Possible Interlibrary Loan delays

The interlibrary loan office will be operating with minimal student staffing June 8 - June 13, 2010. You may experience some minor delays on requests submitted during this period.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Sonja as soon as possible. Thanks!

Past and Present Gustavus Buildings - Display

A new addition is being added to the Gustavus campus! Literally! Construction of the "New Academic Building" is underway, and to keep with the theme, the College and Lutheran Church Archives have brought you a new display, "Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes: Buildings at Gustavus." The display chronicles how particular buildings at the college have changed, progressed, and even been demolished over time. Come see what the first gymnasium looked like! Learn what happened to Johnson Hall! This exciting new display was created by library and archives intern Maura Coonan. It is located on the main floor of the library by the reference desk. Come check it out!

To see more images of the the college's past, visit the archives.

Author Tea! Join us this Thursday, May 6th

The Book Mark and the library host an annual author tea for Gustavus authors who have published books within the past year. Join us this Thursday, May 6th, at 3:30 in the Courtyard Cafe to hear a bit about the books and enjoy refreshments.

Here is this year's bookshelf:

Sidonia Alenuma (Education) Race and Educational Reform in America
Mark Bjelland (Geography) Human Geography
Mary Everett (Spanish, retired) My White Orchid
Barbara Fister (Library) Through the Cracks
Paschal Kyoore (French) Folktales of the Dagara of West Africa
Roger McKnight (Scandinavian Studies) Watonwan County: Past, Present, and Future
Joyce Sutphen (English) First Words

... and More Sunshine

The 2010 State of the Media Report has just been released - a terrific review of what's going on with the news media and where things are headed.

There is also a freshly-issued Secrecy Report Card from Open the Government that sums up developments is government secrecy and transparency in 2009.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a blog post on the importance of Freedom of Information Act requests being carried out without undue over-redaction.

To give credit where it's due, the federal government does share lots of information - including a new website that includes copies of the decennial census of population and housing going back to 1790.

It's Sunshine Week

Sunshine week is March 14th-20th. In celebration Open the Government.org is presenting a web cast called "Building Transparency." Stream the live teleconference to your desktop on March 19th from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Click here for more information.

This teleconference is made available by Minitex and promoted by the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library.

We Need You!

Want to improve the library? We need students to participate in our library study. Your participation could win you 100 pages of free printing or pizza!

Your role may include any of the following:

• Designer
• Photographer
• Web Consultant

When do we need you? And for how long? Sometime between now and the end of April for about an hour of your time.

Interested? Contact libstudy@gustavus.edu

Get Ready to Celebrate!

Are you a student who has done some cool research? Have a creative project you're proud of? Are you involved with a campus group that did something awesome? Why not share it at the annual Celebration of Creative Inquiry? It will be held on April 30th between 5-7 pm in the campus center.

To join in, round up a faculty sponsor and submit an abstract. The deadline is March 19th.

Have a project in mind, but you're not sure how to present it? No problem. There's help available on making posters, and there will be workshops

Still have questions? Check on this page or e-mail your questions to creativeinquiry@gustavus.edu.

And be sure to come on April 30th to see the amazing things students have accomplished. The refreshments are yummy, too.

New Catalog Arrival

MnPALS Plus, our new catalog, is up and running! You can access it directly from the search box on the library's homepage. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new interface. Please click here to send us comments and questions. (Fans of the old catalog, Classic MnPALS, can still access it from the library's homepage. Each catalog searches the same information - it's just the interface that's different.)

The catalogs they are a changin’…

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a new library catalog. It's the same great data with a bold new look. MnPALS Plus, which was developed locally by our library consortium, boasts improved location information, sophisticated ways to refine searches and a number of other features that make it more user-friendly and in line with the next generation of library catalogs.

MnPALS Plus will become the library’s default catalog but fans of the old catalog (Classic MnPALS) will still be able to access it from the library’s homepage. The transition will be completed by the beginning of spring semester but you can preview MnPALS Plus now.

Tell us what you think of the new catalog!

Reducing Paper Waste: The Sequel

Those of you who receive Folkelore by e-mail may have been disappointed to hear about Chloe Radcliffe's video without knowing where to find it. It's embedded in our blog page, but it didn't travel along with the e-mail message. Our apologies.

Here's the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBnsca0aZKA

Enjoy!

Reducing Paper Use: The Movie

Chloe Radcliffe created a video about the new printing policy that meters printing and begins to charge students five cents a page once they've used up a 600 (or 300 double-sided) page allocation. Though the policy has left some students unhappy, it has reduced waste. At the library, we have noticed it has cut printing by almost two-thirds, and there's far less wasted paper left by the printers.

In this video, Chloe offers some hints to students and faculty about ways to get the most out of their printing allocation - and ways to help the environment by printing less.

Interlibrary Loan delays.

Interlibrary loan requests submitted over the holiday break (effectively December 23, 2009 - January 3, 2010) will not be processed until Monday, January 4, 2010.

Please plan accordingly. If you have questions or concerns, feel free to email me.

You can always find answers to FAQs on the ILL homepage.

Take the library with you!

If you'll be away from campus during the holidays or in January, take the library with you! Remember that you can connect to our research databases remotely by linking to them from the library's website -- just log in using the 14-digit barcode from your Gustavus ID as your username, and (in most cases) your last name as your password. This is the same username/password combination you use to place Interlibrary Loan requests.

If you want to test your username and password now to make sure you won't have problems logging in from off campus, view your borrowing record here:
http://gustavus.edu/academics/library/search/borrecord.html. If you're
unable to login to view your borrowing record, contact e-resources@gustavus.edu for assistance.

Illustrated Biblical Views of the Christmas Story

The Gustavus Adolphus College and Lutheran Church Archives has a new semi-permanent display of bibles located outside of the archives reading room. As a tribute to the Christmas season, a number of illustrated bibles have been opened to display various images associated with Jesus’ birth. Many of these rare and unique bibles are hundreds of years old. Please visit the display and see some beautiful and inspiring images. The presentation was made possible thanks to assistance from the following students, Morgen Hagedorn and Tyna Johnson.

Of Course We're Open!

Neither rain nor snow nor dark of night ... if it's not a holiday, we're open. At this busy time of year, students have lots of work to do, and if classes are called off, that's just one more chance to get to it.

But if you've spent hours in the library working on papers or studying for exams, sometimes you need a break. Why not help us decorate our tree? There are supplies in the GLA Reading Room. As you can see, some creative folks have already made a start, but there's lots of room for more hand-made ornaments.

Taking the Mystery out of the Archives

According to some, the College and Lutheran Church archives here at Gustavus are a mystery. It seems people are unaware of the types of materials held in the two different yet related collections.

First, these archives consist of primary source materials created by student organizations, individuals, departments, offices, local churches, and regional church bodies. Most documents, photographs, and recordings held in the archives are found only here and thus have monetary, historical, or sentimental value. The website for the archives gives greater insight and detail into our holdings.

Second, you might be wondering who uses the archives and what types of information are requested. We provide access to materials and help answer questions from students, staff, faculty, alumni, professional researchers, genealogists, and members of the general public. Here are some recent inquiries.
1. When did the first woman graduate from Gustavus?
2. What materials are there documenting the student senate? What is the process to donate additional items?
3. How can I research my local church congregation?
4. Where do I look to learn about the history of Old Main, Rundstrom Hall, the Library, and the Student Union?
5. What World War I posters do you have? A professor is collaborating with local colleagues to develop a teaching plan that helps students learn history by using primary documents.
6. Did members of the anti-war organization the Weathermen ever visit Gustavus?
7. What records exist concerning my relative who was a faculty member at Minnesota College? We hold the records of Minnesota College.

Should you have any additional questions that need answering, please contact the archives.

Christmas and the Holidays at Gustavus

Happy Holidays from the College and Lutheran Church Archives!!

The holiday season is fast approaching. To celebrate, the Archives has put up a new display about past campus events. Come see historic programs and pictures from Christmas in Christ Chapel and the Festival of St. Lucia. The new display, created by archives student worker Birgitta Johnson, is located on the main floor of the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, near the reference desk.

Information Fluency Course Taught This Spring

The library is offering a course this spring for students who would like to know more about research in their chosen major and in general. This .5 credit course meets once a week, on Mondays from 2:30 - 4:30, but if a student is interested and can't meet a that time it can also be taken by arrangement. (It's actually quite a lot of fun. Okay, fun if you like this kind of thing. We do.) Here's the official description:

NDL 301: Information Fluency - This course will give students interested in going to graduate or professional school—or who simply want to know more about research—an immersion in the structure of the literature of their chosen field and exposure to research tools and collections. Students will develop an extensive literature of their chosen field. They also will keep a research log and develop and extensive literature review for a research question of their choice. Shorter projects will require students to analyze aspects of their discipline’s traditions, to compare them to traditions in other fields, and to explore the social and ethical dimensions of research.

For more information, contact Barbara Fister (fister @ gustavus dot edu).

And Yet More on Open Access

... this news just in. The faculty at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, passed an open access mandate similar to the one passed by Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Trinity is the first liberal arts college to pass such a mandate.

The news is so fresh I don't have anything to link to, but you will no doubt be reading about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed on Monday.

More on Open Access

A bill currently in Congress would instruct federal agencies that provide significant funds for research to ensure that the results of that publicly funded research are made public. (That's a lot of "public" in that last sentence, but hey, there's a reason for that. It's a simple equation: public funding of research = public knowledge.)

Publishers of that research - some of them for-profit organizations and others non-profit scholarly societies - are naturally wary of losing their monopoly on content and the revenues brought in by subscriptions, but libraries are having trouble sustaining increasing subscription costs and scholars have been pushing for their right to share their research. Many publishers have already agreed to let authors post copies of their work on institutional websites. (You can find out what publishers' policies are by looking them up in the SHERPA/RoMEO database.)

SPARC, an organization of librarians and scholars who are pushing for open access, have published useful guides such as one on campus collaborations for publishing and another on funding models. Though the Association of American University Presses supported a bill that would rule out open access mandates for publicly-funded research, ten presses broke ranks and issued a statement supporting open access. They've found ways to make it work for them in support of their scholarly mission.

The bill now in Congress - the Federal Research Public Access Act - is limited in scope to only a certain kind of research: that which is funded by public dollars. The National Institutes of Health has shown how this can work with PubMed Central, a clearinghouse of published research funded by NIH grants.

If you'd like to read more about it, seasoned with a dose of opinion, see the Peer to Peer Review column written by one of our librarians in Library Journal's Academic Newswire. Or visit the Alliance for Taxpayer Access site.