Summer Orientations

The Summer is a busy time for many reasons. One of those is the student orientations that we participate in at many of our campuses. For some we set up a booth that shows the different resources in the Library and answer questions about the Library that students or parents might have. For other orientations, we provide organized tours of the Library. This has been useful to orient the students to the Library and let them know that we are friendly people who they can come and chat to if they have questions. Here are some photos of the displays that were up during the orientations - put together by Gail G.!

Giant Microbes

The Library has been collecting and lending out Giant Microbes for a while now. For those of you who haven't heard of them, they are stuffed microbes of diseases such as the common cold, black death, HIV and now they have critters, such as the book worm and maggot. These have proved to be extremely popular and have been used in all sorts of creative and innovative way by students and faculty alike. The Library staff also particularly like to use them in our orientation sessions. The phrase "The Library has Ebola" always being a sure way to capture the attention of the crowd! This summer we have added the following:

Cavity
Yogurt
Bird flu
Swine flu
Nerve cell
Platelet
Amoeba
West Nile
Maggot
Acidophilus
Copecode
HPV
Listeria
Measles
Rubella
Waterbear
Leishmania

I heard a great story about the rabies giantmicrobe being used in a class presentation on rabies. The student asked the prof how hard it was to catch rabies and when the prof said it was very hard, the student tossed the rabies giantmicrobe at the prof who then caught it! If you have any stories like that, please share!

Introduction to RefWorks

Digitization and Libraries: newsy bits

Popular Science has put its entire archive online
http://www.popsci.com/archives

Apparently it works well on the iPhone, which probably means the iTouch. I haven't had time to investigate mobile technology as much as I would have liked but it is moving up the priority list.

Casanova's uncensored diaries have been purchased and then donated to the French National Library. The are plans to digitize them and make them available online.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/18/casanova-uncensored-diaries-sold

http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/anx_actu_bib/a.bnf_manuscrits_casanova.html

If you like libraries (and who doesn't?), you'll like these photos of libraries around the world from the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/the-most-amazing-librarie_n_432126.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/22/the-most-amazing-librarie_n_469484.html

And if you are interested in reading, check out this new resource:

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/

The Royal Society has also been doing a lot of interesting digitization. Recently posted was the William Stukeley's 1752 biography, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life which contains a recounting of the story of Newton and the apple inspiration.

The digitization project: http://royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages/

The story on BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8461591.stm

Lastly, and people say things about Wikipedia...

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/48192

Freedom to Read Week

Taking so long to get around to posting this has meant that I've ended up with a good topic for Freedom to Read Week. In January it was reported that there had been objections raised to having a certain dictionary in a middle school because it provided a definition of oral sex. The dictionary in question the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary!

They have reached a compromise to this concern by adding another dictionary to the classroom and allowing parents to choose which dictionary they want their children to read. Although this is an American example, there are plenty of challenges to books in Canada. Check out the Freedom to Read Week website for more information.

Galileoscope now in the Library!

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy - http://www.astronomy2009.org/

In honour of this event "a high-quality, low-cost, easy-to-assemble refractor kit" was developed. There is now one in the Library that students and faculty can sign out. The call number is TEMP 2094. For more information on the galileoscope - https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/ A lot of teaching material was developed as well, for more on that click https://www.galileoscope.org/gs/content/galileos-classroom

delicious and the library

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that is a useful way to keep track of and share websites. How it works is that instead of bookmarking or favouriting a website in your browser, you bookmark it in delicious. You create a free account for yourself and install a small plugin to your browser that allows you to add them to your delicious account.

One of the useful features is that you can tag the websites that you are adding. This means that for instance, if I was adding this blog to delicious I could tag it with the words library or blog. When I am looking at all my saved websites, I could then look at all the sites that I have tagged with "library."

The social part of this tool comes with the ability to look at the sites other people have tagged with the same tags that I have. For instance, I could look at all the sites people have tagged with library so see if there are sites that I might be interested in.

I like using delicious because it means that I have access to my bookmarks from any computer whether at home or at work or when I am traveling. I can also share my bookmarks with others easily. I can either share a link to my entire account or I can send a link to a tagged list of bookmarks.

When we are working in the Library, we often come across interesting sites that we would like to keep track of and to share. I created an account for the Library quite a while ago and it appears under Internet Links on the Library website. Here is a link to the Library's delicious account:

http://delicious.com/eclinfo

And here's an example of linking to a specific tagged list:

http://delicious.com/eclinfo/images