Our First-year Experience Librarian, Cindy Fisher, is a guest blogger over at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker site. In her post, she lauds LibX, a pretty complex, library-specific browser extension from a couple of innovators at VaTech that makes finding and accessing available resources in your library exponentially simpler.
Like I said, it’s pretty complex, so I’ll let Cindy explain it to you.
Calling all scholars! The Harry Ransom Center has opened their annual Fellowship application period for 2012-13.
Who wouldn’t want to get their paws dirty digging through the personal papers of such luminary writers as Graham Greene, Anne Sexton, Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace? Or wile away the time wading through ephemera from Gone With The Wind, Spellbound, The Third Man or any number of other David O. Selznick productions? Or just bask in contemplative imagery from the massive Gernsheim photography archive? With more than 50 fellowships available annually, there’s no reason not to apply.
And the Libraries’ 9 million+ volumes and vast digital resources and special collections are here to support your work…as if you needed more motivation to follow the link below.
The University of Texas Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts are today announcing the launch of an innovative joint endeavor to align the physical and intellectual resources of the Benson Latin American Collection (BLAC) and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS) in a 3-year pilot venture.
Under the program, Dr. Charles Hale will assume sole directorship of both institutions with the objective of integrating staff and programs towards goals common to both.
In taking this approach to administering two of the University’s most notable institutions in the field of Latin American studies, the principals are creating a fiscal efficiency at the executive level, while at the same time discovering a way to streamline programming and collections development through collaboration for the benefit of students, faculty, researchers and the public at large.
At a time when higher education is facing increasing scrutiny, we’re finding new ways to meet the challenges put to us.
You can find complete information on the partnership here.
The University of Texas Libraries is launching a lunchtime lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across the university.
“Research + Pizza” will begin its monthly run at noon on Friday, September 2, in the University Federal Credit Union Student Learning Commons with speaker Dr. Raj Raghunathan – UT Marketing professor and blogger for Psychology Today – speaking about willpower, success and happiness, as the semester gets underway and students navigate their transition to college life.
The program will take place monthly with faculty presenting informal talks about their research followed by questions and discussion.
Pizza is generously provided – while it lasts – to attendees by sponsor Austin’s Pizza.
Presentations at “Research + Pizza” will be recorded for podcast and are free and open to the public.
For more information, visit the Research + Pizza website.
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To kick off the school year right, the Benson is doing a giveaway to Crisol Danza Teatro, courtesy of Texas Performing Arts.
Simply follow the links above, or go to the Benson Facebook page (and, of course, “Like” them if you haven’t already), and enter the giveaway at the event page.
This giveaway ends at 3pm on September 21, but keep an eye out for more on the Benson’s Facebook page later this semester.
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I suppose this proves that books are still relevant, but what about people?
Thoughts?
A High-Tech Library Keeps Books at Faculty Fingertips—With Robot Help
Last week staff in Library Instruction Services heard the good news that two more of their instructional efforts were accepted into the PRIMO Database, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Instruction Section’s peer-reviewed collection of instructional materials. The purpose of PRIMO is to foster sharing of high quality digital resources to support academic librarians’ as they teach users how to find and evaluate information.
PRIMO now includes a total of four projects designed by Library Instruction Services:
This tool helps students turn their research question into a successful database search. Students often struggle with this first piece of the research process but good keyword selection is vital to bringing back relevant and useful resources.
Tip Jar posts, which have been featured on this blog before, use comics and video to introduce undergraduates to research strategies, resources and library services. They are shared through the News For Undergraduates blog, incorporated into course-specific research guides, and used during chat reference transactions.
This interactive tutorial helps students avoid unintentional plagiarism. Students learn what constitutes plagiarism, why it matters, and strategies for avoiding plagiarism such as quoting, paraphrasing and note-taking. The tutorial is assigned by faculty across campus who can upload a related quiz to their Blackboard course site. Libraries staff were also featured in a PRIMO Site of the Month interview discussing the tutorial’s design.
Understanding Citations Tutorial
This interactive tutorial helps students do research and avoid plagiarism by explaining the elements of a citation. At the end of the tutorial, students are able to discern between different types of citations (a journal article versus a book, for example) and recognize the elements of a citation so that they can build a proper citation for their own bibliography.
These resources are available through the Libraries website 24/7 for students who need help even when the Libraries aren’t open. They allow us to provide point of need instruction whatever the time of day and support us as we work with students on their research projects.
Catherine Hamer is the Associate Director for User Services at the University of Texas Libraries.
An unexpected gift can sometimes be the most invaluable.
Thanks to a generous donation from the Audio Preservation Fund – an Austin-based nonprofit formed by three UT alumni in 2009 – the already extensive Historic Musical Recordings Collection (HMRC) just got a little more so with the addition of 1,000 vinyl albums.
Chairman of the Audio Preservation Fund William Vanden Dries hand-delivered the eclectic mix of recordings to the Collections Deposit Library on Tuesday. After an extensive review of the HMRC’s holdings, the group determined where their reserves might bridge gaps in the collection’s catalog, and the gift was amassed from the cache of an unnamed individual collector.
The Audio Preservation Fund acts as a facilitator for the collection and preservation of sound recordings, and for the distribution of donated items to suitable recipients including public archives, libraries, museums, universities and research centers. The Fund’s goal is to make private collections available to the public in an effort to improve access to rare, unique and historical audio.
We express our gratitude to the Audio Preservation Fund on behalf of the Libraries and the patrons who will benefit from their generous gift.
From Duke University Libraries:
When the Association of Research Libraries wrote a letter to the CCC expressing disappointment over the decision to help underwrite the lawsuit, CCC’s reply emphasized that no damages were being sought and maintained that their participation had the simple goal of “clarifying” fair use. This strikes me as disingenuous. There are more efficient ways to clarify fair use than litigation, and the CCC has a definite financial interest in the case even absent any request for damages. CCC’s aim here is not to clarify fair use but to narrow it dramatically, to their direct and immediate profit.
The argument developed here by Kevin Smith places the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in a harsh light – subvening copyright violation litigation in order to further restrict access options to intellectual property, thus securing its own role in the publishing community while attempting to prop up that foundering industry a little longer. As Paul Courant observes elsewhere (and thanks to Paul for the pointer to this article) it forces a reluctant higher education community to seek alternatives to its own and commercial presses – an outcome potentially fatal to the industry.
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I think Binkley could be on to something….
“The present generation should not be surprised at the conclusion of a technological revolution that has as its seed [sic] of a cultural revolution. Such may indeed be true in this instance. The cultural revival of the monopoly of the metropolis and the democratization and deprofessionalization of scholarship are on the horizon which seems to lie ahead. And these things themselves accord with other elements of our social and economic prospects, notably the possible decline in the centralization of population in cities and the development of a new leisure in the hands of a well-educated people. The same technical innovations that promise to give aid to the research worker in his cubicle may also lead the whole population toward participation in a new cultural design.”
The Libraries have two copies of his Manual on methods of reproducing research materials, both available for recall from the Library Storage Facility.
(via boingboing.net)