"Books for the Break!"

As the march toward finals and break continues, let me make you aware of our next MUM Book Discussion. For those of you still around during the week following finals, we will take on Charles Dickens’ much beloved A Christmas Carol on Thursday, December 20, from 12-1 in the library. Many editions and copies are available through the libraries, as well as some film versions (see http://tinyurl.com/299mfs for a title search in the MU catalog). Please come and join us for a great discussion and a tasty treat.

Looking ahead, the group will read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Miami: http://tinyurl.com/35cr7v and OhioLINK: http://tinyurl.com/37r259 ) in late January (date TBA). We will then turn to our own Eric Melbye’s novel Tru in late February (date TBA) (coming soon to a library near you!).

And, last but not least, let me direct your attention to our new book display area in the library, where my esteemed staff (full-time and student assistants) have compiled a display of “Books for Break!” The items were carefully hand chosen, represent an eclectic mix of styles and topics, and are accompanied by printed reviews (and a few cartoon reviews) to help you decide whether they might be of interest. We thought you might like to pick up a read for over the break, and this makes it easy.

Read. Relax. Enjoy. A book, and three words; you can’t go wrong.

John

See http://www.mid.muohio.edu/library/bookdiscussion.cfm for a list of the books and (soon) dates.

Web 2.0 Comes to Town!

The Virtual Gardner-Harvey Library is Open, 24/7 @ http://www.mid.muohio.edu/library

The times & technologies are changing. And so is the Gardner-Harvey Library Web Page. Web 2.0 social software tools have crept onto the page. When? Recently. How? Thanks to Director John Burke, Undercover Techie. What? Therein lays the tale:

IM Reference Made Easier
Ever wish you could just ask a simple question without the bother of setting up an IM account? Meebo chat, your dream widget has arrived. Click on the “IMaLibrarian” box, front and center, start typing in the text box, and hit enter. Yes, you are now an IM pro.

Interactive Maps
Ever needed travel directions from one Miami campus to another? Go to “Contact Us” on the left. Click “this map” and up pops an interactive street and satellite map with turn by turn directions for the directionally-challenged. Click “View Larger Map” for Mapquest directions for all 9 MU Libraries. Not quite TomTom, but affordable!

Custom Search Engines
Ever wonder what the other 23 Ohio Regional Campuses are up to? Click on “Custom Search Engines”, built using Google Co-op, on the left, then “Ohio Regional Campus Search” and toss in a few words, e.g. “recruitment non-traditional students” to find 9 hits. Or explore 113 academic library sites for information and ideas using “Ohio Academic Libraries Search”.

Embedded Tutorials
Ever wish you could afford a personal trainer in academic research? For the motivated and curious, click on “Library Instruction” on the left to find tutorials on Information Fluency for ENG 111/113, Miami eScholar on Academic Integrity, Academic Search Complete, a comprehensive database, CINAHL, Nursing & Allied Health database, Searching OhioLINK, the statewide Ohio Library and Information Network. Bonus finds: interactive research tutorials, research guides, and search tools chart.

Group Computer Use Area

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of a new area in the library: the group computer use area. Located along the stairwell in the heart of the library, the area is designed for work on collaborative projects that may involve or require the use of a computer.

There are four computers arranged on spacious tables in the area and ten chairs. The plan is that each computer can have 2-4 people working around them. There is enough space on the tables to easily spread out other materials.

We hope you and your group will try this area out and find it useful. Let us know how we can make it work better for your learning needs. Beyond the furniture, the area boasts indirect natural light, a view of our stairway descent, and easy access to research and technology assistance.

Go Global; Be Multicultural

Multicultural comparisons just got easier with the new Britannica Country Comparison feature. Select any two countries and click Go to find articles, maps, flags, statistics, events, and multimedia.

And if you want more, go to Britannica's World Data. There you may compare and contrast statistical portraits for 217 nations. Find current country comparisons for up to ten countries at a time, chronological comparisons of historical data for up to ninety years, or ranked statistics of the highest or lowest rates, totals, or percentages for categories you select. Display results in tables or charts.

A good book and the great outdoors: the Library Terrace!

Care to sit in the fresh air while using library resources? Now you can!

We just opened the Library Terrace: a small porch area nestled on the hillside at the rear of the library, with a nice view of Levey Hall. The Terrace, once intended as an additional library entrance, can now serve as a vehicle for enjoying the warmth of a morning or the cool shade of an afternoon while studying, reading, or enjoying the campus wireless network.

Though fall is getting back on track, there is still some temperate weather remaining this year. The Terrace is open during the same hours that the library is open, except that we close it at 7:00PM on Monday through Thursday evenings (while the library stays open until 9:00PM).

We're still working on getting permanent outdoor furniture in place, but we do have chairs and tables available for you to use out there (just ask if you need help). We hope you'll find this a nice addition to our library environment.

Our thanks to the good folks in Physical Facilities for making the Terrace possible.

New Playaways; easy listening in your car

We are happy to announce the addition of 23 new titles to our Playaway digital audio device collection. The newbies range from Beowulf, read by Seamus Heaney, to Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants.

We now have a total of 103 Playaways (for more information on them, see this earlier post. Here is a link to an MU Library Catalog search showing all of them.

A new addition to help you enjoy Playaways on the road are 4 new Belkin FM transmitters. These transmitters (plugged into your cigarette lighter -- they also take batteries -- and your Playaway) broadcast your audio enjoyment onto a vacant FM radio station. Enjoy your Playaway near at hand (a half-a-deck-of-cards-sized device and your earbuds) or on the road!

Reading on Campus

Brains grow better when fed on fresh fodder. Check out the Chronicle of Higher Education, "What They're Reading on College Campuses," September 28, 2007. And if you are really famished, see the New York Times Best Sellers list too. Who knows, you may even get a jump-start on holiday gift-giving.

Harness the Power of OhioLINK

OhioLINK will be celebrating 15 years of service to the college and university students, staff, and faculty of Ohio's academic institutions this November. Explore the wonder of statewide resource sharing among Ohio's libraries: print materials, electronic resources, and multimedia so unusual in our nation. Aren't you glad you work in Ohio? Students: 15 ways to put OhioLINK to work! Faculty/Staff: 15 ideas to utilize OhioLINK!

YouTube Move Over

Looking for terrrific digital videos? Like to learn? Then check out OhioLINK's Top 15 Digital Videos in celebrations of 15 years of service to the academic community of Ohio this November 2007. Students, Staff, and Faculty, did I mention these digital videos are free and can be accessed 24/7 from campus or home?

How believable, how helpful is the Internet?

In response to a question by American Libraries' interviewer: "You don't believe that everything is on the internet?" Garrison Keillor, noted storyteller, musician, author, and creator of public radio broadcast A Prairie Home Companion replied:

"The internet is just an enormous, interesting swamp. It's full of self-promotion, it's full of bad information, it's full of everything. And you can sort of maneuver your way around it, from island to island, and you can find things of interest, but I think there still is room for paper between covers. People have a limited amount of time, and if you take a hard look at the amount of time you spend drifting, trying to get your bearings on the internet, you are grateful for people who can save you time and that's what librarians do--they save you enormous amounts of time."

Weighty Web Sites

PC Magazine's Top 100 Classic Web Sites in 2007 may be the very sites you need to speed you on your way in research, keeping current, making plans, or taking time out for music, movies, and other leisure pursuits. Check out the best of the Internet in list, in slideshow, or by downloading directly as bookmarks. For the curious, see the criteria applied to select Web sites recognized as superior in their categories.

New libraries join OhioLINK

OhioLINK has grown! Nine new libraries are joining the current band of OhioLINK libraries, for a grand total of 93 institutions.

Three seminaries have just joined, and already have their collections available for borrowing:

Methodist Theological School in Ohio

Pontifical College Josephinum

Trinity Lutheran Seminary

Six public libraries will join and become operational in September:

Cuyahoga Falls Public Library

Greene County Public Library

Portage County District Library

Toledo-Lucas County Public Library

Warren-Trumbull County Public Library

Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County

That will be a lot more materials to browse through, order to have on hand in 3-4 business days, and hang on to for up to 15 weeks!

OhioLINK Electronic Book Center debuts

OhioLINK has made the following announcement regarding the new Electronic Book Center. This is an exciting addition to our resources:

"The new Electronic Book Center is now available at http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu

We have loaded 5000 e-books from Oxford University Press and Springer.
Additional books are coming from these publishers, but we want to make the E-Book Center available now, even without 100% of the books loaded.

We currently access the Oxford books through Oxford Scholarship Online. We will continue to have access to Oxford's OSO interface, but our own interface makes the same books available within a multi-publisher environment.

We have had access to Springer books at springerlink.com, but this was an interim solution until our own E-Book Center is available.

For the time being, ABC-CLIO reference books remain on a separate interface
at: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/ebooks/reference/home

We will move ABC-CLIO books over to the new system in September, and then the old "Electronic Reference Books" system will superseded.

These e-books will be accessible from the catalog. From the catalog record for each book, a "rave" URL links to the e-book itself. Catalog records for Springer and Oxford books are in process. Existing "rave" URL's for ABC-CLIO books will point over to the new system, once that migration is complete."

Region-free DVD Players Available

The Library has added two region-free DVD players for use in playing DVDs produced in any region in the world. One is set up with a monitor in our IMC room. The other is available at our Circulation Desk for checkout (on a 7-day loan).

We added the region-free DVD players to increase our community's ability to use DVD materials produced worldwide. We also hope to free ourselves from United States release delays of international films. For a brief overview of the whole region issue, please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code.

If you would be interested in ordering DVDs that are not available in our region, please be sure to contact the library.

7 Things You Should Know About Wikipedia

Take a look at "7 Things You Should Know About Wikipedia", a recent publication of Educause. This two page document answers essential questions about the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Students use it, faculty use it, even librarians use it (it's linked from our web site). What should we know to get the most out of it and guide others to avoid fallacy pitfalls? Well, read the document!

Some call it leisure . . . we call it literacy!

Just when I was planning to promote our revitalized arrangement of new and popular books in the library (and our nifty Playaways), a possible crisis in literacy came to my attention. Zounds! Coincidence? . . . . I think not!

First, the library has long been committed to providing recreational or leisure reading opportunities along with our more scholarly fare. We have formed a new location for you to browse these items right by the blue chairs in our reference area. Since the 1971-72 school year, the library has leased the "McNaughton Collection" of popular fiction and non-fiction books. Ably chosen by Belinda Martindell since 1990 (or thereabouts), the McNaughtons offer over two hundred titles for your reading pleasure. They are inter-shelved with our New Book collection, a selection of titles ordered by faculty and staff members and managed by Diane Miller.

In addition to these books, we have a growing collection of Playaway digital audio devices. We are just about to nearly double the size of this collection by adding 40 new titles. You can browse the Playaways right next to the McNaughton and New Book area. You can also run a keyword search for "playaway" in the catalog. It's mainly popular adult fiction, with some children's fiction and a few non-fiction titles.

All right, now the potential literacy crisis: are college graduates growing less literate? Are they reading less for personal enjoyment? The following articles were suggested as background reading for an upcoming discussion at the American Library Association annual conference next week, entitled "Aren't There Any Good Books Here? (Un)Required Reading and the Academic Library":

• “A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century” (NCES) at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006470

• Dillon, Sam. “Literacy Falls for Graduates from College, Testing Finds,” The New York Times, December 16, 2005 at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/education/16literacy.html

• Elliott, Julie. “Academic Libraries and Extracurricular Reading Promotion,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 46:3 (Spring 2007): 34-43.

• Feller, Ben. “Johnny Still Can’t Read – In College,” The Globe and Mail, January 20, 2006 at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060120.wliter0120/BNStory/International/

• MacAdam, Barbara. “Sustaining the Culture of the Book: The Role of Enrichment Reading and Critical Thinking in the Undergraduate Curriculum,” Library Trends 44:2 (Fall 1995): 237-63.

Is there anything we can do about this? Well, fear not . . . the above resources can help. We all need a little relaxation, stimulation, and satisfaction that can be gained from reading or listening to a good book.

A Periodical Update: the Popular and the Current

In case you ever wondered what the most popular periodicals in the Library were, here's your answer. We haven't done a count like this since 2004/2005 (which you can check for comparison), but it seemed like a good time. We are unable to track online use of the more than 30,000 full-text periodicals we offer through our databases (at least specific counts to the Middletown campus), but we do track uses of our over 250 current newspaper, magazine, and journal subscriptions.

But before I get to the list, let me mention that we have moved our Current Periodicals shelving over into our reference area. Now you can browse our periodicals collection at a glance, pick out a title to review, and sit in our comfy laptop chairs or at a table. Periodic bliss!

And now, for the 2006/2007 academic year, the top 20 periodicals were:

1. Washington Post
2. Cincinnati Enquirer
3. Publishers Weekly
4. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neo-Natal Nursing
5. Chicago Tribune
6. Time
7. Nursing Times
8. Los Angeles Times
9. Better Homes and Gardens
10. Middletown Journal
11. Rolling Stone
12. Booklist
13. National Wildlife
14. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School
15. Writing Center Journal
16. Ebony
17. Library Journal
18. Health
19. Dayton Daily News
20. American Journal of Nursing

Library Summer Hours

Our summer hours have just been posted to our Hours page. The Library will switch to opening from 8:00 - 5:00 Monday through Friday (closed Saturdays and Sundays) following the last day of exams (May 4th). We will then start our summer hours on May 14th at the beginning of Summer I.

The main change in our summer hours is that we'll close at 8:00 on Mondays through Thursdays rather than at 9:00.

Be sure to check our detailed schedule at the page above for other closures or shifts in hours. Have a great summer!

Springer E-Books Now Available Through OhioLINK

OhioLINK has recently signed an agreement with Springer Publishers to purchase a large number of their books in electronic format. The collection may be browsed or searched at http://proxy.lib.muohio.edu/login?url=http://www.springerlink.com/books/ (a link will be placed on our web site shortly). A wide variety of subject areas are covered in the collection.

We currently have access to 5,321 titles published between 2005 and 2007, with an additional 1,806 titles from 2007 expected to become available before long. There are currently some 16,000 e-books available through the SpringerLink address given above, and the ones that MU students, faculty, and staff may access are those with a green square by their titles (after clicking on a given title and selecting a chapter, click on the PDF link on the right side of the screen to view the chapter in full-text). It is OhioLINK's plan to link our purchased titles from their own server in the near future to make browsing and searching more clear.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments on using these titles. Other notable e-book collections available through OhioLINK include NetLibrary, Electronic Reference Books (ABC-CLIO), and the History E-Books Project

New Digital Media Center look arrives!

OhioLINK’s new and improved Digital Media Center interface will go live on Monday, March 26. The Digital Media Center includes visual and video collections in art and architecture, history, the sciences, and a broad selection of multi-subject digital videos. See it all at http://dmc.ohiolink.edu.

Textbooks on Reserve: new look; collection grows

Students are regularly using the Library's Textbooks on Reserve collection, and now our list of the courses and textbooks included has grown easier to navigate. The list now includes the course number, the author and title of the textbook, and the name of the instructor who is using that text (unless all instructors for a given course are using the same text). The text titles are linked to the online reserve system so that you can see if a particular text is available or checked out.

We ask for your help in publicizing the textbook collection to your students, advisees, or classmates. Faculty members may wish to review the list to ensure that we have listed their textbooks correctly.

The Library is extremely grateful to the Engineering Technology (ENT) department for their decision to use departmental library funds to purchase 15 textbooks for 14 of their courses. Those textbooks will be added to the collection and to the web site shortly.

Those 14 courses join 33 others with textbooks already provided by the project, and 16 more courses for which faculty members have provided textbooks. If my math is correct (and I have the proper textbooks to consult), there are now textbooks on reserve for 63 courses offered at Miami Middletown. Awesome!

Group Study Area reopens

The library's Group Study Area has reopened for use on our lower floor. Tucked just to the left of the stairway to the library's main floor, the Group Study Area offers students a dedicated study area for group or individual use. The area includes a variety of seating options, wireless access, and room for up to 45 people.



We hope that students will find this a useful space to get away for quiet individual study, or for group discussions and study sessions. If you have questions on reserving the area or other uses, please consult the Group Study Area Policy.

Spring Break hours

For Spring Break week, the library will be closed on Saturday and Sunday, March 10 & 11, and then open from 8:00-5:00 on the following Monday through Friday. We will also be closed on Saturday, March 17, returning to our normal hours on Sunday, March 18 (opening from 1:00-5:00).

Have a happy and safe Spring Break!

Heard a Good Book Lately? Try a Playaway!

The Library is pleased to announce the addition of 45 Playaway digital audio books to our collection. Playaways are small devices (half the size of a deck of cards) that come preloaded with an audio book. We provide you with the Playaway and a AAA battery, you provide the earbuds, headphones, or speakers, and your listening enjoyment begins.

Want to listen to your Playaway in the car? Then check out an FM transmitter when you choose your Playway title. We can also provide you with earbuds for $1.

Playaways check out for a three week loan and may be renewed (just like our other books). They are located in a red shelving unit in our reference area.

For more information on what Playaways are and how they work, please see the Playaway "How to Play" page. For a list of the titles we have purchased, see these search results from the MU Library Catalog.

If you have any questions, or recommendations of titles to purchase, please let us know.

Faculty: need to place items on reserve?

The Library is pleased to provide class materials provided by instructors for the use of their students. We can keep items physically in the Library, or articles or book chapters may be placed on E-Reserves. More explanation of these options is available on our Course Reserves page.

A couple of key points to remember:

(1) Sufficient lead time is extremely helpful to us in ensuring that items are added in a timely fashion. A minimum of two business days is needed for physical reserves, and, particularly at this point in the semester, a week for e-reserves.

(2) Faculty need to fill out a reserve request form to ensure that the reserve is processed correctly. The form is available in the Library, but may also be downloaded here as a PDF. Or, use our online Reserve Request Form.

MLK, Jr. Weekend closing

In recognition and celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Library will be closed on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (January 13,14, and 15). We will return to our normal hours on Tuesday, January 16, opening at 8:00am and closing at 9:00pm.

Even More Textbooks on Reserve!

Thanks to Miami Middletown Student Government (MMSG) funding, donated textbooks, and the provision of personal copies by MUM faculty members, the Library's collection of Textbooks on Reserve has increased! Ten additional textbooks were added between Fall and Spring Semesters, making five new courses available (including ACC 221, 222; MUS 185, 189; GLG 141; and now all sections of PSY 111). There are now 45 courses which have at least their main textbooks on reserve, 33 of which were provided through a combination of donations, MMSG funds, and Library funds. The full list of represented courses is available at http://www.mid.muohio.edu/library/textbooks.cfm (links to new textbook titles will be added shortly).

Once again, we hope that the Textbooks on Reserve will be beneficial to students who are unable to purchase (or are delayed in purchasing) required textbooks, or who forget to bring their textbooks to campus. The ready availability of these sources should enhance student learning since the sources are on hand for easy use. One copy of each textbook is available, and the books may be checked out for two-hour use.

The Library asks for your help in making students aware of the program. As well, if we have overlooked a course for inclusion or if you have a textbook to donate, please let us know. If there are any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact John Burke.