What do you wish the library had?

Have a suggestion of a book, DVD, or other item you think the library should have?

Use our new online request form to make a suggestion.

We will respond to your request and order any item we do not already own or that is not already available through Miami University Libraries or OhioLINK. Thanks!

New Materials Added in October and November

The October and November new materials list is now available. We added 106 books, DVDs, and other items over those months, thanks to the impressive efforts of our faculty selectors and the library staff.

Have a suggestion of something to order? Use our online request form, email one of our staff members or drop by the library with your request. Thanks!

John

Blackboard Embedded Librarians in Your Course

Dear Faculty:

Would you like to collaborate with a Blackboard Embedded Librarian next semester, Spring 2010? Have you been toying with the idea, just to see what difference it might make to your students’ research efforts? Have you heard colleagues talking about this online approach to delivering library services and resources that are customized for the courses you teach?

The Gardner-Harvey Librarians have been building research tools and planning for Spring Semester 2010 with you and your students in mind. Before you close your office door for the semester on Friday December 18, 2009, please let John Burke and Beth Tumbleson know of your interest.

To recap the Pilot Program from a year ago, Gardner-Harvey librarians worked with instructors teaching upper and lower division courses across the disciplines. The purpose of the program is to develop information literacy skills in students, whether enrolled in traditional, off-campus, hybrid, or online courses. Once you express interest, we will send you a two page overview of options to determine your needs and schedule an appointment to discuss assignments and your curricular goals in terms of student research. Once you enroll the librarian as a course builder or instructor, content will be added next to the assignment, on the Embedded Librarian page, or wherever appropriate. Then students have direct access to research assistance from a librarian familiar with the course and Miami University Libraries’ collections.

Common research strategies and concepts addressed in prior semesters have included:
• a short list of the most relevant databases and online collections
a list of appropriate subject terms
help narrowing a topic
guidance finding statistics
assistance citing sources using RefWorks and other tools
methods of evaluating Websites
identifying scholarly sources.

If you think your students would benefit from such a faculty-librarian collaboration within Blackboard, please reply to this e-mail and provide the information requested below:

To Complete and Return by December 18, 2010
Name:
email:
Telephone:
Courses: Section, Time/Day, & Location

Best regards,

Beth Tumbleson, Assistant Director
John Burke, Director

New Materials Added in July, August, and September

The July, August, September new materials list is now available. We added 172 books, DVDs, and other items over those months, thanks to the impressive efforts of our faculty selectors and the library staff.

Have a suggestion of something to order? Use our online request form, email one of our staff members or drop by the library with your request. Thanks!

John

Clickers now available!

A cooperative effort of the Educational Technology Center, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Gardner-Harvey Library is now making an expanded collection of Turning Point clickers available to the campus.

Three sets of clickers (personal response systems) may now be checked out from the Library. Each set contains 30 clickers and a receiver. They may be checked out for 3 hours at one time. Please stop by the library at any time we are open to access the clickers or contact us at 727-3222 to reserve a set for a given class period.

Not sure what clickers are? See this brief overview of clickers from EDUCAUSE (It’s a bit dated, but still a good overview of the process.)

The CTL will sponsor a lunchtime conversation with Janet Hurn on December 2 from 12:00-1:00 in Room 136/137 JHN to share examples of how clickers are used in the classroom.

Need more information? Andrea Han is happy to provide one-on-one training and consultation on the clickers.

We greatly appreciate the work done by Technology Services to install Turning Point software in all of the mediated classrooms. Now it is easy to just set up the receiver and click away.

Andrea Han, Educational Technology Coordinator, hanan@muohio.edu
Ellenmarie Wahlrab, Center for Teaching and Learning Co-Coordinator, wahlrae@muohio.edu
John Burke, Library Director, burkejj@muohio.edu

It's National Information Literacy Awareness Month!

President Obama has declared October as National Information Literacy Awareness Month, and the Gardner-Harvey Library has some useful sources to help you increase your awareness.

The Information Literacy Instruction page on our website details our efforts to teach information literacy skills to individuals and classes. One useful area of the page is the link to research guides, which features these helpful items:

The CRAAP Test, which you can use to help you evaluate the information you find.
The Research Project Calculator, which will help you plan your research project and consider the necessary steps and strategies.
The Developing a Research Topic Brainstorming Chart, which helps you turn your topic into a more specific and efficiently-searched statement.

We hope these will be of use to you or your students. What do you find frustrating about the research process? This video shows some common complaints among college students. We'd like to hear yours and help you solve those frustrations.

Textbooks for Fall: where we stand

The Textbooks on Reserve program at the library has recently been updated. We have (starting in the summer and working through the first tow weeks of fall) added 24 new editions of existing textbooks and added 14 new books (either for existing courses or new courses). It is always a little tricky for us to get new books on our shelves right at the beginning of the semester, and we are grateful to the MUM Bookstore and to faculty members for assisting us to make this possible.

We now have books for 94 courses offered at Middletown that the library has purchased, and textbooks on hand for at least 17 other courses provided by individual faculty members or departments. The full list is available here.

We've already had 79 checkouts of these items in the first two weeks of class. If you can help further spread the word that the textbooks are available, that would be most helpful. If you want to correct information on our list, please let us know. If you have suggestions on other courses we should consider buying textbooks for, be sure to contact me.

We thank you for your use and support of this program!

The Kindle is here!

As promised in our Fall 2009 library newsletter, we now have two Kindle readers available for you to check out. You can read about the particulars of borrowing them and the current list of books available on them here. In sum, these devices check out for a week at a time, have 12 preloaded books, and offer a lightweight, enjoyable reading experience.

We are really curious to see what you think of them. Consider checking one out today. We are also maintaining a waiting list for them -- please contact the library to get your name on it.

The web site is all new!

That's right! We switched over to our new web design today. We designed the site to better integrate with the changes to the University Libraries' site and to continue our abilities to better serve you with information resources and information on our services.

Take note of the blue tabs at the top of the page. Each will lead you to a particular type of information and a suggested group of databases and other resources to help you find what you need. Research resources, service information, and other library-related facts make up the three columns below the tab areas. The upper right corner links to the various methods you can use to contact us. And the News and Notes area will feature blog posts and tweets.

The Gardner-Harvey Library staff is extremely grateful to Beth Gray who did the design and HTML programming work needed to make these changes. She also ran a usability testing program for the older site during the summer. This was all done as part of a practicum Beth is completing with the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science toward her Master of Library and Information Science degree.

Is there something you can't find on the new site that you used to use on the old one? Has our work to correctly link documents on the page oft gang aglee? If so, please contact us forthwith so that we can help you navigate and/or fix the issues with the site. We hope you will enjoy this fresh interface to information!