Features

Say someone would like to find out more about the writer Thornton Wilder. For students, faculty and staff at UNH, a biography is available in about a minute, give or take 10 seconds. Literature Online, one of dozens of online databases and indexes that Dimond Library subscribes to, can also—within seconds—produce the names of everything Wilder wrote. What about "The Skin of Our Teeth"? The database Lexis-Nexis will tell you a new musical version was Broadway-bound in December.

Welcome to the new age of scholarship: on the Internet. Serious scholars can now browse journals in which the bibliography and footnotes are linked to yet more scholarly publications. "It really enhances their ability to do research," says University Librarian Claudia Morner. Dimond Library's "Electronic Reference Area" allows users to access a vast array of information, from 9 million medical citations to thousands of journals and hundreds of newspapers. But Morner says there are two problems: the library should have dozens more of these databases, and they are expensive.

Having just finished a $19 million renovation and expansion which transformed Dimond Library from a cramped, dingy facility into an award-winning architectural showpiece, the library staff now seeks to build from within, acquiring additional books, journals and electronic resources. Electronic information is the wave of the future, says Morner. "Students and faculty expect us to have electronic resources," she says, part of the way people now learn.

Lots of people—lobstermen not the least among them—would like to know how many lobsters there are in the ocean. UNH marine reseachers would also like to know, to help prevent catastrophic depletion of the species. So UNH students devised an underwater time-lapse camera, attached it to a lobster trap, and set the apparatus off a beach in Rye, N.H. The resulting videos showed that only one out of every 10 lobsters near the trap went inside. Of those, nine out of 10 came back out.They call it LTV, for Lobster Trap Video, and Winsor Watson, professor of zoology and director of the Center for Marine Biology, says it may prove two things: that lobsters are territorial, i.e. the lobster with the most attitude was kicking the other lobsters out; and that lobster traps are not a very good way to assess lobster populations.

Watson (at right, with UNH students) not only researches the behavior of lobsters and horseshoe crabs but also the function of neurons in sea slugs. His work is part of an extensive marine science program at UNH that includes 41 faculty members from 11 departments, affiliated with three centers and one institute. Yet because of budget cutbacks, the University provides very little of what Watson calls "seed money" that scientists need to test new research ideas.

Last year, Leslie Hubbard '27 made a gift of $10 million, a UNH record, to the marine program. Some of that gift is being used in the Center for Marine Biology to support new faculty and graduate student research. "There's money now specifically for programs that hold promise," Watson says. "It's investment in the future."

Rumor has it that when a baby is born in Durham, the first thing the new parents do is go down to the UNH Child Study and Development Center and sign up on the waiting list. It's a fable, of course, but parents do recognize the center as a place where the best new child care theories and ideas are put into practice. And there is a long waiting list.

The center, a training site for UNH students and a research facility for faculty and students, is "school" for 130 pre-school children. The nursery school dates back to 1929, the full-day programs to 1988. For 18 of those years, Mary Jane Moran has helped guide the early childhood education of hundreds of children and the evolution of the center's "inquiry-oriented" approach. Moran, an assistant professor of family studies and associate director of the center, explains that the inquiry method presumes "children can be trusted to share in determining their course of study." If growing pumpkin seeds was slated for October, but moon rocks have captured the students' attention, well then, moon rocks it is.

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