Snell Library

Parents Weekend Author Talk Coming Up

To some, Parents’ Weekend is a drag… back to that restricted “my-parents-are-watching” mentality. To others, it’s a relief to have some quality family time again, to take away some of the homesickness. Regardless of if you’re happy about it or not, parents are coming in force this weekend and Northeastern has set up some awesome events, like Howie Mandel, to keep you entertained. If your folks can’t make it, you are in luck because you can still enjoy everything Northeastern has to offer this weekend! Snell Library will continue a Parents’ Weekend tradition on Saturday at 11am with another talk from our Meet The Author series. Northeastern Professor Roger Abrams talks about his book Sports Justice and how the law interacts with the business of professional sports. I for sure will not be missing this one, it should be a pretty active discussion. Check out the Facebook page for more info. You can check the full schedule of Parents’ Weekend events in PDF format here.

Status Update: Printing in Snell

The new printing system is up and running in Snell Library!  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the University has rolled out a new print management system that includes Snell Library and the Infocommons. On the public computers located on all four floors of Snell Library (five including the Archives on the lower level), you may log in to the computer using your myNEU username and password and print your work.  You may also print from the secure wireless network (connect to NUwave, not NUwave-guest). Your printout will be released from the printers inside or just outside the Infocommons, depending on which one you selected, with a swipe of your Husky card. There are eight (8) computers on the first floor that currently aren’t printing, even if you log in…those have signs on them so you are warned!  And they should be fixed by tomorrow, 10/14. If you experience any printing problems, such as your Husky card is not working, ask at the Help Desk in the Infocommons. By the way, your 400-page quota was reset in the process of changing over to the new system, a nice lagniappe!

Sept. 29, 2010: On This Day in History

On September 29, 1987, my lovely sister Jacqueline Ratner was born. Happy 23rd sis! In other, more scholarly-related news, on September 29, 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a record 777.68 points after the House voted against a $700 billion financial recovery plan. It was a very somber day that wrote this 21st-century recession in stone. Two years later we are supposedly rising out of the recession, and a lot of valuable lessons have been learned by experts, businesses, and individuals alike. As students, and for the future of this country, it is important that we learn from mistakes in the past so we can keep making that “cash-money.” The library has always had books on finance, as it is one of the most popular majors at Northeastern, but now you can find newly added post-recession books on how to manage your money. Keep that beer-money coming in all of your life by taking a look at some of the great new additions to the Snell Stacks. The Roller Coaster Economy: Financial Crisis, Great Recession, and the Public Option Too Big to Save? How to Fix the U.S. Financial System Guide to Financial Markets

Hot debate over drying your hands at Snell

Ever wash your hands and have no paper towels left? Leaving you to shake them as fast as you can, rub them on your clothes, or hold them awkwardly away from your body while they air dry? Of course that never happens at Northeastern, because of our great Facilities branch, but at Snell Library it will never, ever happen. In conjunction with sustainable initiatives around Northeastern, you will find warm-air dryers slowly replacing paper towel dispensers in all Snell Library bathrooms. In addition to reducing litter and solid waste, the warm-air dryers require minimal maintenance (no refilling) which will help save time and money in Snell. We’d love to hear your input, do you like warm-air dryers, or prefer plain old paper towels? Me personally, I like the warm-air dryers. The sustainability and savings aspect is all well and good but the real benefit of those is being able to do this:

Citations, Quotations, Notations…Frustrations

Remember when before EasyBib you actually had to know what citation convention you were using and actually format your citation yourself? If you’re like me, of course you don’t, because we grew up in the computer age. Regardless, citations are a crucial function to the scholarly process, and withholding due credit (not citing your sources) or even citing incorrectly is frowned upon to the extent of expulsion for plagiarism. Some of the new features on EasyBib have made this process even easier by automatically citing sources based on article titles, and giving a much wider range of citation formats and documentation options. Unfortunately, you still have to cite within your actual text manually, a process that is known to be arduous and often time consuming…until now (for those of you who didn’t know about this before reading my blog post). Available through on the Self-Service tab of MyNEU, by clicking into Software Downloads you will find the answer to all things citation related. The program named EndNote, aptly puts an End to all of your Note-ation problems (I try to be funny… it usually never works). Straight from EndNote themselves…

“Millions of researchers, scholarly writers, students and librarians use EndNote to search online bibliographic databases, organize their references, images and PDFs in any language, and create bibliographies and figure lists instantly. Instead of spending hours typing bibliographies, or using index cards to organize their references, they do it the easy way—by using EndNote” (Endnote).

See the citation convention I used there? All thanks to EndNote! Some other cool functions include automatic paper formatting, template extensions, online reference searches, customizable export options, and more. So, while EasyBib may be a great tool for citations, the software provided by Northeastern will make sure you aren’t stuck in Snell Library all night.