Library News

Rolling Stone Columnist: Matt Taibbi at Snell Library

Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 17th, Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi will be featured in Snell Library’s Meet the Author series with his new book Griftopia. Come for refreshments and a lot of laughs. Matt Taibbi takes a humorous and at times very serious stance on just about all of the big headlines of the news. Notorious for his political comments, Matt wrote Griftopia to report the inside scoop on America’s failing economy and who’s to blame. Come to learn about all of the latest struggles America is facing and some that undoubtedly will be challenges for the future. Want a taste? Check out his blog on True/Slant for a small dose of the excitement about to come. You can purchase a book at the event and even get it signed. Don’t forget to bring your questions and/or rants! This event is sponsored by NU Libraries and the NU Bookstore.

Science Direct Scheduled Outage This Weekend

We’ve learned from the publisher Elsevier that ejournals in Science Direct and the search engine Scopus are expected to be offline and unavailable for approximately 9 hours on Saturday, November 13th, 2010 due to scheduled upgrades. The journals are generally high-quality, high-demand peer reviewed titles.  Downtime by region is expected to be as follows

* U.S. Eastern Standard Time (EST): 7:30AM EST – 4:30PM EST * Greenwich Mean Time (GMT): 12:30PM GMT – 9:30PM GMT * Singapore Time (SGT): 8:30PM SGT, November 13 – 5:30AM SGT, November 14

This is an exceptionally long and nearly all-day outage at a busy time of year.   Please plan accordingly and get your ScienceDirect ejournals now!

Advice and research for teachers of writing

Three research journals from the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)  are now available electronically through the NU Libraries:

College Composition and Communication focusing on practical strategies for teaching based on the latest research and theory

Language Arts, a magazine for those who teach elementary and middle school writing

Research in the Teaching of English for original research and scholarly essays on teaching English at all levels

I’ve been enjoying looking at these as I reflect on how I was taught to write, and on the NU Libraries’ support for First Year and Advanced Writing in the Disciplines programs at NU.  Of all the skills I learned in school and college, writing has been the most important, hands down. What do you think helps students learn to write?  Do you find the essays in the NCTE journals helpful? Practical? Provocative?

It Was 20 Years Ago Today. . .

(Click for larger image) Happy Birthday, Snell Library! November 1, 1990 was the formal dedication ceremony for Snell Library. It’s hard to imagine NU without Snell Library, but for most of the history of the University, the library was a small affair housed in Dodge. Inadequate for the needs of the growing NU community, it was replaced thanks to an alliance including George and Lorraine Snell, University faculty, staff, students, and alumni who undertook to raise funds, and support from a U.S. Department of Defense grant. As part of the project, our first online catalog, “Nulis,” was also established around the same time. In 1990, the things we take for granted today about Snell were inconceivable to most people. The concept of a catalog on a web site, to say nothing of a cell phone, was hard to imagine; so was the notion that most journal subscriptions would be online. There was no Digital Media Design Studio for students to create videos, nor a program to convert our printed archival records to digital form. Email delivery of journal articles from interlibrary loan… even a Cybercafé was hard to imagine in those “no-food-in-the-library” days. One thing that hasn’t changed: the centrality of Snell Library. Architecture professor Peter Serenyi put it so perfectly:

“It is in its siting…that the library makes its most dramatic contribution to the campus as a whole…Opening up to the north and west, the Snell Library gathers the campus around itself, thus becoming not only the intellectual center of the University but its physical center as well.” (Tradition and Innovation, p. 33)

I think this is as true today as it has always been. In the coming year, on this blog and elsewhere, we’ll be reflecting on our anniversary and on what the next 20 years hold in store for Snell Library.  What do you think Snell Library will be 20 years from now?

Springer Books Go "E"

First, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Amira Aaron and I am the new Associate Dean of the Northeastern University Libraries for Scholarly Resources (books, journals, and Library information in all formats). Today I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the 2010 full collection of eBooks from Springer Publishing, one of the top international publishers of scientific, technical, and medical titles. Our set also includes 2005–2009 volumes from the Computer Collection, including the prestigious Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Over 4,000 new eBooks are added to the Springer collections each year. The eBooks can be downloaded by chapter and are fully searchable, even on the book chapter level, and they can be printed out and bookmarked online. The Springer eBooks primarily cover the disciplines of science, engineering, and medicine, but there are also titles in business & economics, humanities, social sciences, law, and mathematics. Individual titles can be found in NuCat. There’s one additional feature of the Springer eBook collection that I wanted to mention. The “MyCopy (Buy a Print Copy)” service allows you to easily order your own personal soft cover edition of Springer eBooks purchased by the Library (back to 2005); they will be immediately printed on demand and shipped to you within a few days. Note that sometimes the “Buy a Print Copy” link doesn’t appear right away for the newest eBooks. So why eBooks? Many of you are no doubt avid consumers of eBooks for your personal reading. Academic libraries are also undergoing a huge transformation to eBooks in many disciplines. We are now able to offer 24/7 access to these books from multiple locations for multiple users. With growing numbers of distance education and online classes, many students no longer come to campus on a regular basis, so electronic books and journals are critical to support teaching and research. Searching across the content of many of these eBook collections is powerful and will help you to discover hidden information on a particular topic. In the Library, we also need to deal with space limitations for print materials and an increased need for study space. Finally, we don’t have to deal with lost or damaged books and you don’t have to worry about fines for late returns. Don’t forget to search the Internet Archive and Google Books for the full text of older books online. In the Internet Archive you’ll find over 1100 pre-1923 Northeastern books that we’ve digitized through the Boston Library Consortium. We hope you enjoy exploring the new Springer collection and we’d love to hear from you about your use of eBooks offered by the libraries. Join us for a Faculty workshop on using Springer eBooks this Friday, October 29th, from 10-11 in Room 90, Snell Library. If you have questions, please feel free to contact me at a.aaron@neu.edu or 617-373-4961. For more information visit our Press Release