St. Thomas Libraries Blog - News, Events and Musings from the UST Libraries

St. Thomas Libraries Blog

Libraries, News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library, Special Collections and Archives

Merry Christmas from the University of St. Thomas Libraries

Among the many treasures in the University of St. Thomas Libraries’ Rare Books collection are volumes sure to spark your Christmas spirit. Throughout our shelves you’ll find charming works that reflect the season’s traditions, celebrations, and stories. Featured below are a few examples from the collection that center on the Nativity story:

Frankincense and Myrrh
Susan L. Mitchell and Jack B. Yeats, Cuala Press, Churchtown, Ireland, 1912

Susan Mitchell, a notable Irish nationalist, poet, and essayist of the early 20th century, authored this small pamphlet of poems, Frankincense and Myrrh. As a close friend of the Yeats family in Sligo, she collaborated with Elizabeth Yeats of the Cuala Press and the renowned artist Jack B. Yeats to bring this publication to life.

The Irish Christmas
Published by Candle Press, Dublin, 1917
Woodcut from a drawing by Sadb Trinnseach; poem by Joseph Campbell

One of the earliest publications from Colm Ó Lochlainn’s renowned Three Candles Press, The Irish Christmas is a poignant reflection of Irish identity and independence. The pamphlet features poems in both English and Irish by writers connected to the nationalist cause. Illustrator Saodhbh Trinnseach, known for her dedication to the Irish language and culture, contributed the woodcuts in the piece.

 

Gloria in Profundis
G. K. Chesterton and Eric Gill, Faber & Gwyer Ltd., London, 1927

Part of the Ariel Poems series, this small yet profound pamphlet, Gloria in Profundis, features a single poem by G. K. Chesterton, one of England’s most celebrated Catholic authors. The accompanying wood engravings of the Nativity scene were designed by Eric Gill.   Gill, who had been deeply influenced by Chesterton’s writings on Distributism, established the Ditchling community—a Catholic artists’ commune dedicated to craftsmanship and simplicity.

Christmas Wayfarers [and Other Poems].
O’Byrne, Cathal. Dublin: At the Sign of the Three Candles, 1932.

Published in 1932, Christmas Wayfarers was authored by the Belfast-based singer, poet and writer Cathal O’Byrne.  Published in Dublin by the Colm O’Lachlan’s Three Candles Press, the volume is illustrated with a series of unattributed woodcuts.

December 2, 2025 by
Media/Music Collections

Streaming Films for Native American Heritage Month

National Native American Heritage Month, celebrated each November, honors the rich histories, diverse cultures, and important contributions of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples. It’s a time to recognize the resilience and enduring traditions of Indigenous communities, as well as to reflect on their vital role in shaping the history and future of the United States. The month also encourages learning about tribal sovereignty, contemporary issues, and the many ways Indigenous peoples continue to strengthen and enrich the nation.

Looking to learn more about Indigenous histories and achievements? The UST Libraries have you covered with a great collection of streaming films—here are a few to get you started.

  • Attla (2019) – The story of George Atttla, an Alaska Native dogsled racer who, with one good leg and fierce determination, rose to international fame and became a legendary sports hero.
  • Being Thunder (2021) – Sherenté, a Two Spirit Genderqueer teenager from the Narragansett tribe, courageously continues to dance in female fancy shawl competitions despite discrimination from some tribal leaders, receiving support from family, fellow dancers, and the broader powwow community.
  • Gather (2020) – A documentary that explores the growing movement among indigenous people to reconnect to their spiritual and cultural identities through food sovereignty and traditional foodways.
  • Lakota Nation vs. United States (2022) – A provocative, visually stunning testament to a land and people who have survived removal, exploitation and genocide – and whose best days are yet to come.
  • Native America (2018-2023) – A PBS documentary series that explores the rich histories, living traditions, and enduring innovations of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, connecting ancient wisdom to contemporary Native life.
  • Rez Metal (2021) – A documentary about a Navajo metal band and the vibrant heavy metal scene throughout the Navajo nation.
  • Singing Back the Buffalo (2025) – Indigenous visionaries, scientists and communities are rematriating the buffalo to the heart of the North American plains they once defined.
  • Sisters Rising (2020) – The story of six Native American women fighting to restore personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States.
  • Stolen Spirits (2022) – The documentary follows a Nebraska community’s search for the graves of Indigenous children who died at the historic Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, exposing how the American Indian boarding-school system attempted to erase Native identity.
  • We Are Unarmed (2020) – A fresh look at the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

You can find more films by searching our list of streaming video databases (https://libguides.stthomas.edu/music-media/databases).

November 6, 2025 by
News & Events

Library Workshop: AI-Powered Scholarly Research Using Consensus

On Thursday, November 13th at 12pm, the St. Thomas Libraries will host a one-hour Zoom session (register here) to help attendees learn about an AI-powered research tool called Consensus. The libraries are trialing Consensus for the 2025-26 academic year and want to help interested users learn how it and the class of research tools it represents differ from both traditional library tools and more web-augmented research tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT. Learn how it deploys LLM natural language searching to surface research from a corpus of 200M+ academic papers, and how it can help both students and faculty with quick-and-dirty literature reviews and syntheses of scholarship on a wide variety of topics.

Session led by librarians Scott Kaihoi and Karen Brunner.

Registration available here. 

October 29, 2025 by
News & Events

October 20–26 is Open Access Week

Open Access logo
Image by MikeAMorrison used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

 

Open Access Week: October 20–26

Each year, Open Access Week celebrates the potential benefits of transitioning research to Open Access (OA). This year’s theme, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?“ emphasizes the importance of prioritizing publishing models that benefit the scholarly community and the public rather than those that benefit commercial interests.

Here are a couple of quick resources to get you thinking about OA:

  • Thought-Provoking Article: We encourage faculty to read an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Making Your Research Free May Cost You” (use this link to access the Chronicle through UST’s subscription to it if the direct article link is not working). The article discusses the NIH’s new policy requiring all federally funded research to be made publicly available as soon as it is published, and how in response, many publishers are forcing authors to pay large open-access fees—effectively shifting costs onto researchers. Some journals, especially those owned by major for-profit publishers like Springer Nature and Elsevier, have eliminated free “green” routes (e.g., a one-year embargo before public release) and now only offer open access via high article processing charges. Scholars who have uncertainty in their funding–especially in an era when policies governing federal grants and other research funding are rapidly changing–are concerned that steep publication fees will limit who can afford to publish in top-tier journals.
  • Library Guide on Open Access: The UST Libraries have created a guide that offers information and resources about the library’s ongoing commitment to Open Access and its role in supporting OA initiatives.

Hopefully these resources contribute to an ongoing discussion of OA on our own campus and support UST’s collective efforts to promote accessible, community-driven scholarly publishing.

October 17, 2025 by
News & Events

October Research Database Trial (concluded)

China Academic Journal

The University of Saint Thomas Libraries has trial access to CNKI China Academic Journals (All Series) until November 14, 2025. The trial gives students, faculty, and staff an opportunity to explore and provide feedback to help determine whether the libraries should invest in this resource in the future.

China Academic Journals (CAJ, 中国期刊全文数据库) is the largest and most continuously updated Chinese journal database in the world, containing over 60 million full-text articles and growing. Offered via the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, 中国知网) platform, CAJ covers 99.9% of all academic journals published in mainland China, with comprehensive access to an impressive range of content in all disciplines, with over 10,000 journals categorized among 10 series, 168 subjects, and over 3,000 sub-subjects. 

We value your input! Please send any comments or questions to Kate Burke.  

October 1, 2025 by
Libraries, LibrarySearch

Help Shape the Future of LibrarySearch! (Concluded)

Picture of the LibrarySearch search box

Please take a few minutes to complete our brief user experience survey to share how you currently use LibrarySearch and what improvements would make your research process easier. The St. Thomas Libraries, in collaboration with our consortium MnPALS, is in the process of evaluating LibrarySearch. Sometimes referred to as the “Google search of the library” or the library catalog, LibrarySearch is the online tool used to find everything from scholarly articles to books to digital media. We want this system to work intuitively for YOU, whether you are a professor preparing course materials, a student working on research, or staff supporting university programs.

This is your chance to help design a search experience that makes finding resources easier and more efficient for everyone in our campus community. Don’t miss this opportunity to improve how you discover and access the information you need! If you have any questions, please contact Karen Brunner, Associate Director for Research, Education & Engagement (brun4952@stthomas.edu).

 

September 26, 2025 by
Database Highlights & Trials

Introducing Consensus: an AI-powered literature review tool

Discover a New Way to Research: Try Consensus

The UST Libraries are thrilled to be trialing Consensus for the 2025-26 academic year. Consensus is an innovative AI-powered search engine designed to provide many of the features people like about using AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity for research, but with a focus on academic literature rather than web searching. Consensus offers a conversational, synthesis-oriented way to surface and summarize academic sources in the early stages of a literature review.

What Sets Consensus Apart from Traditional Databases?

AI-Powered Summaries Rooted in Real Research

Conesus deploys AI only after searching academic literature, eliminating the problem many AI-driven tools have with hallucinating sources or pulling non-academic sources into its summaries. Consensus’ results are based directly on a corpus of over 200 million academic papers and book chapters.

In addition to surfacing the sources most relevant to your question, Consensus provides instant, AI-generated summaries that help you quickly get an overview of multiple papers, complete with clear citations. Every insight is traceable back to its source, allowing you to quickly go upstream and confirm critical information in its original sources. Integration with the library’s full text subscriptions allows you to often get to the full text of articles with just one click.

Smarter Search that Leverages AI to Better Understand Your Question

Traditional tools rely heavily on exact keyword matches, which can sometimes be frustrating if you are too new to a topic to know the best search phrases to try. Consensus combines semantic AI embeddings with classic keyword searching to understand your intent, and then blends that with metrics like citation counts, recency, and journal reputation to surface the most relevant results.  In other words, Consensus will interpret your input to provide results regardless of whether you use simple keyword searches, natural language questions, or advanced, engineered prompts with specific output requests.  Consensus will interpret and provide results for any of the following sample inputs:

  • Vaccines
  • antidepre
  • Effects of ability grouping on academic outcomes
  • Does creatine improve cognitive function in healthy adults?
  • Summarize the pros and cons of carbon taxes in bullet points

Interactive Tools that Give Quick Insight

Consensus includes a variety of powerful AI features:

  • Pro Analysis synthesizes findings across multiple papers, allowing you quickly get an overview of what the academic literature returned by your search says.
  • Consensus Meter helps users visualize how studies answer “Yes/No” research questions by grouping them according to whether they support or contradict the question asked (e.g., do studies answer, “yes”, “no”, or “uncertain” to the research question, “Are antidepressants more effective than placebo or psychotherapy?”).

Consensus meter for question "Are antidepressants more effective than placebo or psychotherapy?"

  • Study Snapshot gives a short, quick summary of an individual paper to help support quick scanning of results for relevance
  • Ask Paper lets you chat directly with a paper’s full text for deeper clarity on methods or findings.
  • Deep Search mode is a research agent that conducts literature review-style searches of Consensus’ 200M+ article corpus, similar to deep research modes other AI tools use to do web research.

What is Its Subject Area Coverage?

While Consensus’ corpus of academic documents does have coverage in most disciplines and is worth trying, especially for multidisciplinary research, it is more robust in some areas than in others.  It tends to shine in the sciences (particularly the health sciences) and be a bit more hit-and-miss in the humanities.

How Do I Get Started?

Thanks to our site-wide license, anyone with a UST university email can sign up to get access to the premium version of Consensus with all of its advanced tools and features is available free for the entire 2025–26 academic year.

Navigate to Consensus, find the “Sign Up” link in the upper right corner of the page, and use your stthomas.edu email address to create your account.  After you have signed up, be sure to go into Settings in your account and set “University of St. Thomas” as your institution.  This will connect your Consensus account to the UST Libraries’ subscriptions so you can access the full text of articles that we have in our collections.

Settings--your university or institution

We Want Your Feedback!

Throughout the trial the libraries would love to hear any feedback you are willing to provide. Please use our Consensus Trial Feedback Form to let us know what you think of the tool and whether or not the libraries should continue to provide access to it.

September 5, 2025 by
Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events

New User Interface for EBSCO Databases

EBSCOhost logo

EBSCO has rolled out a modern, user-friendly new interface design for databases on the EBSCOhost research platform, including Academic Search Ultimate, Business Source Premier, CINAHL, and Education Source!

What’s new?

  • Durable, shareable URLs
  • Enhanced accessibility features, including text-to-speech
  • Improved search and filtering, including a new natural language search option
  • Personalized dashboard for saved searches, articles, and projects
  • Responsive, mobile-friendly layout that works well on various devices

Visit EBSCO’s Quick Start Guide to learn more, or ask a librarian if you have any questions!

May 30, 2025 by
News & Events

Spring 2025 Book Cart Name Winner!

The University of St. Thomas Libraries invited students, staff, faculty, alumni and the public to help us name our little blue library book cart! From March 31st until April 7th,  you submitted your pun-ny ideas. We definitely saw a theme of name suggestions based on famous figures and also a smattering of funky alliterations. The winner is:  

Dolly Carton!  

a small blue book cart with 2 photos of Dolly Parton

Here are the top 5 book cart names that followed our winner: 

  1. Young Shelvin’ (as in Young Sheldon)  
  1. René De Cart (as in René Descartes)  
  1. The Novel Navigator  
  1. The Literary Limo  
  1. Jean-Luc Bookcart (as in Jean-Luc Godard)   

Thank you to all who voted! Follow @ustlibraries on instagram for updates! Please contact Conrad Woxland (conrad.woxland@stthomas.edu) with questions, feedback or comments. 

April 24, 2025 by
Database Highlights & Trials, News & Events

Generative AI Tools for Research

Generative AI Tools in Library Databases

The St. Thomas Libraries are trialing several databases in February, including two with AI-driven search interfaces: Scopus AI and Web of Science Research Assistant. The Libraries are excited about the potential for these tools to help researchers save time and uncover hard-to-find content. As we look at the broad range of AI-based tools that advertise similar functionality, we are closely evaluating their capabilities and differences.

What makes these library tools different from freely available tools?

The tools the library is trialing combine natural language AI search with high-quality, subscriber-only content. Both Scopus and Web of Science index over 20,000 journals, offering rich metadata that enhances summaries, relevancy rankings, and connections to related research. Additionally, as tools connected to our subscriptions, full-text access is often just a click away.

Free tools generate results based on either general web searches (Perplexity, ChatGPT Web Search, etc.), the Semantic Scholar corpus of academic documents (Semantic Scholar, Elicit, Consensus), or a mix of web content and publisher metadata they maintain themselves (Scite). These tools often do quite well at surfacing and summarizing relevant scholarship, particularly in fields with a lot of open access content, but results can vary widely depending on the specific subfield being researched.  Some disciplines are well-covered and return excellent results, while others have gaps where important publishers or journals are missing.  Free tools may also include predatory journals and student scholarship in the results they return.

So…is the library saying I shouldn’t use the free ones?

Not at all! We’re actively testing them alongside subscription-based tools to understand their strengths and limitations. Right now, it’s a “both/and” situation rather than “either/or”—free tools can help surface insights missed by traditional searches, but the tools we are trialing fill in many gaps left by the free tools, particularly when doing deep, comprehensive research.

We want your feedback!

We would love to hear from anyone who is interested in using AI tools to help them with research and has time to try out either Scopus AI or the Web of Science Research Assistant.  If you have tried them, please take five minutes to fill out our feedback form.  Faculty input is crucial when we evaluate new tools like this.

February 7, 2025 by