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 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.
Last week staff in LibraryInstructionServices 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 featuredonthisblogbefore, use comics and video to introduce undergraduates to research strategies, resources and library services. They are shared through the NewsForUndergraduatesblog, 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 PRIMOSiteoftheMonth interview discussing the tutorial’s design.
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.
“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.”
Recently, The University of Texas at Austin has found itself at the center of a debate over the structure of modern research universities. Questions have been raised about the value of research to the academic mission of higher education, and in light of the state’s current budget situation, whether state institutions can afford to be so heavily invested in the research enterprise. There is a belief in some quarters that the commitment to research excellence that characterizes top-tier research universities is unavoidably detrimental to the University’s teaching mission.
President Bill Powers presented his case last week in a speech that effectively made the argument that teaching and research are inextricably linked at the level of excellence the University pursues. In fact, his examples demonstrated that the interplay between teaching and research has resulted in the sort of collaboration and innovation invoked by the notion that what starts here changes the world. President Powers noted that our ability to sustain this level of excellence requires a continued commitment to the tradition of ongoing institutional introspection and transformation that have made The University of Texas at Austin a model of efficiency and excellence.
There are several ways for alumni and friends to show their pride and support for the University of Texas at Austin. No matter what ranking the Longhorn football team has, there are still several Top Tens on campus. One of which is the University of Texas Libraries.
When you support UT Libraries you are making a direct contribution to the core mission of our University…teaching, learning and research. Contributions, especially in a time of declining state revenue, ensure that current and future students have the books, journals and scholarly research available to them that former generations of students had.
The University of Texas Libraries is where information lives! We encourage you to support one of the top information resources in Texas.
Here are three ways to help provide books, journals and other needed resources for our students and faculty.
1) Join our We ❤ UT Libraries initiative.
2) Adopt your favorite book.
3) Become a Literary Longhorn with a $5,000 annual contribution and enjoy exclusive dinners with distinguished authors and faculty in one of our historic reading rooms; and invitations to tour national and international library collections and archives. Contact Gregory Perrin for detailed information.
There are no great universities without great libraries! Support UT Libraries today!
Author/food activist Michael Pollan. Photo by Ken Light.
Texas Performing Arts is partnering with the Libraries to publicize its 2010-11 season, and as part of that campaign, we will occasionally announce contests through our Facebook and Twitter feeds (so become a fan or follow us to get a head start).
To enter, head over to the contest page and fill out the brief questionnaire for your chance to win. Contest ends at 11:59pm tonight (Wednesday, April 21).
This past month, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) and several prominent water researchers began the process of developing a new collaborative resource for sharing water data across the state of Texas. The Texas Water Digital Library (TWDL) will federate water research currently stored in dispersed databases and websites at various Texas universities. A model for the cooperative efforts of the Texas Digital Library, the TWDL will electronically harvest these resources from cooperating institutions (using a technology called OAI-ORE) and deposit them in a TDL-hosted DSpace repository. This federated repository will create a single place for researchers to search for water data from every part of the state: the Texas Water Digital Library. Continue reading Texas water researchers working with the Texas Digital Library→
The archive covers his entire career, so it includes the source materials for all of his major plays (Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Oleanna), as well as his screenwriting work (The Postman Always Rings Twice – the 1981 adaptation, The Untouchables, The Spanish Prisoner).
Making a wish is easy, but getting it fulfilled takes…well it takes you!
The University of Texas Libraries invites you to help us build our library collection by picking an item on our online wish list.
I talk with people all the time about supporting our library. Many of them feel that libraries are very important, but they never think to put their money where their passion is. And when they do they feel that their $150, $400 or $ 1,000 is not really enough to make a difference in the lives of our students and faculty.
The truth is that $150 does make a difference. In the next year, the University of Texas Libraries will add more than 100,000 books to its collection, which will support the learning, research and knowledge of our 50,000 students and Continue reading Libraries launch online wish list→
This past month, the 
