Listen to Grammy Award Winners

There were some surprises last night at the Grammy Awards, and you’ll be surprised that some of the award-winners and their recordings can be found at the Snell Library, too! The best new artist of the year, Esperanza Spalding, is featured on a 4-DVD set available at the Snell Library called “Icons Among us: Jazz in the Present Tense.” For pop and r&b artists, we may not have the winning recordings but we do have some CDs and DVDs featuring Jeff Beck, Eminem, John Legend, and Neil Young. Intriguingly, we happen to have a recording by the Nor’easters, Northeastern’s a cappella group, of a Lady Gaga medley. In the classical category, you can find the multi-award winning Metropolis Symphony and Deus Ex Machina by Michael Daugherty (Best Engineered Classical, Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary) streaming online from Naxos. I admit I have my issues with contemporary classical but I really liked Metropolis (which is based on the Superman Comics) a lot; it has great energy and is modern in the best sense, with echoes of Gershwin. Naxos also streams the Parker Quartet’s Ligeti’s String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 (Best Chamber Music Performance) and P. Jacobs’ organ recording of Messiaen’s Livre du Saint Sacrement (Best Instrumental Soloist). We’ve also got recordings by these award-winners: If watching the Grammy Awards made you want to expand your horizons, scratch that itch at the Snell Library!

Join Our Student Advisory Group

Last week the Library’s new Student Advisory Group met for the second time. The group’s charge is to discuss and give feedback on issues concerning Library services and facilities. Participation in this group is a way for students to voice their concerns and participate in planning for new services and programs. Every student is welcome to join the Advisory Group. If you are interested, please contact Lesley Milner at l.milner@neu.edu or by phone at 617-373-4920. The following items were discussed: • The Library is partnering with the SGA on a pilot project to provide laptop computer locks for loan from the circulation desk. The pilot project will try and determine if having locks available for laptop computers would benefit students by reducing the opportunity for theft. We will start with providing locking capabilities at 10 tables on the first floor and the service will be available later this month. The Library will send out an announcement when the locks are available to be borrowed. A follow-up survey would be conducted to poll users as to their perceived value. • Students are still having problems with the temperature in the building. We reviewed the procedures for reporting area temperatures in the building when it is too hot or too cold. Either call Building Services at X2757, or report it to the staff at the Circulation Desk on the first floor. • The need was expressed to have more hours with fresh food available for purchase in the Cyber Café. Discussions have been had with Dining Services, the department that manages the Café, and this concern will be added to our future improvement planning processes. • We need to improve our communication. Ideas for the best ways to contact students and to post information included Blackboard, Facebook, the NU student portal, and campus e-mail. • Good news! Everyone raved about how great wireless printing was in the Library and how it eliminated waiting in long lines to get your print jobs from the InfoCommons. As a result of this discussion, the Library is putting together a new publicity campaign to increase student awareness of this great new service. • Opinions were expressed to expand the number of lockers available to students and to make a group of lockers available to undergraduate students as well as graduate students. • Actively ask for student feedback. The need is there to survey students about services and proposed changes in services and facilities at the library. The group offered to facilitate surveys as the need arose.

Lots More E-Books!

In my last post about the availability of the 2010 Springer E-Book collection, I outlined some of the advantages of e-books over the print — 24/7 multi-user access, support for distance users, powerful and granular searching, suitability for reserve, and more. To expand our e-book offerings, we’ve now leased access to a core collection of over 50,000 e-books from the past several years — a collection called Academic Complete and hosted on the ebrary e-book site. We’re providing this collection on a trial basis this year to see how well the titles are used and to gather feedback from you. The Academic Complete collection is multidisciplinary, covering a variety of subject areas in the humanities, social sciences, business, medicine, and science, and offers a large number of titles from leading academic publishers. Over half of the collection dates from 2004 and later. Special features include: * Powerful searching across all of the e-books or all e-books in specific discipline areas * Complete full-text searching, including indexes and tables of contents * Ability to navigate directly to your highlighted search results within a title * Ability to browse through a book, or to navigate via the table of contents or index * Ability to browse titles by discipline and drill down to specific subject areas * Automatic generation of citations and persistent links to titles, chapters, and individual pages * Ability to add highlighting and notes to text and save in your personal online bookshelf * Convenient printing and copying * Easy export of information to EndNote or RefWorks citation managers * Text-to-speech and other accessibility features You can go directly to the ebrary site to search or browse this collection. You’ll also find the individual titles listed in NuCat. By the way, on the main search or advanced search screens in NuCat, did you know that you can now limit searches to e-books only? Instead of “View Entire Collection,” simply select “Ebooks.” I hope you enjoy using our new e-book collection. Your comments are welcome and important to us; you can comment on this post, contact your subject librarian, or you can reach me any time at a.aaron@neu.edu.

Wiley Online Library Downtime Saturday A.M.

Due to essential site maintenance, access will be interrupted to Wiley Online Library on Saturday, February 5, 2011 beginning at 5am for up to 2 hours.

Staff News: Donna Kennedy and Brian Greene

Donna Kennedy has assumed a new role within the Research & Instruction Department in order to increase support and research assistance for the School of Education, as it expands its graduate certificate, degree, and distance learning programs. Donna has held many positions at the University over her 34 years of service. She has relocated to 270 Snell Library and retained her phone extension, 617-373-3197. Brian Greene has been named Head of Access Services. Most recently he was Head of Resource Sharing & Assistant Head Librarian in Access Services. Brian is now a member of the Library Management Team. His office is in 130 Snell Library (behind the Circulation Desk) and he can be reached at 617-373-2401.