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. 

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.

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!  

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.