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Starting University can be daunting. For most, becoming a University student is the beginning of a new academic challenge and social life. However, with these exciting ventures comes financial responsibility.

The post Four top tips about student finance appeared first on OUPblog.

I love being a children’s librarian.  But, I also have a secret love of numbers. Luckily for me, I am the chair of the ALSC budget committee where we have the thrill of looking at spreadsheets, puzzling out numbers and analyzing trends with ALSC’s Executive Director, Aimee Strittmatter.  My committee also has the honor of overseeing the Children’s Library Service Endowment, which provides funding of approximately $1500 annually for ALSC committee projects.  We make dreams come true, okay maybe not dreams, but we make good ideas a reality.

The Children’s Library Service Endowment fund (CLSE) started in 1982 and was formerly known as the Helen Knight Memorial Fund.  The proceeds of this fund support long and short-range projects and programs of ALSC.  The endowment is designed to support committees that have ideas for special projects not covered by the operating budget. Through the years it is has been the financial engine behind the “Seal” created by the Great Interactive Software for Kids Committee, School-Age Programs and Service Committee’s PDF booklist “Great Elementary Reads”. The endowment also financially supported the Great Web Sites Committee in the redesign of the website and in 2013, CLSE funded the Early Childhood Programs and Services Committee webinar speaker and provided free access for ALSC members.

If you are part of an ALSC Committee please consider using CLSE funding to make your idea a reality.  The Special Funds Application (also known as Form M) is located in The Division Leadership Manual and on ALA Connect in the ALSC Budget Committee Files and is easy to complete.  Remember that projects must align with ALSC’s strategic plan. If you have any questions along the way please contact Diane Foote, ALSC Fiscal Officer [email protected] or myself, Paula Holmes, ALSC Budget Chair [email protected].  Deadline for Applications is April 15, 2014 with notification of funding approval after Annual 2014.  Monies must be spent prior to August 31,2015.

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Paula Holmes chairs the Budget Committee for ALSC.  She is the past chair of the Library Service to Special Population Children and their Caregivers, serves as a member of the United for Libraries Awards Committee, another division of ALA and serves on the Upper St. Clair Township Library Board. Outside her board responsibilities she runs a book group at the USC library. Before entering the world of Library Land, Paula was a retail buyer for a major, no longer existing, department store chain.  Her husband Neal, sons Thomas and Sean have benefited from her keen fashion sense, even if they don’t know it.   She is secretly proud of her LEGO trophy she won in Denmark at LEGO headquarters.

She can be reached at [email protected] and you can follow her on twitter @qsprite.

KidLit Con has launched a fundraising partnership with Reading is Fundamental (RIF).

Earlier this year, we reported that the federal budget for RIF has been reduced. With the new partnership, readers can donate to the childhood literacy program in the name of KidLit Con.  Follow this link for more details about how to make a donation.

Here’s more from the announcement: “KidLit Con is seeking to make a more personal and direct contribution as the funds we raise will be coming directly from book lovers in the pursuit of creating more book lovers. Now is the time, quite frankly, where we need to put up or shut up. If you are a writer or a librarian or a bookseller or a book blogger or if you read blogs about books then this fundraiser is targeted directly at you … This is easy. You think books matter then you need to do something to help kids get books. Period.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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By Elvin Lim

The strategic gamesmanship leading up to the budget compromise that was reached late last week suggests a blueprint for the budget battles to come. But while many observers believe that Washington is bracing for even more epic battles to come, when Congress considers the budget for the rest of the fiscal year and legislation to raise the debt ceiling, my guess is that there will be more sabre-rattling than a serious effort to avoid raising the debt ceiling. Here are three reasons why.

First, even Democrats agree that cuts are necessary, and even Republicans know that deep cuts are difficult. There will be collusion to fight, but not necessarily to disagree. Certainly, Republicans and Tea Partiers still enjoying the honeymoon from last November’s elections have successfuly set the frame of “spending cuts” such that Democrats have been forced to fight the battle on Republican turf. But everyone already accepts that the federal government has to rein in its spending. Now, Republicans will have to take their pick between fiscal restraint and their social agenda. So far they have been consistent in prioritizing the former, for when push came to shove, even Senator Tom Coburn dropped his insistence on the Planned Parenthood rider. For Democrats, the question is not whether they can beat Republicans at their own game and propose a bigger budget slash than Republicans want, but whether they can reset the political agenda, postpone the issue, or talk about something else. Both sides however, will be sure to start off each new debate with maximal bluster and deliberately over-reach, so as to win the maximal concession from the other side and to achieve a final resting point closest to one’s original pre-bluster preference.

Second, last week revealed that neither side wants to risk the political fallout of a government shut-down. Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton was the net political winner when Republicans forced a government shutdown in 1995 and 1996. Last week, even Tea Partiers revealed their interest in seeing government work, not shut down. The budget talks were the first real test of the Tea Party in government, the first test of Speaker Boehner’s ability to unite a diverse group of freshmen and veteran Republican congressmen, and the first test of President Obama’s ability to reconcile Democrats and Republicans after his announcement to seek a second presidential term. Because nobody wants to risk appearing obstructionist, the irony of divided party control in Washington – which was the case the last time a president managed to balance the budget – is that it may well prove to be more constructive than gridlocked in the short-term. The long run, of course, is a different matter. Nobody in Washington thinks about that.

Third, while Democrats are hailing the $38 billion cut in spending they acceded to as the biggest real spending cut in history, the fact is this amount represents 12 percent of the amount (about $300 billion) we would have to cut from the budget so that Congress would not have to raise the public debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion, which The Treasury Department expects we will hit in about a month. Not even Congressman Paul Ryan or Senator Marco Rubio have proposed plans aggressive enough to save us $300 billion in one month. When politicians make the most noise, then we know that they are interested more in the semblance of trying than confident in the possibility of a solution.

If the last ten years, in which we have raised the debt ceiling ten times, is any guide, it is very likely that we are going to have to raise the debt ceiling, if not the US government would not be able to raise money to fund its operati

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By Michelle Rafferty

When my friend sent me a link with the subject line: Carmel in WSJ! I clicked with trepidation. The last time my hometown made national news it involved a sodomy hazing incident and the high school basketball team. Phew. This time, it was only about a local dispute over an expensive new piece of suburban architecture:

Photo by Melissa Rafferty

This is the Palladium, a $126 million concert hall, whose controversial price tag is heating up this spring’s mayoral election. My first thought was: why, when Indianapolis theater and concert venues reside a mere 20 minutes south, did Carmel do this?* I asked our resident city expert Sharon Zukin for her opinion on the matter and she wrote:

…so Carmel, Indiana, has entered the global sweepstakes of destination culture!…every city copies every bigger, more famous, more glamorous city to build cultural attractions in the hope of attracting tourists and (hope against hope) They hire starchitects (usually Frank Gehry but in this case…the long-dead Andrea Palladio!) to design flagship buildings that will get media attention (the Guggenheim Bilbao effect). They sign up for the Cow Parade (see the website) if they have a low budget and for “The Gates” (Christo in Central Park, 2008) if they have a big budget and for the Olympics if they have a huge budget. All of which puts them on a treadmill of cultural competition.

And the ironic thing  is that the more cities compete, trying to differentiate themselves with “cultural attractions,” the more alike they become. As Zukin also told me:

…so many cities do the same thing that they ALL wind up building the same kind of attraction, so the uniqueness of any of these attractions is submerged in the wave of same-old same-old spectacles; the resulting standardization is called, thanks to the geographer Donald McNeil, McGuggenization.

Think of the Guggenheims, Times Squares, MOMA’s, and MOCA’s across the world. That’s McGuggenization. And your city could be next!

*In the Palladium’s defense, I spoke with my mom and she happened to like the center (they offered a free concert for the grand opening).  And she didn’t have much sympathy for the outcry about a potential raise in taxes due to Palladium expenses. Turns out Carmel has one of the cheapest tax brackets in the area, meaning the residents have gotten a lot of bang for their buck over their years. Like a brand new Arts & Design District. Safer roads. And Waterslides.

Last November, armed only with a copy of Teen Spaces by Kimberly Bolan and a budget of $1,000, I set out to create a teen space in my library. The budget actually seemed huge to me at first, but after looking up the price lists for a number of nice contract furniture companies, I realized it was almost enough to buy a chair. Woo. Hoo.

Undaunted, I expanded my search to include residential and school furniture, until I found something with an acceptable balance of quality, versatility, and price. During the process, I learned a number of things I wanted to pass on to anyone else in the position of choosing furniture for a teen space without the benefit of a consultant or even the advice of a furniture company.

1. If you don’t have access to floor plans for your building, you can make ones using free online tools. I started out with a tape measure and graph paper, but I ended up using floorplanner.com. The best part was that after I created an outline and entered the dimensions of the shelves I was working with, I could drag and drop them anywhere and get a 3-D simulation. I think my coworkers were more impressed with the 3-D simulation than anything else I’ve done this year.
2. Tables and chairs (and coffee tables and stools and ottomans) need to be complementary in height. Unless you’re buying chairs that go up and down (and I’m always afraid they’ll lose their oomph), you need to make sure the measurements line up. Lots of websites have guidelines. As a general rule, for adults, chair seats should be 18 inches off the ground, and table tops should be 8 inches above the chair seats. Of course, not all teens are adult sized, so you might consider slightly lower chairs, like 16 inches. Or you might consider lounge furniture, where the seats are usually lower.
3. The space between furniture is as important as the size of the furniture. Fire code for my library requires 3 feet of walkway space between pieces of furniture. However, you should consider what really has to get through that walkway: book carts? strollers? three teens with arms linked a la the Wizard of Oz? My big mistake was putting my desk three feet from the wall, so when I pushed my chair back to stand up, the 3 feet shrank to 1 and everyone was uncomfortable walking behind me to get to the Spanish books.
4. If you can’t afford contract furniture, you can still choose furniture based on classic commercial designs. One of the most helpful research methods I applied to this project was reading design blogs like Desire to Inspire, Design Sponge, and Apartment Therapy. I was attracted to them because they had pretty pictures, but they also taught me some design terms. In fact, by comparing library furniture catalogs with what I saw on the blogs, I learned that a lot of the furniture billed as “teen” are based on designs by Eames, Saarinen, Mies, and Breuer. Although I can’t afford originals of these mid-century modern designs, I can find knock-offs with some of the s
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

After attempting a pivot to jobs, the Obama administration has realized that a hanging cadence on health-care will not do. Perhaps they should never have started it, but closure is what the administration now must have. An encore after the strident audacity of hope on health-care reform was temporarily dashed after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate.

In the immediate aftermath of that election, Democrats were in danger of exchanging over-confidence for excessive humility. After Obama’s historic election the year before and Arlen Specter’s party switch, Democrats were overtaken by hubris that Obama’s tune of change could be used to overturn Washington and to compel it toward a Progressive utopia. But just as Democrats were foolhardy to think that 60 votes in the Senate gave them invincible power, they somehow thought after the Massachusetts Senate election that 59 made them completely impotent.

In the media, we hear, conversely, about the conservative comeback in hyperbolic terms. On Saturday, Glenn Beck, not Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, delivered the keynote speech in the largest annual conservative gathering, the CPAC conference. If Beck’s stardom exceeds that of the winner of the CPAC straw poll this year, Ron Paul, it is because the conservative movement, charged as it is, remains a movement in search of a leader. It is also a movement, as Beck’s criticism of Progressive Republicans in his speech reveals, which is not exactly in sync with the Republican party – the only machine capable of taking down liberal dreams.

And so a Democratic comeback on health-care reform is afoot. With one vote shy of a fillibuster-proof majority, Senator Harry Reid has opened the door to the Budget Reconciliaton process that more Progressive advocates of health-care reform like Governor Howard Dean have been pushing for a while. While it is not clear that there are 50 votes in the Senate for the public option, assuming that Vice-President Biden will cast the 51st, what is clear is that Democrats are much more likely to push through a liberal bill with the veto pivot sliding to the left by ten Senators.

In the White House too, we see a coordinated move to bring Reconciliation back as an option. Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to lay the ground work when he warned that “in time, we’ll see these skyrocketing health care costs become the single largest driver of our federal deficits.” He said this because in order to use Reconciliation, Democrats must show a relationship between health-care reform and balancing the federal budget.

No one in Washington believes that Thursday’s Health-care Summit will magically generate a consensus when in the past year there has been nothing but partisan bickering. If so, the President is not being naive, but signali