Tag Archives: Middlebury Community Interest

Open Access Week: What is It?

Open Access Week is an international event that raises awareness of the many benefits of making research free and open for others to use. This year’s theme is “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge,” which asks libraries and researchers around the world to consider how they will create and support platforms for sharing knowledge that are “inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community. Asking ourselves and our partners ‘open for whom?’ will help ensure that considerations of equity become and remain central… .”

At Middlebury, we are considering “open for whom?” through two goals for the upcoming year: expanding our efforts to support campus-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; as well as identifying our role in building and sustaining the infrastructure required for digital scholarship.

Other open access efforts at Middlebury include:

  • Digital Collections at Middlebury, our open-source repository that houses digitized works from our archives, along with student theses, scientific datasets, and faculty open access articles.
  • The Open Access policy, adopted by faculty in 2016, grants the college a license to republish scholarly essays by faculty in our online repository.
  • Lever Press, a consortial open access publisher focusing on “digital-first” online scholarly monographs. 
  • An examination of digital scholarship infrastructure, supported by a Mellon grant and led by Dean of the Library Mike Roy (along with a multi-school team of library professionals), with the goal of envisioning a more modern and sustainable system that would enhance scholarly communication at colleges, universities, and research libraries. 

Finally, are you wondering where to find open access research? Here are a few places to look:

Bye-bye Summon, Hello LibrarySearch

LibrarySearch allows you to search our catalog of physical books and all our digital resources at the same time.

The Library has hundreds of databases, indexes and catalogs, providing access to millions of articles, books, films, musical recordings and primary sources.  That sounds promising… until it sounds overwhelming. Where should you start your research? We used to recommend Summon, but over the summer, we replaced Summon with LibrarySearch.  

Like its predecessor Summon, LibrarySearch is a great place to begin your research.  That’s because LibrarySearch links you to nearly everything in our collections. And, we think LibrarySearch is even better than Summon at matching results to your search terms.

We’re still straightening out some of the kinks with our new discovery service.  For example, LibrarySearch is linking to materials at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and it is not linking to many of our online newspapers. So as always, please get in touch with a librarian if you’re not finding what you need.

Next time you’re starting a research project, try LibrarySearch! Look for it at the center of the Library home page, or at go.middlebury.edu/librarysearch. 

ITS Tech Services Overview Offered December 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 Wednesday, December 11 at 9:00 a.m.  We’ll introduce services and resources provided by ITS to all Middlebury employees, including:  online learning, file storage, self-service software installation, access to  computing help, and more.  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, January 15, 2020, at 1:30 pm.  Our complete workshop schedule can be viewed at http://go/techworkshops/.

LibrarySearch!

LibrarySearch is here!

This fall, the library is switching from Summon to a new discovery platform from EBSCO, which we are calling “LibrarySearch.”  LibrarySearch will work very much like Summon: it will still retrieve results from the library catalog (MIDCAT), and it will still find article-level results from our subscribed journals and databases (as well as beyond, if desired).

We made this switch for a number of reasons.  LibrarySearch:

  • offers better discovery of non-full-text indexes such as MLA Bibliography and RILM (in fact, these databases are not indexed by Summon, due to their dissatisfaction with how Summon handles non-full-text databases)
  • has features not available in Summon, such as a view into which databases search results are coming from, and the option to save search results directly into online storage providers such as Dropbox
  • is more tightly integrated with the library’s catalog than Summon
  • is (like Summon) a very stable and widely-used system
  • is highly customizable
  • is also now available to students and colleagues at the William Tell Coleman library at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Of course, since LibrarySearch is provided to us by a different vendor, you will see changes in how search results are ranked and displayed, and the interface will look somewhat different. 

Please see go/librarysearch to try out the new system.  As with any new system, there are bound to be some bugs, broken links, unexpected results or behavior, etc.  Please submit problems, or suggestions for improvements, to Terry Simpkins in the Library (x5045).

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 – Thursday: 9am-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!

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