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Information Commoner Summer 2009 Volume 4, Issue 7 Keeping Library Staff on Common Ground In This Issue At Your Service 2 Announcements 3 Department News 3 Tech Tip 9 Employee Spotlight 10 Vacation Schedule 11 Brag Box 11 Mike’s Message What’s Our Policy The annual all-staff summer retreat will be held at Canyon Park, Building L (the Culinary Arts School, or the old WordPerfect campus) on Friday, July 31. We will be doing our annual review, some AA/EEO required training so that everyone is eligible to sit on search committees, and other fun stuff. At some point I would like to ask for ideas reflecting thinking outside the box. For example, some libraries are starting to eliminate their reference collections altogether. Some are merging the Reference and Circulation Desks together. Why do we do things that way, or this way? What should we eliminate? Just quit doing? What should we be adding? What makes sense, and what doesn’t? Do we simply do things a certain way just because that’s the way we’ve always done them? We are quickly moving this summer to Symphony. What opportunities, such as electronic ordering, does this offer? What new ways of doing things will be presented? I’ll be looking for all the answers, so put on your thinking caps between then and now. Safe Hiring By Lesli Baker UVU is now requiring Safe Hire training for all employees who serve on hiring/ search committees, and every committee must also have a trained AA/EEO (Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employment) representative who can assist with UVU policy and state and federal employment law compliance. Safe Hire trainings will include an introduction to employment law and focus on practical application in UVU hiring/search committees. In the very near future, HR will be combining Safe Hire training with AA/EEO training, and any employee may act as a committee member or as an AA/EEO representative. HR has agreed to provide Safe Hire training for all Library employees at our July retreat. 2 INFORMATION COMMONER Readers' Advisory By Annie Smith As academic librarians, we don’t often get to recommend a book to a student just for fun. But with summer upon us, we may get the opportunity to put on our readers’ advisory hats. Historically, readers’ advisory was about recommending the “best” books, i.e. books people ought to read. Today’s RA is about matching books to people’s tastes and interests. In order to do this, we have to ask questions to find out what our patrons really want, what appeals to them in a book. Some good questions include: • What was the last good book you read? • What did you like about it? • What are you in the mood for? • What don’t you like to read? The purpose of these questions is to get a feel for what our patrons do and do not enjoy in a book. Do they like novels about families? Will they only read non-fiction about World War II? If they read mysteries, what is their tolerance level for violence? (I have learned from experience that this last question is an important one.) Once you’ve got an idea of what they’re looking for in a book, we have several guides to genre fiction in the Reference and General Collections to help give you ideas of books to suggest. We have guides for horror, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, historical fiction, short fiction, series, and children’s and teen fiction. There are also some great online tools that we can use to get more ideas. Barnes & Noble’s Browse Books feature lets you find books by genre, setting, awards won, age level, and other criteria (www.barnesandnoble.com/subjects/subjects.asp). Amazon’s Also Bought recommendations can be used to help find books similar to ones our patrons enjoy. These bookseller sites are also useful because they often include reviews and summaries. Another great online tool is the LibraryThing BookSuggester (www.librarything.com/suggester). To get suggestions, type in the title of a book the patron likes in the search box, and LibraryThing will come up with database- and user-recommended books. LibraryThing also has the UnSuggester (www.librarything.com/unsuggester), which also shows books that a patron might want to stay away from. Recommended Reading Chelton, M. K. (2003). Readers advisory 101: a crash course in RA: common mistakes librarians make and how to avoid them, Library Journal, 11/1/2003. Retrieved 26 May, 2009 from http:// www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA329318.html. Trott, B. (2008). Building on a firm foundation: readers' advisory over the next twenty-five years. Reference & User Services Quarterly 48(2): 132-135. At Your Service INFORMATION COMMONER 3 News from Reference/Instruction Reference Tips By Trevor Young Keystrokes Hands off that mouse! You’re going to give yourself Carpal Tunnel Syndrome with all of that pointing and clicking. The Window’s operating environment features many keystrokes which will enhance and accelerate most of your day-to-day computer use. Here are some I’ve found handy while teaching and working at the Reference Desk: Find (Ctrl + F): The find function works with most applications in the Microsoft Office Suite as well as Internet browsers. When I am faced with an Excel file or a web page with a sizeable amount of information, and I know the exact word or phrase I’m looking for, I hit Ctrl + F (look for the search box to appear) and type the word(s), which will be instantly highlighted on the page. Forget scanning pages with a fine toothed comb. I find this particularly helpful on pages chock full of links. (If only this worked on paper…) Alt + Tab: Instantly flip to the previous window with no clicking! Depress the Alt key with your left thumb. Then hit the Tab key with a free finger. Pretty cool, eh? But wait, there’s more. If you continue to hold the Alt key and repeatedly press and release the Tab key, a menu representing the various active windows will appear in the center of your screen. Keep hitting Tab until you highlight the desired window, then let go. Master this trick and you will find it much easier to navigate your computer’s desktop. This can be particularly important when patrons are lining up for your help. For more keystrokes, visit www.bltt.org/accessibility/ win_keystrokes.htm. In Defense of Wikipedia We’ve all heard (sometimes from our own mouths) how academia looks down on Wikipedia. Citing Wikipedia is tantamount to believing the stories of Baron Münchhausen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Baron_Munchausen). The articles are written by unpaid Continued on next page. Announcements Librarians’ Retreat On June 8, the Librarians will be taking the day to strategize and discuss Library services. Staff Retreat We will hold the annual Library retreat on July 31 at the Building L in Canyon Park (formerly the WordPerfect Campus). Remember this is an important day for strategic planning, and all employees need to attend. See Mike’s Message for more information. Canyon Park, where the retreats will be held 4 INFORMATION COMMONER Continued from previous page. volunteers and, until 2005, could be edited 100% anonymously (now, one needs to log in to avoid having their IP address made public). Contributors have nothing riding on the accuracy or reliability of their own prose. However, there exists a phalanx of editors within Wikipedia which do check the accuracy and reliability of content. The damage is done when a researcher cites Wikipedia before the information has been verified. Because of Wikipedia’s open editing model, which has caused a number of incidents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Seigenthaler_incident), it has come under considerable criticism where other sources have not. We forget that most encyclopedias, especially the general use type, were never meant to be used as primary source material. Although there is an editorial process involved, it is not on the same level as a peer-review process. There’s simply no need for it. Not only should we avoid citing Wikipedia, but most encyclopedias should not be used as one’s only source. Encyclopedias present drastically condensed versions of important scholarship. This creates a quick and easy way to learn important names, theories, facts, and movements. We forget how encyclopedias are meant to be used, as a wonderful and logical place to begin a research project. As long as we explain that encyclopedias are where we begin our research, we should feel free to direct our patrons to Wikipedia as well as the print encyclopedias. UbiDuo Face-to-Face Communicator By Annie Smith The Reference Desk is now the home to a pair of UbiDuo Communicators. These machines are designed to help us assist hearing impaired students. Essentially, these machines allow the librarians and the students to chat to each other. Hearing impaired students, for the most part, have already been taught how to use these machines and know to look for the UbiDuo Face-to-Face Communicators. To talk with a student, use the arrow keys in the lower right of the keyboard to highlight the “In Range” box and hit enter. (The “In Range” box looks like a target.) An intermediary screen may pop up, but you will eventually be taken to a chat window where you can talk with the student. If you would like to print out your conversation, use the USB cable in the UbiDuo bag (kept by the computer on the north side of the Reference Desk for now) to connect the machines to the desk computer. You can then transfer a transcript of the document to the computer and print it. By Keith Rowley Everyone in Technical Services is very busy doing training on Symphony. We really haven't learned enough to know how cataloging and acquisitions will eventually work but we're really impressed with the reports feature in Symphony. A pair of UbiDuo Communicators News from Technical Services INFORMATION COMMONER 5 By Christy Donaldson At the MPLA conference I presented a session on Managing Media. The following list is from the resources handout: Copyright, know your rights: • UVU Media Copyright Concerns: www.uvu.edu/copyright/copyright_format/ media.html • Copyright Advisory Network: http:// librarycopyright.net/wordpress/ • ALA Copyright: www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/ offices/wo/woissues/copyrightb/ copyright.cfm • ALA Library Fact Sheet 7, Video and Copyright: www.ala.org/library/fact7.cfm Where to find video reviews: • Video Librarian: www.videolibrarian.com • Booklist: www.booklistonline.com/ default.aspx?page=media • Library Journal: www.libraryjournal.com/ community/Video% 2fDVD+Reviews/47117.html • Educational Media Reviews Online: http:// libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/search.asp • Movie Review Query Engine: www.mrqe.com • Metacritic: www.metacritic.com Video vendors and list of vendors: • Streaming Video Vendor list: www.ala.org/ ala/mgrps/rts/vrt/vrtconferenceinfo/ streaming_vendors.xls • Video Distributor Database: www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/ Distributors.html • Video Librarian Distributor Database: www.videolibrarian.com/plus/ distributors.html • SUU Library’s DVD & Video Vendor list: www.myhq.com/public/m/u/multimedia/ Other Media resources: • National Media Market: www.nmm.net. Industry conference where you can meet with over 50 of the nation’s top educational media producers and distributors and get some great show discounts on your videos. • Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com. Great resource on feature films. • A/V Geeks: www.avgeeks.com. They have over 22,000 educational 16mm films, many short films offered online or in DVD format. • Re:frame: http://reframecollection.org. Great source for independent and alternative films, blog, and film lists. Free online video resources: • Google Video search: http:// video.google.com • Most major broadcast networks or shows: examples www.abc.com, www.nbc.com/ video , video.nationalgeographic.com, etc. • Hulu: www.hulu.com • YouTube: www.youtube.com • Snag Films: www.snagfilms.com - documentaries. • National Film Board of Canada: www.nfb.ca/explore-by/title/ News from Media 6 INFORMATION COMMONER By Catherine McIntyre It’s been very busy in Archives and Digitization the past few months. Working with Students During Spring Semester I worked with some of Professor Lyn Bennett’s History students to set up five hours each of required hands-on working experience in the Archives. Ten students participated. They worked at transcribing oral history interviews, updated Archives records in Horizon, and created inventories of new collections that had come in, such as materials on the protests against the MX Missile system and newspaper clippings about Michael Moore’s appearance at UVSC. Committees and Conferences I was on the ULA Programs Task Force for the UALC Digitization Committee, and we had some great programs accepted for ULA, covering topics such as supporting digitization, using Flickr to promote digital collections, and long-term preservation of digital assets. I also had a poster session entered, about my experience of working with the Springville Museum of Art’s library to involve and connect them with the Mountain West Digital Library and grant By Trevor Morris and Judy Robertson Access Services has begun training on Symphony. Alan has taken on the thankless task of making sure all supervisors do the training. Shelf reading, inventory, and map tattle-tapping are winding down. We would like to thank all the Library aides and supervisors who worked hard on these projects. Judy has finished the Library aide exit survey. We are excited to have Claudine back. She has been busy harassing everyone to make up for lost time, especially Mike. Spring wedding season is upon us and Library aides are getting married. Hillary Smith married Scott Dastrup on Saturday, May 23. James Kemer married Brenda Sanjuan on May 8th. They are making their home in this area and James is working for the Library this summer. Melissa Stevens married Gene Curtis Ledbetter on May 5th. They are living in the area and both are involved in theater. Anyone wishing to contribute to a gift card can do so through Judy. Please excuse their excessive happiness and post-marriage distraction until they settle. We have 21 Library aides working for Access Services this summer. Brad Frank is back, Debra, Gus, Gideon, Gerri, Hongmi, James, John, Kayla, Kuki, Larissa, Liliana, who is house hunting and chaperoning for children’s singing group, Lupe, Michael (is doing an internship in Europe), Mariah, Patricia (she presented at the Geological Society Conference), Rory, Stefani, Shawn and Larissa (are going to Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon, the National Zoo and Aquarium, Gettysburg), Shannon (Shannon is expecting her second baby a boy), and Daniel. They are hard working, dedicated library aides and we are happy to have them working for us this summer. News from Access Services News from the George Sutherland Archive INFORMATION COMMONER 7 Continued from previous page. funding organizations in an effort to get their library collection organized and catalogued in preparation for digitization. We hosted a meeting of the Utah Manuscripts Association May 14. One topic that UMA is very active in is promoting Utah Archives Month, held every October. This year’s theme is “Documenting the Human Experience,” which each institution can tailor to best fit their collections. For our Utah Archives Month events, I’m thinking of working with Dr. Kathryn French to promote the oral history project she is working on, which is interviewing past and present peace activists in Utah. In November we are going to be hosting a workshop with the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board (USHRAB) on doing oral histories. It will be given by Kent Powell, who is the State Historian at the Utah State Historical Society. That should be a very popular workshop—more details to come. I attended the annual Conference of Intermountain Archivists (CIMA) at BYU on May 15. I attended sessions on documenting scarce resources that deal with water management in the West, developing and maintaining digital collections, usability testing of digital collections, and the huge process of bringing the Joseph Smith Papers Project to fruition. I will be attending the CONTENTdm Users Group meeting June 4-5 at the University of Nevada, Reno, which offers practical sessions and workshops for those who use CONTENTdm as their digital content management system, as we do. Digitization We have met some important digitization project goals with our digitization partners. Provo City Library needed to show progress, so we were able to complete the first 49 images and metadata for them. The deadline for their grant funded project is July. I was also able to complete the project we did for the Utah Council of Land Surveyors, which was to digitize a calendar put together by their history committee. It had to be finished for the meeting of their History Committee (http:// contentdm.uvu.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ Surveyors). And the Provo City Recorders meeting minutes, which will ultimately amount to thousands of scanned pages, are coming along slowly but surely. I have a few sections of the indexes and minutes uploaded, and they are searchable! They are not in the correct order yet. Their grant funded project is due in August (http://contentdm.uvu.edu/ cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ProvoMinute). Archives And last but certainly not least, we just received a big donation of materials dealing with UVU history from Dr. Mark Bezzant, who is the Assistant Vice President of the School, College, and University Partnership. He has collected materials, conducted interviews with former and current employees (including Judy!) and much more in an effort to preserve as much of UVU history as he can. It will be like Christmas morning to go through that donation! Catherine’s poster presentation at the 2009 ULA Conference 8 INFORMATION COMMONER By Tim Rowley We are planning to purchase several netbook computers for checkout to library users. They will check out similar to the way the Toughbook PCs have. A netbook is a scaled-down laptop PC in most aspects. They are much smaller—most can fit in a purse or small backpack. Many use a new technology called SSD (solid state drive) which replaces the hard drive with what could be described as a very large flash drive. They are much less expensive than notebook computers, costing about $300 each instead of three to six times that much for a conventional laptop (the Toughbooks cost about $2500). I recommend giving them a test drive when they come in to familiarize yourself. See Carlos for more information. Along that line, we have also purchased an external DVD-combo drive for checkout that can be used with any netbook or laptop computer. This drive can read and write CDs and DVDs. It is available for check out at the Circulation Desk. Systems, and most of the rest of the Library, is now in the throes of our Horizon-to-Symphony migration project. Our project manager is Mark Stevens, whose "past-life" experience as a programmer and database administrator could not have come our way at a better time. Azucena will be flanking Mark on the project as she moves from being our Horizon Administrator to being our Symphony Administrator. Her experience with Horizon will be indispensable as we trudge though this arduous and demanding project. Our goal is a go-live date of August 20th (yes, this year). Stay tuned for the training dates for your department to be posted in the near future. Missed training can be made-up online with recorded sessions, but they are not as effective as the live training in that they Continued on next page. News from Systems News from Serials By Wendy Wise Beginning last month The Christian Science Monitor newspaper changed from a daily to a weekly publication format. Because of this change it is now considered a weekly news magazine and will be kept in the current periodical collection (AP 2. C 475), instead of the newspaper collection. There is a temporary note on the newspaper shelving leading patrons to its new location. The Christian Science Monitor’s website address will still be updated daily. Both changes will be noted in Journals by Title. Also of note, the call number tab of the current periodical issues will now say "3rd floor." At times, journals have been mistaken as a paperback book and misshelved. Hopefully, this change will result in fewer of journals being reshelved on the fourth floor. Beginning July 1st, Journals By Title, accessible from the Library's homepage, will have a different look. Serials Solution 360 Core was chosen as the resource for managing all the Library's electronic and print journal titles. More information will be available at a later date. INFORMATION COMMONER 9 Continued from previous page. do not offer interactive exchange with the trainer. Our thanks to the many people it will take from all library departments to accomplish this monumental task. Symphony Project Status Report and Path Forward By Mark Stevens The following milestones have been reached for the Symphony implementation project: (1) The new server hardware has been specified, ordered, purchased, and installed. (2) The Solaris 10 UNIX operating system and Oracle database environment have been installed by campus IT specialists. The Symphony installation specialist is scheduled to install the application modules on the new server on May 28th. The network firewall ports have been configured for security as well as the needed local and remote communications. (3) We have largely completed the policy document that configures our new Symphony application and permits mapping of data from the old (Horizon) system to the new (Symphony) system. We will submit this specification to the SirsiDynix data conversion specialist for final analysis around May 22nd. (4) We have received the Symphony Workflows client software (which will take the place of the Horizon client) and Azucena Aguayo will be installing it first on the machines of the project team, and then on the machines of the remaining staff and librarians. (5) The Symphony "Training Server" has been installed in the Systems office. This will be made available to all Library staff for training and study as an example of the new Symphony system (containing sample library data). Please press the "pause button" during your training sessions to reinforce new concepts by experimenting with this Training Server. You can't hurt it. In fact, we expect to "refresh" (reset) it periodically to its initial configuration to rollback any "bad" experiments. Path Forward: Our main three emphases starting May 25th will be: (a) Symphony Training, (b) Training for Symphony, and (c) More Symphony Training. The resulting familiarity with Symphony will permit our Library staff to properly examine the results of the upcoming data conversion, preparatory to our eventual sign-off and acceptance of the production system. Our thanks to the Symphony project team for their daily efforts thus far, and into the coming weeks. Library Workshops By Carlos Alarco Basic Workshops in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint will be held in LI 205 throughout the summer. Reference Desk staff are strongly recommended to attend. If you feel you understand the basics, a "Test out" option is available via a test. Other topics are also available and all staff/faculty/ students are welcome to these sessions. See website for more information www.uvu.edu/library/help/ training.html. Tech Tip Employee Spotlight: Keith Rowley 10 INFORMATION COMMONER Background information: I’m from Orem and I grew up less than a mile from UVU. At that time there were just open fields and sand dunes where UVU is now. My friends and I would walk down 800 South all the way to the railroad tracks to play. There wasn’t any freeway there at that time either. I’ve been married to my wife Priscilla for 33 years now. We have three adult children and one grandson. When did you start working at UVU? What changes have you seen? I started working at UVU in July 1992 as the Public Services Librarian. There were only four librarians at that time. There was only one electronic periodical index on only one computer and no full-text articles. All the periodicals were in one small room, closed stacks, and a Library worker had to retrieve requested periodicals, and none of the periodicals were bound. When I started at UVU we had less than 9,000 students and only 59,000 volumes in the Library. Favorite things about job/UVU The best part about my job is that I get to do a lot of different things. (See job duties) Job duties As the Technical Services Librarian I supervise the cataloging and acquisitions departments. I work at the Reference Desk a certain number of hours each week. I teach about 10 bibliographic instruction sessions each semester. I do collection development for the areas of philosophy, religion, art, music, and languages. And I coordinate art exhibits for the Library. Education After graduation from Orem High School I went directly to BYU where I received a BA in Music Theory. While I was in the Army in Texas I was able to attend classes at the University of Texas at Austin. After I got out of the Army I returned to Austin where I received my Master of Music degree. I later took 28 semester hours of computer science courses at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. And even later I went back to BYU where I got my Master of Library and Information Science degree. I’ve earned a total of 349 semester credit hours. Favorite things to do in your spare time or hobbies The thing I do most in my spare time is practice on my harp. I also do a lot of reading. Any other fun stuff you’re willing to share? I’ve had formal instruction in French, German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Once upon a time I could converse pretty well in all of them, but now I’m doing good to converse in English. Keith Rowley INFORMATION COMMONER 11 Summer Vacations Lesli Baker: June 1-5 Claudine Boothe: July 21-23, July 28-31, August 4-7 Christy Donaldson: June 29-July 3, July 9-14 Mike Freeman: May 21-June 5, July 22-26 Catherine McIntyre: June 12-15, July 6-15 Judy Robertson: June 26 and 29, July 1-7 or 23- 28, August 20-25, September 1- 8 Keith Rowley: June 22-July 10 Tim Rowley: June 12-19, mid-July Debbie Short: July 9-14 Annie Smith: June 11-16 Mark Stevens: July 23, September 23-25, October 5-6, October 19-20 Trevor Young: July 31-August 4 ED I TO R I A L IN FORMA T I ON The Information Commoner is an internal communication tool published once a month by and for the Utah Valley University Library staff. Input from all library staff is en-couraged. The deadline for information submittal is the third Friday of each month. Send information to Lesli via email. BR A G BO X Mike Freeman Wins Award Mike Freeman was recently awarded a 2009 Award of Excellence by UVU’s Board of Trustees. A reception was held for all recipients on April 10. Congratulations to Ben! Kudos to Ben Wilson for finishing his Master’s degree in Library Science. He and wife are also expecting their first child a girl. Christy Elected ALA RUSA BRASS Secretary “The position of BRASS Secretary is a two-year term commencing with the Mid-Winter Conference meeting and ending, two years later, with the Annual Conference. Principal responsibilities are to take minutes at BRASS Executive Committee Meetings and to keep the BRASS Handbook current with Executive Committee actions."—BRASS Handbook. Congratulations, Christy! UALC Named Best in State UALC won Utah's Best of State in the category of Educational Institution/Service.
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Creator | Utah Valley University Library |
Contributors | Utah Valley University Library |
Title | The Information Commoner: Keeping Library Staff on Common Ground, 2009 Summer. |
Description | This is The Information Commoner, an online newsletter designed to keep all library staff members aware of services, developments, and staff professional activities and achievements. |
Edition | Electronic |
Date Original | 2009-04-01 |
Publisher Digital | Published digitally by Utah Valley University Library |
Physical Description | Online newsletter |
Owning Institution | Utah Valley University |
Subject | Utah Valley University. Library; |
Local Subjects | Newsletters; Library newsletter; Staff newsletter; |
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Collection Name | Utah Valley University Library Collection |
Rights | All rights held by Utah Valley University Library |
Copyright Status/Owner | Utah Valley University Library |
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Contributor Metadata | McIntyre, Catherine |
Metadata Entry Date | 2011-02-03 |
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Identifier | Summer 2009 |
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Title | Summer 2009 |
Full Text | Information Commoner Summer 2009 Volume 4, Issue 7 Keeping Library Staff on Common Ground In This Issue At Your Service 2 Announcements 3 Department News 3 Tech Tip 9 Employee Spotlight 10 Vacation Schedule 11 Brag Box 11 Mike’s Message What’s Our Policy The annual all-staff summer retreat will be held at Canyon Park, Building L (the Culinary Arts School, or the old WordPerfect campus) on Friday, July 31. We will be doing our annual review, some AA/EEO required training so that everyone is eligible to sit on search committees, and other fun stuff. At some point I would like to ask for ideas reflecting thinking outside the box. For example, some libraries are starting to eliminate their reference collections altogether. Some are merging the Reference and Circulation Desks together. Why do we do things that way, or this way? What should we eliminate? Just quit doing? What should we be adding? What makes sense, and what doesn’t? Do we simply do things a certain way just because that’s the way we’ve always done them? We are quickly moving this summer to Symphony. What opportunities, such as electronic ordering, does this offer? What new ways of doing things will be presented? I’ll be looking for all the answers, so put on your thinking caps between then and now. Safe Hiring By Lesli Baker UVU is now requiring Safe Hire training for all employees who serve on hiring/ search committees, and every committee must also have a trained AA/EEO (Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employment) representative who can assist with UVU policy and state and federal employment law compliance. Safe Hire trainings will include an introduction to employment law and focus on practical application in UVU hiring/search committees. In the very near future, HR will be combining Safe Hire training with AA/EEO training, and any employee may act as a committee member or as an AA/EEO representative. HR has agreed to provide Safe Hire training for all Library employees at our July retreat. 2 INFORMATION COMMONER Readers' Advisory By Annie Smith As academic librarians, we don’t often get to recommend a book to a student just for fun. But with summer upon us, we may get the opportunity to put on our readers’ advisory hats. Historically, readers’ advisory was about recommending the “best” books, i.e. books people ought to read. Today’s RA is about matching books to people’s tastes and interests. In order to do this, we have to ask questions to find out what our patrons really want, what appeals to them in a book. Some good questions include: • What was the last good book you read? • What did you like about it? • What are you in the mood for? • What don’t you like to read? The purpose of these questions is to get a feel for what our patrons do and do not enjoy in a book. Do they like novels about families? Will they only read non-fiction about World War II? If they read mysteries, what is their tolerance level for violence? (I have learned from experience that this last question is an important one.) Once you’ve got an idea of what they’re looking for in a book, we have several guides to genre fiction in the Reference and General Collections to help give you ideas of books to suggest. We have guides for horror, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, historical fiction, short fiction, series, and children’s and teen fiction. There are also some great online tools that we can use to get more ideas. Barnes & Noble’s Browse Books feature lets you find books by genre, setting, awards won, age level, and other criteria (www.barnesandnoble.com/subjects/subjects.asp). Amazon’s Also Bought recommendations can be used to help find books similar to ones our patrons enjoy. These bookseller sites are also useful because they often include reviews and summaries. Another great online tool is the LibraryThing BookSuggester (www.librarything.com/suggester). To get suggestions, type in the title of a book the patron likes in the search box, and LibraryThing will come up with database- and user-recommended books. LibraryThing also has the UnSuggester (www.librarything.com/unsuggester), which also shows books that a patron might want to stay away from. Recommended Reading Chelton, M. K. (2003). Readers advisory 101: a crash course in RA: common mistakes librarians make and how to avoid them, Library Journal, 11/1/2003. Retrieved 26 May, 2009 from http:// www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA329318.html. Trott, B. (2008). Building on a firm foundation: readers' advisory over the next twenty-five years. Reference & User Services Quarterly 48(2): 132-135. At Your Service INFORMATION COMMONER 3 News from Reference/Instruction Reference Tips By Trevor Young Keystrokes Hands off that mouse! You’re going to give yourself Carpal Tunnel Syndrome with all of that pointing and clicking. The Window’s operating environment features many keystrokes which will enhance and accelerate most of your day-to-day computer use. Here are some I’ve found handy while teaching and working at the Reference Desk: Find (Ctrl + F): The find function works with most applications in the Microsoft Office Suite as well as Internet browsers. When I am faced with an Excel file or a web page with a sizeable amount of information, and I know the exact word or phrase I’m looking for, I hit Ctrl + F (look for the search box to appear) and type the word(s), which will be instantly highlighted on the page. Forget scanning pages with a fine toothed comb. I find this particularly helpful on pages chock full of links. (If only this worked on paper…) Alt + Tab: Instantly flip to the previous window with no clicking! Depress the Alt key with your left thumb. Then hit the Tab key with a free finger. Pretty cool, eh? But wait, there’s more. If you continue to hold the Alt key and repeatedly press and release the Tab key, a menu representing the various active windows will appear in the center of your screen. Keep hitting Tab until you highlight the desired window, then let go. Master this trick and you will find it much easier to navigate your computer’s desktop. This can be particularly important when patrons are lining up for your help. For more keystrokes, visit www.bltt.org/accessibility/ win_keystrokes.htm. In Defense of Wikipedia We’ve all heard (sometimes from our own mouths) how academia looks down on Wikipedia. Citing Wikipedia is tantamount to believing the stories of Baron Münchhausen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Baron_Munchausen). The articles are written by unpaid Continued on next page. Announcements Librarians’ Retreat On June 8, the Librarians will be taking the day to strategize and discuss Library services. Staff Retreat We will hold the annual Library retreat on July 31 at the Building L in Canyon Park (formerly the WordPerfect Campus). Remember this is an important day for strategic planning, and all employees need to attend. See Mike’s Message for more information. Canyon Park, where the retreats will be held 4 INFORMATION COMMONER Continued from previous page. volunteers and, until 2005, could be edited 100% anonymously (now, one needs to log in to avoid having their IP address made public). Contributors have nothing riding on the accuracy or reliability of their own prose. However, there exists a phalanx of editors within Wikipedia which do check the accuracy and reliability of content. The damage is done when a researcher cites Wikipedia before the information has been verified. Because of Wikipedia’s open editing model, which has caused a number of incidents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Seigenthaler_incident), it has come under considerable criticism where other sources have not. We forget that most encyclopedias, especially the general use type, were never meant to be used as primary source material. Although there is an editorial process involved, it is not on the same level as a peer-review process. There’s simply no need for it. Not only should we avoid citing Wikipedia, but most encyclopedias should not be used as one’s only source. Encyclopedias present drastically condensed versions of important scholarship. This creates a quick and easy way to learn important names, theories, facts, and movements. We forget how encyclopedias are meant to be used, as a wonderful and logical place to begin a research project. As long as we explain that encyclopedias are where we begin our research, we should feel free to direct our patrons to Wikipedia as well as the print encyclopedias. UbiDuo Face-to-Face Communicator By Annie Smith The Reference Desk is now the home to a pair of UbiDuo Communicators. These machines are designed to help us assist hearing impaired students. Essentially, these machines allow the librarians and the students to chat to each other. Hearing impaired students, for the most part, have already been taught how to use these machines and know to look for the UbiDuo Face-to-Face Communicators. To talk with a student, use the arrow keys in the lower right of the keyboard to highlight the “In Range” box and hit enter. (The “In Range” box looks like a target.) An intermediary screen may pop up, but you will eventually be taken to a chat window where you can talk with the student. If you would like to print out your conversation, use the USB cable in the UbiDuo bag (kept by the computer on the north side of the Reference Desk for now) to connect the machines to the desk computer. You can then transfer a transcript of the document to the computer and print it. By Keith Rowley Everyone in Technical Services is very busy doing training on Symphony. We really haven't learned enough to know how cataloging and acquisitions will eventually work but we're really impressed with the reports feature in Symphony. A pair of UbiDuo Communicators News from Technical Services INFORMATION COMMONER 5 By Christy Donaldson At the MPLA conference I presented a session on Managing Media. The following list is from the resources handout: Copyright, know your rights: • UVU Media Copyright Concerns: www.uvu.edu/copyright/copyright_format/ media.html • Copyright Advisory Network: http:// librarycopyright.net/wordpress/ • ALA Copyright: www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/ offices/wo/woissues/copyrightb/ copyright.cfm • ALA Library Fact Sheet 7, Video and Copyright: www.ala.org/library/fact7.cfm Where to find video reviews: • Video Librarian: www.videolibrarian.com • Booklist: www.booklistonline.com/ default.aspx?page=media • Library Journal: www.libraryjournal.com/ community/Video% 2fDVD+Reviews/47117.html • Educational Media Reviews Online: http:// libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/search.asp • Movie Review Query Engine: www.mrqe.com • Metacritic: www.metacritic.com Video vendors and list of vendors: • Streaming Video Vendor list: www.ala.org/ ala/mgrps/rts/vrt/vrtconferenceinfo/ streaming_vendors.xls • Video Distributor Database: www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/ Distributors.html • Video Librarian Distributor Database: www.videolibrarian.com/plus/ distributors.html • SUU Library’s DVD & Video Vendor list: www.myhq.com/public/m/u/multimedia/ Other Media resources: • National Media Market: www.nmm.net. Industry conference where you can meet with over 50 of the nation’s top educational media producers and distributors and get some great show discounts on your videos. • Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com. Great resource on feature films. • A/V Geeks: www.avgeeks.com. They have over 22,000 educational 16mm films, many short films offered online or in DVD format. • Re:frame: http://reframecollection.org. Great source for independent and alternative films, blog, and film lists. Free online video resources: • Google Video search: http:// video.google.com • Most major broadcast networks or shows: examples www.abc.com, www.nbc.com/ video , video.nationalgeographic.com, etc. • Hulu: www.hulu.com • YouTube: www.youtube.com • Snag Films: www.snagfilms.com - documentaries. • National Film Board of Canada: www.nfb.ca/explore-by/title/ News from Media 6 INFORMATION COMMONER By Catherine McIntyre It’s been very busy in Archives and Digitization the past few months. Working with Students During Spring Semester I worked with some of Professor Lyn Bennett’s History students to set up five hours each of required hands-on working experience in the Archives. Ten students participated. They worked at transcribing oral history interviews, updated Archives records in Horizon, and created inventories of new collections that had come in, such as materials on the protests against the MX Missile system and newspaper clippings about Michael Moore’s appearance at UVSC. Committees and Conferences I was on the ULA Programs Task Force for the UALC Digitization Committee, and we had some great programs accepted for ULA, covering topics such as supporting digitization, using Flickr to promote digital collections, and long-term preservation of digital assets. I also had a poster session entered, about my experience of working with the Springville Museum of Art’s library to involve and connect them with the Mountain West Digital Library and grant By Trevor Morris and Judy Robertson Access Services has begun training on Symphony. Alan has taken on the thankless task of making sure all supervisors do the training. Shelf reading, inventory, and map tattle-tapping are winding down. We would like to thank all the Library aides and supervisors who worked hard on these projects. Judy has finished the Library aide exit survey. We are excited to have Claudine back. She has been busy harassing everyone to make up for lost time, especially Mike. Spring wedding season is upon us and Library aides are getting married. Hillary Smith married Scott Dastrup on Saturday, May 23. James Kemer married Brenda Sanjuan on May 8th. They are making their home in this area and James is working for the Library this summer. Melissa Stevens married Gene Curtis Ledbetter on May 5th. They are living in the area and both are involved in theater. Anyone wishing to contribute to a gift card can do so through Judy. Please excuse their excessive happiness and post-marriage distraction until they settle. We have 21 Library aides working for Access Services this summer. Brad Frank is back, Debra, Gus, Gideon, Gerri, Hongmi, James, John, Kayla, Kuki, Larissa, Liliana, who is house hunting and chaperoning for children’s singing group, Lupe, Michael (is doing an internship in Europe), Mariah, Patricia (she presented at the Geological Society Conference), Rory, Stefani, Shawn and Larissa (are going to Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon, the National Zoo and Aquarium, Gettysburg), Shannon (Shannon is expecting her second baby a boy), and Daniel. They are hard working, dedicated library aides and we are happy to have them working for us this summer. News from Access Services News from the George Sutherland Archive INFORMATION COMMONER 7 Continued from previous page. funding organizations in an effort to get their library collection organized and catalogued in preparation for digitization. We hosted a meeting of the Utah Manuscripts Association May 14. One topic that UMA is very active in is promoting Utah Archives Month, held every October. This year’s theme is “Documenting the Human Experience,” which each institution can tailor to best fit their collections. For our Utah Archives Month events, I’m thinking of working with Dr. Kathryn French to promote the oral history project she is working on, which is interviewing past and present peace activists in Utah. In November we are going to be hosting a workshop with the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board (USHRAB) on doing oral histories. It will be given by Kent Powell, who is the State Historian at the Utah State Historical Society. That should be a very popular workshop—more details to come. I attended the annual Conference of Intermountain Archivists (CIMA) at BYU on May 15. I attended sessions on documenting scarce resources that deal with water management in the West, developing and maintaining digital collections, usability testing of digital collections, and the huge process of bringing the Joseph Smith Papers Project to fruition. I will be attending the CONTENTdm Users Group meeting June 4-5 at the University of Nevada, Reno, which offers practical sessions and workshops for those who use CONTENTdm as their digital content management system, as we do. Digitization We have met some important digitization project goals with our digitization partners. Provo City Library needed to show progress, so we were able to complete the first 49 images and metadata for them. The deadline for their grant funded project is July. I was also able to complete the project we did for the Utah Council of Land Surveyors, which was to digitize a calendar put together by their history committee. It had to be finished for the meeting of their History Committee (http:// contentdm.uvu.edu/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ Surveyors). And the Provo City Recorders meeting minutes, which will ultimately amount to thousands of scanned pages, are coming along slowly but surely. I have a few sections of the indexes and minutes uploaded, and they are searchable! They are not in the correct order yet. Their grant funded project is due in August (http://contentdm.uvu.edu/ cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/ProvoMinute). Archives And last but certainly not least, we just received a big donation of materials dealing with UVU history from Dr. Mark Bezzant, who is the Assistant Vice President of the School, College, and University Partnership. He has collected materials, conducted interviews with former and current employees (including Judy!) and much more in an effort to preserve as much of UVU history as he can. It will be like Christmas morning to go through that donation! Catherine’s poster presentation at the 2009 ULA Conference 8 INFORMATION COMMONER By Tim Rowley We are planning to purchase several netbook computers for checkout to library users. They will check out similar to the way the Toughbook PCs have. A netbook is a scaled-down laptop PC in most aspects. They are much smaller—most can fit in a purse or small backpack. Many use a new technology called SSD (solid state drive) which replaces the hard drive with what could be described as a very large flash drive. They are much less expensive than notebook computers, costing about $300 each instead of three to six times that much for a conventional laptop (the Toughbooks cost about $2500). I recommend giving them a test drive when they come in to familiarize yourself. See Carlos for more information. Along that line, we have also purchased an external DVD-combo drive for checkout that can be used with any netbook or laptop computer. This drive can read and write CDs and DVDs. It is available for check out at the Circulation Desk. Systems, and most of the rest of the Library, is now in the throes of our Horizon-to-Symphony migration project. Our project manager is Mark Stevens, whose "past-life" experience as a programmer and database administrator could not have come our way at a better time. Azucena will be flanking Mark on the project as she moves from being our Horizon Administrator to being our Symphony Administrator. Her experience with Horizon will be indispensable as we trudge though this arduous and demanding project. Our goal is a go-live date of August 20th (yes, this year). Stay tuned for the training dates for your department to be posted in the near future. Missed training can be made-up online with recorded sessions, but they are not as effective as the live training in that they Continued on next page. News from Systems News from Serials By Wendy Wise Beginning last month The Christian Science Monitor newspaper changed from a daily to a weekly publication format. Because of this change it is now considered a weekly news magazine and will be kept in the current periodical collection (AP 2. C 475), instead of the newspaper collection. There is a temporary note on the newspaper shelving leading patrons to its new location. The Christian Science Monitor’s website address will still be updated daily. Both changes will be noted in Journals by Title. Also of note, the call number tab of the current periodical issues will now say "3rd floor." At times, journals have been mistaken as a paperback book and misshelved. Hopefully, this change will result in fewer of journals being reshelved on the fourth floor. Beginning July 1st, Journals By Title, accessible from the Library's homepage, will have a different look. Serials Solution 360 Core was chosen as the resource for managing all the Library's electronic and print journal titles. More information will be available at a later date. INFORMATION COMMONER 9 Continued from previous page. do not offer interactive exchange with the trainer. Our thanks to the many people it will take from all library departments to accomplish this monumental task. Symphony Project Status Report and Path Forward By Mark Stevens The following milestones have been reached for the Symphony implementation project: (1) The new server hardware has been specified, ordered, purchased, and installed. (2) The Solaris 10 UNIX operating system and Oracle database environment have been installed by campus IT specialists. The Symphony installation specialist is scheduled to install the application modules on the new server on May 28th. The network firewall ports have been configured for security as well as the needed local and remote communications. (3) We have largely completed the policy document that configures our new Symphony application and permits mapping of data from the old (Horizon) system to the new (Symphony) system. We will submit this specification to the SirsiDynix data conversion specialist for final analysis around May 22nd. (4) We have received the Symphony Workflows client software (which will take the place of the Horizon client) and Azucena Aguayo will be installing it first on the machines of the project team, and then on the machines of the remaining staff and librarians. (5) The Symphony "Training Server" has been installed in the Systems office. This will be made available to all Library staff for training and study as an example of the new Symphony system (containing sample library data). Please press the "pause button" during your training sessions to reinforce new concepts by experimenting with this Training Server. You can't hurt it. In fact, we expect to "refresh" (reset) it periodically to its initial configuration to rollback any "bad" experiments. Path Forward: Our main three emphases starting May 25th will be: (a) Symphony Training, (b) Training for Symphony, and (c) More Symphony Training. The resulting familiarity with Symphony will permit our Library staff to properly examine the results of the upcoming data conversion, preparatory to our eventual sign-off and acceptance of the production system. Our thanks to the Symphony project team for their daily efforts thus far, and into the coming weeks. Library Workshops By Carlos Alarco Basic Workshops in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint will be held in LI 205 throughout the summer. Reference Desk staff are strongly recommended to attend. If you feel you understand the basics, a "Test out" option is available via a test. Other topics are also available and all staff/faculty/ students are welcome to these sessions. See website for more information www.uvu.edu/library/help/ training.html. Tech Tip Employee Spotlight: Keith Rowley 10 INFORMATION COMMONER Background information: I’m from Orem and I grew up less than a mile from UVU. At that time there were just open fields and sand dunes where UVU is now. My friends and I would walk down 800 South all the way to the railroad tracks to play. There wasn’t any freeway there at that time either. I’ve been married to my wife Priscilla for 33 years now. We have three adult children and one grandson. When did you start working at UVU? What changes have you seen? I started working at UVU in July 1992 as the Public Services Librarian. There were only four librarians at that time. There was only one electronic periodical index on only one computer and no full-text articles. All the periodicals were in one small room, closed stacks, and a Library worker had to retrieve requested periodicals, and none of the periodicals were bound. When I started at UVU we had less than 9,000 students and only 59,000 volumes in the Library. Favorite things about job/UVU The best part about my job is that I get to do a lot of different things. (See job duties) Job duties As the Technical Services Librarian I supervise the cataloging and acquisitions departments. I work at the Reference Desk a certain number of hours each week. I teach about 10 bibliographic instruction sessions each semester. I do collection development for the areas of philosophy, religion, art, music, and languages. And I coordinate art exhibits for the Library. Education After graduation from Orem High School I went directly to BYU where I received a BA in Music Theory. While I was in the Army in Texas I was able to attend classes at the University of Texas at Austin. After I got out of the Army I returned to Austin where I received my Master of Music degree. I later took 28 semester hours of computer science courses at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. And even later I went back to BYU where I got my Master of Library and Information Science degree. I’ve earned a total of 349 semester credit hours. Favorite things to do in your spare time or hobbies The thing I do most in my spare time is practice on my harp. I also do a lot of reading. Any other fun stuff you’re willing to share? I’ve had formal instruction in French, German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish. Once upon a time I could converse pretty well in all of them, but now I’m doing good to converse in English. Keith Rowley INFORMATION COMMONER 11 Summer Vacations Lesli Baker: June 1-5 Claudine Boothe: July 21-23, July 28-31, August 4-7 Christy Donaldson: June 29-July 3, July 9-14 Mike Freeman: May 21-June 5, July 22-26 Catherine McIntyre: June 12-15, July 6-15 Judy Robertson: June 26 and 29, July 1-7 or 23- 28, August 20-25, September 1- 8 Keith Rowley: June 22-July 10 Tim Rowley: June 12-19, mid-July Debbie Short: July 9-14 Annie Smith: June 11-16 Mark Stevens: July 23, September 23-25, October 5-6, October 19-20 Trevor Young: July 31-August 4 ED I TO R I A L IN FORMA T I ON The Information Commoner is an internal communication tool published once a month by and for the Utah Valley University Library staff. Input from all library staff is en-couraged. The deadline for information submittal is the third Friday of each month. Send information to Lesli via email. BR A G BO X Mike Freeman Wins Award Mike Freeman was recently awarded a 2009 Award of Excellence by UVU’s Board of Trustees. A reception was held for all recipients on April 10. Congratulations to Ben! Kudos to Ben Wilson for finishing his Master’s degree in Library Science. He and wife are also expecting their first child a girl. Christy Elected ALA RUSA BRASS Secretary “The position of BRASS Secretary is a two-year term commencing with the Mid-Winter Conference meeting and ending, two years later, with the Annual Conference. Principal responsibilities are to take minutes at BRASS Executive Committee Meetings and to keep the BRASS Handbook current with Executive Committee actions."—BRASS Handbook. Congratulations, Christy! UALC Named Best in State UALC won Utah's Best of State in the category of Educational Institution/Service. |
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