be able to follow the changes in the development of the nervous system in a tadpole prior to its developing into a frog. Three other neurobiologists, Su Tieman, Greg Lnenicka and Jon Jacklet, will use the confocal to study synapses in visual cortex, at the neuromuscular junction, and in the ganglion of aplysia.
Al Millis, who studies the molecular biology of cellular aging and differentiation, will be able to examine smooth muscle cells from the pig aorta as they form thick clusters and differentiate in culture. And Paulette McCormick, whose area is development and carcinogenesis, will be able to look at the synthesis of lysosomal associated membrane proteins and watch their movements to the cell surface during fertilization of the ovum. Three other cell and molecular biologists, Dmitry Belostotsky, Joseph Mascarenhas and Caro-Beth Stewart, are also planning to use the CLSM.
Collectively, the Department of Biological Sciences is regrouping its research efforts under the theme of Comparative Functional Genomics. The CLSM will be critical for studying the function of the proteins, whose sequences are coded in the individual genes.