Category Archives: Library News

Experience the Library in Your Language

Finding your way around the library takes time, and we know that during summer language schools, time is scarce!  That’s why we’ve created guides to the library for every summer language, from Spanish, to Hebrew to Experience the library in your languageChinese and more. Browse a complete list of guides here.

Each guide is curated by a Middlebury librarian to help you find what you need quickly.  We provide links to lists of in-language books, search tips, and answers to questions that have been asked by other students.

Most importantly,  each guide includes contact information for a librarian who can help. Use the “Schedule Appointment” button to sign up for a one-on-one research consultation with your librarian. Talk with us about what you’re working on — and save yourself some time!

Find your research guide at go.middlebury.edu/guides.

Interlibrary Loan Service changes

Dear Library Patrons:
You may have noticed that turnaround times to complete ILL requests
have of late at times been slightly longer than in the past.  As a
result of workforce planning, we have reduced the number of staff
working in this department by .5 FTE. We will of course continue to
fill requests as quickly as we can, but do bear this in mind when
submitting requests with hard deadlines. Please note the following as
well:

* ILL requests submitted with incomplete or erroneous bibliographic
information may be returned to you as unfulfilled and/or in need of
additional information

* ILL staff may not be able to devote quite as much time as in the
past to filling requests for particularly rare or hard-to-acquire
items

You should continue to use our online form
(http://go.middlebury.edu/illiad) to submit ILL requests and as noted
above, provide as much and as accurate bibliographic information as
possible.  If you need to speak to a member of our dedicated ILL
staff, you can stop by the Davis Family Library circulation desk
during the following hours:

Monday – Thursday9am-5pm
Friday: 9am-3pm

We apologize for any inconvenience these changes may cause. If you have questions or comments about these changes, please feel free to contact:

Michael Roy, Dean of Libraries (mdroy@middlebury.edu)

Terry Simpkins, Director, Access and Discovery Services (tsimpkin@middlebury.edu)

Mental Health Awareness Month

Literatures and Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer interviews Madeline “Maddie” Hope, the Assistant Director of Health & Wellness Education, for Mental Health Awareness Month. Visit the Davis Family Library to engage with a thematic display on this topic. Credits go to Dr. Raquel Albarrán of the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies and students Jayla Johnson, Class of 2021, and Myles Maxie, Class of 2022, for the display’s design. Special thanks to Barbara Walter, Kat Cyr, Laura Kearley and Joseph Watson.

Professor Raquel Albarrán, Myles Maxie and Librarian Katrina Spencer pose with the Mental Health Awareness Month Display.
Professor Raquel Albarrán, Myles Maxie, Class of 2022, and Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer set up the Mental Health Awareness Month Display in the Davis Family Library lobby.

Katrina Spencer (KS): Hi, who are you? How long have you been here? What do you do on campus?

Maddie Hope (MH): Hi! I’m Maddie Hope. I’ve worked at Middlebury since July of 2018. I am a Health Educator, which means I provide trainings, one-on-one discussions and programs about topics related to health and wellness for students. My areas of focus are mental health, alcohol use and cannabis use. Come visit me in the Health and Wellness Education Office on the second floor of the Service Building. We have a massage chair!

Assistant Director of Health & Wellness Education Maddie Hope provides answers to important questions.

KS: What do you know about the display in the Davis Family Library?

MH: I know the display is focused on decreasing stigma related to discussing mental health challenges and providing different resources that can be accessed for support.

KS: Why is it important to reduce stigma surrounding mental health and illness?

MH: So often when people are struggling with mental health, they are also having a hard time connecting to themselves or others and stigma, or judgment, can make this problem worse. Stigma about mental health and mental illness is often the largest barrier to seeking support and feeling understood. These are two of the most important curative factors for mental health challenges. When we seek to understand the challenges others are facing rather than meeting them with judgment, we pave the way for healing.

KS: What resources are available on campus? To students? Staff? Faculty?

MH: For students, there is the Parton Center for Health and Wellness. Students can choose to speak to a counselor or a health care provider for mental health support. To make an appointment with a counselor, students can call 802-443-5141, or visit their office on the third floor of Centeno House. You can also read about counseling staff on campus at go/counseling/. If students are interested in meeting with a health care provider, they can call 802-443-3290, or visit their office on the first floor of Centeno House to make an appointment.

For staff and faculty, Human Resources provides a confidential service called Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP) which can provide short-term counseling services on a variety of topics and serve as a referral source for more long term services. More information can be found at go/EFAP/ or by inquiring with Human Resources.

KS: Are there any mental health counselors of color? And if not, what can community members do when they are seeking cultural familiarity and competency in their mental health care services?

MH: The Counseling staff at Middlebury is predominantly white-identified, but the counseling center is commiting to actively recruiting counselors of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.

This can certainly be a challenge. Community members have a few options here. It might be valuable to consider beginning an online counseling relationship. It may be helpful to search for a clinician in your home community or in Burlington, VT. Some counselors may be open to meeting completely online, or have a few sessions in person and then offer online appointments.

A few resources for finding a therapist who can provide cultural familiarity include:

a screenshot of Therapy for Black Girls
A screenshot from the online directory Therapy for Black Girls

For additional reading and listening about how mental health challenges can be different for people of color consider the following:

KS: Thank you for those resources above. How might the Health and Wellness Education Office and the Libraries collaborate in reducing the stigma surrounding mental health?

MH: Often the library can be a place students experience many overwhelming emotions (e.g. feeling fatigued from studying, experiencing frustration or hopelessness about assignments or workload). I can see some exciting potential to explore having consistent stress management events in the library for students, faculty and staff to enjoy. Providing opportunities to explore strategies to address overwhelming emotions together helps to show support for those who may have a hard time discussing mental health challenges with others.

KS: Brilliant. Thank you for your time. Students, keep a look out for the Health & Wellness Education’s Stressbusters Calendar out May 6th!

Audiobooks on OverDrive and You

What are audiobooks?

a librarian at desk
Literatures & Cultures Librarian Katrina Spencer poses at the Research Desk, modeling audiobook use with sex columnist Dan Savage’s American Savage.

Audiobooks on OverDrive are digital versions of a book, often a novel, that allow you to listen to a book’s text. Many come in downloadable MP3 format files and are therefore portable on many electronic devices like iPods. Sometimes the authors read their works to you with modest sound effects or other dramatizations of the story or action! Audiobooks can also be found on CDs in the Middlebury College Libraries’ collection. See a thorough listing here.

Why might I want use them?

If it’s hard to find still moments to sit down and open a print work or scroll through an ebook, audiobooks offer a hands-free alternative to the other formats. So, you can carry out household chores, drive, or even exercise while listening to an audiobook.

Where can I see what’s available?


A screenshot representing a small sample of the ~200 audiobooks available at go.middlebury.edu/overdrive.

In terms of what the Middlebury College Libraries holds on OverDrive, just visit go.middlebury.edu/overdrive for access to over 200 audiobooks. If you’re a Vermont resident and a holder of a public library card, you can access 5,000+ titles through the Green Mountain Library Consortium. See go.middlebury.edu/gmlc for more information and use your last name in all caps, ex. ALI, as your password.

Do you have any recommendations?

Book cover art for Eddie Huang’s memoir, Fresh Off the Boat

Yes, sure! But that depends on what you like. One of my favorite parts of my job is readers’ advisory. Look at the bolded type for genre:

  • If you want a psychological thriller in the realm of domestic noir, I recommend The Silent Wife.
  • If dystopian fantasy is what you’re into, Director of Access and Discovery Terry Simpkins and Library Associate Kat Cyr swear by N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Series.
  • If you want to access a classic and haven’t gotten around to it, Things Fall Apart is available.
  • Social justice? Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is sure to please and enlighten. And Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed also deeply engages systemic injustice.
  • Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer lit? I really enjoyed Less. Dr. Marcos Rohena-Madrazo of the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies is a big fan of Redefining Realness.
  • Humor? Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay.
  • Disability studies? Good Kings Bad Kings is on the docket.
  • Then there’s also historical non-fiction like The War Before the War.
  • Historical fiction? Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Underground Railroad is recommendable.
  • And we have memoirs like Michelle Obama’s Becoming— though you may have to wait awhile to get to this one. See my review of it in The Campus, in the meanwhile.
  • Oh, and if you’re studying a foreign language like Spanish, you’ve got about 10 works to choose from on OverDrive and several on CDs in many languages found in the foreign language browsing collection on the main level of the Davis Family Library.

There’s a lot out there!

How can I use them and what should I know about the app?

There are three basic steps for accessing audiobooks:

a flyer advertisement
A flyer with detailed instructions on how to use OverDrive’s audiobooks, a condensed version reproduced at left
  1. Download the OverDrive app, create an original account and after signing in, add the Davis Family Library.
  2. When prompted to sign in with a library card, accept, but use your Middlebury credentials instead.
  3. Make a selection, borrow and manage your ebookshelf.

Also, when in doubt, you are welcome to ask a librarian for help or visit the guide found at go.middlebury.edu/ebookguide. With regard to the OverDrive app, there are some cool options like setting a timer for when you want the recording to stop playing, for example, if you’re getting in bed to sleep, and adjusting the speed of the player if you want to move through some text more quickly or more slowly than others. There’s some bookmarking, too.

Book cover art
Book covert art for Harriet McBryde Johnson’s Accidents of Nature

For how long can I borrow audiobooks?

There are two loan periods: 7 days and 14 days. Know that only one user will use each audiobook at a time. So, if desirable, you can place a hold on a work if you want to be in line for when a popular item is released. Check out up to three audiobooks at a time!

Last words?

They’ve changed my life, for the better. I hope they are of use to you, too. Also, to hear more from Middlebury audiobook users, see this week’s issue of The Campus.

Update on New York Times access

New York TimesYou may be aware that we’ve had an access problem with the New York Times web site over the past few months. The short version of the issue is that SGA was providing online access until NYT discontinued that program…which no one on campus realized until our access ceased (there’s more detail in this Campus article). The Times’ new program is extremely expensive, and the library’s funding for this fiscal year was set last year. Partial access is still available; would that full access were, and we wish an immediate solution were at hand. We haven’t given up, though, and are still working on the problem. Please feel free to contact Douglas Black, Head of Collections Management, for more information.

Links to our remaining options for online access access to the NYT are in the Journals list New York Times. (You can get to this list on your own by clicking on the “Journals” tab on the library home page and searching for “new york times.”) For today’s paper, select “Global Newsstream,” a database that provides NYT articles with full text but without images. Need help? Ask a librarian.

Write-In 2018

a flyer

Come Visit the 4th Annual Middlebury Write-In, Wednesday, December 5th, from 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m. in Davis Family Library 201 or the Anderson Freeman Center.

On Wednesday, December 5th, from 8:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m., supported by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR), the 4th Annual Middlebury Write-In will be held. Students can receive writing assistance from tutors and research help from librarians in Davis Family Library 201 or in the Anderson Freeman Center. Snacks will be served. For more information, visit go.middlebury.edu/writein.

Books

Interlibrary Loan Winter Break Service Update – 2018

Books

Due to the holidays, shipping madness, the increased risk of losses, and the lack of open libraries willing to send things, the Interlibrary Loan Department limits ordering and shipping during the second half of December.

If you need anything before winter break request it now!  Interlibrary loan requests submitted to ILLiad after Dec. 15th will be ordered in early January.

ILLiad article requests will continue to be filled by RapidILL through Dec. 22st, but requests must have a valid ISSN and year to be processed by Rapid.

Use Worldcat to find your citations and submit your loan requests!

 

You can now receive library circulation notices via text message

The library now offers patrons the option of receiving circulation notices via text message. If you choose to opt in, you will get overdue, hold pickup, and courtesy notices on your phone, in addition to via email. To opt in, login to My MIDCAT at go/renew, click the “Modify Personal Info” button, enter your mobile phone number, check the “Opt in” box, read the conditions, and click “Submit”. Opt out at any time by following the same procedure and unchecking the “Opt in” button. Contact library_circulation@middlebury.edu with any questions.