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ARLD Day 2013

UST Libraries has a good contingent attending this annual conference on a great day at the MN Landscape Arboretum. Inspiring speech by Jenica Rogers as the keynote.

Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Uncategorized

Talkin’ of things Irish – Monday and Friday in the Library, March 11 and 15

We invite all of you to two events highlighting the feast of St. Patrick’s Day – they’re both in the library and they are both waiting for you!

Rogers

 1.  On Monday, March 11, 2013 (Noon – 1pm) in the O’Shaughnessy Room it’s a book launch of Extended Family: essays on Being Irish American from New Hibernia Review.  Your speakers will be editor Jim Rogers and one of the contributors, Brian Nerney.   A book signing immediately follows the program and refreshments will be provided.   Read more information here.        

 2,  Friday, March 15, 2013  (11:30 am to 1:30 pm)  Come for the Annual St. Patrick’s Day Open House in the Special Collections Department of the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library.    The program begins at 12:15 pm.   Please contact archivist and head of special collections, Ann Kenne, if you have any questions – 962-5461.

 

Uncategorized

What is this RefWorks thing, anyway?!

Have you heard of RefWorks but don’t know quite what it is or how to use it?

refworks

If so, today is your lucky day!

RefWorks is an online research management, writing and collaboration tool — it’s designed to help researchers (ahem, that means  you!) easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

In short, RefWorks is something that can save your skin when working on all those pesky research papers that seem to pop up when you just so happen to be a college student.

RefWorks allows you to do all sorts of nifty things, like:

  • Create a personal database online where you can store an unlimited amounts of references that are, accessible from any computer without having to  download or install any software
  • Import references automatically from a wide variety of databases.
  • Organize references so that you can sort and search your stored references quickly and easily.
  • Format citations and bibliographies instantly in any of hundreds of styles: (APA, MLA, Turabian, etc.)
  • Attach files to your citations (100MB of file storage for attaching files at up to 5MB each)

In order to use RefWorks you must create an account.  But, thanks to how UST’s subscription is set up, once you have an account it is yours forever!

Find out more on our RefWorks subject guide or by asking your favorite UST librarian! Also keep on the lookout for some “Just in Time” quick workshops in the library throughout the semester about this and other topics!

Archbishop Ireland Library, Charles J. Keffer Library, Libraries, New Materials, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Uncategorized

UST Libraries Embarks on New Ebook Initiative

Demand Driven Acquisition/Patron Driven Acquisition pilot project has started at the University of St. Thomas.

What does that mean? Liaisons in Business, Education and Psychology have hand-crafted profiles with Coutts/Ingram for the purposes of identifying and adding ebook records to CLICnet in those 3 disciplines. We won’t own these – AND they are available for use. We will own them once the third user goes into the book itself or the index (not the cover page or table of contents).  The books should all be able to be used by more than one person at a time, but we could not limit our profile to only downloadable – until more publishers are on board. The sample size would have been too small.

These should all work and act like all other MyiLibrary books.

Questions?

Ask Linda Hulbert (lahulbert@stthomas.edu) or 651-962-5016 if she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll make a good one up! On the spot!

Archbishop Ireland Library, Charles J. Keffer Library, Libraries, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Uncategorized

UST Research Online Usage Data

USTRO

UST Research Online is the the University of St. Thomas’ institutional repository. Initiated by the library staff, the goal is to include the creative and scholarly works of the faculty, students and staff of the university: including, but not limited to, theses and dissertations. During the last two years that the resource has been active, staff have uploaded 631 papers and they have been downloaded over 60,000 times. The content is obviously highly discoverable in Google (62% of the searches), Google Scholar (21% of the searches) and 17% from other external searches. The content is now in our own Summon search.

I want to share some data. Our first and most robust faculty collection is that of  Opus College of Business. Over 31% of the downloads and hits are content from OCB with Ethics and Business Law leading the way with over 4,000. The most downloaded paper from OCB is Jeffrey Oxman’s “Price Inflation and Stock Returns” exceeding 1,300 downloads! The dissertation from CELC with the most downloads is Emily R Murphrey’s Effective Treatment of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Early
Attachment at over 800 downloads. At 1,123 the UST Law Journal’s most downloaded article is “Incapacitation through Maiming: Chemical Castration, the Eighth Amendment, and the Denial of Human Dignity” by John Stinneford. John Heintz’s article “Developing a Library School Course in Government Statistics,” from the Library staff collections was downloaded 264 times and leads the pack.

The Law School added the University of St. Thomas Law Journal including all of the back content. And its use is 56% of the repository – nearly 30,000 downloads. We are interested in adding the other journals published here at the university.

The theses and dissertations of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling including Education – Leadership and Education – Organization Development and Psychology are growing collections and have seen downloads in excess of 5,500. We have recently uploaded the theses of the School of Social Work. We look forward to watching their use.

Library staff article downloads and hits exceed 1,000.

If you are interested in adding your content to the repository, please contact Linda Hulbert – lahulbert@stthomas.edu.

News & Events, Uncategorized

Nancy Sims open access presentation at UST is online!

Nancy Sims, the copyright program librarian at the Univesity of Minnesota, and advocate for democratic information access, spoke at UST last month about open access publishing, a new model for scholarly communication. The event was sponsored by the UST libraries and it was well attended by faculty and librarians from UST and neighboring institutions. If you missed her presentation it has been made freely available to watch here.

Higher Education, Recently Read, Uncategorized

Starting from Scratch – What Would Your University Look Like?

The Chronicle of Higher Education is having a bit of a contest.  What a 21st Century College would look like if we were starting from scratch. What’s missing below is why each person who submitted their vision would set it up that way. Read the article to get that.  I’d be interested in knowing if YOU would go to school there or if you would work there?

These are the different kinds with the high points indicated:

Costco University

  • Faculty own the institution, and administrators work for faculty
  • No dining halls, residence halls, athletics programs, or libraries (sigh)
  • Each professor makes $80,000 a year and teaches four courses per semester, or eight courses a year.
  • If 10 students take each course, each needs to pay $2,000 a course. Everything is rented (including classrooms).
  • No Scholarships
  • No R&D. If you want that you go to the sister institution, Costco Research and Development ALL professors expected to create intellectual property.

Let’s Go Monk! The 21st-Century Monastery, Reinvented

  • Strict vows of poverty, charity, and abstinence from social media.
  • Identical robes woven from the same fabric as sweatpants (decorative belts are permitted.)
  • Mobile devices are confiscated may be reclaimed by their owners only upon going into town
  • Communication takes place with quill, ink, and parchment.
  • Single-sex classes no larger than 15 (college is co-ed).
  • Academic year is 12 months with two six-week vacations and two months spent in a foreign country.
  • Pursues multidisciplinary answers to one Big Question, such as the clean-water crisis.
  • First two years. Courses in philosophy, world religion, the Great Books, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and the history of China, Russia, India, and Britain.
  • Must study Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, or Hindi.
  • Third year matches each student with a faculty mentor who guides him or her through a multidisciplinary capstone project.  Students are forbidden, upon risk of expulsion, to create résumés or start the job search until the fourth year.
  • Fourth year Leave the university and the robes for full-time internships with alumnae.
  • Grow wine and make beer,  grow and cook all of your own food. (lowers tuition costs and complaints about the quality of cafeteria food.) Students chill out in one of the many dance halls on campus.

College of the Global Village

  • Multidisciplinary investigation of varied meanings and practices of the good life
  • Immersion into new languages Acquisition of an additional spoken and written language
  • First year in which students participate in four immersive blocks of study, each eight weeks long: research and writing
  • Matched with experts in their chosen field, including those from academia as well as nonteaching professionals with whom students collaborate on a research-and-writing project
  • The History of Science and Ecology, Engagement with great books,
  • Second and third years a fulfill eight additional learning blocks
  • Fourth year is spent in a guided internship overseen by a professor or community leader

The Mobile University

  • Four-year “mobile college,” whose “home” is defined not by place but by just four faculty mentors—one each in the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences, and the arts—who move from institution to institution over four years with a cohort consisting of no more than 40 students.
  • First-year liberal arts.
  • Second year placed in an American college or university in the social sciences: focus is on the meaning of citizenship in a democratic society, studied in interdisciplinary fashion.
  • Third year sciences and the humanities.
  • They continue studying the second language.
  • Final year, complete their studies at a university in the same nation where they began their studies. Four faculty members each is paid $25,000 per year, plus room, board, and travel expenses. One of the faculty members earns an additional stipend of $25,000 for arranging Cost estimate of four years for the mobile college is $1.5-million, with each of the 40 students paying $37,500.

The Reinvention Poem – a poem that I can’t do justice to so you should just read it!

  • Diversity
  • Open to the world
  • The future is embraced
  • Green studies
  • Just pay when you can,
  • Or  work off your dues,
  • As our admins are alumni in cooperative education
  • Emphasis on technology, creating, and sharing,

 

Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Uncategorized

Library to host Concerts in November and December

  • Joan GriffithJoan Griffith (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)
     
  • Please mark your calendars for November and December concerts in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library.  You are all invited to these performances  – and you are welcome to come and go as your schedule allows.  Refreshments will be provided and we hope to see you!
  •  
    • Tuesday, Nov. 20
      3:30-4:30 p.m. in the library coffee shop lobby: Guitarist Joan Griffith, UST Music Department, and Twin Cities pianist Laura Caviani will perform an acoustical concert of jazz and Latin music.

     

    • Wednesday, Nov. 28
      1:45-2:30 p.m. in the O’Shaughnessy (“leather”) Room (108): The UST Guitar Ensemble, under the direction of Joan Griffith, will play an informal concert of guitar music. Selections will include classical music, jazz, Latin and original works.

     

    • Tuesday, Dec. 4
      Noon-12:30 p.m. in the library rotunda: The UST Women’s Choir, under the direction of Dr. Robert Vickery, will sing holiday music (an annual St. Thomas tradition). The concert will include some audience singalongs.

     

    • Thursday, Dec. 6
      2-3 p.m. in the O’Shaughnessy (“leather”) Room (108): The UST String Ensemble, under the direction of Dr. Matthew George, returns to the library for a concert of classical music. Selections will be chosen from: “Sinfonia in G-dur,” Albinoni; “Hungarian Dances from the 17th Century,” Ference; “Capriol,” Warlock; “Sinfonietta,” Genzmer; and “Mourão,” Guerra-Peixe.

 

  • Questions?   Please contact Karen Batdorf at 962-5401.