Browsing Category

News & Events

Archbishop Ireland Library, News & Events, Theological Libraries Month, Theology

Vote for Staff Book Spine Poetry!

No one sent us any book spine poetry last week. We are sad, but know you are hitting the books hard*, so it’s okay. In a couple of weeks we know you’ll be looking for a study break preparing for mid-terms and this will be the perfect little distraction.

In lieu of announcing a winner from last week, we are inviting YOU to judge the book spine poetry that our student staff created last week. The entries are below. Vote early and often at our Doodle polling site.

: #1 – From Chaos to Mission

: #2 – Meaning and Exisitence

: #3 – Praise of Folly

: #4 – With Roots and Wings

* Or perhaps you are not digitally inclined? Or maybe you’re on a break from social media? Good news! You can still participate in the Book Spine Poetry Contest! Swing by the library and put together a few books into a winning poetic combination. Then bring it up to the circulation desk — we’ll take the picture and post it for you!

October 8, 2013 by clborchardt

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

It’s Love Your Technology Week!

Sponsored by IRT, the library’s technology students will be hosting events all week to help promote safe computing and general computing knowledge. Stop by for some info or to get your personal device engraved – all for free!

There will be a game hosted each day, and winners will get prizes like Davanni’s gift cards! Also personal engraving, computer cleaning service, and much more. Check out the calendar below for a schedule of events.

All events will take place in OSF Room 108.

Can’t wait to see you there! Get any updates, and let your friends know you’re going, too, by checking out the Tech Week Facebook event page!

October 7, 2013 by

Libraries, News & Events, Services

Federal Government Shutdown affects Research

It’s happened: the Federal government has shut down.

For those of you doing research today, you may start to encounter a screen that looks a lot like this one:

Because of the shutdown, many websites funded by the federal government are currently also down, including statistical organization websites, public sites, blogs, online surveys, and more. Many of them are used by UST researchers on a regular basis.

Below is a list of websites linked to on our subject guides that we currently know of that have been affected; we will try to keep it up-to-date with anything new we discover.

If you would like assistance finding alternative resources for your research, please feel free to contact any UST Librarian.

Resource	Status
American Community Survey	Shutdown
American Factfinder	Shutdown
Bureau of Labor Statistics (including Consumer Expenditure Survey)	Up, but not being updated
Census Bureau	Shutdown
Department of Energy	Up, but not being updated
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)	Website is down, but content is still available via the ERIC database (EBSCO-owned). No new data is being uploaded to EBSCO.
Fedstats	Shutdown
Library of Congress	Shutdown – Interlibrary Loan will also NOT be available from any federal library, which could potentially cause delays
National Center for Education Statistics	Shutdown
PubMed	Up, but not being updated
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)	Shutdown
United States Geological Survey (USGS)	Main site shutdown; some critical subsites still live

Archived versions of these websites can all be viewed on the WayBack Machine (waybackmachine.org). Other options for alternative sources of information can be seen on this list compiled by the Pew Research Center.

More information about the shutdown and available government services can be found at USA.gov.

October 1, 2013 by

Archbishop Ireland Library, News & Events, Theological Libraries Month, Theology

Happy Theological Library Month!!

October is a very exciting time for us over at Ireland Library … It is Theological Library Month!! We like to celebrate a little differently each year. This time around we are having a BOOK SPINE POETRY contest!! What is book spine poetry you ask?

September 30, 2013 by clborchardt

News & Events

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week

Celebrating The Freedom To Read

September 22-28, 2013

Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Held September 22-28, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types –- in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. As such, they are a threat to freedom of speech and choice.

September 20, 2013 by kmburke

News & Events

Celebrate Banned Books Week at the UST Libraries

What does the children’s book series ‘Captain Underpants’ have in common with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’? They both top the 2012 list of most frequently challenged books according to the American Library Association’s State of America’s Library Report 2013. In order to highlight instances of challenges made to books on local levels, the UST Libraries will join thousands of libraries and bookstores across the nation to celebrate the 31st. anniversary of Banned Books Week Sept. 22nd. – Sept. 28th. Since its inception in 1982, Banned Books Week has promoted the idea that while not every book is intended for every reader, each person has the right to decide what to read, listen to or view. By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship.

Throughout the week the university’s libraries will observe Banned Books Week with displays and events in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, a “Banned Books Coffee House” discussion lounge, library tours, updates on the UST Libraries Facebook page and an informative UST Banned Books Week website that will link to other libraries, articles and videos that focus on issues of intellectual freedom.

Also returning is the popular Banned Books Week trivia contest (posted on the UST Banned Books website). Test your knowledge each day of the week with a new question about a famous or infamous work of literature. Each day’s winner will be selected randomly from among those with the correct answers and will receive a $5 gift certificate to the UST Bookstore or a popular banned book.

banned_2013

September 17, 2013 by Andrea Koeppe

Archbishop Ireland Library, Kudos, News & Events, Science, Special Collections and Archives

Chemistry Department & Libraries Work Together to Preserve Books

We all know that UST Libraries have a wonderful collection of rare and archival materials. Sometimes, however, taking care of so many old books can be a challenge, especially when they are discovered to be growing things they’re not supposed to. Who knew that we had a real-world chemistry problem sitting right here on campus!?

Books with Spew When Mr Curt Le May, Director of the Archbishop Ireland Memorial Library, approached the Chemistry department for help in identifying white film forming on the surface of leather bound 300-year-old books, Meghan Talbot, chemistry major and a research student under Dr. Marites Guino-o, was glad to help.

Meghan Talbot

Meghan collected the white film/powder by using a spatula and carefully scraping off the residue found on the surface of the leather bound book, “Histoire des variations des églises protestantes.” Through a combination of three characterization techniques (FTIR, Mass and NMR spectroscopy), she deduced that the white film/powder is a spew (or speu). A spew is a combination of carboxylic acids that originated from the leather itself, and leather dressing used to increase the leather’s preservation and flexibility.

“Being able to work on a project such as this was a great honor. It was a very interesting experience to be able to work with a book that was evidence of a time in which I had learned about in previous history classes. I am glad that the work that I was able to do has the ability to help the library preserve books, such as this one, as they are such a crucial connection to our past.” ~Meghan Talbot

We at the library are grateful to Meghan for helping us find out what the white substance was, so we could find a way to safely remove it and keep these books for future Tommies. Cooperation across the campus can certainly be a great thing!

September 16, 2013 by

News & Events, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library

Meet and converse with fellow students at the English Café

Interested in meeting and having conversations with students from different cultures?

Want to learn about different cultures and meet students with diverse backgrounds?

Interested in improving your conversational (English) skills?

Peer consultants from the UST Center for Writing will be hosting the English Café at Coffee Bené in the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library, starting on Sunday, September 15th, 2013. The English Café is an effort to bring together both native and non-native English speakers and provide an opportunity to get to know one another in a casual setting.

Students interested in diversity in their UST community can learn about the different cultures present on campus. For non-native speakers, this is also a great opportunity to practice conversational skills.

In addition, peer consultants from the Center for Writing will be available to work with interested students on their assignments at any stage of the writing process.

The English Café will be held on Sunday evenings, 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., at Coffee Bené in the library (by the leather room). Students should feel free to bring homework if they would like, and just hang out.

Questions may be directed to Shannon Heitkamp at: heit3437@stthomas.edu.

September 11, 2013 by

Business & Economics, News & Events

UST Faculty Publications Getting Some Love Nationally

Kudos to the OCB faculty, whose publications are among the most downloaded this month from the Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons. Earlier this year, UST faculty works have also ranked highly in the Feminist Philosophy Commons, the Clinical & Medical Social Work Commons, and the Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons. Our congratulations to all involved!

The Commons are part of a national network of universities that provide access to faculty research via an institutional repository. UST’s institutional repository is called UST Research Online. Faculty can arrange to upload and display their published or unpublished scholarly work in their department’s section of the site. In addition, the repository can be used to publish online journals (like the UST Law Journal), and is also used by several programs for electronic publishing of graduate student theses and dissertations.

We’re sometimes asked why faculty should bother making their work available through UST’s repository, especially if it’s already been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The answer is simple: it multiplies the visibility of the articles.

The citation (and article copy or link) is published in UST Research Online, and Digital Commons, which powers our repository, aggregates and makes available works from all participating institutions via their Digital Commons network, from which the works are organized into disciplinary collections (like those linked above) available for searching and browsing. Perhaps the paper gets published in a journal, and also in one or more disciplinary sites like SSRN, etc. Then the search engines crawl these sites, discover the articles and the connections between them, which in turn raises their placement in online search results.

Fame, fortune, and scholarly ninja status are sure to follow.

BTW, OCB faculty aren’t the only ones who can get in on this action: the repository is open to all faculty members. For more information, contact your department chair or Linda Hulbert, Associate Director for Collection Management Services at the Libraries.

August 21, 2013 by

News & Events

Media Resources Collection Moving to Reference Room

Folks walking through the O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library this week noticed some unusual clamor in the first floor reference room. We’ve been rearranging the reference collection, withdrawing some older works, moving some to the stacks, and consolidating the collection into fewer shelves.

All of this activity is to make room for the new, improved Media Resources Collection, soon to be installed on the north end of the reference room.

Library Director Dan Gjelten explains:

The UST Libraries’ media collection was moved to the first floor two years ago with two major goals:

to better feature our excellent video content and make this collection more easily accessible by our users (it was previously located on the third floor of the library).
to take advantage of the proximity to staff already working on the first floor (achieving efficiencies in our staff workflow is a constant goal for the Libraries).

The move to the first floor achieved those goals very well, and we decided to take the next step and give the collection a more functional and attractive space than it has had behind the circulation desk.

We are installing a 9 foot high glass partition that will run across the north end of the reference room to hold the relocated collection. The glass wall will highlight the wonderful natural light in that room and provide a beautiful, convenient space for users of the media collection.

This location is suitable because much of the print reference collection has been supplemented by online subject encyclopedias and other reference content, so it could be reduced in size. The first floor will continue to have plenty of space for students to study, for the new books and leisure reading area, and of course, the coffee shop at the south end of the room. This is not a permanent or structural change to the room and requires no adaptation of the HVAC system.

It is a high priority goal for us to design and develop spaces in the library for student learning, study and community, and to address needs for both individual and group work, quiet and more active space, and all the varieties of needs our users have. There is enough room in this wonderful building to accommodate everyone.

Please let us know if you have ideas for the library that we can consider.

The north end of the reference room being prepped for installation of the Media Resources Collection.

A rough conceptual rendering of the new space.

August 9, 2013 by

Older Posts

Newer Posts