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

Welcome to the New Students

We spent a lot of time in the month of July welcoming new students! It is always great to meet them and hear their excitement about starting on this new chapter of their lives. We try to put out displays that show them the wide variety of material that we have in the Library and to encourage the students to come visit us at the Info Desk if they have any questions.

Taking care in the Library

We had a little problem with our skeleton - his wheels broke. So here is lying behind the Circ Desk waiting to be fixed. Sammy (Sammy Styx is his full name) gave a little start to the staff in the morning when they came and found a body lying on the floor! The staff in the Library all work hard to make sure that the resources in the Library are in good condition for everyone to use. This sometimes requires some creativity on our part.

Michelle was not able to find replacement casters for his existing base so she made a whole new base and then screwed the old base to it. Now Sammy has a nice new stand. It is much sturdier than the old stand and is easier to roll.
Here he is - ready to be used again! Michelle also tightened his screws which helped to improve his posture a bit. Thanks Michelle! I guess that just leaves me to go through and assess all the triage books that are in my office:(

Master of Education Theses and MRPs

We wanted to make the Education MRPs and Theses easier to discover so we created two RefShare lists where you can look and search what we have. We are trying to add the supervisor into one of the user fields and hope to eventually have the abstracts added in as well. In addition we hope to create lists as the MA in History and MSc in Math MRPs are added to the Library.

I am including the links here but they can also be found on the Library's website under the RefShare Area. As always, if you have any questions let me know.

MEd Major Research Papers

MEd Theses

Reference Statistics

Last Friday, the staff of the Information Desk met for our yearly mini-retreat. I will be blogging more about that in the near future. One of things that we looked at was our reference and instruction statistics. Gail complied these and did some yearly comparisons which she presented to us. This year in the Winter Term we collected, during two different weeks, more detailed statistics than we normally do. See Gail's presentation below and as always, comment and questions are welcome!

ECLReferenceStats2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from cami3595.