NYT 10 Best Books of 2008

The New York Times recently published its "10 Best Books" list - selected from the 100 Notable Books of 2008 list published a couple of weeks ago. The Library will acquire the 10 Best; which of the remaining 90 do you think the BSC Library should acquire: All of them, because they are "Notable"? Just some of them, because only a certain fraction of them support the BSC curriculum (which is the mission of the library)? Or none of them, because the printed book may soon be obsolete?

Library hours for the next couple of months

The Library hours for the coming couple of months may be found at this LINK. Generally, library materials don’t come due on days we are closed, nor do days we are closed count toward fines. Remember that you may view your library account by selecting My Account from the catalog and see what materials you have checked out, and any fines. You may also renew eligible library materials. See the blog entry of October 6th for more details. Also, for students (not faculty), all ILL Books are due December 8th (Monday). We will not do any renewals for books due December 8th. ILL will be closed for student requests from December 8th through January 4th. We will be open again for ILL requests Monday, January 5th. Have a safe and good Holiday season!! Steve Laughlin and the Library staff

Podcast of Dr. Guy Hubbs' presentation: Four (of Many) Ways to Write a Book

The BSC Library is pleased to share this podcast of Guy Hubbs' Provost Forum of November 6, 2008. This is an experiment on our part which may serve as a prototype of future podcast of Common Hours and other events on Campus. Podcasting will allow us to share these rich events with potential students, alumni, and each other.

At this Link you will find a web page with the images from Dr. Hubbs' presentation and the talk broken into five sections to accompany the images. At the end of the web page is a link to the entire podcast and the question and answer session.

The Library is eager to hear your opinion of the presentation format, as well as your opinion of the quality of the recording, and any other comments you may have. We appreciate the support of the IT department, especially Jan Pontia, and our own Geri Worley. Enjoy!!

(By the way, no claim of accuracy is made for this alleged likeness that Professor Hubbs provided) Link to podcast Steve Laughlin

International companies added to Mergent

The Library is happy to announce the addition of the International Companies component to our Mergent Online subscription. This is a significant addition to the tools available for research into public companies. We have added both the International Companies Data and the International Companies Archive. Additionally, we have added Industry Reports for Latin America, and Mergent's Factsheets Plus. Factsheets are the online version of the standard reference tool Mergent's Handbook of Common Stocks and Handbook of NASDAQ Stocks. These are available by selecting a company, then selecting "TearSheets" from the tabs across the top of the company entry. Here is an example of a company factsheet:

Please contact the Library with any questions.

Steve Laughlin

Library Trials

No, not the Perry Mason, jury and court room kind. You may have noticed on the Library home page a new graphic listing database trials. Through the several consortia in which the BSC library participates, we have the opportunity to try databases which may be of interest to the College community. These trials are usually for a limited time period, generally for a few weeks to a month. Try out the trials and let us know what you think of these products! Steve Laughlin

The lighter side of research

For those who missed media coverage of the Ig Nobel prizes, awarded earlier this month, it's not too late to check out such creative studies as: The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835) and You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations For further enlightenment, visit the Improbable Research web site: http://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2008

New Books and Periodicals Shelves Relocated!

The new book shelves, as well as the current newspaper shelves have been moved to a new location at the front of the main floor. As you can see from the photo, the new location is between the entrance and exit doors. We have also added a current magazine browsing area. The current issues of a dozen popular magazines may now be found on the circular table in front of the new book shelves. Enjoy!! Steve Laughlin

Open Access Day - October 14, 2008

Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public. Read more in the full Press Release. Steve Laughlin

Patron Empowerment, or what you can do with your My Account on our catalog

Patron empowerment is a fancy term to describe your ability to look at your current library circulation activities on our Online Catalog. You may access your activities by clicking the "My Account" button toward the top of the library catalog: From My Account you can review bills and checkouts, review and cancel hold requests, view library messages and requests, and reply to library messages. Steve Laughlin

New Color Printer at BSC Library

The Library has a new COLOR PRINTER!!! The new HP Color LaserJet 4700n is located at the circulation desk, and may be used with the four PCs in the library to which scanners are attached. There are two PCs with scanners on the main floor and two on the ground floor in the ARC lab. The color printer funding was provided jointly by the Student Government Association (SGA) and the BSC Information Technology department. Our thanks to both! Steve Laughlin

Aaaaah... comfy furniture!

Thanks to the generosity of the Class of 2008, the Library now has some additional new furniture on the first floor -- including sofas, chairs with ottomans, and the ever-popular (but frequently misunderstood) "bongo stools." While the furniture looks elegant all by itself, it looks even better when in use... so please come on by, grab the reading material of your choice, and "set a spell!"

SGA and BSC Library add video games

We are happy to announce the addition of video games to our collection of leisure materials provided through the BSC Library and funded by the Student Government Association. The collection is small currently, but will grow. Feel free to suggest new titles. We currently have games for the Wii, XBOX 360 and PS3. We have also dedicated a new area of shelves on which our new video titles are displayed. As always, please feel free to suggest new titles. Steve Laughlin

BSC Library adds access to ScienceDirect!

Born out of an Elsevier® tradition in scholarly communication, ScienceDirect has always followed a vision of the digital library of the future. Today we offer one of the world's most advanced web delivery systems for scientific, technical and medical information. ScienceDirect contains over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information. ScienceDirect's extensive and unique full-text collection covers authoritative titles from the core scientific literature, including high-impact factor titles such as THE LANCET, Cell and Tetrahedron. We have licensce the College Edition, containing more than 1,800 journals, and our coverage begins with 1995. This is a great addition to our online holdings in three three areas in which the College Edition covers, Health & Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social & Behavioral Sciences. We hope you try ScienceDirect soon and let us know what you think. Steve Laughlin

Latest Acquisitions

The Library's summer acquisitions are now available, listed by academic subject. Click here http://www.bsc.edu/bsclibrary/new-books.htm

New Library Research Toolkit

Pam has really done it this time. No, really. This thing is great--not just for students but for anyone scholar needing a quick answer on how to proceed. We should have had this years ago. Click here to see what I'm writing about. --Guy

Welcome, New Students!

... and welcome back, returning students!

The Library and ARC held our new student orientation sessions in the library this morning. Kim Thomas and Julia Matson spoke with students about the Academic Resource Center and its services; Geri Worley provided an overview of some of the information technology available to students on campus; Pam Sawallis and Steve Laughlin discussed library databases and other services; and Stacey Thornberry energetically led students on tours of the building and its collections. We were generally pleased with the turnout - and we thank the peer advisors and SOS for their help with this part of orientation! If you missed the library orientation, or found your interest piqued by one of the sessions, please note that the first 3 Common Hours of the semester have been set aside by the Provost to follow up on some of the information we quickly breezed through today:

Tuesday, September 2 Getting Comfortable with Blackboard & Office 2007 Time / Place: 11 a.m. / Library Auditorium Presenter: Geri Worley, Library Systems & Accounts Manager

Thursday, September 4 College-Level Writing & the Writing Center Time / Place: 11 a.m. / Writing Center (Humanities Center 102) Presenter: Rachel Clevenger, Writing Center Director Tuesday, September 9 That First Research Paper: You Can Do It, We Can Help Time / Place: 11 a.m. / Library Auditorium Presenters: Guy Hubbs, Steve Laughlin & Pamela Sawallis, Reference Librarians Please plan on attending 1, 2, or (gasp) even all 3 of these Common Hours, as your schedule permits. We hope to see you there!

Biological Abstracts now available

Welcome back to the spring term. We have some exciting new information sources available now. The first is Biological Abstracts, which is a very important resource for biology and related fields. We had previously subscribed to a subset of Biological Abstracts (called Basic Biosis), but when that product was discontinued, and the database from 1997 forward. Biological Abstracts works well with our Articles@BSC linking service to our e-journals.