Meet Summon, our new catalog: The basics

Hello, there! I’ve come out of my long summer hibernation because there’s a big New Thing you need to know about.

This New Thing has been a long time in coming for a lot of reasons, including, well, it’s just been a complicated process getting all the parts working together.

If you go to http://library.gallaudet.edu, you’ll see it right away. No, not the new look -- I like it, myself, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s mostly cosmetic. I’m talking about Summon. It’s our new catalog, sort of.  You’ll see it named above the search box.  Below the search box, you’ll see a few options for focusing your searches, and a link to our good ol’ Classic Catalog too.

Here’s the thing about Summon: It’s big. It includes not only the usual books, DVDs, e-books, and streaming videos that we and other libraries in the Consortium offer, but also journal articles that you’d usually have to go to a database (like ProQuest, EBSCO Academic Search Complete, and PsycARTICLES) to find.

Summon is a unified search interface for most of our e-resources in addition to our usual stuff. So naturally, it runs a little differently. I thought it’d be a good idea to do a quick run-through of the basics. We’ll start with how results for books appear in Summon, then talk a little bit about journal articles.

Books

Suppose we need to find resources on bilingual families, leaving all the default options as they are -- those are the checkboxes you see underneath the search box on our home page, some of which are already checked, and others that are blank. Here’s what comes up:

 

I hope you noticed that the search brought up over 60,000 results! But fear not. On the left-hand side, you can see the usual options for narrowing your search: more-specific choices for what you want to appear on the list, which institution you’re interested in (I decided not to limit it to Gallaudet’s stuff), the types of content, and so on. There are a few more options below where I cut off the screenshot, like subject terms and publication dates, but you get the idea.

The really important part is that you can see right away exactly where to find specific items: not just which institution owns each item, but also whether it’s available, what the call number is, and which library -- or part of a library -- has it. Here’s a more complete example: 

 

So right away, you can see that our copy is available, the call number is 404.2 G76b, 2010, and you can find it in the General Stacks, downstairs. Pretty sweet! There’s also an e-book in the list, complete with a link -- in light-blue text above -- that I clicked so you can see that it’s working. We’ll cover e-books in more detail in a later post.

In some ways, Summon’s not as complicated as it looks, because it uses a neat trick: the Classic Catalog! Yep, the old bare-bones workhorse, which you may have thought died years ago, is still around, and both the title link above and the links to all the locations below it will take you to Classic Catalog records.

Journal articles

Journal articles work a little differently. Limiting the ‘bilingual families’ search to “ … articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review’ by clicking the relevant checkbox on the left side of the following picture yields this: 

 

You can see the full article citation for “Learning from bilingual family literacies” -- journal name (Language Arts), publication date (09/2012), volume and issue information (Volume 90, Issue 1), and even page numbers. Before we get to the “Full Text Online” link at the bottom, which I’m sure you’re slavering over, here’s a neat feature: 

 

Hovering your mouse pointer over the title link will bring up a preview! This will often include an abstract, so, in this case, there’s no need to get over to the article itself to find out what it’s about.

But suppose the abstract reveals that the article is probably something you want to look at in more depth. Clicking on the “Full Text Online” link for this particular article gets this: 

 

In the immortal words of Emeril LaGasse: BAM. If you’ve never heard of him, look him up in Summon!

It should be noted that if you already have the full citation of the article you want to find, our article finder will probably be a better bet. Summon and the article finder (known officially as 360 Link) are sibling products from the same company. The key difference is that, as far as finding specific articles are concerned, Summon is a searchlight, while 360 Link is a laser.

Concluding thoughts

This is the part of the post where I offer the customary caution. First, Summon doesn’t provide access to all of our e-resources. Also, the Summon catalog is still very much in beta, which means we’re still working out all the bugs -- for instance, it’s not always very clear whether or not you have access to a given full-text article or e-book -- so search with patience and care. One strategy you could use is start off with Summon, gather a few titles, then switch to Classic -- http://catalog.wrlc.org -- for a clearer picture of what’s available. This works best with finding books, e-books, and films.

Another strategy, of course, is using the big, giant, red Chat With Us! button at the top of the Summon search page during regular business hours. It’ll pop up a window that looks like this: 

 

Which, I hope, is self-explanatory.

Above all, always remember to:

• Be patient
• Get in touch with us before throwing your computer out the window

Good luck, and happy searching!

A few new books

A number of weird software issues have held my most recent vlog back from completion, which is a shame, because it's a review of one of my sleeper favorites: Childhood's End.

Instead, I've placed it on the back-burner until those issues resolve themselves -- how 'bout an update, Apple? -- and decided to do a bunch of quickie reviews of new books. Here goes ...

Afrika Reich by Guy Saville
An alternate-universe novel in which the Second World War ended in truce rather than victory, this book explores Africa in the 1950s. Divided between British and German colonies, the continent harbors a new German threat that promises to end British supremacy. Our intrepid British hero participates in an assassination with disastrous consequences that strand him in the middle of enemy territory. It's a fairly high-concept work that delivers on tension and excitement!

Aya: Love in Yop City by Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie
Aya returns in the third and final installment of a graphic-novel series about her life. This series is pretty popular, probably because it's light-hearted and is an interesting look at life in 1970s Ivory Coast. Aya's grown up and is working on becoming a doctor, until a scorned professor ruins her plans. She gets to take her revenge, though, with the help of her hometown!

Bomb: The race to build and steal the world's most dangerous weapon by Steve Sheinkin
The development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos is one of the most fascinating stories of military technological advancement -- even more than the history of the Internet -- largely because the stakes -- and risks -- were so high and the people involved were ... well, it's tough to describe them. Put it this way: my favorite scientist of all, Richard Feynman, had an exceptionally puckish sense of humor. For example, his favorite hobby was safecracking ... in the middle of the most top-secret government facility in the world.

Extra virginity: The sublime and scandalous world of olive oil by Tom Mueller
Like dog shows and kiddie entertainers, the most innocent-seeming parts of life often conceal a seething cauldron of corruption, fraud, and deceit. This is true even of olive oil, everyone's favorite addition to toasted bread, mozzarella, tomato, and basil. It's not just knowing the difference between virgin and extra-virgin -- what about the difference between olives and canola? These are the things that matter, people!

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
One of my personal favorite recent reads, House of the Scorpion is a young-adult science-fiction novel, which is increasingly becoming a genre not to be reckoned with. Our main character lives in Opium, a new country that exists between Mexico and the United States, ruled and fueled by drug lords' agricultural pursuits. Weird enough, except he's an illegal -- and widely-hated -- clone of the richest lord of them all. That's weird enough, except his original dies, and ... well, read it. Tense, suspenseful, and jam-packed wall-to-wall with issues in bioethics, House of the Scorpion is fantastic all around.

Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior by Leonard Mlodinow
Full disclosure: This book is on my kitchen table right now. Sorry. But I highlight it for two reasons: It's from the author of The drunkard's walk, which I briefly review here, and it's just interesting in general to see how your brain seems to have a mind of its own. Mlodinow focuses on how people make decisions, and the factors that affect those decisions without their knowledge. Drunkard's walk was about probability and how some things are considerably less -- and more -- likely than you usually think they are, and Subliminal is about all the tiny little signals that go into shaping your view of the world and how those signals can be manipulated. He's a fun guy!

That about covers it this time. Have fun browsing the stacks!

Update ... for real.

I hope everyone enjoyed that April Fool’s post, because now it’s time to bring the pain.

Just kidding! Actually, we’re long overdue for new stuff on this thing, which I admit is my fault.

First and most immediate, we’d like to announce a trial subscription to EasyBib; it’s an online citation tool similar to RefWorks.

And by “citation tool,” we really mean, “thing that does all the work for you when you have a bunch of references to cope with for your paper, project, or other academic product.” This trial expires April 25, so if you’re curious, you’ll need to hop to the following:

• Go to http://www.easybib.com while on campus.
• Register for a free personal account. You can tell you’ve done it right if you see the Gallaudet logo.
• Once that’s done, you can get in from off-campus with your login information.
• Play around a little bit. Maybe take a stab at it with an actual assignment.
• Let us know what you think. We’ve got a survey up and running.

A lot of other things that we’ve been working on are taking place behind the scenes. For instance, we’re in the process of getting some new inter-library loan software on its feet.

That doesn’t sound terribly interesting, but the immediate advantage for students, staff, and faculty is that the turnaround time required to get your requests out and the loaned items in should go down somewhat. Ideally, you wouldn’t notice much of a change from the way we already do it, but the truth is, a lot of work had to happen in order to get your requests out there and taken care of as quickly as possible. It saves you time and us a lot of work!

Speaking of lengthy implementations, you can expect to see one version of our catalog, ALADIN Discovery (the search box on our web site), change considerably at some point in the near future, mostly in terms of what it looks like and the results that will show up when you search. I’m careful to say “at some point,” because I’ve been teasing this announcement for the past year. But the light at the end of the tunnel is finally visible.

Basically, we’re replacing Discovery with a newer product from the same company, one that will -- wait for it -- also search quite a few of our databases in addition to our print and electronic books. It’ll be more of a one-stop shop than ever!

It’s taken so long because, as it turns out, figuring out how several universities and their library collections, database subscriptions, and generally-weird resources, some of which are publicly-available and some of which aren’t, all slot together so that the right people take the right pathways to the right resources ... is a bit of a challenge.

Each university library also has its own individual preferences for how to present things -- do we want to make sure Gallaudet items are at the top of the list (well ... yes)? Do we display books only first, or let the articles come through full blast, or tweak the relevancy algorithm, or set up a tabbed search box for each type of resource? That kind of thing -- so that’s also taken some time.

I’m sure that the folks directly involved with this process would roll their eyes and say “a bit of a challenge” is a bit of an understatement, and they’re right about that.

Either way, we’re looking forward to the final implementation at some point before the next Fall semester, and getting prepared for the inevitable flood of confused and delighted e-mails from the campus community.

And our old-school users don’t need to worry: the Classic Catalog isn’t going anywhere. Truth is, it’ll be years before that one goes away; it actually grows directly from the backbone system that most of WRLC uses to handle, well, everything. That backbone has to be replaced before Classic goes anywhere. We’ve begun the process of figuring out what we want from the new system, but are looking at, possibly, several years before a final decision is reached.

What can I say? We’re picky.

Anyway, those are the big things, as well as all the smaller things we all do every day, that keep the Library moving along.

Next week, you can anticipate a vlog of some kind. Stay tuned ...

New movies and books

As of October 1st, the 2012 fiscal year is over.

Why mention that? Because it means that new orders are essentially on pause for a short time -- except for urgent items for faculty -- until we shake out what our plans are for 2013. I thought I’d offer a bit of an update.

All told, we ordered over 1,600 books, e-books, and films. It’s a respectable addition to the collection, I think! So I thought I’d quickly review some of the highlights of our recent film and book purchases. I’m focusing on my own purchases for this one; it’s just easier that way. I’ll do some legwork for the next one.

All Joss Whedon, all the time
Admittedly, I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon on general principle (even that one film with Sigourney Weaver) -- Buffy and Firefly are two of my top ten favorite shows of all time, while Dollhouse continues to intrigue, years after its cancellation. He’s moved back into movies, and I have to say you don’t need to be a fan of the man to know what he’s been doing. We just bought Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers (which is being processed as we speak).

Cabin in the Woods is pretty interesting! It starts off as a stereotypical coed horror flick, with a bunch of unrealistically attractive college students (and the requisite stoner in tow) heading off to … you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. But the story takes a strange turn early on, and just keeps getting stranger. Summing it up requires that you look at the old complaints about ridiculously-premised horror films in new ways; what if it’s all deliberate for reasons other than Hollywood’s love of proven tropes? It’s both an homage to, and a tweak on, the horror-movie formula, with an ending that breaks the mold in its boldness.

The Avengers, of course, is widely considered the best comic-book film of the year, if not the last few years, and a big part of that is the way Whedon wrote it. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of his trademark wit and unusual turns of phrases in the script, plus the fight scenes are brilliantly-choreographed. The actors are terrific, too -- Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner still makes me uneasy whenever I think of him, while I get goosebumps when the Hulk emerges.

Lovers, not fighters
We also got The Artist, another award-winner -- and for good reason. People looking for dialogue-heavy films probably should avoid this one. For all but the last five minutes, it’s actually a silent film, the subtitles registering only the type of music being played on the soundtrack. Once in a while you’ll see an intertitle with a summed-up version of the dialogue being mouthed on-screen, but if you’re a good lipreader, you’ll be amused at just how much they vary from what the actors are actually saying. It’s a lovely love story, covering a famous silent-film star at the end of his era and his very slowly-growing romance with an up-and-coming star of the new ‘talkies.’ It’s also worth it for the dog, which is ridiculously cute and extraordinarily well-trained. The entire film is shot in a very appealing black-and-white format that actually makes John Goodman look good.

Last (for this post; we actually purchased 64 films this year) is The Vow. I kept it last because it’s not my kind of film, but I know heartstring-tugging stuff tends to be popular. In this case, it’s the story of Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum (both veterans of Nicholas Sparks flicks) as they rebuild their lives and marriage after a car accident and subsequent coma robs her of her memory. It’s actually based on the true story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter.

Drop everything and read
First, I have to admit to being intrigued by Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books, and it appears I’m not alone. We got the most recent installments -- Aloha from Hell and Devil Said Bang -- and they continue in much the same vein as the first two in the series. James Stark, our resurrected antihero, exists in a Los Angeles where the supernatural abounds and the world is constantly under threat from a race of creatures that favor total destruction of both good and evil. Sort of like the Constantine comic books, except the protagonist of this series doesn’t bother with pretending to help people.

Then there’s Crackpot Palace, a collection of surreal short stories that explore a few different classical tropes ranging from army-as-well-oiled-machine to Dr. Moreau’s Island and the real story of what happened there. It’s hard to describe the way it’s written; the best I can think of is a combination of Harper Lee and Stephen King, with a little of Flannery O’Connor’s highly-calibrated sense of irony.

The fourth and last title I’d like to highlight is The Medieval Python. It’s a collection of essays about the work of Terry Jones, a member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python; it turns out he’s actually been a prolific historian and critic of medieval literature, especially the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries. Jones turned 70 this year, so a bunch of historians and literary critics wrote up essays about the work he’s done and presented the published version to him as sort of a birthday present. A comedian gets a history book as a birthday present; sounds like a joke, right?

I could go on (really, I could; see me in the Library if you don’t think this post was sufficient), but space and time are immutable constraints. Suffice it to say that we’ve all been making interesting -- and useful -- additions to the collection over the past year!

Next week, you can expect a vlog. See you then.

Quick update!

Two weeks later, we’re back!

If you’re a regular reader, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you may also be a regular user of our Web site. The new version has been up and running for a couple of weeks now (and no, the timing is purely coincidental). We figured right now was a good time to put up a survey -- just three questions and a comment area -- and get people’s thoughts.

We got one comment on the site within an hour of it going live, an IM asking in a rather shocked manner what had happened to our site and that “it’s so … boring.”

I was lucky enough to get that chat -- I’m being sincere; I was pretty amused -- but unfortunately, my identity as the anonymous librarian chatter was sniffed out, so our one bored user remains nameless, perhaps permanently. Still, in case he or she isn’t alone, I’m going to admit something that might shock, surprise, disgust, or even appall some readers.

Are you ready? Here it is: The Gallaudet University Library is not a sexy place.

We have sexy things, certainly, once you figure out where to look -- and if you don’t, one of us will be happy to help you find them.

But we’re a library. With stuff that people use. And there’s a lot of it. Most of it sprawls across the Internet, and a lot of it only works if you go through us. We want to make getting to information as easy on our students, staff, and faculty as possible, which is not really served by whiz-bang graphics or walls of text.

I’m inclined to think that we’re getting closer to pulling it off with each new iteration of the Library’s Web site -- this will be the fourth version I’ve seen -- but as a librarian, I’m not the best judge of that.

In case you’re curious, the Wayback Machine has archived the Library’s Web site all the way back to 2000! If you’re looking for nostalgia, a good laugh, or some satisfaction of your curiosity about how far we -- and the Internet -- have managed to come in the past 12 years, I highly recommend it.

In other news, Lee Murphy, our Circulation Specialist, has retired, after just about 35 years of service. She’s seen the Library, Gallaudet University, and Washington, DC, grow and transform beyond all recognition. We’re sorry to see her go, but wish her well!

August still isn’t over, the Fall semester still hasn’t begun, and we’ve still got some changes coming in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled!

It’s getting to be that time of year!

The last week of classes for Spring 2012 is wrapping up, finals are coming, and a bunch of students are graduating. Then school’s out for the summer!

Well, for the majority of students, anyway. Things are as busy as ever here at the Library, which is a year-round condition for us. I have a couple of conferences to go to, myself -- one of which is next week, in fact, which means no blog post. I’m excited about this one, actually, even though it’s in Columbus, Ohio (Honolulu would have been nicer, or my birthplace of Clearwater, Florida), because there’ll be a lot of interesting talks about information literacy, a subject near and dear to my professional heart. And, of course, we’ve got some projects lined up.

Personally, it’s all about the weeding. I’m looking to offload a lot of our really old, outdated books that are a) falling apart, b) not being used, and c) silly. This’ll free up more room in the stacks for new books, plus give us some more flexibility in the future.

Collectively, there are three major initiatives on the agenda for the warm months, all of which have to do with managing the unruly pack of books roaming around our basement.

First, Deaf Copy 1. Fair warning: there’s quite a bit of background to this.

If you’re not familiar with that, here it is in a nutshell: Closed stacks. This room contains what we call the “first copies” of the entire Deaf Stacks you see on the first floor. The Deaf Copy 1 (hereafter abbreviated as “DC1”) stacks are our permanent, final, must-preserve copies. This room is what keeps safe the world’s best, most comprehensive collection of Deaf-related work, so obviously it’s very important.

Up until last year, DC1 -- and the Deaf Collection in general -- had a very broad purview that included everything from Deaf culture to otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat, for those unfamiliar with bastardized Greek roots). This presented a problem, both practically (medical literature has a short shelf life that becomes unmanageable when mixed in with a very large multidisciplinary collection) and culturally -- deafness as a physical state and deafness as a culture are two very different things.

So we relieved the Deaf Collection & Archives staffers of all the stuff that treated deafness as a pathological condition and absorbed it into the General Collection. Since it had all been part of the Deaf Collection up to that point, this also meant cleaning out the first copies of the books affected, which in turn left a ton of empty space on the shelves down there.

So we’re moving the Deaf Copy 1 stacks around a little bit this summer to fill in those gaps and make room for more stuff. It’s actually warm-up for …

The General Stacks. Yup, we’re shifting them again. It’s nowhere near as drastic as last year’s shift, though -- mostly it’s just adjusting the collection to fill in some empty spaces opened up by weeding, and to add more space on the shelves for overcrowded books. They’re distributed pretty unevenly at the moment because when last year’s shift happened, we had to estimate which areas might need more room than others.

A year later, it turns out that a number of factors, including e-books, shifts in departmental focus, and the aforementioned weeding, have solved a lot of the space issues we used to have, so instead of worrying about specific areas, we get to make sure the entire collection has room to grow.

The third thing is, of course, inventory. We’ve spent most of the Spring semester working out a process for what is probably the largest project we’ve undertaken in recent memory: finding out exactly what we have on the shelves.

It sounds funny, I know, as though we haven’t been keeping track all along. But the truth is, even the systems we’ve put into place to track the movement of our stuff -- all 220,000 pieces of it -- aren’t perfect, and the Library’s been through so many technological changes since it moved into the current building that things fall through the cracks.

The causes of these problems are surprisingly varied, ranging from obvious theft to cataloging snafus -- records get left in the system for books we weeded years ago, or sometimes it goes the other way: books that clearly belong to us, but which the system thinks don’t exist. Other times, browsing students will pull a book off the shelf, skim through it, and put it back -- somewhere else.

So we’re going to spend the next couple of years going through the entire thing, shelf by shelf.

Yes, years. It’s not as bad as it sounds; the Consortium offers us the ability to scan a whole bunch of books in one fell swoop, upload their barcode numbers, and get back a nicely-detailed report letting us know what’s out of order, what should be there that isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there that is. It’s a little weird to read, but makes the process go fairly smoothly. And because the Library will continue to be used the entire time, of course, it’ll take a long while to get through the full collection.

Actually, we will probably never get through the full collection. By the time we finish going through it, enough will have changed in the rest of the collection that we’ll need to start over again. And again. And again, and again, and …

Believe it or not, this is okay with us. We’re undertaking this huge project -- along with the General Stacks shift -- specifically so people can find stuff more easily. That is, after all, why we’re here.

And it starts this summer, along with our usual day-to-day work. We’re looking forward to getting started!

Graduation season

It’s getting to be that time of year again. Students panicking over graduation, our preparation for the oncoming summer, and the LURP Award.

Just because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s take each thing in reverse order.

First, “LURP” is short for “Library Undergraduate Research Paper.” We do this every year; undergraduates submit their best papers from the last couple of semesters and a group of Library people reviews them and determines a winner in a blind judging. Winning relies on a number of factors, including the use of Library resources in the paper. The prize? A $200 gift card to Amazon.com!

There’s a link to the submission details and form on our home page, but here it is as a Word document anyway.

Second, our summer is going to go pretty much as usual; there’ll be a few projects we’re undertaking. This year, however, they won’t be disruptive to people who want to use the Library.

One thing I’d like to add for students, though: Even if you aren’t registered for the summer semester, you can still use the Library if you’re in town! Just come in after the end of the spring semester (after May 6, in other words) and let us know:

• You’re here and want to use the Library
• You’re registered for the fall
• You’re going to be around long enough to return your materials on time

Every time we come upon a break between semesters or the beginning of the summer, we get a few students, staff, and faculty who ask if we can extend the due date while checking stuff out because they plan to leave town at some point and don’t want to end up with fines on their record if the due date falls before their return.

We also get a few people who contact us after a month, upset because they suddenly have fines; maybe they thought they could borrow an item for the entire summer, or someone else placed a hold on their item, so it can’t be renewed, or they just maxed out their number of permitted renewals. After asking some questions, we generally find out they’re not in town, one of the local states, the country, or -- in rare cases -- on this planet*.

Our advice in each case, often given pre-emptively and sometimes far too late, is the same, and here it is: Although we understand the desire for some free vacation reading, books have a nasty habit of being left behind on planes, forgotten under hotel beds, dropped on mountain tops, or buried in beach sand. Depending on how conscientious you are about keeping track of your things while backpacking through Peru, it may be a better idea to spend the money on a new book for yourself. Better safe than sorry!

Third and finally, graduation. If you’re graduating in May and have outstanding fines or fees on your record, please don’t forget to get that taken care of before you leave. Commencement is still more than a month away, but as the victim of two graduations myself, I know those final weeks can be hectic!

That’s three. Vlog next week. Ditto MLB’s Opening Day. Spring is here!
-----
*Just kidding. As far as we know, no one at Gallaudet University has been definitively proven to be an extraterrestrial.

Faces in the window

Phew.

That’s all I have to say about this semester so far. Part of it is the September in the Stacks series of events, which has required quite a bit of preparation, part of it is the class I’m teaching, part of it is the usual work, part of it is …

Well, there are a lot of moving parts in general. Including furniture. We’re slowly but surely changing a few things here in the Library, even as we settle into the new routine that comes with each fresh-faced September.

For instance, we’ve added a pair of super-comfortable IKEA rocking chairs to the new seating area by the public computers on the first floor. We’re currently waiting on a loveseat that’ll accompany the rocking chairs, and then ta-da!

We also finished the conversion of our 1404 computer lab into the new Quiet Study Room, which has some similar furniture and is a little more of a comfortable environment for people to work quietly, free of distraction.

While all of this has been going on, the renovation of our two study rooms downstairs got off to a strong start on Monday. The old chalkboards are already gone, soon to be replaced by whiteboards and computers with large monitors, similar to the setup we have in the Deaf Library Study Center. We’re also working on a room-reservation system for those two rooms; we anticipate a higher level of demand because of the new equipment, and want to make sure everyone gets their fair shot at them.

In the meantime, weird things keep cropping up. Last month, when we tore down the old counter that enclosed the new seating area, we found 40-year-old Pepsi bottles and Schlitz cans (empty, alas). Yesterday, a window appeared behind a chalkboard in one of the study rooms that are undergoing renovation downstairs.

My post today is going to be about that window.

One of the fellas working on the room came upstairs yesterday afternoon when they found the window, asking to be allowed into an adjacent room around the corner to the right, thinking that accessing the window from the other side might make things go a little easier.

So I left the meeting I had been in and went downstairs with him, and discovered that he meant the Genealogy Room, which belongs to the Archives. Once we got in, we discovered a distinct lack of windows. Or, not of windows -- one corner of the room is glassed in, opening onto the General Stacks -- but of windows resembling the newly-discovered one.

Hmm.

We checked the room around the corner to the right of that one, the other study room which was undergoing renovation. It turned out to be windowless. So we made another right turn and tried another room, where the Archives stores many of its photographs. There were windows! But not the window. The contractor started grumbling, and I privately wondered why anyone would treat buildings like honeycombs made by avant-garde bees (I’m reading a book about bees this week, and the comparison is apt, as many of the rooms in this cluster are hexagonal).

Puzzled, we found an emergency map in the corridor that connects the central hallway going past the auditorium towards the Archives to the General Stacks in the 900s, and examined it closely to try to get some idea of where the window actually was. Then we moved further along the corridor (are you confused yet? I’m not quite all there myself) and around the corner to the right to B112, a smaller auditorium-style classroom. Windows! But …

Well, you guessed it.

So we tried next door, which turned out to be a strange little hallway with a ramp going down, then stairs going up, and which represented the sixth right turn that brought us full circle around the southwest quadrant of downstairs rooms from where we’d started.

We found another door into B112, the rear door of the photograph room we tried earlier, and another door, which I’d never noticed before, not in the just-about-three years I’d worked here. We tried that one, and discovered something creepy.

A dark staircase. Well, it wasn’t much of a staircase -- there were a couple of stairs leading up to a landing, and then around a corner, they continued into a small room. It led into utter darkness. I saw a light switch on the wall to my right, and flicked it, but it only turned on a set of uplights set in the wall near the floor that did nothing to help and, if anything, only aggravated the mounting sense of weirdness.

Luckily, we weren’t in there for long because as it turned out, we’d found the window we were looking for. At long last. We lifted the white shade and peeked through only to see the other contractor hard at work on the other side of the room, his back to us.

The guy I was with knocked on the window, and we saw his colleague give a start, turn around slowly, and see what I can only imagine were a pair of sinister orange faces, lit from below and wreathed in darkness, staring at him through what had up until now been a sheet of blank white glass.

His reaction was something to behold.

As I went back to my meeting, I realized that more than anything else, all the big projects that the Library’s undertaken since January -- from weeding to renovations -- have shown me that regardless of how long you’ve worked or studied here, this place still has plenty of surprises.

We're underway!

We survived without a scratch!

The campus, actually, is pristine, an accomplishment made all the more impressive by the sight of downed trees and damaged homes in the surrounding neighborhoods. We also have quite a few faculty and staff members who have to cope with what the hurricane wrought upon their own houses, what with the loss of power, strong winds, and a whole lot of rain.

Nevertheless, the semester started yesterday without a hitch for Gallaudet students, as evidenced by the large number of people we had coming and going all day. It’s nice to work at the Service Desk and get none of your own work done because you’re busy helping students, staff, and faculty members.

I just wanted to drop this quick note to update everyone that we’re okay and prove this to be true by informing the world that as of yesterday, we have a shiny new microform scanner! You can use it to scan our microfilm documents (e.g., deaf-related theses and dissertations, back issues of our periodicals, the Little Paper Family, and other deaf-related historical material) to PDF or print it out from a computer. We’d like to convert all the microform stuff we have to digital formats, but copyright restrictions make that difficult, if not impossible, for some titles. We’re working on the rest of the collection as quickly as we can -- since microform was the best technology available for preservation for a pretty long time, there’s a lot of it to get through!

Bonus: It’s fast. And has this cool green-colored light that glows under the scanning plate. The future is now, people!

And the future can get a little complicated. Most of the stuff you’ll be using it for is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a few bells and whistles we’re still familiarizing ourselves with. Once we’ve got the whole thing down, we’ll post some basic instructions you can use to get started. Or just give it a shot yourself; learn by doing!

In the meantime, we just have the one, so I’d like to emphasize again that, like the regular scanner workstation and the ZoomText workstations for our users with visual disabilities, people who need the computer for its specific purpose take priority.

We actually added another computer with the microfilm scanner, so the overall number of available computers shouldn’t be affected and, when nobody’s scanning microfilm, has actually increased. It’s a win-win!

I’ll do a vlog tomorrow. It’s actually on a really cool book; I just have to figure out how to explain it ...

Welcome back!

So we’ve got a hurricane bearing down on us this weekend.

I have a tendency to downplay them; I grew up in Florida, where we get hit by these things pretty often. All a hurricane is is a lot of rain and wind, and it’s usually no big deal. You get some flooding, some deck chairs flying around, power lines falling, tree branches taking out roofs and car windshields, telephone poles getting knocked over …

Well, okay, it’s kind of a big deal. But the point is we have a hurricane coming!

All I can really say about that is: What can be prevented will be; what can’t be will be dealt with.

In the meantime, the new semester opens on Monday, come hell or high water (whichever happens first), and we will be ready. All the computers are in place with the latest images from Gallaudet Technology Services, the printers are humming along, the copy machines are ready and waiting, our database and e-books are fizzing and sparking away, and the books are as patient as ever.

Not a huge amount of stuff has changed policywise since the Spring semester; loan periods are still 4-6 weeks depending on your status and where in the collection (Deaf or General Stacks) you borrow from. Except for faculty, of course, who get the usual September-January-May due dates for loans from the General Stacks. Films are still 3 days, up to 3 per person borrowed at a time.

We’ve also changed how databases are accessed, hopefully in a clearer way. Check it out for yourself; head to our homepage at library.gallaudet.edu, find the “Find article databases” link in the “Research Help” box, and click on it. Any feedback? E-mail us at library.help@gallaudet.edu or me at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu.

We’re also closed this weekend and will be for most of Labor Day weekend next week so you can enjoy a couple of days off from academic obligations before the semester really gets going! Our Thanksgiving hours have also changed, since, for the first time, there won’t be any classes Thanksgiving week. Check out our schedule for more information. If it resembles a Metrobus timetable fed through a shredder, my apologies; holidays can get funky.

Now, I’m going to wrap this up by burying the lede so far down it’d take a dedicated gravedigger to find it: We’re hosting a series of events in September in order to spread more awareness about the Library and the kind of things we offer the population of Gallaudet University, as well as tying in to this year’s Common Theme about freedom of expression. The kicker is that we’re using this as an opportunity to raffle off an iPad 2 and $100 gift certificates to Amazon.com!

Tickets will be available to Gallaudet students only. Sorry, faculty and staff! Nevertheless, here’s our main event page; check it out!

Summer isn't over yet!

Mea culpa.

It’s been a long, busy week for everyone here at the Gallaudet University Library. The renovation of the former photocopy area proceeds apace; we finally finished it this morning! You can visit our Facebook page to see photos of the progress. All we need now is the new furniture.

Classes are starting just a week from Monday! We’re all suitably terrified but our game faces are on; not only are we doing the usual Library things -- setting up accounts for new students and returning students who’ve lost their ID cards over the summer, making sure all the books are in order, double-checking that our electronic resources haven’t dropped an IP address or two, tweaking our new public computers to make sure all the basics are available for students to use, planning our upcoming events, updating our class presentations, and putting together lesson plans, among many, many other things.

Lesson plans? Yup. I’m teaching a GSR 101 course for brand-new students. They’re so new I don’t think the packaging’s been taken off yet! I did the same thing last Fall, and am looking forward to doing it again -- hopefully with a little more experience and seasoning behind me this time!

Elizabeth Henry, on the other hand, is about to undertake her own big adventure! She’ll be teaching GSR 150: City as Text with Kathleen Wood, a professor from the English department (whom you can see in our Web story -- she appears right around 3:58). We’re all looking forward to seeing the fruits of their collaboration!

In the meantime, things have entered the calm-before-the-storm stage. Arrival Day and orientations for both undergraduate and graduate students are next week, and classes begin the following week. But right now, it’s Friday afternoon, the sun’s out, and there’s a mild breeze.

Next week, you’ll get a vlog and another update on what to expect if you’re walking through our doors for the first time since last May or, well, ever. We’ll have things like an event schedule, an exciting contest, fresh floor plans, and plenty more!

Quick updates

A thing or three for today …

First, no vlog this week. There’s just too much to do. August slipped in through the door when I wasn’t looking, and now we’re suddenly three weeks away from the beginning of the Fall semester. However, as a substitute, I offer Thing Number Two:



It’s a nifty little video about the Library! The TV department downstairs (part of Gallaudet Technology Services) worked with us through the nimble hands of Lizzie Sorkin to create this video as a way to sum up what we have to offer the Gallaudet community. Of course, as I mention at the end of the video, there’s lots more we haven’t mentioned!

We try, of course, through this blog, but it’s easy to overlook things you work with every day! Plus, of course, all the stuff we keep adding, changing, updating, expanding, and moving.

Yeah, it’s been a busy summer.

Speaking of which, Thing Number Three is an important thing to know if you’re a regular user of the Library these days: The printers, print-release station, and scanner have all relocated.

Both printers and the print-release station are now all in one place, on a table in the photocopy area, and the scanner’s moved to where Printer 2 used to be. Basically, all the computers usable for normal work in the first-floor public-computer area, as well as all the printing equipment, are together in their own areas.

We’ve done this in order to clear out the low counter that the scanner, one of the printers, and the print-release station used to sit on; that counter’s not long for this world! Per my previous post, we’re having it removed sometime this month. That’ll open everything up and make it all much easier to get to. In the meantime, it’s a New Thing to know about!

That’s all for this week. There are plenty more updates to come later this month; keep an eye out!

We've been busy!

It’s been a while since I posted an update!

The collection shift is over. Since then, we’ve been working on other things while the Archives expansion continues.

1) New computers. Most of our public computers in the open area on the first floor have been replaced with brand-new computers and super-delish widescreen monitors. They’re pretty, but are considerably larger than our old computers, so we’ve been …

2) Clearing space. We’ve relocated the microform readers from their old space between the public computers and DVD area to the seating area by the emergency exit immediately across the atrium from the Service Desk. It makes more sense when you see it, instead of going by how I’m trying to describe it. The upshot is that we’ve opened up that space between the public computers and DVDs and added …

3) New lights. One oddity we’ve fully recognized for years is that one of the most heavily-trafficked areas in the Library is pretty poorly-lit! It’s like entering a cave once you pass the public computers on your way to the DVDs. One major reason for the gloom is that the leaks we’ve historically had in that area have made it difficult to add any electrical equipment; another one is all the exposed ductwork, which makes positioning pretty awkward. In recent years, though, things have been relatively dry, and moving the microform readers gave us more options for light placement, which we immediately exploited. It’s nice and bright there now, which is good, because we’re getting ready for …

4) New furniture. Because the new computers are so large, and because we’re working on a reconfiguration of that part of the first floor in general, we’ve decided to add more working space there. There will soon be new tables in that area which will let us spread the public computers out a little more and add more elbow room for you to work, whether alone with a lot of stuff, or in groups sharing a single computer. If you think that sounds cramped, think again because we’re actually undertaking a …

5) Small renovation. One space constraint we have in the open public-computer area on the first floor is a low counter that encloses the photocopy area. We’ve used it for years as sort of a throwaway space for equipment that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of our public computers -- like the scanner and printer workstations that are there now -- so it’s fairly convenient, but it definitely limits everyone’s options on how to use the space. So we’re getting rid of it and opening up the whole area! This will allow us to add a …

6) Seating area and printing center. We’ve ordered new couches and chairs for the photocopy area; the copiers will be moved to the railing on the other side of the public-computer area, overlooking the General Stacks in the basement. That way, there’s a nice space for people to relax, drink some coffee, put their feet up, do some work, or socialize right next to our most popular computers. We’re also going to set up both of our printers and the job-release station there, so there’s no need to try to figure out which printer is which and where your paper will come up -- it’ll all be in the same place! In the meantime, the scanner will join the public computers on the newly-added computer tables. That’s not all, because we’re also ordering couches for a new …

7) Quiet study room. The 1404 computer lab will become something more accommodating to students who want to study quietly on an individual basis, but need access to a computer, which isn’t available (yet!) in the study rooms downstairs (it’s on our list). We’re adding more comfortable seating and table space to the room, and plan to figure out ways to keep the area free from both visual and aural noise so you can focus on your work in peace. There’ll be plants and stuff.

That’s it for the more noticeable changes, I think. We’ve gotten rid of the videophone in the Deaf Library Study Center (the computer lab with DVD players and the giant TV), mostly because nobody seemed to use it, and we thought we could use the space to add another computer.

Sorenson also renovated their public videophone booths by the men’s restroom on the first floor; they’re now in spiffy permanent enclosures which are a big improvement over the temporary partitions that had been there for years.

And of course, we can’t help but mention, once again, the collection shift. Not only did the General Stacks move around (with the very nice side effect of making the children’s books, graphic novels, and literature much easier to find! See me for more information), but we also relocated the General Periodicals (both popular magazines and academic publications), Reference (encyclopedias and the like), and the Deaf VHS collection (just a few stacks over).

We’ll have a few opportunities in September for first-timers and lifers alike to get to know the Library a little better. In the meantime, if you’re returning this fall, whether student or faculty, and are a little mixed up, please don’t be shy about asking any of the librarians you see! We’re always happy to help point people in the right direction. Same goes for anyone who’s new to Gallaudet this fall.

Or even if you’ve just dropped by to be nosy. Really.

NEW resource: Films on Demand!

A couple of things to close out the week, just to offer you a nicely-quivering little gobbet of deliciousness to tide you over through the weekend.

First thing: The collection shift I wrote about in this post started just this past Monday, June 20. I've documented part of the process and posted the results on our Facebook page. Check them out!

I will say it is very, very interesting to see the Library change in this manner. Most of the long-timers -- we've got people who've been here for over 30 years -- don't think too much of it because they've seen a lot more than this, but I'm a relative newbie. Even this little bit -- only two or three ranges' worth of shelving and a bunch of microform cabinets so far -- is pretty weird!

I also thought I'd take the opportunity this week to introduce people to a new online resource that we've just set up: Films on Demand.

First, a caveat: It's not that easy to get to. It's pretty different from most of our other online resources (you'll see why in a minute), so we're working on figuring out a way to categorize it that makes some kind of sense. Until then, you'll have to search for it (just enter "films" in the search form that pops up after clicking on the "Find article databases" link on our home page). But don't worry; we're also seeing if we can figure out a way to get all the information about, and links to, the available films into ALADIN Discovery and the Classic Catalog. That way, you could just do a search in either catalog and watch a film straight from there if it's relevant to your needs without all that mucking about with "article databases."

Anyway, this thing is awesome.

It's a big database of online streaming educational videos on pretty much every disciplinary topic under the sun, with offerings appropriate for most age and skill levels (hence the difficulty with categorizing it). It's set up so that instructors can either show the entire video or just the segments they want that are relevant to their courses; if there's a video about mammalian biology, for instance, and you want to focus on thermoregulation and homeostasis (e.g., warm-blooded animals), you can head straight to that segment and show it to your class without playing around with glands and slider bars and the like.

We'd been sniffing after it for the past couple of years, but had always balked at one issue: captioning. Films on Demand offers captioned videos, but not all of their videos are captioned. We went back and forth for a while about whether it was cost-effective to purchase access anyway, even if it meant spending a lot of money on videos that nearly all of our students and faculty wouldn't be able to watch.

Last year, we got fairly close to the brink and set up a trial, but found that not only were our faculty frustrated by the lack of captioning on many videos, but there were also some issues when it came to limiting search results to captioned videos only. It was possible, but not as easy as it could have been, and this combination made us decide to hold off for a while.

Fast forward to ...

Aw, heck. I had the entire background story typed up: two years, one trial, three faculty requests, two representatives, six months of back-and-forth, two WRLC task forces, and one offhand remark. But you aren't interested in all that!

The upshot is that Films on Demand has made it possible for us to subscribe to only their captioned videos, with pricing that's commensurate to the relative size of the collection. This is most excellent of them.

So you can use Films on Demand all you like; all you'll ever see are captioned films (ideally, that is -- we've found one or two so far that may have either slipped into the collection or accidentally mislaid their captions somewhere else). No muss, no fuss. We've set Flash as the default format; the other options were Windows Media Player and Quicktime, which is annoying. Quicktime only really works on Apple computers, while Windows Media Player only really works on no computers.

One thing to note, though, is that at the moment, it's not too obvious how to turn on the captioning. Look for a button with a speech balloon on it along the bottom of the video. After you've hit "Play," click on that button; two white lines should appear inside the speech balloon, indicating that the captions are on. You'll have to click it again if you skip ahead in the video, though, I'm afraid; seems to be unavoidable, although I am trying to talk them into getting rid of the speech balloon in favor of something more obvious. A big "CC," for instance. We'll see how that turns out!

Ah, I see. You're all hung up on that phrase a paragraph or two ago: "the relative size of the collection." How big is it, you ask?

Well, as of April 27, there were 2,935 captioned films, encompassed by broader disciplines like:

• Humanities & Social Science
• Business & Economics
  
• Health & Medicine
• Science & Mathematics
• Careers & Job Search
• Family & Consumer Sciences
• Guidance & Counseling
• Technical Education

The largest subject area is Humanities & Social Sciences, followed by Science & Mathematics. These are the most recent numbers, by the way; they've said they intend to keep adding to the collection as more captioned films become available. It's been a couple months since then, and the collection has mostly grown, so we are certainly past the 3,000 mark by now. Something to think about.

We're super-excited about this! It's only one change in a frankly surprising number of them that are taking place this summer, though; I just hope I can keep pace with this blog. It's good for all of you to know what's going on with us and what you can expect in the coming months and years. We -- or at least I -- also like to have a document of all the things we've done and are doing, because it's always interesting to look back and see where we were compared to where we are now. Things have changed, are changing, will always change.

Enjoy your weekend!

Summer update!

No vlogs this week!

I know, even I can hear the groans. Truth is, we're just busy.

With what? Fair question.

At this point, I suppose I should share the things on my mind (and desk) these days; it'll also reveal a little something about what's going on in the Library this summer.

The biggest thing on the collective plate right now is the collection shift.

You heard right. We're shifting the collection. I was joking around with someone not too long ago, actually; I told him we were moving the collection, and he asked where we were moving it to. I thought about it for a moment and said, "About five feet to the left."

Funny as it sounds, it's more or less an accurate description. And it's not at all minor; close to a quarter of a million books takes a lot of moving, whether it's five feet or five miles. This is happening largely because the Archives is expanding this summer. The current reading room will just about double in size, which will take up the space occupied by the 900s and some of the 800s downstairs.

Because this is a once-in-30-years kind of occurrence, we're seizing the opportunity to do a number of other things, too:

1) Clearing out space for ourselves. Right now, there's zero space for the collection to move into. This is mostly because the very beginning of the General Stacks is hemmed in by a set of microform cabinets. Those cabinets contain our historical records of The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and ERIC, the government's repository of education research. However, it's kind of silly -- we've got electronic subscriptions to the same stuff, this collection is duplicated across the Consortium, and it sees very little use for such a large collection. We're not the only ones facing this kind of issue, either; the other Consortium schools who have the same collection have been talking about moving one school's collection to the WRLC storage center and getting rid of the rest. We plan to follow through on our end and clear out space for more shelves at the beginning of the collection. However, even that won't be enough, because ...

2) We're moving Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences materials to the General Stacks from the Deaf Collection. The Library and Archives have been in a yearslong process of evaluating the Deaf Collection and its institutional role in general, especially within a larger cultural context. One of the results of this is that there's been increasing consensus -- within the Library and Archives, elsewhere on campus, and out in the rest of the world -- that deafness as a cultural phenomenon is markedly distinct from deafness as a physiological phenomenon (as in deafhood versus deafness). So all the items in the Deaf Collection -- from books to periodicals to films -- that focus on deafness in scientific and medical terms (audiology, genetics, speech pathology, etc.) will be moved to the corresponding sections in the General Stacks.

If this sounds complicated, by the way, it is. Patrick Oberholtzer, the librarian who's taken over the subject area in the past year or so, has been spending almost every working hour for the past few months figuring out the logistics of the move. Kudos to him!

However, given that our space is shrinking, even with the removal of the microfiche cabinets, and the collection is getting larger, this means we're doing yet a third thing:

3) Weeding. Weeding. Weeding. And more weeding. I've lost count of how many books I've cleaned out of the General Stacks in the 800s alone. If you end up in the Library this summer, you'll notice some odd patches where shelves are nearly empty, kind of like the "after" photo in this post. That's because we've been at work. So far these past few months, I've focused on getting rid of large, old sets of books between 801 and 840, clearing space in the language-related areas (e.g., linguistics, language education, foreign languages), and slashing and burning my way through 801-810, which are mostly focused on both theoretical and practical aspects of literature, ranging from discussions of Aristotle's thoughts on rhetoric to how to write a term paper.

Don't worry. I'm leaving the best stuff. It's astonishing how many books we have about computers and composition ... from the 1980s! These books are great if you want to learn word-processing, except I think they stopped making word processors a few years ago. It was very forward-thinking of my predecessors, but these books are museum relics! Once I've hit -- and cleaned out -- 810, I'll backslide to the 700s, most of which relate to the fine arts. Why am I not tackling the 810s just yet -- American literature?

The truth is, I'm a little scared. We have such a diverse collection of fiction that I keep thinking that someone will show up in the Fall and feel that we've completely neglected readers of his or her proclivities and might, in fact, be hostile to lovers of books about, I don't know, coincidental apples or something.

Not that there's anything wrong with those. Anyway, we are focused on shrinking the collection, which is complicated by ...

4) Ordering. Yup. Even while we're streamlining the collection, we're adding more to it. At this point, though, we're getting close to the end of our major annual purchasing period and the money's starting to dry up. We're also doing it in conjunction with the weeding -- don't view both activities in isolation! For instance, we do have a lot of relatively redundant books from varying periods that cover more or less the same topic. In my particular case, weeding often informs my ordering -- if I end up getting rid of 20 books on how to speak effectively in public, published between 1898-1988, I'll generally plan to replace them with three or four comprehensive overviews from different angles -- rhetoric, overcoming anxiety, organization and structure, stuff like that.

Of course, all of this gets more interesting when you consider that we're ...

5) Cleaning out the reference collection. We've got a huge number of dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, and other reference works that need to go. Most of that is because almost everything is either outdated or available online through our electronic resources or for free on the open Internet, and part of that is because we're moving the General Periodicals up to the first floor. This particular shift is relatively easy; as we've increased our electronic subscriptions, we've cut way back on our print material, which doesn't see anywhere near as much use as the digital stuff and isn't searchable besides.

Now, the reference collection is pretty sizable and is being cleaned out at the same time as the rest of the collection, so that's a lot of work! If you stopped by the Library last week, or plan to this week, there are a lot of carts full of books congregating on the first floor over by the Deaf School Yearbooks, which is not-at-all-coincidentally right by my office.

That's right, I'm fulfilling the "other duties as required" clause of my job description and removing a lot of the material from our system, along with our director, Sarah Hamrick. Because of that, I probably should warn you that this blog will go quiet for a week or two. We'll still get a post up later this week -- and this will be a fun one! -- and most likely a vlog if we're lucky, but then I go on ...

... wait for it ...

... VACATION! For a week. Sorry, guys. Even librarians need a little R&R from time to time. But after June 20, things should be a lot more active on the blog front!

Anyway, that's the big what's-the-Library-doing-this-summer update. You'll hear more as the summer wears on, though -- the list above is far from the only thing happening around here. Keep an eye out!

Guest post: Setting minds at easel

To make up for such an execrably long period of silence, as mentioned in yesterday's vlog, I'm offering something new today: a guest post! Elizabeth Henry, our Electronic Resources/Instruction & Reference Librarian, had the brainwave a few weeks ago of putting up easels with large blank pads of paper and inviting people to write on them with comments about the Library. They were placed at various locations around the building, and we got quite the response!

She's written up a summary of what people had to say, as well as our responses to it all. It's very interesting reading!

---

Hi everyone! Remember those easels that we set up with those big pads so you could write comments about the Library? The easels had three questions total, which were:

• I visit the Library because…
• I like the Library because…
• I wish the Library had…

We were thrilled to see the large number of responses! We felt it was only appropriate to give you a summary of what everyone had to say; after all, you took the time to write your thoughts!

We were glad to hear that people like to visit the Library because it’s a quiet place to study and work on assignments. There’s plenty of space here! Of course, a nice bonus is being able to bring in food and drinks to enjoy while studying -- totally understandable! I enjoy drinking and eating while reading too.

We were also pleased to see that our support for Gallaudet’s students, faculty and staff is appreciated as well! We are always more than happy to help where we can. All you have to do is come in, e-mail us, or use the chat widget on our home page -- we’re here for you!

Now, down to the nitty-gritty: How can the Library improve?

First, some people wanted longer checkout periods, maybe up to a full semester. That’s understandable. But did you know you can already have a book for an entire semester? How you ask? All you have to do is renew your books! You can do it up to three times. Our shortest borrowing period for books is up to four weeks, and if you renew it 3 times, then you can have a book for another 12 weeks for a total of 16 weeks. That’s an entire semester right there!

We set it up that way because we’re a Library -- people like to check out books from us! So we like to try to make sure that the books are available to everyone within a reasonable time. Yes, I know, it can be a pain in the neck to have to renew a book over and over, but if someone else had a book you wanted, then you’d want a fair chance at it, wouldn’t you? By the same token, if you find a book you need for class, but it's checked out to someone else and doesn't look likely to come back soon, you can ask us to place a hold on it. When that happens, the other person with the book will bring it back instead of renewing it, so you'll have a chance to use the book, too. For more information on this, just ask at the Service Desk any time!

Other people asked for more computers, and we are working on it! We are aware that there are a few issues involved with the computers, such as the long log-in times you’ll sometimes experience on our computers, plus there can be such high demand that there’s nary an available computer to be found when you visit the Library. But the good news is that we’ll be replacing many of our public computers this summer! Also, we’re looking into improving our wireless Internet signal in the basement so students with their own laptops can be more flexible in where they work.

Many people mentioned how gloomy the Library can be! Yes, we know -- the basement can get dark! Every summer, we check all the study desks in the basement to make sure the bulbs are working, and do our best to replace any burned-out bulbs both there and in the rest of the Library. Still, bulbs don’t die on schedule! If you see one and it’s causing a problem with visibility, just let someone at the Service Desk know which light needs to be replaced and we’ll happily report the problem to be taken care of as soon as possible.

Another thing we noticed is that there seems to be a lot of people who love coffee! We got a lot of requests for free coffee to be provided all semester long, or at the very least a café in the Library building.

To be frank -- I need my caffeine fix myself too! I love to get my caffeine fix by drinking mochas. Mmm! -- the truth is, I can’t figure out where we can put a café in this building, as much as I’d love one! As for providing free coffee all semester, that does sound like a pretty nice idea, but that can take a lot of money. So what we do instead is that we target the most important parts of the semester -- midterms and the last week of classes! We know our statistics really shoot up during those times of the semester, and we know students’ stress levels do too, so we try to make the coffee available when it’ll do the most good. Some people have also asked for alternatives, like tea and hot chocolate, which we think is a great idea. We’ll let you know if that suggestion will become a reality!

As for the leaks, yeah. We know about the leaks. We’ve been working on them since the day the Library opened; although they’re a fact of life, we won’t stop until they’ve been eradicated. Lots of people also had suggestions about how to improve the general feel of the building -- the color scheme, the smell, and the furniture. We’re taking all those suggestions very seriously and are already kicking around a few ideas that might see some new things in the Library this Fall!

We also noticed an odd issue with this building … vampires? Ghosts? Really? Well, I’m not so sure about the vampires, but ghosts … well, now that’s definitely a possibility. If you see any, please let me know. I’m curious about which areas they usually haunt…!

Again, we really appreciate all of the responses we got. One person actually filled two or three big pages with all of her reasons for coming in to the Library, while others had a little fun. Did you know that the word "Library" spelled backwards, is y-r-a-r-b-i-l? Some of our librarians had a hard time figuring that out! There also plenty of useful comments, concerns, ideas and suggestions on top of it all.

So we want to thank everyone who participated and had their say. You’ve been heard and listened to.

Have a great summer!

Amazons shifting into OverDrive

This might be a little bit overdue, but lots of other things have been happening, so please bear with me.

For a little background, read this article that I ganked off our Facebook page.

As news go, this is pretty far-out. In summary, Amazon's agreed to make it possible for people to borrow e-books from their local library on their Kindles. They've partnered with OverDrive, a major vendor for lendable e-books to accomplish this.

For a variety of reasons, most of which are known only to them, Amazon has historically been resistant to the idea of e-book lending. That's why, for instance, when I talked about EBL last month, I had to note that it didn't work on the Kindle. Ditto OverDrive, which I wrote about the month before that (I seem to be turning into quite the e-book blogger).

Up until this deal came along, it was a truism that if a library made e-books available for lending, those books would not be Kindle books. It's sort of a format-war thing -- VHS and Betamax, DVD and LaserDisc, HD DVD and Blu-Ray, Microsoft and Apple, Kindle and ePub.

ePub is the other format that's most widely used to disseminate e-books. It's readable on a large variety of devices and can be distributed with digital rights management (DRM) software baked into the e-book so that it either can't be copied, or can remove itself from the user's device after the borrowing period expires.

There are just two problems with ePub, a general one and a specific one.

First, the general one. The ePub format is an open standard, so it suffers from what I call the "Android Syndrome."

If you're not familiar with this, some background: Android -- the smartphone operating system created and distributed by Google -- is an open standard, meaning it's free for anyone to modify to their heart's content. Predictably, this has led to a huge variety of personalized versions of Android, depending on what phone company you use, what kind of smartphone you have, which third-party software developer you particularly like, or your own personal taste.

This means that when Google releases newer, faster, and better basic versions of Android, millions of people miss out because:

• The particular type of Android they have on their phones doesn't play nice with the new stuff.
• Their phone company is too slow to release a new version of their personalized Android that works with the new stuff.
• The smartphone they happen to have just doesn't have the hardware necessary to run the new stuff.

It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because when people run into any of the three problems listed above, their only option to upgrade their phone is generally to break their phone company's hold on it and find a third-party developer who's created a better version of Android that's suited to their equipment and needs. And we wind up with an Android that's been fragmented into a million pieces.

In ePub's case (back to the point!), as an open standard, it doesn't require or enforce a specific digital-rights mechanism, which means it may become difficult for a given device or app to support all the possible forms of DRM applied to different e-books, leading to a fragmentation of usability. This is still a relatively small concern -- ePub isn't all that old as standards go -- but then it was also a small concern in the early days of Android. Still, most public libraries use large e-book vendors, like OverDrive, that require that users download a specific app or use a specific format in order to read their e-books, which makes the DRM consideration a pretty small one!

So that's the general problem with ePub, which really isn't much of one these days, despite the lengthy exposition!

The specific problem with ePub is just that they're unreadable on the Kindle. Sigh ... and the war goes on.

In general, the Amazon-OverDrive deal seems to be a good thing for libraries. A lot of kinks still need to be ironed out -- how much control will libraries have over their Kindle e-books? Will they have to pay again for a Kindle copy, even if they already have an ePub version from the same vendor? -- but there's cautious optimism about the implications for libraries that are facing the growth of e-books.

It's certainly made us sit up and take notice here at the Gallaudet University Library, but we have to admit to being uncertain that there actually are all that many people on campus -- or off, in the case of our online students -- who would use a mobile device to read one of our e-books. Working with EBL will help us learn a little more about whether or not that feature gets used, but we also don't know how many people own Kindles, for instance, as opposed to Nooks or Sony Readers.

Or would more people use their devices for this purpose after the e-books became available?

It's kind of a funny little dilemma. Either way, we're still buying e-books and they are still being used, even in the current, relatively-limited format that's available.

One way we could get around this is to get feedback. If you're reading this and you use a device of some kindto read e-books, let me know! Just e-mail me at james.mccarthy@gallaudet.edu and let me know what device you use to read e-books and your thoughts on whether or not the Library should start thinking about stuff like OverDrive and its Kindle e-books.

We may also do a survey about it over the summer, depending on how quiet it is here. Nevertheless, you can still expect to hear more about it in the coming months ...