Category Archives: Middlebury Community Interest

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)

Summer Reading!

Summer’s almost here! The library has added 30 new titles to our print browsing collection, and another 30 (including many non-English titles) to our collection of e- and audiobooks (go/overdrive/). These books are available for borrowing by the entire College community, so enjoy the copious Vermont sun with some lemonade and a new book!

Customer Purchases of Technology

Great news!  College faculty and staff can purchase many computer peripherals directly through Oracle Finance purchasing system.  Purchasing with this new system gives you the ability to price, budget, order, and directly receive items.  In addition, you will be able to track shipping and confirm charges are correct. We are here to guide, and recommend items you might be looking for; feel free to give us a call or email the ITS Helpdesk.  The Middlebury College Bookstore also has many accessory items in stock and can direct you to what will work for your setup.  

PURCHASE THROUGH ITS

Although you can purchase your own office peripherals, cables, and such, please remember you must work with ITS on purchases of computers, tablets, specialty monitors, and printers, as well as projectors, network switches, software, and TVs.  This will ensure you receive educational discounts, proper licensing, and appropriate warranties on college-supported equipment.  College funded computer purchases must be coordinated with Information Technology Services (ITS) prior to ordering, so ITS may review the specifications to ensure the equipment is compatible with the Middlebury College environment plus confirm in-house support is available.  For example, there are items ITS does not support, like departmentally purchased printers, or non-standard model computers.

PURCHASE ON YOUR OWN

We have put together a list of common accessories our campus customers have requested and we have tested.  Because items come and go in availability, and pricing changes, this list may go out of date.  Like I said, feel free to check in with the Middlebury College Bookstore or with us at the ITS Helpdesk, we are here to help.

Exam hours at the Davis Family Library

The Davis Family Library will be open until 2 am starting Monday night, May 6th. Regular hours resume for Friday and Saturday, May 10th and 11th, then the 2 am closing will be in place for Sunday night through Thursday night.  Regular hours resume for Friday and Saturday, May 17th and 18th.   2 am closing resumes for Sunday and Monday, then both Davis and Armstrong Libraries will close at 10 pm on Tuesday, May 21st.   A reminder that you will need your college ID to access the building after 9 pm.

Armstrong Library will have regular hours until May 21st.

A full calendar of the hours can be found at go/hours

Adobe Creative Cloud 2019: Available in Labs by June

Adobe logo

Adobe Creative Cloud 2018 is being replaced with version 2019 in the computer labs this June of 2019. New integration with the Adobe Cloud in CC 2019 may eventually bring exciting developments, allowing cloud storage of documents and settings, as well as access to some applications that rely on the cloud to run. Syncing to the cloud is not currently enabled in the computer labs.

What this means to you: when opening an Adobe Creative Cloud application on a lab computer, you will be prompted to log into Adobe. Faculty, staff, and students of Middlebury’s degree programs may use their Middlebury account credentials. If/when prompted, choose the option to sign in with an “Enterprise ID.” You may also opt to use a personal Adobe ID for this purpose, if you prefer. They are free and easy to set up.

Faculty and Staff of the undergraduate college and the institute may be interested in the installation options outlined in our past blog post about Adobe CC 2019 availability.

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!

ITS Tech Services Overview Offered March 11 – for New (or not-so-new) Hires

Information Technology Services (ITS) offers a monthly workshop with recent hires in mind called “ITS & You:  Technology Services Overview.”  The next session will be held Monday, March 11 at 1:30 p.m.  We’ll introduce services and resources provided by ITS to all Middlebury campus employees, including: email, file storage, account security, online learning, and how to obtain computing help.  The workshop format will be a presentation with questions entertained along the way, followed by an optional half hour for hands-on assistance with specific questions.

To sign up, please use our online form.  Although geared toward new or recent hires, everyone is welcome to attend – you might surprise yourself with an “aha” moment or two.

Next month’s session will be held on Wednesday, April 24 at 1:30 pm.  Our complete workshop schedule can be viewed at http://go/techworkshops/.

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.