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February 22nd, 2021
West Lafayette, IN- Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies begins 2021 with new open access publishing partnerships with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Cambridge Press, and Public Library of Science (PLOS). Now, Purdue University authors interested in publishing their scholarship in corresponding journals can choose to retain copyright and publish their articles as open access, immediately and without embargoes, at no cost to them.
The new partnerships represent a progressive evolution in Libraries’ existing relationships with all three publishers. In the case of ACM and Cambridge Press, Libraries now pays one fee to each publisher that covers both subscription access to journals, as well as the publishing costs for Purdue authors who decide to publish their articles as open access in the ACM Digital Library, or in one of over 400 included Cambridge Press journals, respectively. As a non-profit open access publisher, PLOS operates differently. Purdue’s membership in their Community Action Publishing (CAP) program means that Libraries now pays an annual fee for unlimited publishing in PLOS Medicine and PLOS Biology without incurring individual author fees. All three partnerships increase the reach of Purdue-authored research and support the University’s land grant mission to serve the greater community by expanding public access to a wealth of high-quality, scholarly content.
Purdue is not alone in pursuing new partnerships in open access publishing. Both the Cambridge Press and PLOS agreements were made possible through the collective bargaining of the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s consortium of academic research libraries. In speaking of the new PLOS partnership, Maurice York, BTAA’s Director of Library Initiatives, says: “One of the key strategic questions in front of us is how to advance the growth of open science and open scholarship through collective and intentional action. We are actively seeking pathways to create a sustainable, scalable open knowledge ecosystem for our researchers and scholars.”
The new open access publishing agreements align with Dean of Libraries and Esther Ellis Norton Professor of Library Science Beth McNeil’s ongoing commitment to make access to high quality scholarship more economically sustainable at Purdue. “The benefits of open access publishing are numerous for both author and audience, but the associated cost often prevents authors from being able to take part, even when they agree with open access in principle,” McNeil says. “Our new partnerships with ACM, Cambridge Press, and PLOS will create greater opportunities for researchers and authors from most campus disciplines to choose cost-free open access publishing options and work with us to help make scholarship more equitable, now and into the future.”
Purdue authors interested in learning more about the specific journals available through these new agreements and how to participate should visit Libraries’ new guide or contact Nina Collins, scholarly publishing specialist, at nkcollins@purdue.edu.
Filed under: collections, faculty_staff, general, Open_Access, scholcommFebruary 22nd, 2021
We talked to Jonathan E. Martin, the author of Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science.
Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science recounts the life and scientific contributions of Reginald Sutcliffe, an understudied and underappreciated pioneer of modern weather forecasting.
Q: What motivated you to spend this amount of time documenting Reginald Sutcliffe’s life and accomplishments?
Jonathan E. Martin: When I was first hired at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994, my first assignment was teaching a senior undergraduate course in synoptic-dynamic meteorology – the study of the theory and observations of mid-latitude weather systems. It was a dream come true since the phenomenology of these storms had fascinated me since childhood and my education and research experience to date had only heightened my enthusiasm for them as it had revealed to me their wondrous physical and dynamical nature. As I prepared my notes for the course I was to teach that fall, it became clear that Sutcliffe had singularly elucidated the fundamental dynamics of the development of these cyclones, a process known as cyclogenesis, as well as the dynamical explanation for the coincidence of the characteristic frontal zones of such storms and the production of the clouds and precipitation associated with them. This was the whole franchise of modern weather systems science and it had seemingly sprung from the mind of a single scientist in the late 1930s. I was struck by the discrepancy between the importance of these contributions to modern understanding of weather systems (which informed the subsequent great advance in numerical weather prediction) and the relatively low profile of the man who had brought them forth. Twenty years later a sabbatical afforded me the opportunity to begin examining Sutcliffe’s life in detail and perhaps remedy this unjust set of circumstances.
Q: When researching for this project were there any surprises that significantly altered your view on Sutcliffe or his legacy?
Martin: The core of my interest in Sutcliffe was his seeming monopoly on fundamental contributions to understanding mid-latitude weather systems juxtaposed with an incongruous obscurity as a scientist. Nothing in the research that went into the book altered that basic view. Nonetheless, it was surprising to discover that he was not interested in weather as a boy and, in fact, turned to the Meteorological Office upon graduating with his Ph.D. in Mathematics because there were virtually no other options at the time. The Meteorological Office officially discouraged research and so a very talented Ph.D. in math was set to really boring tasks in the largely unscientific approach to weather forecasting then employed at the Office. How, despite such intellectually suffocating circumstances, young Sutcliffe began to wriggle free and eventually elevate the forecasting enterprise to a hard science is an inspiring story. Another unexpected aspect of Sutcliffe’s intellectual life was that he was a persistent skeptic of numerical weather prediction, perhaps the most unheralded scientific advance of the late 20th century. Throughout the 1950s, when the enterprise was in its infancy, his main complaint was that it was not as good as what could be rendered by deep knowledge and expert judgement. This was indeed the case and remained so for a good part of his professional career. His perspective was sweeping; at the beginning of his career forecasting was a truly unscientific activity. Then his own contributions elevated it to something much more rigorous. It seems as though his skepticism was rooted in a frustration that too large a share of forecasting research effort in the 1950s focused on the computer, which was still quite limited. He commented more than a couple of times later in his life that he thought the computer came too early – implying that important conceptual and theoretical work might have been displaced by an emphasis on tool development.
Q: The availability of an accurate forecast and our ability to check it is no small feat, yet it has become so routine it is almost taken for granted. What kind of challenge does this provide in touting the accomplishments of someone like Sutcliffe?
Martin: My experience has long suggested to me that most people have some level of interest in the weather. In fact, I’d venture to guess that meteorology, in the form of weather forecasting especially, is the physical science with which the general public makes is most frequent and familiar contact. By extension, I imagine that a good number of us who benefit from the easy availability of accurate forecast information probably harbor a companion desire to know something more about where it comes from – to peer behind the curtain a little. To the extent that such a desire does exist in some segment of the population, I think it provides motivation for coming to know Sutcliffe, his life and his influential accomplishments. In fact, given the increasing profile of weather and climate issues in the public consciousness, this may the perfect time to begin telling the stories of the pioneers, like Sutcliffe, who helped fashion the modern scientific infrastructure upon which so much of our current predictive capability is built.
Q: In the preface of the book you mention that Sutcliffe’s life, in many ways, “was unusually illustrative of the progress often associated with the century in which it was lived”. What do you mean by this?
Martin: The pace of progress in the 75 years since the end of WWII probably exceeds that of any other period in human history regarding advances in medicine, physical science, social issues, technology, and a host of other human endeavors. Sutcliffe was born into a world where children were still working in factories as opposed to getting a basic education, male life expectancy in Britain was 50, and a reasonably reliable weather forecast hardly existed for the next day. By the end of his life, child labor was nearly non-existent in the West, a typical British man could expect to live until 74, and outlooks as long as 5-7 days were as routinely accurate as the 1-day forecast had been in 1905. Sutcliffe himself was an agent of substantial change despite the catastrophic interruption to his professional life imposed by the war. Like so many of his generation, he answered the call to duty without hesitation or complaint, served admirably, and went about rebuilding the world upon returning to civilian life. I believe that the progress that was made in so many dimensions in the post-war world was a direct result of the intestinal fortitude of men and women whose perspective on civic duty and citizenship mirrored Sutcliffe’s.
Thank you to Jonathan! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.
You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.
Filed under: PurduePressFebruary 19th, 2021
We talked to Norman F. Cheville, the author of Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health.
Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues covers a century of progress fighting infectious diseases and plagues, illuminating the important role of veterinary research and science.
Q: What was your impetus for writing this book and studying this subject?
Norman F. Cheville: A mystery existed about why America trailed Europe by a full century—from the 1760s to the 1860s—in building science-based veterinary colleges to educate for animal health care. Why? No historian had ever explained that. Turns out, veterinary colleges in Europe has been stimulated by rampant infectious disease, many of them zoonoses—diseases transmissible from animals to humans. Yet in North America, there was a century-long delay. Did it arise from public ignorance of microbes, from national energies miss-directed to war, or from the fraudulent veterinarians working in rural frontiers? There had to be a story there.
Then a celebratory editorial in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association had things backwards; an employee of the National Library of Medicine had written that medicine in North America had been the model for veterinary education. The writer had ignored not only the rich practical science culture but also the difficult but creative contributions to veterinary science in rural America and Canada. In seeking the historical facts, it appeared that much of the history of veterinary medicine has been ignored. In the beginning, I wanted to correct that and to include the important seminal contributions of pioneering scientists who I believed had been left out in the story, e.g., Heinrich Janssen Detmers and Rush Shippen Huidekoper. In progressing, a remarkable historical tableau emerged that drove the remainder of the book on how microbes, war, and public health had changed animal health care in North America.
Q: When you started writing this project you may not have expected it to be as topical as it now is. What are some of the most striking parallels between the plagues you talk about in the book and the pandemic we’re facing today?
Cheville: From the start, it was clear that the great plagues occurred in cycles that were driven by national economies, idiosyncrasies of political cultures, and wars. It was also soon clear that in responding to pandemics, the answers provided by science had to be translated into action – a translation that required journalists, informed politicians, and responsible pharmaceutical business; it has been the task of these groups to lead the public into acceptance of social behavior change including use of drugs and vaccines. Early successful scientists had been connected to some form of public information where the press, politicians, and heads of state drove effective actions. At the beginning of the era, the political talents of Jenner (smallpox), Pasteur (fowl cholera, anthrax, and rabies), Koch (tuberculosis), and Virchow (trichinosis) convinced the public and had been the key to their successes. In each succeeding plague cycle, some scientist or science group appeared to fulfill that mission. Virchow solved the problem of trichinosis in pigs in Germany by providing the science behind trichinosis in pork and the on-farm methods to prevent it; he had connections with the Reichstag to implement regulations and laws to mandate action. In America, unlike our early response to the COVID-19 disaster, some plagues led to effective responses. In the first decade of the 20th century food safety for humans appeared because of a scientist, a journalist, and a Congress who understood their responsibility to establish the Food and Drug Administration. For animals of that decade, scientists provided the vaccination method for the disastrous pandemic of hog cholera, the federal government, the research impetus, and the state legislatures (most of them at least) provided the funds and production facilities to stop the disease. Succeeding pandemics of influenza, poliomyelitis, and the prion diseases followed the same pattern. The importance of all this is that when journalists, legislators, or heads of state fail in this scheme, disaster ensues.
What emerged in writing this book was that distortion of veterinary science and education was occurring from two idiosyncrasies of culture – disbelief in science and distrust of government. Spreading misinformation and downright lies, people in these misinformation cults spawned scientology, creationism, anti-vaccination movements, astrology, and other anti-science scams. All of these scalawags were having destructive impacts on science in general and on veterinary medicine in particular. There were other bogeymen – fraudulent veterinarians, scientists that published fake data, dishonest entrepreneurs, and other latter-day snake oil salesmen. The anti-science stance of a disturbing percentage of the public arises from avoiding logic and rational analysis in solving what is basically a science problem. Underlying much of this mischief are the prejudices of the more misinformed segments of human cults of various kinds.
All of this is part of a scary anti-science and anti-government philosophy that has been growing since the 1960s and has been severely exacerbated by the internet and its lack of control. Failure of the federal government to take command of this issue has allowed COVID-19 to spread throughout the nation before serious efforts of mitigation were finally begun. This is in striking contrast to the outbreak of smallpox in New York City at the end of World War II; then the nation was educated by the presidents, governors, mayors and public health departments; the public was responsive to the needed behaviors, and together acted immediately to prevent spread, vaccinate the population, and track spreaders. Because of our anti-science and anti-authoritarian beliefs (that are now being disguised at some loopy faux patriotism), we have become victims of pandemic viruses. It will get worse unless we correct this nonsense.
Q: As you put it, disbelief in science and distrust in government may be the two largest impediments to the advancements you outline in the book. From the 1860s to now, what do you think makes these so pervasive?
Cheville: There are several factors, the most important of which seems to be the tone set by those in charge. Presidents, state governors, and local leaders must take the steps and walk the walk of responsibility to keep the public informed and educated about the steps that must be taken: surveillance of global infections, monitoring for spread, social behavioral changes that prevent spread, and scientific research that expands production of vaccines and drugs. This often involved subtle communications and seeing that the public is informed correctly. A lethal move is the political re-direction or re-interpretation of science data. In recent times there is the need to regulate the internet, making it conform to public standards of truth – just as newspapers were forced to do in the early 20th century. Today, this is the major route for misinformation and anti-science cults to spread fake news. There is a persistent phony mentality that drives many of these cults, most based upon ignorance and expediencies of money, land, and material things that override the needs for the public good. These scams can only persist when there are deficits in public education. Any lack of a rigorous and demanding educational curriculum for teaching civics, government, science, and propaganda analysis in our primary and secondary schools provides fertile soil for cults.
Q: You write at the start of the preface of the book, “Animal health care in North America evolved from farriers and itinerant cow leeches to science-based veterinary medicine in one century, from 1860 to 1960.” When doing your research, what struck you most about the advancement of this era?
Cheville: It was a time when social responsibility moved to regulate the expanding economy. Reforms of the early 20th century regulated dangerous business habits that had spread not only plagues of infectious diseases but episodes of food adulteration and uncontrolled toxic disposals. These reforms gave us the safe nation in which we now live. The demands of regulated capitalism was co-incident with societal reform that promoted education and science. It was a time of public acceptance of science. There was less opportunity for those struggling with personality disorders/mental illness to seriously harm society.
Q: You end the book with an epilogue and changes since 1960 with emphasis on a growth in public distrust; how about the future?
Cheville: Things may seem dark at the moment, but there is hope. It takes time, but we will correct our mistakes through education and correction of misinformation, and by regulating the unrestricted falsification of public information. As to Veterinary Medicine and animal health care, these changes have been maintained. The book documents a striking and direct impact of change: the complete reversal in the acceptance of women as veterinary scientists. Not permitted to study for the profession in early times, women veterinary graduates exploded after World War II from near 0 in 1960 to nearly 90% in 2000. This remarkable change doubled the intellectual power of the profession. The change was coincident with an emerging spiritual aura of empathy and responsibility – an understanding of how animal behavior and human-animal connections change when biology goes awry. For the veterinarian, professional responsibilities expanded. One of the remarkable books of the period was James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. It represented the era; scratch away the beautiful Yorkshire dales, the funny humanistic stories, and the cleverness of the writing, the reader is still left with a continuing theme of empathy of the human-animal bond – dealing with animal cruelty in a global production system, with the ecologic health of free-ranging terrestrial mammals in the wild, with dolphins and fish that must be saved from toxic tides in oceanic environments, and of protecting wild birds from suffering infections, starvation and lead poisoning along their intercontinental flyways. Knowledge and skill dedicated to healing animals of many species in a variety of environmental settings provided an unspoken but protective spiritual bond that leads to public trust.
Thank you to Norman! If you would like to know more about this book you can order your own copy or request it from your local library.
You can get 30% off this title and any other order by entering the code PURDUE30 when ordering from our website.
Filed under: PurduePressFebruary 10th, 2021
In one century, animal health care in North America evolved from farriers and itinerant cow leeches to science-based veterinary medicine. Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health by Norman F. Cheville covers this century of progress fighting infectious diseases and plagues, illuminating the important role of veterinary research and science.
The narrative of Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues is driven by astonishing events that centered on animal disease: the influenza pandemic of 1872, discovery of the causes of anthrax and tuberculosis in 1880s, conquest of Texas cattle fever and then yellow fever, the German anthrax attacks on the U. S. during World War I, the tuberculin war of 1931, Japanese biological warfare in the 1940s, and todays bioterror dangers.
This history focuses on the scientists and institutions that pioneered veterinary education and research and made conquering these plagues possible. It memorializes events that propelled science forward and those that blocked progress. This includes the ways in which the cycles of discovery were enhanced or impeded by viability of the economy, demands of war, and idiosyncrasies of political culture. Also underlying this change were twin idiosyncrasies of culture—disbelief in science and distrust of government—that spawned scientology, creationism, ‘no vaccination’ movements, and other anti-science scams.
This phenomenon is now all too familiar, our world now reckoning with disbelief in science and cultural stasis that threatens progress. As new infectious plagues continue to arise, Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues details the strategies we learned defeating plagues from 1860 to 1960, and the essential role veterinary science played.
“Dr. Norman Cheville draws on over sixty years of experience as a prominent veterinary researcher, educator, and administrator, and he makes use of his acute observational and analytical abilities to provide his perspective on the early and continuing evolution of veterinary medicine. The result is a fascinating and thought-provoking examination of veterinary medical history, with insights to help shape the future of a profession that plays a central role in addressing critical challenges facing the modern world such as infectious diseases, food security and safety, public health, climate change, sustaining wildlife, and the human-animal bond.”
—James Roth, Clarence Hartley Covault Distinguished Professor, Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine
Receive 30% off Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering directly from our website and entering the code PURDUE30 at checkout.
Filed under: PurduePressFebruary 10th, 2021
Less than a century ago any forecast of the weather was generally considered a practical impossibility. Today’s routine availability of accurate weather forecasts represents one of the most unheralded scientific advances of the last century. Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science by Jonathan E. Martin recounts the life and scientific contributions of Reginald Sutcliffe, an unsung hero who laid the groundwork of modern weather forecasting.
The book makes the case that three important advances guided the development of the modern dynamic meteorology and that Sutcliffe was the pioneer in all three of these foundational developments: the application of the quasi-geostrophic simplification to the equations governing atmospheric behavior, adoption of pressure as the vertical coordinate in analysis, and development of a diagnostic equation for vertical air motions. These very developments, in addition to enabling the revolution in weather forecasting, have also been employed in our interrogation of the Earth’s changing climate and now offer the best tools we have to peer into its long-term future.
This work not only details Sutcliffe’s life and his ideas, but also illuminates the impact of social movements and the larger forces that propelled him on his consequential trajectory. It incorporates the reflections of the protagonist on his own work and on the development of the field, such as the prescient prediction of a future in which “weather consultant services” would monetize the need for forecasts and data in industry, markets, tourism, and even professional sports, thereby extending the lifetime of the forecasting enterprise indefinitely.
In an age where nearly everyone can cast a quick glance at their phone to acquire accurate weather forecast information, where responsible governments seek scientific answers regarding the possible ramifications of global warming, and where an enormous fraction of the global economy depends on the current and future weather, Sutcliffe’s influence on the modern world cannot be overstated.
“An advancing world demanded better weather forecasts, but meteorology was in a rut. Then along came Reginald Sutcliffe. This thoroughly accessible, meticulously researched, and inspiring twentieth-century journey reveals how wonderfully diverse factors such as geopolitics, community action, sport, a visitor to Malta, underemployment, family, and war engineered this giant of the meteorological world. Discover how his relentless endeavours in understanding and application genuinely have improved quality of life for us all.”
—Timothy Hewson, Principal Scientist, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
Receive 30% off Reginald Sutcliffe and the Invention of Modern Weather Systems Science and any other Purdue University Press book by ordering directly from our website and entering the code PURDUE30 at checkout.
Filed under: PurduePressFebruary 9th, 2021
To commemorate Black History Month, Purdue University Press is featuring excerpts of notable moments in black history at Purdue.
In this post we’re featuring a few excerpts and pictures from Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer and Sammie L. Morris.
On an overcast morning in May 1968, 129 students from the Black Student Union assembled at the steps of the Administration Building, nonviolently protesting discrimination on campus by symbolically placing bricks on the steps of Hovde Hall. The students delivered a petition to the University listing specific demands for change. It stated:
We demand that the University pressure its departments to recruit qualified black professors for the 1968–1969 school year.
We demand that the professors of the History Department integrate their segregated, bigoted, and insulting U.S. history courses.
We demand the immediate integration of student organizations.
We demand courses dealing with black culture.
We demand that the black arts be incorporated into the music and art appreciation courses.
We demand that the University compile a list of discriminatory housing and make this list public.
We demand more than a token integration of the administration.
We demand that the University see to it that black professors do not meet discrimination in procuring housing.
We demand that a course dealing with distortion be instituted as a general core requirement for all students.
“The day of the march we had already been told that we needed to get a brown paper bag and find a red brick. . . . (Purdue had red brick buildings everywhere). So, we each got our brick, put it in our little paper bag. . . . We assembled in Stewart Center, and we got in a single line, with our bricks in our paper bags, and one by one we marched to Hovde Hall. . . . Single file. Quietly. . . . We took our red bricks out of our brown paper bags and one by one we walked up the steps, and put a brick on the steps.”
— Marion Blalock, BS 1969, director of the Minority Engineering Program, 1973–2008
After decades of fighting for rights and representation, African American students began gaining new opportunities in academic and cultural programs. The Black Cultural Center (BCC), dedicated in the fall of 1970, offered a location for both learning and community building. Professor Singer Buchanan was hired as Purdue’s first coordinator of Black Student Programs in 1970. He articulated a vision for the BCC as an educational and social center, a place for people of different races and backgrounds to discuss issues, exchange feelings, and “emerge hopefully on the other side with a greater understanding of what each thinks, and feels, and believes. Graduate student John Houston became the first director of the BCC in 1972. He was succeeded by Antonio Zamora in 1973.
The Interdisciplinary Afro-American Studies Program at Purdue was approved in 1970. The option for students to major or minor in African American studies became available in the fall of 1971. The College of Engineering’s Minority Engineering Program was established in 1974, with alumna Marion Blalock serving as its inaugural director. The BCC brought Muhammad Ali to campus in 1976, sponsoring a lecture he gave on the topic of friendship.
Two undergraduate students, Edward Barnette and Fred Cooper, established the Black Society of Engineers (BSE) in 1971 as a means of improving black engineering student retention and recruitment. Barnette served as the first president of the new student organization. The society’s president, Anthony Harris, contacted students at universities across the country and, on April 10–12, 1975, hosted the first meeting of what would become known as the National Society of Black Engineers.
By the 1970s, students were increasingly taking advantage of the press to make their voices heard. The Black Hurricane newspaper, a publication of the Black Student Union, published its first issue in 1970. It advocated for total freedom for African American people, with a sphere “like a hurricane” that “knows no boundaries to its destination.” Several other independent student newspapers, such as Red Brick, made their debuts during the decade.
As a sophomore in the fall of 1978, Kassandra Agee Chandler was elected Purdue’s Homecoming queen, the first African American Homecoming queen in Purdue’s history. A representative of Meredith Residence Halls, she competed against twenty-three other competitors to win her title. When reflecting upon the nomination and campaign experience, she remembered hearing, “They’ll never let you win this.” But Agee Chandler drew upon the strength of her family, friends, and dorm mates, as well as her own tenacity. She worked tirelessly on her campaign, going door-to-door and hanging posters. She remembered, “I didn’t let it get to me. I never let anyone talk me down. . . . In the end, I was able to make my family and sisterhood proud.”
In addition to her roles as Homecoming queen and leader for African American students on campus, Agee Chandler was active in extracurricular activities. She was a member of Alpha Lambda Delta freshman honor society, Purdue Pals, and the Black Voices of Inspiration Choir. Agee Chandler was also a president and founding member of Purdue’s Society of Minority Managers. In addition, she served as a social counselor for the Business Opportunity Program in the School of Management and was a member of the Mortar Board senior honor society. Her involvement reflected her role as a leader on campus as well as her excellent academic record.
In 1890 George W. Lacy, or Lacey, completed a degree in pharmacy, becoming the first African American graduate of Purdue. At the time, Pharmacy was an academic organization separate from the university, and as a result, Lacy’s success is sometimes overlooked. In 1894 David Robert Lewis of Greensburg, Indiana, completed his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, becoming the first African American graduate of a traditional four-year program at Purdue.
Purdue at 150 is available for 30% off on the Purdue University Press website when you use the code PURDUE30.
Filed under: PurduePressFebruary 9th, 2021
Parrish Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This time we’re featuring IBISWorld Industry Reports, brought to you by IBISWorld.
IBISWorld Industry Reports include information on over 700 US industries in the US economy at the granular level covering industry-specific titles from the popular to the not-so-popular.
The List of Business Databases is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Click Getting Started with IBISWorld Industry Reports to see the basics of using IBISWorld Industry Reports.
IBISWorld Industry reports include key statistics, industry outlook, major companies, and much more.
Some other resources you might want to explore are:
Featured Database comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to parrlib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMTFebruary 9th, 2021
Newly Signed “Read and Publish” License Confirms Shared Commitment to Open Access
New York, NY, February 9, 2021—ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, and Purdue University have entered into a new transformative Open Access (OA) “read and publish” agreement under the ACM OPEN program. The three-year agreement, which includes regional campuses, will allow for Purdue corresponding authors to publish an unlimited number of OA research articles in the ACM Digital Library across ACM’s entire portfolio of journals, magazines and conference proceedings. Regular access to the rest of the ACM Digital Library’s subscription contents is also provided for in the license. The new agreement demonstrates a shared commitment between ACM and Purdue to further sustainable OA publishing in computer science.
“We are proud to partner with ACM, who understands, as we do, that the benefits of open access publishing are numerous for both author and audience,” says Assistant Dean for Collections and Access, Rebecca Richardson. “Our new partnership with ACM creates greater opportunities for Purdue researchers and authors to choose a cost-free open access option and continue our mission to make high-quality scholarship more equitable and accessible to all learners.”
Under the new agreement, all new ACM research articles published by Purdue corresponding authors will be made OA in perpetuity in the ACM Digital Library (dl.acm.org) at no cost to authors, with default CC-BY author rights for article reuse. Additionally, all accepted new ACM research articles from any Purdue author (corresponding or not) will be automatically deposited into Purdue’s institutional repository.
“Purdue University’s faculty and students are among the most prolific authors of high quality and impactful research articles in ACM’s portfolio of scholarly journals, conference proceedings, and technical magazines published in the ACM Digital Library worldwide”, noted Scott Delman, ACM’s Director of Publications, who went on to say that “ACM is incredibly excited to enter into this new ACM Open partnership, which will enable Purdue-affiliated scholars to reach an even larger readership and greater impact on the global Computing community.”
Since its launch in late January 2020, more than 70 institutions worldwide decided to begin participation in the ACM OPEN license model. The newly signed agreement with Purdue continues ACM’s collaborative efforts towards becoming a sustainable, fully OA research publisher for the computing community.
About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today’s toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 5 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at purdue.edu.
Filed under: general, Open_AccessFebruary 4th, 2021
To commemorate Black History Month, Purdue University Press is featuring excerpts of notable moments in black history at Purdue.
In this post, we’re featuring a chapter from John Norberg’s Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University on the desegregation of Purdue University’s Residence Halls.
In the summer of 1946 Winifred and Frieda Parker, two sisters from Indianapolis, prepared for their freshman year at Purdue University. They were excited and nervous like all freshmen.
Excellent students, after being admitted to Purdue they applied for a room in a residence hall where all freshmen women were required to live. But Winifred and Frieda were denied.
They were African Americans.
During World War II, by federal mandate, African American male military personnel had been housed in Cary Hall — something that had not occurred throughout all the previous years of the University’s existence.
But when the war ended and military personnel left, Purdue continued its practice of refusing African American students housing in residence halls. Some men were placed in a converted home that was occupied by international students. The rest, including women, had to find housing with families across the river in a segregated Lafayette neighborhood around the Lincoln School at Fourteenth and Salem Streets. African American children attended that segregated school through eighth grade and then went to the integrated Jefferson High School. All Lafayette school grade levels were not integrated until 1951. In West Lafayette there were written restrictions in neighborhoods against renting or selling property to people who were not “pure white.”
One African American student denied access to a Purdue residence hall went on to become chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia — one step below the U.S. Supreme Court. During his long, successful career, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. recounted his experiences at Purdue and credited them with convincing him to become an attorney and civil rights advocate.
“In a career of energetic accomplishments and unambiguous liberalism, Judge Higginbotham received much recognition as a legal scholar and civil rights advocate, including the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” the New York Times said in his December 1998 obituary. “Some historians say Judge Higginbotham was one of a handful of black jurists President Lyndon B. Johnson considered as candidates to integrate the Supreme Court before he named Thurgood Marshall in 1967.”
Higginbotham enrolled at Purdue to study engineering and was placed in International House, where students slept together in a top-floor room with open windows. The room was very cold in winter. It was believed that open-air circulation helped stop the spread of viruses, and cold dorms were common in fraternities and sororities. Some students liked them. Others, including Higginbotham, did not.
In 1944 Edward Elliott was president of Purdue, and his office was always open to students. Elliott had met Higginbotham previously. Higginbotham and another student protested that the Union barbershop would not cut the hair of African American students. Elliott told them he would buy clippers to be kept in the barbershop so they could cut each other’s hair.
Now Higginbotham was entering Elliott’s office with another request. He asked to be placed in a Purdue residence hall where students slept in warm rooms.
What happened next was retold many times by Higginbotham but was never mentioned by Elliott. “In emotional speeches, the judge . . . described how a white college president at Purdue University had flatly told him when he was a college freshman in 1944 that the school was not required under law to provide black students with heated dormitories and, therefore, never would,” the New York Times stated.
According to Higginbotham, Elliott told him he would never be allowed to live in the residence hall, and if he didn’t like it, he should leave Purdue. Higginbotham did leave. In the fall of 1945 he entered Antioch College in Ohio and in 1949 was admitted to Yale Law School.
It’s not known how many African Americans were enrolled at Purdue in the mid-1940s, because the University did not then keep records of students by race. African Americans who attended Purdue at the time estimated there were not more than twenty-five.
In a paper titled “Evolution of the Black Presence at Purdue University,” Alexandra Cornelius said, “Between 1940 and 1951, African Americans began attending Purdue in increasing numbers. Despite their proven abilities, African American students in every college in the state were discriminated against both on and off campus. . . . West Lafayette restaurants did not admit African Americans. Blacks were only allowed to eat in the Union Building or the cafeteria during lunch time.”
Nationally, The Negro Motorist Green Book, published from about 1936 to 1966, was a guide to African Americans as they traveled through the country. Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation were in effect not only in the South but in many parts of the country. In their hometowns, minorities knew where they were welcome and unwelcome. But they did not know this when they were on the road. So the Green Book was their guide, listing hotels, restaurants, taverns, gas stations, and all manner of businesses where they would be welcome and safe. The 1949 guide lists only one business open to African Americans in Lafayette — the Pekin Café at Seventeenth and Hartford Streets. That was in the heart of the segregated African American neighborhood. There were other establishments in Lafayette open to minorities that didn’t make the Green Book. But discrimination was the norm of the day.
A Social Action Committee at the Purdue Methodist Church Wesley Foundation was opposed to segregation and sent African Americans to various businesses in Lafayette and West Lafayette to see what would happen. In February 1947 the committee reported that of nineteen restaurants investigated, five refused to serve African Americans, six did serve them but were rude and hesitant about it, and some of the employees who did serve blacks were not aware they were breaking management policy. Three movie theaters would only permit African Americans to sit in the balconies. No barbershop in Lafayette, West Lafayette, or Purdue would cut the hair of African Americans.
Winifred, the younger of the two Parker sisters, had graduated number one in her high school class in May 1946. Frieda was second in her class and had graduated five months earlier in January. She completed a semester at West Virginia State College but decided to transfer. In early July 1946 both young women were admitted to Purdue. Their father, Frederick Parker, was a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts who had done graduate work at Harvard and Indiana Universities. He was the former head of mathematics at the African American Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis and had moved on to become a consultant to the Indianapolis Public Schools system. Their mother, Frieda Parker, was a graduate of Butler University in Indianapolis.
Immediately upon their being accepted, Mrs. Parker took her daughters to Purdue to meet with administrators. According to a statement written and signed by the Parkers in September 1946, they met with the registrar, who told them that while admissions had been closed prior to July, Winifred and Frieda were accepted “as a special case” because of their outstanding personal and academic records.
The Parkers next went to Clare Coolidge, acting dean of women, to obtain student housing in a residence hall. Coolidge gave them residence hall applications and told them to complete and mail them as soon as possible. The applications from the Parkers were rejected with a statement that the number of students seeking housing exceeded the spaces available.
The following day the Parkers received a letter from Coolidge. Parker said Coolidge was “gracious” to the family throughout the experience, but her letter was blunt. It stated: “I was informed by the [Purdue] President’s Office yesterday that at its last meeting the Board of Trustees of the University had discussed the question of housing negro students in the residence halls and felt it was not feasible for the present. Had I known of this action, I would, of course, have saved you and the girls the embarrassment of making an application which can only be refused.”
The most recent meeting of the board of trustees had been on June 22, 1946. The written minutes of that meeting make no mention of a discussion concerning African American students in the residence halls. However, at a meeting of the board on April 17 and 18, 1946, the topic did come up, without any official decision being recorded. Minutes of the meeting state: “[Board] Secretary [and University vice president Frank] Hockema presented an application for admission to Men’s Residence Halls from a negro student in the University. After discussion and by consent, the foregoing report was received as information.” A newspaper reporter was at the meeting but he did not write about the discussion.
Parker contacted Faburn DeFrantz, director of the African American Senate Avenue YMCA in Indianapolis. DeFrantz was a civil rights leader in the state who had worked on integrating housing at Indiana University. DeFrantz told the Parkers they should all meet with Hovde. “Our hope was that we could show President Hovde that it was an injustice for our own state college to discriminate against its own supporters, the citizens and taxpayers of Indiana, regardless of their color or their religion,” Parker said. “We had heard that this new president was fair and just and therein lay our hope and prospects.”
They were unable to arrange an appointment with Hovde and instead met with Hockema, who told them the residence halls were full. Asked if the University had a policy that prohibited African Americans in the residence halls, Hockema said no. But “he admitted that such might be the case from ‘custom and usage.’”
Taking part in the conversation was one man who was Caucasian. After the meeting with Hockema he went to the office of the director of residence halls and said his two nieces were enrolling as freshmen in the fall. He was told there were several rooms available for them.
Parker and DeFrantz returned to Hockema. “We pleaded and we begged,” Parker wrote. “We insisted a man in so esteemed a position must be able to make the decision even if he had no precedent.”
Hockema said he could not go against the position of the trustees, who had told him to hold off on admitting African Americans to the residence halls.
Following their meetings at Purdue, Parker and DeFrantz contacted Indiana governor Ralph Gates, who was “sympathetic” to their position. Gates contacted one or more of the trustees and probably Hovde.
On December 16, 1946, Parker received a five-page letter from Hovde, who went into great detail, stating that he opposed discrimination in any form, but societal change would take many years and “will not be completed in your lifetime or mine.”
The University had no written policy excluding African Americans from the residence halls, Hovde said. But he also noted that over the years three or four African American women had applied to be admitted and had been rejected. “These have been refused,” he wrote, “not because we wished to discriminate, but because the administration did not think it wise to jeopardize the successful operation of the halls, jeopardize our incoming number of women enrollees in the halls; because administrative officers and faculty felt that neither our women students nor their parents were ready yet for true social democracy in living. The situation, therefore, exists, not because we of Purdue believe in discrimination of any kind, but because the decision was thought to be in the best interests of the University and its welfare.” They were afraid students would refuse to live in a residence hall with African Americans, placing a financial strain on the University’s ability to retire construction bonds.
In his letter to Parker, Hovde concluded, “You realize and understand, I am sure, the difficulties I have in persuading and influencing others to my point of view in these matters. . . . I must use my own method of accomplishing my aims. I am personally sure they are right and will produce results more quickly than other methods. Otherwise I would act differently.” Frustrated, Frieda and Winifred attended classes at Purdue in the fall of 1946 and lived in a home in the segregated Lafayette community. They took buses to and from campus. But change came. Hovde ended discrimination at the Union barbershop, and in January 1947 the Parkers were admitted to Bunker Hill Residence Hall.
Soon after the Parkers moved in, the students voted on leadership for their residence hall.
Winifred Parker was elected president of Bunker Hill.
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Filed under: PurduePressJanuary 26th, 2021
Parrish Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This time we’re featuring Mintel, brought to you by Mintel Group Ltd.
Mintel includes market research reports for Europe, the UK, and the US that cover a variety of sectors including consumer goods, travel and tourism, financial industry, internet industry, retail, and food & drink.
The List of Business Databases is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Click Getting Started with Mintel to see the basics of using Mintel.
Mintel reports discuss market drivers, market size & trends, market segmentation, supply structure, advertising and promotion, retail distribution, consumer characteristics, and market forecasts.
Some other resources you might want to explore are:
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