Library

A reminder that on Wednesday, June 9, the library’s online catalog will be unavailable all day, due to an upgrade to the server.

While Magnus is down, a link to WorldCat will be prominently posted to the library’s home page. While WorldCat displays results from many library collections around the world, search results do indicate the location of items held locally.

During the downtime for Magnus, Encore will also be unavailable for full searches of the catalog.

Library Journal.com reports that Wikipedia has created an FAQ For Librarians which encourages librarians (and I think all information professionals) to take a more active role in creating and editing Wikipedia entries. It also suggests that we might want to offer training to our patrons and to use Wikipedia as a platform for teaching new media literacy skills.

Present: Chris, John, Rebecca, Rachel, Ryan, Germano, Andi, Lindy and Jane.

Andi led a discussion of several possible information literacy mission statements. She will attend an immersion experience this summer and report back.

Germano and Lindy presented a number of ideas about the future of reference services.

Present: Ryan, John, Lindy, Germano, Jane, Rebecca, Chris, Rachel

Andi & Germano talked about their experiences at the LOEX conference over the past weekend. Andi was a presenter at the conference.

Ryan talked about his experiences team-teaching the CyberEthics Paideia II course this semester with Soren Steding.

John started a discussion on ways to create physical space in the library for new initiatives.

Present: Andi, Germano, Jane, Rebecca, Lindy, Rachel, John, Chris, Ryan

Meeting began with a brief report on the ILA/ACRL conference held on April 23. Rebecca Sullivan, Ryan Gjerde & Germano Streese all made presentations at the conference.

On campus patrons currently have access to two American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collections. The first covers the years 1691-1820 and the second covers 1821-1837.

For articles and journal titles that are available in PDF format in EBSCO databases (Academic Search Complete, Business Source Elite, PsycInfo, etc.) there is now an enhanced viewer that allows users to browse complete issues of journals via a table of contents. For a demo, see http://www.ebscohost.com/special/movies/pdfViewer/ThePDFViewerInEBSCOhos...

Present: Andi, Germano, Lindy, Jane, Ryan, John, Rachel, Chris

Andi led our ongoing discussion of Information Literacy planning and we talked about developing a possible in-house summer workshop. We also discussed the idea of offering faculty course planning grants.

Jane reported on her trip to Norway (arranged by the Art in Embassies division of the U.S. State Department) to attend the reception at the U.S.

Did you know that a graduate of Luther College helped to create the Library of Congress Classification system? Otherwise fondly known as “call numbers”, a classification system consists of the numbers and letters that organize materials by topic area. The Dewey Decimal system is used primarily in school and public libraries, while the LC system is typically used in college and university libraries. Our connection is J.C.M. Hanson, an 1882 graduate of Luther, who was invited to become head of the Catalog Division of the Library of Congress in 1897.

The second of two whiteboard tables is now in place in the library. This one (a four-seater) is located next to the Writing Center on the main floor.