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Recent Additions October 13, 1997
The counter WebTracker is being added to our pages. The service seems reliable and non-intrusive. It's also free!
September 5, 1997
We have added a Conference Room feature to the chat room. The Conference Room automatically signs users into a chat environmemnt and assigns a nickname when those pages are loaded. A more fully featured chat format with scheduled events is available in the chat room.
August 9, 1997
We have received several new awards over the past while. We have also created a cinema category. The cinema " Great Directors" list was developed by Malaspina Film Instructor Shirley Goldberg.
April 16, 1997
The sites we use as our anchor links for each record in our data base are being designated according to an evaluation scheme ranging from one to five stars. For a list of five star sites click on the panel below.
Five Star Site List February 16, 1997
We have signed on with the Internet Link Exchange (see banners below). This service exchanges banner advertizing between our site and other non-commercial sites. The service is free and is a good way to let people know about our resources and for us to discover other non-commercial resources on the net.
LinkExchange Member January 3, 1997
Happy New Year! We are making major revisions to these pages affecting both content and navigation. Each entry is being modified to include Library of Congress HTML citation links. Amazon book lists are still being added, and the database structure is being altered to provide easier linking to parallel databases. We have also changed the home page to one that is less graphical. The old home page is still available here.
December 1, 1996
We are presently revising all of our database entries by adding links to the Library of Congress Offline Citations for each record and Amazon Bookstore lists of all available "Books by" and "Books about" for each entry. This revision also includes the replacement of dated links and the addition of new links. The complete revision should be in place by the new year. The Great Books Home Page has been selected by Excite as part of their tour Joining a Reading Group. The page has also made it onto Webcounter's Top 100 most visited sites placing number 11 in their Plus category.
WebCounter's Top 100 Sites
November 14, 1996
As of November 14, 1996 we have beome an Associate of the online bookstore Amazon. We have been linking to books at Amazon for some time. Our associate status provides assurance that any books you decide to buy through our links to Amazon will receive the same customer service you would receive from Amazon directly, The association will not alter our linking policies or book choices which continue to be based upon the backbone of "Great Books," and we will continue to also provide links to online texts wherever they are available.
November 3, 1996
The sweep through the databases relinking the old NlightN bookstore URLs to Amazon is finished. We have added many new books in the process and updated citations in many cases to "live" links at Amazon.
October 27, 1996
Many of the links to books on these pages have been to the online bookstore provided by NlightN. NlightN suddenly changed its policy and linking scheme a few days ago rendering all of our links to that provider obsolete. We are currently shifting all of our NlightN links to "Amazon". This is time consuming and labour intensive but should be completed in a week or so.
October 13, 1996
We have added a few "mild" animations to the home page--using the technique conservatively to present a looped review of art images from the seven historical periods. These images take a while longer to load than single images but the dynamic slide show effect is quite impressive. Let us know if these are distracting. Here is a sample:
October 5, 1996
The Liberal Studies Faculty at Malaspina has proposed 2 three credit courses that would take place during the summer over a one month period in Florence, Italy. These courses will be components of the Liberal Studies Program and will explore rich and varied material from the humanities, fine arts and sciences. Full details on these courses are pending. We anticipate that interested students will have the option of enrolling for these courses for credit or on an audit basis. For more information please send a short Email message to Russell McNeil. Click on the panel below for updated details.
September 29, 1996
Great Books, eh? Great Art too, eh! Yes, this is a Canadian site, and it gives me great pleasure to direct you to our new gallery of Canadian Art. The Gallery is located currently within our Group of Seven image collection. This contains a series of personal images gathered this past summer. We must remind you that these images are intended exclusively for the educational and personal use of students, scholars, and the public. Any commercial use or publication of materials contained herein without authorization is strictly prohibited. Here is a sample:
Albert H. Robinson (1881 - 1956) Noontime, Longue Pointe Village Musee du Quebec Oil on Canvas 1919
Malaspina Photograph, R. McNeil 08/96 September 18, 1996
The historical reference entries in our database have expanded considerably over the past month as has the Theatre category. The database index currently contains 848 separate entries. Our main efforts of late are focussed on improving the layout and functionality of the four course modules: LBST 301 Matrix, LBST 302 Matrix, LBST 401 Matrix, and LBST 402 Matrix. One feature added in the past week is a comprehensive Malaspina search utility which offers complete site access to all files in the Great Books data base as well as all files in other department and personal homepage directories. It's east to use. Just click on the panel below and try a keyword like: "Plato"
The Globe and Mail New Media Centre together with Pointcast offer a fascinating personalized news service which you can customize for your own interests. The program (a viewer) needs to be downloaded and it can be a bit of a memory hog on slower systems. But, if you choose it will also become your screen saver. It does not work on LAN systems but works well from direct access sites. Try it:
[Personalized News -- Needs Pointcast Viewer (below)]
(Required for New Media Centre) August 8, 1996
We have created a historical reference category for database entries which do not "fit" into current categories (science, art, books, theatre or music) but are helpful is situating "events" along the timeline. The only entry there so for is the one for Alejandro Malaspina but others will be added from time to time as the need arises.
August 3, 1996
The listserv GREATBOOKS-LIST is now available to anyone interested in Great Books. The list is unmoderated and easy to join. Activity on this listserv will be slow in the early stages but will certainly pick up as Autumn approaches. Try it out.
July 21, 1996
With Vincent van Gogh's entry into the database tonight, the Malaspina Great Books Home Page gaps have been filled. The database contains 639 individual records spanning 2,600 years from Homer (900 B.C) to composer Alexina Diane Louie (b. 1949). The entries by category are as follows: Books (151), Music (181), Art (250), Theatre (17), and Science (40). New links will be added in the future, but for now, we will be concentrating on filling out the lecture and seminar sections of this document. Please suggest new entries and enjoy the page.
July 16, 1996
The music database is now complete. The art categories [Renaissance through Romantic] are also complete in the Gallery section but not yet entered into the data base. We expect to complete that process within the week.
July 8, 1996
These are the dog days in home page land. We are making slow slogging progress with the data bases although the changes may not be all that obvious to casual visitors. The art material is fascinating, and extremely time consuming. My colleagues have also passed on an arm full of lectures and notes which I hope to integrate into these pages by fall.
June 16, 1996
We have incorporated the following mini-timelines for each of the five categories (science, art, books, theatre and music) contained in our guide. Selection of points on these timelimes will bring up the first entry from the musical period selected: [A]ntiquity, [M]edieval, [R]enaissance, [B]aroque, [C]lassical, [R]omantic or [M]odern.
We have also redesigned our interdisciplinary matrix learning tool.
June 6, 1996
We have added a mapped timeline (below) to our home page and within each record in our author database. The line is clearly not linear (antiquity spans a 1200 years period while the classical only 70 years), but timelines are helpful constructs. The links within the timelime contain chronological entries from five categories: science, art (pending), great books, theatre, and music. Once an entry is selected you can move to adjacent entries (alphabetical or chronological) using the appropriate selection arrows.
May 29, 1996
With the Great Books Authors list under control, we are now concentrating on developing an analagous list for the music pages. Our music list is based upon a representative selection of composers drawn from the basic repertoire compiled by David Lampson at Classical Net. To better facilitate the comparison of authors with composers (and artists) we are organizing these lists chronologically (by date of composer birth) and assigning composers to periods based upon this criterion rather than compositional style. Check back from time to time to see our progress. Our site was featured in the May 17, 1996 Scout Report. Our Interdisciplinary Matrix has been selected by Blue Web'n as a resource for their library of Internet-based learning applications.
May 14, 1996
The Great Books data base has been revised to allow for faster chronological and author searches. The data base has also recently been approved as an important literature guide by by the Clearinghouse Research Library.
Clearinghouse approved
April 20, 1996
We are experimenting with an external guestbook service. Panels to sign and view the guestbook have been added to the home page.
April 13, 1996
We have redesigned the home page over the past few weeks producing a more contemporary (and less "baroque") look and feel. We have also added important new links to the Music Centre, and made some progress in completion of the lecture modules in our World Lecture Hall. The popular award winning CBC Radio science series Quirks & Quarks has also been added to the Science Centre.
March 22, 1996
We have added a link to the SETI Institute in our Science Centre. This site serves as a hub for Serving the World Wide Web with information about scientific research in the general field of Life in the Universe with an emphasis on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
March 7, 1996
The Great Books list (with author links and citations) is now complete. The list will change as more E-texts become available and more net resources are identified. This first run at the list includes books recommended by Mortimer Adler in an Appendix from How to Read a Book. Many other books have been added to that list and are used in our program but are identified in each case as not from the original Adler list.
March 2, 1996
In addition to a periods classification, we have added an authors search capability to the Great Books page.
February 18, 1996
Five student art projects done in conjunction with the LBST 301 seminar on Euclid were judged by students and faculty as the "best of the bunch" (see Project Guidelines). The works are "hanging" in the "Euclid Gallery" as well as the "Great Books" Gallery.
Euclid Art Gallery February 16, 1996
The issue of internet censorship and the possible impact of recent US legislation on the availability of materials on the net is being monitored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to online resources and information. According to this organization, many of the books and links provided on these pages (including Sophocles' Oedipus Rex) would be banned if this legislation is fully enforced. Links to that organization's Blue Ribbon campaign have been added to the Liberal Studies News Room and Great Books page.
February 10, 1996
Most of our effort on this page is currently directed towards the completion of links to the Great Books lists. If there is no HTML or text electronic version of a particular book available we are linking to NlightN's electronic book store which provides both the book citation and an option to order on line. Where the book is not available for ordering we are providing the Library of Congress citation(s).
The Globe and Mail link in the News room has been renamed to Globe net. This is a new and interesting interactive service which also offers an electronic forum for the discussion of national issues.
Globe net February 3, 1996
We have added a link in the Liberal Studies Art Gallery to the just completed web page for the Nanaimo Art Gallery which is located on the Nanaimo Campus of Malaspina University-College.
Lon Spight's (UNLV) Composer's Gallery in our science centre is back in service.
We've added the NLightN search engine to our home page as the first and preferred engine of choice. NLightN will search both the public internet (as the other search engines do) and the many private databases around the world. The information derived from private or proprietary databases is fee based. You can choose to pay the fee as you go, or stick to the free information NLightN provides. To make full use of NLightN you need to sign on and use the password the company (Library Corporation) will automatically assign you (that part is also free). For serious researchers, the option to have access to proprietary data can be important. Take it for a free ride and see if it meets your needs.
January 30, 1996
A picture speaks volumes. We've expanded the home page weather link to encompass the globe. The global temperature montage (image below from Jan 30, 1996) is updated every six hours. Check it out.January 29, 1996
We have split the world lecture hall materials into more manageable modules and made provision for future modules in science, art, theatre, and special enquiry topics. Maclean's magazine has been added to the News room and Fitness on the Net given a prominent place on the home page.January 26, 1996
We have added the Starting Point metasearch web search tool to the home page. This is a flexible searching approach which allows the user to choose from several manual and robot search engines available on the web. There are significant differences in research results obtained from various search tools. While most database companies will accept URL submissions, many are months behind in updating their indexes. So, it is advisable to check through several data bases if you are looking for current information and sites.January 25, 1996
Fitness, wellness, mind-body connections--however characterized--are an essential element in any rounded liberal education. Although we have offered enquiry seminars on these themes in the past we do not (as yet) offer an integrated component on wellness within the program (we are working on it). We do however offer you a link to Fitness on the Net, an interesting new approach to fitness.We have finished the first cut "great Books" entries within the interdisciplinary matrix. We've started with the Adler list as a point of departure. That list does not yet include several of the books we use, nor does it represent a "recommended" list from our faculty. Most of us will agree that these are "Great Books," but there are obvious holes and deficiencies in the current list which will be filled in the next few weeks. And, yes, we will be linking these books to primary source materials and related sites--stay tuned.
January 22, 1996
We have listed all of the "Great Books" from the Adler list within the time frames in the historical (News) section. These lists are always controversial. Indeed, we have in our program ventured outside of this list on a number of occasions and those books too will be entered into this master list. Books which have had a significant influence on the development of science, art, theatre, and music will be duplicated later in the parallel time frames for those categories. Several of the books in these lists have been linked to external sites and that work will continue. We also plan to link the books we have used in our program to the "lecture," essay and seminar materials in the Liberal Studies world lecture hall study centre.January 21, 1996
We are entering the " Great Books" list recommended by Mortimer Adler ("How to read a Book") within the category divisions of the Liberal Studies News room and linking wherever possible to electronic text versions or another appropriate page if the book is not yet available on line. This may generate some debate. The position here is that in hindsight the important "historical events" from each era were not its "great" wars, famines, earthquakes or migrations, but the "great ideas" that emerged both as a continuing synthesis from earlier ideas and from the influence of contemporary currents (the stuff we call news). We sometimes need to remind readers that "great" does not always equate with "good" or "virtuous." These ideas (warts and all) have nevertheless had an enormous influence on Western culture.January 20, 1996
We've added several important links to the Theatre Centre (and interdisciplinary matrix) period areas. One fascinating addition is the History of Costume which we have added and "tailored" to match each of our theatre periods.Lon Spight's Gallery of 1000 Composers (Department of Physics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas) link in the Music Centre is temporarily out of service. This gallery is an extraordinary contribution to musical history so we will be leaving the link in place until UNLV reestablishes the connection.
January 19, 1996
The world lecture hall material is in an early stage of development. It is an important space and one where anyone may audit part of this Program. The heart of the Program however is the main seminar where students and instructors meet regularly to discuss the ideas contained in the books we are reading. This process is critical to the success of programs like this and one that is difficult to reproduce in the web environment. "Great Books" come alive for us when we own them, enter them in personal terms, and converse with them in a community setting. Your success in this process requires your involvement in a seminar. Is it possible to engage in an effective electronic seminar? It may be. But to do that we need your input. We would like to hear from you with suggestions on the best way to accomplish this seminar activity in the web environment. Private listservs, email, or a dedicated newsgroup might help, but more might be required. At present it is an informal arrangement. We expect over the summer months to develop a series of modular thematic distance based short "courses" with interactive components (including a private listserv for those involved). We'll keep you informed as our thinking and planning develops.
Coordinator Ian Johnston's Word Processor
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