This Thursday, Nov. 8, at 1:00 p.m. Elizabeth Burgess Dowdell, PhD, RN, FAAN, will deliver a lecture on the complex and increasingly relevant issue of child internet safety. The lecture is the second in this year’s Scholarship@Villanova series and is available for ACS credit.

Dr. Dowdell’s lecture will focus on research findings made possible by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The grant helped fund a study that analyzed the Internet and social-networking patterns in ordinary populations as well as in Internet offenders. Dr. Dowdell describes this approach as multi-pronged. Beyond that study, her lecture will analyze a world in which, increasingly, children have made the Internet their “society,” one populated by “friends.” However, they also tend to be unaware that the Net is also populated by individuals who may put children at risk.

Dr. Dowdell will also touch on the practical application of her study by offering policy recommendations. These include designing technologies and/or educational programs to identify suspicious online behaviors, strengthening Internet filters for student online protection and providing school outreach for students who are harassed, threatened or assaulted after meeting someone online.

The Scholarship@Villanova series is a string of lectures highlighting bold publications and research from distinguished faculty members at Villanova. The library will host five more Scholarship@Villanova events before the end of the academic year. This event will be held in the Speakers’ Corner on the first floor of Falvey Memorial Library, and in the tradition of previous Scholarship@Villanova events it is free and open to the public.

Please join us on Thursday, Nov. 8, at 1:00 p.m. in Falvey Memorial Library’s Speakers’ Corner (1st floor), as Elizabeth Burgess Dowdell, PhD, RN, FAAN, presents “A Multi-prong Approach to Child Internet Safety.”

Dr. Dowdell will share key findings of of her grant-supported research involving middle school, high school and college students, as well as over 400 adult offenders defined primarily by having an Internet sexual offense or a hands-on sexual offense and/or prior Internet experience. She will offer ideas for policy recommendations, such as designing technologies and/or educational programs to identify suspicious online behaviors, strengthening Internet filters for student online protection, and school outreach for students who are harassed, threatened or assault from meeting someone online. Part of the Scholarship@Villanova series.

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Need research assistance?  Contact Barbara Quintiliano, liaison librarian to College of Nursing

The Dream of the Celt by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa is a fictional account of the life of Irish Nationalist Sir Roger Casement, hanged by the British government during the First World War. Several of Casement’s manuscripts are in Falvey’s Special Collections; as well, other materials collected by his friend and ally Joseph McGarrity are housed in the McGarrity Collection in Falvey Memorial Library. All of these materials have been digitized and are made available in Villanova’s Digital Library.

Prominently featured on the front cover of the English language translation of The Dream is a photograph of Roger Casement drawn from the McGarrity Collection. Read more on the Blue Electrode blog.

By Alice Bampton

Christopher (Chris) Hallberg, a native of Milford, N.J., is beginning his second year as a graduate assistant for Falvey Memorial Library’s Technology Development team. Chris works with David Lacy, software development specialist; Demian Katz, technology development specialist; and David Uspal, senior web specialist for library services and scholarly applications.

Chris’ duties involve writing and documenting code. He assists with VuFind, VuDL and other smaller projects.

Katz says, “Chris has been a tremendous help with the huge project of updating VuFind for a 2.0 release. His eye for visual interfaces has led to some nice cosmetic improvements to the look and feel of VuFind, and his work will also eventually lead to a major overhaul of the Digital Library book reader.”

Chris has two bachelor’s degrees, one in interactive multimedia and the other in computer science, from The College of New Jersey in Ewing. He is enrolled in the Department of Computing Sciences at Villanova University, working on a master’s degree, which he plans to complete in 2013.

He is considering pursuing a doctorate. “If not, I’ll be looking for work as a web developer. I will be starting a game studio with my close undergraduate friend, Brett Taylor, in the time that my regular job doesn’t consume,” Chris says.

He was the lead web and research developer at RiverSound Media Group, East Setauket, N.Y., before coming to Villanova.

His hobbies are practicing yoga, climbing rocks and playing guitar.

Photo by Alice Bampton