Finals: every college student’s favorite time of year. Your friends at Snell Library know that it is an incredibly stressful time. That’s why we’ve got some Finals Week activities for you at Snell. Firstly, we’ll have a coloring table beginning on Reading Day and all through finals week set up in the first floor lobby. Coloring is a fantastic, proven way to reduce stress and focus on something other than college.  Also on Reading Day, we’ll have massage chairs with professional masseuses as well as energy filled snacks to hand out from 12-4 PM. A big thanks to Fit University for making this happen. Feeling stressed about last minute citations, bibliographies, or research? We’ll have a Citation and Walk-In Research Clinic from 4-6 PM in the lobby on Reading Day for any last minute help you may need. Throughout all of Finals Week, be on the lookout for goodie bag giveaways, free coffee study breaks, and positive sentiments from library staff. From all of us here at Snell Library, we wish you the best of luck on your finals!

Faculty and staff, it’s time to start thinking about submitting your course reserve requests for Spring 2018!  Classes begin January 8, and the sooner we receive your requests for materials, the sooner we’ll have them ready for students to borrow. The library is not open over Winter Break, so in order for your materials to be ready for check-out during the first week of classes, we recommend that you have your lists submitted by December 18, 2017. If you already have items on reserve for Fall 2017 that you’d like to keep in place for the Spring semester, please let us know before December 15, 2017!  After December 15, library-owned reserve materials not needed for Spring will be re-shelved in the regular stacks upstairs.  Personal copies expiring Fall 2017 will begin to be removed during intersession week (December 18-December 22). To request library materials for reserve, submit this form (myNEU login required). The library doesn’t purchase textbooks for courses, but we’d be happy to add your personal copies to our catalog; just print out the completed request form and drop it off with your textbooks at the Help and Information Desk on the 1st floor. Feel free to get in touch with me directly with any questions or concerns.

To read the full reflection, visit the Digital Scholarship Group’s news page. Design for Diversity is an IMLS grant-funded national forum project based out of the Digital Scholarship Group. The goal of the project centers around creating a collaborative Teaching and Learning Toolkit for practioners who are interested in designing and working with information systems that can represent diverse ways of knowing. The Design for Diversity Opening Forum – the first event – was held at Northeastern on October 16 and 17 to begin the collaborative process of building the toolkit. This two-day event consisted of case study presentations to inspire both larger and smaller group discussions as well as collaborative group note-taking; the Design for Diversity team has made available several of the slides from the presentations (available on links the schedule) and recordings of the presentations. These case study examples ranged from how to work with historically disenfranchised communities and their cultural materials, to how metadata can be exclusive or uncover previously hidden relationships and networks, and to how the constraints of digital tools and platforms’ might help or hinder identity representation. One of the most common questions during the event was how academics– who are situated in an institution that can continue to perpetuate the oppression of historically disenfranchised communities –can not only work with, but work for these communities. Another common theme that came up during the event was how well-designed workflows can center around this work. What are the methodologies that will lead to a successful, ethical, and healthy project ecology that will set up for the success of the project and those invested? All projects have constraints and recognizing them is an important step to acknowledging what a project can do. Designing a healthy project ecology also means understanding the affordances and limitations of individual tools and technologies. Using the examples provided at the Opening Forum and other places where these conversations are happening, information system practioners can continue to come together and share how we shape learning environments to foster conversations about justice, dismantling hierarchies, and making spaces for a multitude of ways of being and knowledges. If you would like to know more about Design for Diversity, there are several ways to participate in the project. You can also sign up for the Design for Diversity e-mail list or follow us on Twitter.