Library is a Quiet Zone for Exam Week

In order to help our students do their best on their final exams, the library will be offering a quiet place for study during exam week, Monday, December 10th through Saturday, December 15th.

Students, faculty, and staff are asked to remain quiet in the library during this week and turn off their cell phones before they enter the library. Headphones are available at the information desk for anyone wishing to listen to audio on their computers.

Silence will be enforced in the table area as well as the library lab. Students wishing to use the group study rooms are also asked to refrain from loud discussions and to close the door when studying with groups.

Getting into Databases from Home

Happy Holidays!

If you're like me and trying to search the databases from home this weekend, you may have noticed some subtle changes to the UA Libraries page.

In order to access the databases from home, please consider establishing a VPN (virtual private network) as this ensures that you will have access to every database from home. Detailed instructions are available at: http://www.uakron.edu/libraries/info/connect/#vpn

You may have already discovered that clicking on the database name without first establishing a VPN connection will result in taking you to the vendor's password page. You will be unable to log in on this page.

If you are unable to set up a VPN, your next best bet would be to go to the Ohiolink database list, and click on the "off campus URL" link for the database you want to use. This will start the authentication process that many are already familiar with.

We hope this is helpful information as you finish up your research this weekend!

Maureen

OhioLINK, how do I love thee?

The fine folks at OhioLINK are looking for testimonials from students, faculty, and staff, describing the value of OhioLINK.

They are looking for quotes and short vignettes that go deeper than "I love OhioLINK" and illustrate the value of OhioLINK resources for both research and instruction.

If you have comments you would like to share, you can enter your testimonials on OhioLINK's online webform at: http://www.ohiolink.edu/about/share-story.html.

Testimonials will be shared with the OhioLINK community in the annual "Snapshot" newsletter. To view previous Snapshots, go to: http://www.ohiolink.edu/about/publications.html

Contributions need to be received by January 14th to be considered for the 2007 Snapshot.

If you're not sure why we love OhioLINK so much, check out the archived testimonials at:
http://www.ohiolink.edu/supportohiolink/stories.html

Maureen

Thanks for helping raise funds!

Over the month of October the library was able to raise $110 in donations and fine collection in order to help out the Findlay Hancock County Public Library’s flood recovery efforts. We all wish the best for the fine folks in Findlay as they work towards opening the main library for business soon.

If you would like to keep up to date with the progress at FHCPL, you can visit their website at:
http://www.findlay.lib.oh.us/

Their website includes a weekly update on the recovery efforts, a link to their blog, and pictures of the recovery effort.

Thanks to everyone who donated funds or paid their fines in October!

Maureen

Thanksgiving Holiday Hours

Next week is Thanksgiving!!!! If you're like most students you probably have some kind of project due right after the holiday break. Be sure to plan ahead because the library will be closed over the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

Library Hours next week:
Monday, November 19th: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Tuesday, November 20th: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Wednesday, November 21st: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
CLOSED: Thursday through Sunday, November 22nd through November 25th

Let us know how we can help you gather the resources you need to meet your after-the-holiday deadlines.

Maureen

Fireside Readers December Selection

Please join the library's book discussion group, the Fireside Readers, for our next meeting on Monday, December 3rd at 7 p.m. in the community room.

We will be discussion Ishmael Beah's A long way gone: memoirs of a boy solder.

Find out more about the author at the publisher's website and on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry also includes a link to an interview of the author by the Daily Show's John Stewart.

As always, you do not need to have read or finished the book to join in on the conversation. New members and guests are always welcome. Light refreshments are provided.

Hope to see you there!

Maureen

OhioLINK Celebrates 15 Years

November 2007 marks the 15th year OhioLINK has been in existence. (1992-2007) Bring yourself up-to-date on all of OhioLINK's services by clicking on the links below.

(for faculty) http://www.ohiolink.edu/ostaff/marketing/15yrthingsnotknownfac.html

(for students) http://www.ohiolink.edu/ostaff/marketing/15yrthingsnotknownstudents.html

Topics, Topics. Where do you start?

Whether you're in the library or at home, you probably have everything you need to choose an interesting and researchable topic for your next persuasive speech or argumentative paper.

For the couch potato:
Turn on the television and start flipping channels. Chances are the evening news or the morning talk shows have a topic idea that will hold your interest for the next several weeks. Did you know that you can use transcripts from news and radio shows as documentation for your research? Transcripts for many shows are available in the Lexis Nexis Academic database.

Are you plugged-in or wireless?
Check out blogs to find out what others are buzzing about. To find a blog on a topic of interest to you, use the online search tool, Technorati. If you're an avid Google user, you could also turn to Google's Blog Search tool. Blogs are great places to find a topic or even refer you to additional resources, but remember that the blogs themselves may not be a reliable source to quote for your paper or speech.

Pros and Cons:
It's always a good idea to look at all the sides of an issue. Why not use a database that provides that for you all in one place? Check out the subscription database, Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Not only does this online resource offer a list of ideas you might consider, but each topic has viewpoint essays, entries from reference books, articles from magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, and links to Internet sites. This is one-stop-shopping at its best.

Browse, browse, browse
There's no better way to pick up a great topic than flipping through current magazines and newspapers. If you don't subscribe to many titles at home, stop by the library and take a look a our magazine wall or browse through our local papers.

Just for fun:
Check out what other people are looking for. Check out Google Trends or Ask.com's IQ site to look at popular searches or see what the buzz is on Yahoo's Buzz Index.

When in doubt, just ask:
We would be glad to discuss a topic with you and offer advice on where to get started. Stop by, call, send us an email, or chat with us online.

Got Fines? Help a Library in Need!

During the month of October the library will be offering patrons a discount of 50% off of fines. All funds collected will be donated to the Findlay Hancock County Public Library which was devastated by flooding this August. We are not able to discount any charges for lost materials.

You can view pictures of the library damage and recovery efforts at FHCPL's online picture album at: http://picasaweb.google.com/findlaylibrary.

We are hoping that all collected fines and any additional cash donations will assist the library in their recovery efforts.

Banned Books Week - Sept. 29th - Oct. 6

Treasure your freedom to read during the 26th annual banned books week presented by the library. Help celebrate banned books week with the library. During the week of September 29th through October 6th the library will be hosting a college-wide banned books treasure hunt!

To play is simple: grab a treasure map from the library, follow the map around the college and fill in the map with the correct banned book title that matches the clues on the posters. Be sure to turn your maps into the library by October 6th for a chance to win prizes which include t-shirts, mugs, and of course, banned books!

Happy Hunting!

NEW Anthropology Research Database

AnthroSource is the premier online resource serving the research, teaching, and professional needs of anthropologists. AnthroSource combines digital access to the AAA's peer reviewed journals, newsletters and bulletins with high-level electronic content functionality.

This database has access to 49 full-text titles.



Enjoy!

Printz Titles on Display

Come check out our new Printz Award display!

The Michael L. Printz award is given to books that embody literary excellence in young adult literature. The Printz award books can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or an anthology and also, can be a work of joint authorship or editorship. For the month of September, we will be highlighting the Printz award winners and honor books from 2000-2007.

Stop by the new book shelf and check them out!

New E-Book Collection from OhioLINK!

Thousands of new scholarly e-books, published by Springer, are now available to students, faculty and staff at OhioLINK member institutions. These are recent (2005-2007), high-quality scientific, technological and medical books. Students can use these books to do research anytime, anywhere. Faculty can use the books for research or as course materials. Faculty can assign particular readings and link to relevant chapters or sections from course pages or Web sites. New Springer e-books will be added regularly. These recent additions bring the total number of e-books offered by OhioLINK to 25,000!

To access the books, go to the new Electronic Book Center at: http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ebc/.

On this page, you will also find links to OhioLINK’s other e-book collections.

The books in the E-Book Center will soon be accessible from the OhioLINK Libary Catalog and the UA Libraries Catalog. Enjoy!

Hot Topic: Single-Sex Schools

A local hot topic hitting the news in Northeastern Ohio these days is the concept of the single-sex classroom. This fall the Cleveland school district will be creating four single-sex elementary schools, complete with standardized "uniforms" for the district. If you would like to investigate these topics for a research paper or speech topic, here are some ideas on how to get started:

Do a search in our online catalog or in the OhioLINK catalog. The established subject heading is "single sex schools," but you might also want to investigate the concept of "single sex classes" as well. To get a more well-rounded collection of research materials, don't forget to investigate the alternative by doing a search for "coeducation." Performing a word / keyword search will expand your search results to include chapters out of books.

For articles out of magazines and professional journals, try searching the Education Research Complete and ERIC online indexes. Both of these databases focus on the field of education, eliminating the need to weed out articles from other disciplines.

To look at local coverage of the topic, we recommend locating newspaper articles from the region. The Akron Beacon Journal is indexed in our NewsBank Newspaper database, and there are several Northeastern Ohio newspapers, including the Plain Dealer, indexed in the Lexis Nexis Academic database.

To access the periodicial indexes / databases listed above, view UA Libraries alphabetical list of all databases and scroll through the list alphabetically.

Whatever topic you decide to investigate, be sure to ask us if you would like help with your search strategy, from choosing appropriate keywords, putting together a Boolean search, or choosing the right database.

Maureen

The library is so Del.icio.us!

Have you discovered Del.icio.us yet?

If you haven't, you're in for a treat (and read on...)!

If you have discovered this social bookmarking site already, then check out the library's Del.icio.us site and start using our bookmarked Internet sites at: http://del.icio.us/waynelibrary.

So, what is social bookmarking, you ask?

It's one of the newest customizable web features that allows Internet users to keep track of their favorite websites, just like saving bookmarks or "favorites" in your Internet browser. These bookmarks, though, you can access from anywhere you have an Internet connection. You can take your favorites with you wherever you go! Even better, you can share your bookmarks with others and see what other people have bookmarked.

Consider this research scenario:
Your in a class and are assigned a project to work with a group of classmates. Each of you are gathering websites on your topic, but you are not sure if you're duplicating what others have collected. Now you can create Del.icio.us accounts and easily access each other's bookmarks and share them as needed. Or, check out the library's del.icio.us page and see if we have some sites that we recommend on your topic.

Be sure to use the "tagging" feature that allows you to create keyword headings for each of your bookmarks so that they can be sorted and organized in a way that works for you.

If you would like more information about Del.icio.us, go to the main site at http://del.icio.us/ to find out more or to create your own account.

Our favorite periodical database is BIGGER!

Our favorite go-to online periodical database, Academic Search Premier, has been upgraded for all OhioLINK libraries.

The newly expanded database, Academic Search Complete, is already available to our library users. Searching the database will remain the same. Currently, the full text of over 800 journals has been added and this number is expected to increase over the next year.

We know how much our patrons love that full text, so we're so happy to have this expanded resource. Thanks, OhioLINK!

Fireside Readers announce upcoming selections

The Fireside Readers book discussion group has announced the list of titles to be discussed in the fall and winter:

• September: Behind the veil : an American woman's memoir of the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis by Debra Johanyak

• October: The glass castle : a memoir by Jeannette Walls

• November: I've got a home in glory land : a lost tale of the underground railroad by Karolyn Smardz Frost

• December: A long way gone : memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah

• January: No meeting.

• February: Team of rivals : the political genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The group plans to continue meeting on the first Monday of the month at 7 p.m. New members and guests are always welcome. Refreshments will be served.

If you would like more information or are interested in joining the group, contact Maureen Lerch at (330) 684-8951 or mlerch@uakron.edu.

The Fireside Readers also has a MySpace page at: http://www.myspace.com/firesidereaders.

NEW: Easier browsing for videos

This summer we have completed a project that we hope will make it easier for you to browse and find what you're looking for in our audiovisual collection.

The first aisle of the audiovisual collection now includes major motion pictures and films. They are arranged in alphabetical order, so if you know the name of the film you're looking for, it's as easy as singing your ABC's.

Across the aisle is our collection of non-fiction or documentary materials. These are now arranged in call number order, just like our books. Why did we do this, you ask? Now you can see what videos we have in a particular subject area. For example, all of our yoga videos are shelved together in the RA 781.7 area. Before they were spread throughout the collection alphabetically.

Our collection is small enough that you can still browse to find what you're looking for. If you find that you don't know the call number for the area you're looking for (don't worry, we don't expect you to!) you can search the catalog for the subject heading you are interested in, then limit your search to the "Audiovisual" material type and "Wayne" location.

Or... you can just ask us for help! Often Lisa can suggest a good audiovisual title on your topic since she is the one who selects all of the AV materials for the library.

Don't forget that we also have many, many more video titles available digitally through the OhioLINK Digital Media Center.

Fireside Readers June 2007 Selection

The June selection of the Fireside Readers Book Discussion Group is Chris Gardner's The Pursuit of Happyness. Join our discussion on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 7:00 p.m. in the Community Room (next to the library).

At the age of twenty, African American Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son. Motivated by the promise he made to himself as a fatherless child to never abandon his own children, the two spent almost a year in shelters and soup-lines. Never giving in to despair, Gardner went from being part of the city's invisible to being a powerful player in its financial district. (From the publisher's description)

Read the book that inspired the recent film, starring Academy Aware nominee, Will Smith.

Possible discussion questions to consider are available here.

New members and guests are always welcome to join the discussion, even if you haven't read or finished the book. Light refreshments will be served.

Welcome Readers!

Welcome to the newly created blog for Wayne College Library. We hope you enjoy the content and let us know if there are topics that you would like us to include.

Enjoy!

The Wayne College Library Staff