Author Archives: Richard Jenkins

LIS at the Student Services Fair

Last Friday,  LIS had plenty of representation at the First-Year ‘Student Services Fair,’ which was held concurrently with the Academic Forum in (a steamy hot)Kenyon Lobby. Mary Backus, Pij Slater, and I were there as staff members; Christine Wemette & Fernando Sandoval Jimenez represented the Helpdesk students. As first-year students came through Kenyon lobby after being at the Forum & stopped by a table to get information, they received a sticker for their “Road map to Student Services” flyer, which eventually led to an ice-cream reward.

What topics did they ask about?

  • Wireless!
  • Printing/Paper-cut
  • In-person tech help
  • MS Office
  • Checking out materials
  • Course hub/Moodle
  • Library catalog
  • Misc. computer questions: Ethernet vs wireless, Mac vs. PC, etc.
  • Misc. questions about student life at Midd

Fernando was quite the recruiter for prospective Helpdesk student workers. It was a great chance to meet new students, to hear how their first week was going, and to learn how to respond to some of the most common tech-troubleshooting questions.

Chat Reference Now Available

Do you need a rapid response to your library/research question? Try our new Ask-a-Librarian Chat Reference service.

Find this CHAT link on the Library page (go/lib) or on the Ask a Librarian page (go/askus)

Chat Reference is available during regular library walk-in reference hours.

And as the illustration shows, you may still contact us via text, email, or phone.

 

Senior theses 2010-2011 available online

Last year’s seniors (2010-2011) who submitted theses to include in our digital repository now have their work available in DSpace (go/dspace). Some students request that their work be restricted to the College community, so to view those, you’ll be asked to log in with your Midd username & password.The others are available ‘worldwide,’ and are eventually searchable via Google (etc.).

In the DSpace repository, you’ll also find previous years’ submissions, back to 2007-2008, which is when we began experiment with “ETDs” (“electronic theses & dissertations”).

Submissions are tracked and uploaded, along with metadata (including title, author, summary, subject headings), by LIS cataloging staff — this year, Sue Driscoll. (In the past, other staff who have helped include Michael Warner, Marlena Evans, and Richard Jenkins.)


Take a look to find intriguing research in a wide-range of topics and academic areas.

On a related note: print copies of Honors theses, some master’s theses, and DML theses (Doctor of Modern Languages) continue to be stored in the College Archives, housed in the Library’s Special Collections area. Titles and authors can be found here. Contact Andy Wentink or Danielle Rougeau to view these items.

Middlebury faculty authors: finding in MIDCAT

The Cataloging department has added a genre/subject field in MIDCAT records for books that have been written, edited, or contributed to by Middlebury faculty.

Try doing a MIDCAT genre search for Faculty authors, and you’ll see all the titles that currently appear on the shelves of the Davis Library faculty authors section.

We’ve probably missed some titles, so faculty members, if there is a title missing from this list, let me know, and I’ll add the field to the record.

Richard
rjenkins@middlebury.edu

LIS website content managers

As part of its charge, the LIS Website Team has identified staff who are willing and able to oversee the various sections of the LIS website. These people will:

  • Serve as main contact persons for questions about their sections of the site
  • Ensure their section of the site is current and accurate (which may involve delegating tasks to others).
  • Be aware of formatting, style, and other conventions used on the LIS/College web site and follow them when making changes.
  • Keep current with the necessary skills and tools do this (or receive training)
  • Consult with stakeholders before implementing major refresh & enhancements.

The team has created a wiki page (go/liswebcm) that  describes the role of the content manager, lists the names of content managers and the areas for which they are responsible, describes tools they can use to maintain content, and includes an FAQ section for anyone who may visit this page looking for answers. There is now also a “Problem with this Page?” link on each LIS page which can be used to communicate with the content managers about issues with pages such as broken links, misspellings, outdated content, etc.

We’d like to emphasize that content managers are not the only ones who make contributions to and work with the LIS website. The purpose of this contact list was to create quick access to specific “go-to” people responsible for the major parts of the site so that LIS staff would not have to spend much time determining whom to contact with questions.

If you have responsibility for a sub-section of the website, your content manager is not superseding you–you’re still responsible–but now you will hear from your content manager when you have to fix broken links, or when a design change needs to be made. More granular permissions for LIS pages in Drupal are managed using web data groups.

For Women’s History Month: an Online Resource

In honor of Women’s History Month (March), you might want to visit the Library’s online subscription to: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.

This is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women’s history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection  currently includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools.