Students have a chance to get acquainted with professors' expertise and interests with the book exhibit, "Faculty Scholars of Penn State's Commonwealth College."

The exhibit will be displaying books written by Penn State Commonwealth College professors through Monday in the entry lobby of Pattee Library.

"The idea behind the exhibit, as I understand it, is to feature faculty within the Commonwealth College, who are active in research, and have been successful in having their research published as full-length books," said Richard Fitzsimmons, director of the library at Penn State Worthington Scranton campus.

His work Pro-Choice/Pro-Life Issues in the 1990s is part of the exhibit. The work provides bibliographic access to monographic and periodicals.

"My research interests relate to issues of intellectual freedom, censorship and democracy," Fitzsimmons said.

Professor Marylin Daniels is another faculty member whose work is being displayed at the exhibit.

A professor of Speech Communications at the Worthington Scranton campus, Daniels publishes books and articles concerning the history and use of American Sign Language with both hearing and deaf individuals.

She is one of the primary authorities on the use of sign language with hearing children.

Her book Benedictine Roots in the Development of Deaf Education: Listening with the Heart is presently displayed at Pattee.

"This book discusses the first teacher of the deaf, the Benedict monk who believed that the deaf could be educated," Daniels said.

The book further examines the educational instruction of the deaf individual from the Benedictine beginning to the present condition in Gallaudet University located in Washington D.C.; the only school dedicated to deaf people, Daniels said.

The executive director of the American School for the deaf has acclaimed the book as the most important treatment of deaf education and its history to be published in his 33 years as an educator of the deaf, Daniels said.

Raising the Devil is another work on display that just came out this month.

The author, Bill Ellis, is an associate professor of English and American Studies at the Hazleton campus. His book discusses the panic that occurred in Great Britain during the 1980s involving the Christian Pentecostal movement and the Satanism scare caused by crime rituals.

"Common normal teenage activities like late night visits to graveyards, Ouija boards and legend tripping were considered satanic in the 1980s," Ellis said.

Ellis also discusses the L.A. McMartin pre-school case in which a teacher was charged with 35 counts of assault.

He was accused of sexually molesting and terrorizing children at Faith Chapel church in Spring Valley by dangling them from a chandelier, dunking them in toilets and making them drink the blood of animals in ritualistic ceremonies. Some children blamed the teacher of bringing an elephant and a giraffe to class and killing them both as a way of warning his pupils not to reveal his crimes. The teacher was proven innocent of the crime. Ellis claims that this was the most expensive prosecution in American history, about the level of the O.J Simpson trial.

Many other books are on display at the exhibit exploring subjects ranging from literature to science. The Commonwealth College was created in 1997 Penn State's Commonwealth Educational System reorganized to better meet the educational needs of Pennsylvania residents by inventing the Commonwealth College.

The College is composed of 12 of the Commonwealth Campuses and offers baccalaureate degree programs so those students didn't have to transfer to University Park. With more than 14,000 credit students, the college has the largest enrollment of any college in the Penn State system.