Monday, October 29, 2012

Finding Your Subject Librarian

by Annie Smith, Reference/Instruction Librarian

Your subject librarian is your link to requesting books and videos for the Library's collections, teaching workshops for your upper division class, and designing great library assignments. If you're not sure who your subject librarian is, just visit the list here.

We'd love to hear from you!

Monday, October 22, 2012

News from the George Sutherland Archives

By Catherine McIntyre, Archivist


Welcome back! We’ve had a busy spring and summer and are looking forward to adding more archival and digital collections throughout the coming year. Toward that end, I’d also like to ask all of you to contribute any historical or scholarly materials that you or your students may have, such as departmental or committee proceedings, publications, research materials, scholarly class projects (oral histories, etc.) student theses, and so on. These types of items help document and preserve the ongoing
history and scholarly endeavors of Utah Valley University faculty and students.

New Archives Collection

Unknown Civil War soldier.
Tintype with gold foil.
From the Sutherland Archives.
We received a donation last spring from area businessman Steve Zolman which consists of materials collected by and about the John Varah Long family, his descendants, and their families. John Varah Long (1826–1869) was a personal clerk to LDS Church second president Brigham Young, but  fell out
of favor with him, was excommunicated, and reportedly died mysteriously. Long’s death was, as the
rumor goes, because he had overheard Brigham Young’s instructions to George Albert Smith regarding actions related to the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

The majority of this collection is from the Hance and Watson families, who were in-laws, descendants, or other relatives of John V. Long. It includes many ambrotypes and photographs, as well as scrapbooks, personal papers, correspondence, legal documents, mining documents,  genealogical records, stock certificates, and other miscellaneous items. It is now completely processed and ready for use by interested researchers, with a detailed finding aid available online at http://contentdm.uvu.edu/u?/UVUfindaid,290.

Digitization

We have been awarded a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant of $10,000 toward digitizing the student newspaper back to 1966! Just like UVU, the student newspaper has gone by several names reflecting its changing role, from The Tradewinds to the UTC Press, to the College Times and now the UVU Review.

These papers, which contain a wealth of historical information, have been housed in the student newspaper--morgue--under the care of Robbin Anthony, and we are looking forward to working with her to make them freely searchable and accessible online for the first time!

UVU Digital Repository  

We now have 183 student theses online in our UVU Digital Repository. This collection Includes undergraduate Honors and Integrated Studies theses as well as Master’s theses from the Education and Nursing graduate programs.

Nook eReaders Available for Check Out

Nook Color

As the publishing world changes, so must the Library. We offer thousands of titles in our eBook collections (available through the Library’s online catalog). Barnes and Noble’s Nook eReaders represent a likely future for publishing and reading.

We have Nook Touch eReaders and Nook Color eReaders available for check out at the first floor Circulation Desk. The Nooks come preloaded with over fifty titles from classic and current fiction and may be checked out for three weeks. More titles will become available during the academic year.

For the past year, we've also been filling interlibrary loan requests with Nooks. When you next request a book through this services, you may be offered the choice of "Paper or digital?"

Friday, October 19, 2012

Librarian Spotlight: Catherine McIntyre

Catherine McIntyre is our archivist. She holds a Master of Library Science from Brigham Young University and a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Utah.

You can learn more about our amazing George Sutherland Archives here.

Monday, October 15, 2012

New Databases


By Annie Smith, Reference/Instruction Librarian

In the past year, the Library has added several new databases in education, the sciences, and the social sciences.

TeachingBooks is a specialized resource for future teachers and education professionals. It offers a wealth of materials and activities designed to promote literacy in K-12 students. This database makes matching up resources to specific books a snap.

The Library has had access to Chemical Abstracts for a number of years but we recently renegotiated our access with the vendor to offer direct access. We recently added a link to our list of databases to instantly search for chemistry research, conference proceedings, patents, dissertations, and much more.

ArXiv is a free online collection of prepublication articles from a wide variety of physical and life sciences as well as mathematics. The articles available in this database are not quite in their final form,
but they are freely available. ArXiv is maintained by Cornell University’s library. They welcome submissions from scholars around the world. For more information about ArXiv, visit http://arxiv.org/.

The Library also purchased access to The Mental Measurements Yearbook online through EBSCO. The
MMY can be found on our list of databases. This resource has been published by the Buros Center for
Testing for decades and offers information that’s not available anywhere else. Testing is a key source of information in the social sciences. While it doesn’t offer access to the tests themselves, the MMY specializes in descriptions and evaluations of hundreds of different tests. Our subscription includes every issue of The Mental Measurements Yearbook from volume one, published in 1938, to the present.

Friday, October 12, 2012

Librarian Spotlight: Ben Wilson

Ben Wilson serves as instruction coordinator and subject librarian for business and law.

Ben holds a Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of North Texas and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management. He is currently working on a Bachelor of Science in Digital Media.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Faculty Checkout Period Extended


Did you know faculty can now check out books for a whole semester? We are pleased to announce that the faculty loan period for books is now 16 weeks. To renew items, bring your books to the first floor Circulation Desk, and we will renew them for an additional 16 weeks. Check out periods remain the same for all other items. If you need DVDs or videos for extended classroom use, please contact Christy Cathro Goodnight at x7421 for assistance.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Librarian Spotlight: Mike Freeman

Mike Freeman, our current director holds a Master of Library Science from the University of Missouri--Columbia, and a Master of Science in History from the University of Utah. He also has a Bachelor degree in English Education (also from UM-Columbia).

Mike has been at UVU since 1993.

Monday, October 1, 2012

New One Stop Shopping Research Tool


By Mark Stevens, Systems Librarian

During the summer, a UVU Library committee pursued a one stop shopping research resource to allow searchers to find articles, books, and media simultaneously for all subjects. Dubbed OneSearch, the result has been quietly rolled out as a new link on the Library’s homepage.

We believe that this new tool will provide a general improvement in user friendliness increasing the number of relevant hits for a given search. Full text articles can be located more quickly and easily than through the old methods. A formatted citation (MLA, APA, etc.) can be automatically generated for books and videos in the Library collections (expanding upon the same ability that EBSCO has provided in the past for article citations). Searchers can save sources to folders as well. For those of you who are expert researchers, please rest assured that your favorite databases are still available for specialized research.

You may note that OneSearch’s interface looks similar to a typical EBSCO database and reacts to both Boolean search syntax as well as natural language phrases that a person might enter into Google. Limiters are found on the left of the results page, and search expanders may be found on the right.
We continue fine tuning to the software configuration. We eventually want to have the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) form populated automatically from the database to save users’ time.

As you have feedback, questions, or suggestions, please contact your subject librarian or call the Reference Desk at x8840. Thank you for helping us test this new research tool.