Friday, August 28, 2009

What You Need to Know: Part 5 (Fall 2009)

What a busy week!

We did the GSO Arrival Day event on Monday and handed out plenty of fliers and goodies; then the GSO Lunch on Tuesday and had a great time meeting all the new grad students (and giving them the third degree about what they wanted to see from us, which will have an impact on this blog for the rest of the Fall semester; you can expect more reviews and research tips!); then spent all day Wednesday outside in the sun and warmth giving out ice-cold lemonade and even more goodies to new students and their families, earning, I am sure, the eternal gratitude of some on such a hot day; and welcoming faculty members into our Library on Thursday for Faculty Development Week.

In the middle of it all, I've been working hard on making electronic reserves available to the professors who need it, putting together materials for GSO Arrival Day and the lunch, trying to finish off a LibGuide that'll help you find good stuff to read in the stacks, keeping library.gallaudet.edu updated with important news and downloads (such as this PDF of our GSO Lunch presentation -- check it out, the trivia's good!), carrying heavy stuff, meeting new students, helping new faculty, and just generally being all librarian-ish.

Not to mention getting the new Library online catalog actually ... online. It should be up and running by Monday -- keep an eye out!

In the middle of it all, I actually managed to finish Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Really, the only reason I could pull it off was just that the book is one of the most page-turningest things I've read in a long time. Cory's one of my favorite authors; he's a very active blogger and all-around techie and is something of a prominent civil liberties advocate (he believes in copyfighting, the principle that information "wants to be free," works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and distributes news about various government intrusions on individual rights in the Anglosphere). He's also a fantastic writer who's written some fascinating "in the very near future" books (almost all of which can be found as free downloads online under Creative Commons licenses), which includes Little Brother.

Little Brother is the story of a 17-year-old San Franciscan technological prodigy who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when San Francisco is attacked by terrorists. The Bay Bridge (and underlying BART tunnel) is blown up, thousands are killed, and San Francisco is cut in half. Predictably (this novel was published a year before the 2008 elections), the government swoops in, arrests the main character and his friends, and detains them all on suspicion of terrorism in a torture-prison camp in the middle of San Francisco Bay without any legal recourse. He just disappears for a few days and is tortured into giving up his secrets, then released. The rest of the book follows him as he becomes a cyberterrorist, using all the various technological means the government employs to keep track of every citizen in San Francisco against them to both foment chaos and make a point about overbearing government intrusion. Along the way, he finds love, frees his best friend from the government, causes massive traffic jams, stops the BART in its tracks (so to speak), and leads a movement of tens of thousands of people under the age of 25 in their fight to overthrow the Department of Homeland Security and take the city back for themselves.

It's an amazing read. You learn a lot about how some newer technology actually works (like radio-frequency identification (RFID) -- which you can find in your Metro SmarTrip card; it's what lets you just tap it at the faregate and move right on through) and how to subvert it, you meet some truly fascinating characters along the way, and you see what happens when Big Brother clamps down and Little Brother decides to fight back.

Ordinarily, because it's been a lazy summer, I'd say the book is on display. However, we've just swapped out the book recommendations for a display of books on college survival strategies. I would also strongly recommend checking out the other display table by the West entrance (near Peet) -- we just put up a bunch of Myron Uhlberg's other books in celebration of his memoir, Hands of my Father, being this year's Common Reading, as well as a few other CODA memoirs and videos.

Okay. On with the show.

We're going to wrap up "What You Need to Know" with just a straight clarification of our borrowing policies. The idea is just so you're clued in on how long you get our materials, how much of our materials you can get, and what happens if things get overdue. This way, you can read this and then come on over and start borrowing stuff!

The first and most important thing: you need a Library barcode. It's affixed to the back of your Gallaudet ID card (which means only students, faculty, staff, and alumni with a lifetime membership can get it). You will not be able to borrow anything without that barcode; we need to have that piece of plastic in our hand before we can check anything out to you. That's the first, most basic thing you can remember.

Now, let's talk about our borrowing periods for books. They're pretty context-specific, which means they vary according to who you are and what you're checking out. I'm just going to make a bullet-point list, categorized according to whether you're an undergrad, graduate student, faculty member, or staff member.
  • Undergraduate student
    • 4 weeks
  • Graduate student
    • Books from the General Stacks: 6 weeks
    • Books from the Deaf Stacks: 4 weeks
  • Faculty
    • Books from the General Stacks: 1 semester; all annual due dates are: 1/31, 5/31, 9/30. All books are subject to recall (very rare) after 4 weeks
    • Books from the Deaf Stacks: 4 weeks
  • Staff member
    • 4 weeks
  • All groups can check out an unlimited number of books
  • All groups have the same restriction on videos:
    • Each person can only borrow up to three videos at a time
    • Up to 3 days
    • The reason for this is explained in Part 3's Question of the Week
Alumni have a few different rules, according to the terms of the AA's lifetime membership:
  • 4 weeks, same as most other groups
  • 10 books max
  • Videos can only be checked up for up to 2 hours and cannot leave the building

Why? Well, because our alumni are fairly far-flung; many do not live anywhere near Washington, DC. A lot of times, when they come in to check out materials, it's while they're in town for a few days to visit. In the hubbub of visiting the ol' alma mater, it's easy to forget that you've got a Library DVD in a suitcase pocket until you're halfway to Dulles, and then what do you do? We also realize that there's a huge number of Gallaudet alumni still in the DC Metro area, but in the interest of fairness, the same limits apply to all alumni with lifetime memberships. Then there's the fact that our first responsibility is to our students, so we do what we can to make sure they have the best chance possible to use our collection, given the demand for our materials.

So, okay. You've checked out some books and movies with the understanding entailed by the bullet points above. What happens if you go past the due date without returning your stuff?

We start charging by the day. 25 cents for books, $1 for movies. We do this because it turns out to be a pretty good incentive for people to bring our things back. This way, we can make sure that others who may want the same book or movie can get it within a reasonable time. Our fines accumulate until the total for each item hits $10; after that point, the item is marked as 'Lost' and we hit you with $87 for replacement and processing (explained in further detail here). We also give a three-day grace period in case the book really is lost -- we'll waive everything if the book is returned within those three days, but if the book comes back after those three days are up, all of the overdue fines accrued since the end of the three-day period have to be paid.

If you've accumulated more than $25 altogether in fines, you won't be able to borrow anything else until you've gotten that number down to $24.99 or less. Hit $50, and you won't be able to register for classes. Hit graduation with any fines on your record, and you won't be able to get your diploma or any academic transcripts until your record's been cleared. Kind of tough, but it's for good reason: all of our books and movies actually belong to Gallaudet University. Things need to be even-Steven between you and the University before you can get that sheepskin, get a job, or stick around for the next semester.

Don't think we exact every cent we can from anyone who owes us money; we don't break legs, manufacture concrete overshoes, or encourage people to sleep with the fishes. We just want our stuff back. If the item was overdue because of unavoidable situations (like suddenly being called out of town due to a family member's medical emergency), come in and talk to the staff at the desk, and we'll work with you to figure something out. In the meantime, it's usually possible to renew books electronically through myALADIN to buy a little more time.

That about covers the basics of What You Need to Know before Monday, August 31 hits.

Next week, we'll talk a little bit more about Hands of my Father. It should be fun -- I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by Myron here on campus last spring, and he was just an incredibly energetic and entertaining speaker. Something to look forward to!

Question of the Week
I was watching that PowerPoint that was running on your computers this week, and noticed something about eReserves. I know it's for faculty, but what is it?
If you're a student, chances are you've had a course where the professor had all of his readings on Blackboard. Sometimes they're PDFs, sometimes they take you to a page on ProQuest or Ebsco. Those are eReserves -- we accept requests from faculty for help getting their readings online so they don't need to make 320 copies (say, 16 readings for 20 students) to hand out in class. It just cuts down on paper for everyone, especially since we used to offer actual, physical reserves here at the Library -- rows and rows of photocopied articles!

We also scan any readings that don't have electronic copies for professors who want those articles to be available online. We take care of any copyright issues that might come up and make sure everything's accessible, complete, and readable for all the students in a given course. It's a very popular service, and helps out a lot of harried, overworked faculty and keeps students from being loaded down with a bunch of dead trees.

All in all, it's just one way for us to contribute to the smooth running of Gallaudet's curriculum!

Friday, August 21, 2009

What You Need to Know: Part 4 (Fall 2009)

First: What has Jim the Librarian Read Lately?

Sort of a mélange, actually. I got through both Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson and White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

Tree of Smoke was an interesting book. It follows a few characters through Asia in the time of the Vietnam War, touched off by the assassination of President Kennedy. Some of it takes place in Vietnam and some of it takes place in the Philippines, and all of it consists of interesting episodes in the lives of its characters as they struggle through the expanding ripples of the war. Most of it seems to be a commentary of sorts on human nature, both in terms of the local culture and the Americans who are there for various reasons. It's also pretty funny in parts. White Tiger, on the other hand, is one of that rare breed of books: both screamingly hilarious and deeply thought-provoking. It follows the life of one Balram Halwai and his trajectory from an impoverished village in rural India to a job as a driver for a wealthy man in Delhi, then to a murder, flight, and eventually success as a Bangalore entrepreneur, all in the form of a series of letters to Chinese premier Hu Jintao. The letters also serve as a meditation on India itself and the people who live in it; there's so much that's both familiar and jarringly different. Large, sparkling malls rise next to slums where people use a communal trough as both a bathroom and a ward against outsiders, and Balram must learn to live with his employer's American wife and her startling, last-minute compassion while placating his traditional grandmother's demands that he return to the village to be married. It's a truly fantastic book.

As always, both are on display.

Now, moving on. We've reached part 4, and this is a big post: I'll be talking about the changes we're making to our online catalog. They're big and bold, and you should start coming across them sometime next week while searching through our collection.

As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the changes, though largely cosmetic in terms of utility, are drastic. Things look a little blank for now because we're still tweaking the eye-candy. Still, you can really see how different it is from the old catalog.

First, some background, then we'll go over the different elements step-by-step.

We've basically switched over from the old platform to a new one. This new platform is called "Aquabrowser," and it's been getting a lot of interest from libraries all over, including the one at Harvard University. We're calling it "ALADIN Discovery," and it's an improvement over the old one because more information is immediately visible, and it provides quite a few more options for manipulating your search so you can more easily navigate your way through both our collection and the collections of the seven other universities in the WRLC.

With that said, let's get specific!

It's in beta
This isn't by any stretch of the imagination the final product. We plan to tinker with various elements of the catalog search as we hear more from all of you about what you like or dislike about using the new system. There's quite a bit of customization possible with this, which is why it's such a good thing to have!

That word-web kind of thingy on the left
... for lack of a better term, anyway. This is one of the key features that's coming in with this change. This is mostly a semantic web; that means that any keyword will automatically bring up a bunch of other words that are related to your original keyword. This can help you find other words for the same thing, related concepts, spelling variants (in case you mistyped the keyword or there's an equally-applicable word that's just a little different -- like "emphasize" and "emphasise"), translations, or what is called a "Discovery trail," which consists of the last words you searched for. It's good for either expanding your ability to search for related concepts or just plain old looking around.

The search results
You'll see right away that it's now much easier to see whether the item you're looking at is a book or a movie. No more [videorecording]s! We also used to have individual records for the same item held by different schools. It didn't matter if our copy of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest was identical to Georgetown's copy; both copies had their own separate records because they were at different schools. Not anymore! We've managed to accomplish the monumental feat of merging all of our records so that one record can now apply to multiple copies across multiple schools. This should help make things much easier for you to find.

Select location
Basically exactly what it looks like. Right now, the default search will show all the libraries in the WRLC, but you can still limit your search to Gallaudet's holdings only, just by using this drop-down menu.

Narrow results by:
Also pretty much what it looks like. You can do this for time period (such as "telecommunication devices" before 1931), region ("children's literature" from China), online (do you prefer e-books or would you rather avoid those?), and so on and so forth. There are a lot of different options that should come in very handy when you're searching for something that may be difficult to find.

Now let's take a look at an actual item record ...

As you can see in the screenshot to the right, the first part in the middle isn't so new -- it looks a lot like the kind of record you could get through the old catalog system. However, the Notes (which tells you what additional stuff is included, like an index or a bibliography), Summary (self-explanatory), and Contents (basically a table of contents) fields are all now collapsible; you can show or hide them as you please. This saves space and makes it easier to make sure that the item has what you need before you go looking for it and possibly checking it out.

Below that, you can see the new "Item availability" section, which tells you which school has a copy, where that copy is located, and whether or not it's available. If you can't check the book out right away, but want to keep the record for later, we also now provide a few different ways to do so, whether by printing, e-mailing, Twittering, or digging. Also, the CLS request process has been simplified: just click the "Request" button!

Up on the left, you can see the options for viewing the MARC record (basically the actual record as it's coded into our catalog, untranslated into the nice, neat version you see here), options for working with the record's Web address (URL) so you'll be able to go straight to it from an external source, and exporting all the information in the record into RefWorks, where it'll create a citation for you if you use the book in a paper.

In a nutshell, we're just looking to make our catalog into even more of a one-stop shop than ever. You should be able to do many more things on your own. It also looks a bit more updated than the old catalog, which was kind of static, confusingly laid-out, and anything but visually-oriented. It was a great workhorse while it lasted, but, as you can see, we're ready to move on to the next generation, and we think you are, too.

We are also totally open for any comments or feedback on ALADIN Discovery; I've said the system is pretty flexible and there are many customizable elements, but we can't make very good changes without your input. We'll be adding a link to leave comments soon, but in the meantime, just click on "Ask a Librarian" up top on the right-hand side and let us know what you think!

That wraps it up for Part 4. As I said, we'll be rolling this new system out sometime next week, so keep an eye out and get ready to experiment!

Question of the Week
I'm a grad student, and I love to read, but would like to find out more about the Library. Will the Library be involved in any orientation activities?
You bet we are. On Monday, August 24, we'll have a table at GSO Arrival Day in JSAC, where you can pick up some goodies, grab this handout (PDF), and give ALADIN a try, including searching the catalog for your favorite book or movie and checking out our very impressive list of databases.

Then on Tuesday, we'll be doing lunch with all the new grad students at the Plaza Dining Hall. We're going to give a multimedia presentation full of interesting Library facts and some very far-out trivia. You'll also be able to talk to some of our librarians and ask us anything!

Then we'll be hanging out in front of the building on Wednesday, giving out lemonade and other treats for New Undergraduate Student Arrival Day, although, of course, anyone (including grad students) is welcome to stop by and get a nice cool drink and a delicious snack!

And, of course, all through the week, feel free to drop by the Library (we're open until 5 p.m. all week), take a look at what we have, meet the people who work here, ask questions, and maybe borrow something nice to take home with you before you get too busy to enjoy the Library for anything other than academic work!

Friday, August 14, 2009

What You Need to Know: Part 3 (Fall 2009)

Wow.

That's all I can say after polishing off The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. It's kind of a crazy book, describing a sort of alternate universe where, after World War II, the Jews were resettled temporarily in Alaska instead of the Middle East. Temporarily, I said -- the book is set two months before the Jews have to turn over control of the land to the United States after occupying it for 50 years. In the middle of all this, a police detective finds a dead man in his apartment building, murdered in what appears to be a professional manner. It's police-department policy that all cases have to be cleared before the Americans take over, so our main character has to navigate his way through organized crime, the world of chess and its champions, a crazed rehab center, a shootout or two, the death of his sister years before, and a whole lot of alcohol before a lot of questions get answered in very surprising ways.

Oh, there's also American-government-funded international terrorism, a burning cow, and a whacked-out religious cult who thinks dynamite can bring back the Messiah. Surprisingly enough, it's also pretty funny. Highly recommended, worth the awards it's won, and available on the display table by the entrance facing the SAC!

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Now that we've gotten all the previous blogs out of the way, let's move on.

Back in May, I posted this. Did any of it happen? Let's go over it point by point.

New computers
Yes and no. We did get new computers, but instead of adding them to what we already have, we decided that everyone would be best served by using the new computers to replace some of our older ones, which were getting decidedly creaky. It happens to all computers after a while, especially when they see usage as heavy as ours have. We also had Information Technology Services (ITS) come in and load some fresh Gallaudet images on their hard drives (geekspeak for "They cleaned it all up"), so you should see things running a little quicker this Fall.

New Web site
This was covered in the subsequent week, but we're actually still tweaking and adding stuff. There'll be a pretty big change happening to the ALADIN Catalog next week as well, which will be covered in next week's post; it's a pretty big "What You Need to Know" that deserves a week to itself.

New Library hours
The hours for Fall 2009 have been posted (down at the bottom). The most immediate change you may notice is that starting Monday, August 31, we'll be open until midnight Sundays through Thursdays, and until 8 p.m. on Friday. That's a fairly significant change, one that's a little kinder to night-owls and people who need a little extra time to get work done.

LibGuides
As I mentioned in the original post back in May, LibGuides are basically quick and easy research guides that we can whip up on any given topic for a particular course. They also serve as a way for us to introduce students to all of our resources and teach them how to fend for themselves in the wilds of academic research. Some students -- particularly those in GSR courses -- may end up using one or two of them this Fall; we're sort of gingerly dipping our toes in the water when it comes to integrating LibGuides with the curriculum. As always, if you do use one, feedback is welcome!

Aside from that, I thought I'd add a little note about our current hours, which seems to have taken some by surprise. We are indeed closing at 5 p.m. until the start of the Fall semester, which is -- wow -- only two weeks from Monday. It's what we do during intersession (the break between semesters) in order to make sure everyone's here at the same time for various reasons. Come August 31, things will go back to what we so laughably call "normal."

Enjoy your weekend!

Question of the Week
I was curious about the borrowing limits. We're allowed to check out as many books as we want, but we can only take out three movies at a time. Why is that?
Simply put, we have a whole lot more books than movies -- about 260,000 books versus 8,000 movies, or around 30 times as many books. This is because we do our best to make sure that every conceivable topic that could be studied at Gallaudet is well-covered from a variety of viewpoints. The system works pretty well for one of the following four reasons:
  • When someone's researching a topic, it's usually with a fairly narrow focus -- only a few books on the subject will actually apply, while the rest are free for others to use (say, the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, as opposed to the subsequent rise of the Third Reich).
  • The sheer number of books makes it pretty hard to carry out everything we have on the more common topics (17th-Century British poetry, for instance).
  • If someone actually does do that, it's usually because their topic is so esoteric (like the mating dances of the Ruahuaparura tribe of the darkest Amazon as undertaken under the waning gibbous) that nobody else will be researching it at the same time.
  • If the above three fail to apply to a particular situation, the professor leading the class usually will have foreseen the problem and placed the most important books on reserve so nobody can hang on to them for more than two hours at a time.
In other words, our supply of books is well-matched to the demand for them.

However, our supply of movies is a bit less than the demand for them, so we try to make sure people have a reasonable number of movies and a reasonable amount of time to watch them in, before asking that they be returned so fellow Gallaudetians can enjoy them too!

Friday, August 7, 2009

What You Need to Know: Part 2 (Fall 2009)

I just realized that I haven't said anything about what books I've read in the past couple weeks. So much for that habit.

The main reason for that is The Dumbest Generation, which I started and put down when I got within 100 pages of finishing. In case you're curious, this book discusses what feels like a couple thousand studies, all of which outline a pretty basic, simple fact: the people of my generation, the so-called Millennials, don't read. At all. And this will destroy our civilization. Cheerful.

I put it down before finishing because another book kept distracting me: the Selected Poems of Alfred Tennyson, Baron Tennyson. I usually call him Lord Alfred -- he's one of my favorite poets, along with a few others from that era, but I hadn't read his stuff in a long time, so I finally caved in and brought The Dumbest Generation back here so I could focus more fully on that. Absurd, really: I put down a book that was telling me that I don't read -- in order to pay more attention to a book of Victorian poetry.

Since then, I've gone through The Age of American Unreason, which is sort of similar to The Dumbest Generation, but instead of focusing only on my age group, Unreason examines some of the more disturbing trends in American society over the past few decades toward anti-intellectualism for a number of reasons, culminating -- and this isn't a political opinion, it's just what the book says -- in the last presidential administration. Really a fascinating book. Also Never Let Me Go, which reminds me a lot of Margaret Atwood's work -- which is a good thing if you liked The Handmaid's Tale, not so much if you didn't like Oryx & Crake. It's the gently-dystopian story of a trio of clones in Britain who were bred for organ donations and the ways in which their lives intertwine as they, both together and separately, slowly figure out what it means to be a human being in the face of a society seeking to deny them that knowledge. It's a beautifully-written story -- especially if you like the English countryside, which, in this book, appears to be less damp and more scenic. It also happens to be one of those books with a very ambiguous ending; it's up to you whether or not to feel a sense of closure. Terrific book.

Out of the above, only The Dumbest Generation and Never Let Me Go are on display. Selected Poems and American Unreason don't have very eye-catching covers, which happens to be one of my major criteria for deciding whether to put a book up on display. You can still find them easily, though -- just click on the linked titles above and that'll take you right to their records and call numbers.

Now that that's over with, back to more utilitarian considerations.

Last week, I took you through this blog's previous posts which could be classified as focusing mostly on the librarians, the collection, and our equipment and important resources, as well as a kinda-sorta FAQ. This week, we'll be looking at directly research-related posts -- if you're wondering about how to get started on your research here at the Library, this is where you should start -- and the Questions of the Week by category.

First up: Finding Journal Articles
Part 1 | Part 2
This pair of posts details the process of finding journal articles in our databases. Part 1 gives a general overview of how to find journals in ALADIN and what most of the terms mean, as well as good general advice for starting your research from a broader standpoint (when you know the topic but not the specific articles you want to find). Part 2 gets even more specific, starting with a sample citation and explaining exactly how to find the article it belongs to.

Databases
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
This series of posts is considerably more comprehensive. Part 1 discusses how to access databases from off-campus, which can be a sticking point for people who are not used to having to log in to see an article. After this point, the general idea is to familiarize you with the hows and whys of databases -- Part 2 covers how our access works (and explaining why it may seem to be funky from time to time), Part 3 is about why our access works the way it does and how much databases cost in general, and Part 4 includes a preview of new stuff we may be getting in the coming months.

Questions of the Week
Bear in mind: all Questions of the Week (or as we refer to them around here in our e-mail missives, QotWs) appear at the bottom of the linked posts. I've split up all the QotWs into four rough categories, as follows:

Library building
What's up with the recent construction around the Library? (July 31, 2009)
Why is the big skylight in the middle of the first floor blocked by sails? (June 12, 2009)
Where can I plug in my laptop or charge my phone? (June 5, 2009)
Does the Library own the entire building? (May 22, 2009)

Library system and policies
How does a new student get into the system? (July 24, 2009)
Why do the Library hours change? (May 15, 2009)
How do the shelves behind the Service Desk work? (March 27, 2009)
What is the Consortium? (March 13, 2009)

Library collection
How does the Library make room for all the new books? (June 19, 2009)
How do I get the Library to buy a book I'd really like to read? (April 17, 2009)
What are "microforms" and how do I use them? (April 3, 2009)

Searching
How do I search for a movie in ALADIN without having to wade through a long list of books? (May 1, 2009)
How do call numbers work? (April 24, 2009)
Why can't I find what I'm looking for? (April 9, 2009)
What does 'peer-reviewed' mean? (March 6, 2009)

Alternatively, you can click on the 'qotw' label in the sidebar to the right to see all 15 of them in one go.

Since there are 15 Questions of the Week in this post alone, I'll give you a break and forgo it this week. I also mentioned last week the possibility of comparing our plans for the summer from back in May with what's actually happened, but we'll put it off until next week -- this post is quite long enough already, thanks to my bookish babbling up top.

I'm off to watch the Nationals play Arizona (I would have said "lose to," but my boss is a Nats fan, so ... ). Enjoy your weekend ... if it doesn't rain too much!