Ohio University Libraries News and Events

The Cion Fall Festival of Events kicks off next Wednesday, October 21 with the first of three Common Reader Project sponsored activities.

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Consciousness: Films to change the World

Sunday: Oct 18, Nov 1 and Nov 15
Alden Library, Friends of the Library Room
Refreshments and Discussion after!

Oct 18 @ 6 pm “American Outrage”
A documentary of the 35-year fight of Carrie
Dann and Mary Dann against the U.S. government’s attempts to take over traditional Shoshone land in Nevada, part of 60 million acres guaranteed to them in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley.

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On Tuesday, November 10 Deanda Johnson, Coordinator of the African American Research and Service Institute and a Visiting Instructor in the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University, will speak on “Freedom Denied: African American Prison Literature and Other Stories of Confinement.” Her presentation is part of the Libraries’ Culture Showcase series.

Ms. Johnson’s presentation will be from 3:00 – 4:00 pm in the Friends of the Library Room (Alden 319). Refreshments will be available.

On Tuesday, October 20 Dr. Akil Houston, Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department, will speak on “Re-Membering African American Studies at Ohio University.” His presentation, part of the Culture Showcase series, will focus on a film he is doing about the department’s history.

Dr. Houston’s presentation will be from 2:00 – 3:00 pm in the Friends of the Library Room. Refreshments will be available.

University Libraries celebrated the acquisition of its’ three millionth item on Saturday, October 3, 2009 as a part of a year-long celebration commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Vernon R. Alden Library. See a digital copy of the item and more by the same artist in our digital repository. For more information about the unveiling, read The Post article.

The Friends of the Libraries of Ohio University will hold a book sale from October 22-24, 2009 in Alden Library’s 4th floor lounge.

The hours are:

• Thursday, Oct. 22, 7-9pm
• Friday, Oct. 23, 10-6pm
• Saturday, Oct. 24. 10-4pm

“When you support the Friends, you are supporting all of Ohio University-every discipline, every student, every faculty-by helping to build and maintain a great library.”

During Fall Quarter 2009, we will be offering several workshops on the RefWorks bibliographic management software. For more information about RefWorks and why you might want to learn about it, see our RefWorks pages.

All workshops will take place in ALden 323. Pre-registration is NOT required. Just show up at the day and time listed for each workshop.

Click here to link to Workshop Page

Sciences: Friday, Sept. 25, 1-3 pm

Social Sciences: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 5-7 pm

Humanities: Friday, Oct. 2, 10-12 am

Refworks Basics in the Evening: Tuesday, Oct. 13, 7-8 pm

Join President Emeritus Vernon Alden on Saturday, October 3 from 6:30-9:30 p.m., and explore the hidden treasures within Alden Library and celebrate a special 40th anniversary commemorative evening.

Cruise: The Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections including the E.W. Scripps Collection, Cornelius Ryan Collection and the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection.

Journey Through: The new Yao Ceremonial Artifacts Collection in the Frederick & Kazuko Harris Fine Arts Library.

Explore in Amazement: Cultures from around the world in the Hwa-Wei Lee Center for International Collections.

Peruse: The diverse photography of Ohio University alumni.

Discover: Rare books including a 13th-century, illuminated Bible seldom seen by the general public.

Plus, witness the unveiling of the three millionth addition to the Ohio University Libraries. Proceeds will benefit the Friends of the Libraries’ Scholarship Fund.

RSVP – kindly respond by Sept. 24, 2009.

Register now

The Yao exhibit will debut Saturday, Sept. 19, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Frederick and Kazuko Harris Fine Arts Library on the third floor of Vernon R. Alden Library. Ohio University President Emeritus Vernon R. Alden will preside over the opening reception. The artifacts comprise the largest collection of Yao Daoist ritual paintings in the U.S. and one of the largest such collections in the world.

Read more about the collection and the exhibit in Outlook. View images from the collection on the Fine Arts Library web site.

Times are tough all over. An ever-present example of doing more with less is OhioLINK, our statewide academic library consortia of nearly 90 libraries across Ohio. Read OhioLINK’s new 2008 Snapshot to learn all about how the cooperative efforts of the OhioLINK member libraries use the economy of scale to offer our communities world-class research resources.

Enjoy these beautifully handmade books, each fascinating to behold: 141 items from 12 countries. Athens is just one stop on this extensive travelling exhibit. The collection will be visiting 10 countries!

On view in the Fine Arts Library on the 3rd floor of Alden through mid-September.

Due to scheduled maintenance on the server, the ALICE Online Catalog will not be available between 5 am and 9 am on Saturday, August 29. Our holdings information will be available via the OhioLINK Library Catalog during those hours.

Over the past several months a committee of librarians has worked to give a new look and new features to the ALICE Online Catalog. These are summarized below:

• ALICE’s front page has a completely new design, featuring a tabbed box for the most popular types of searches.
• Other types of searches are available by clicking links in sidebar the on the right.
• A Meebo widget on all Help screens for initiating a Chat with a Librarian session.
• Ability to send call number and location information as a text message.
• The ability to limit search results to only those items “AVAILABLE” for checkout.
• On the right side of search results screens, there is now a set of inks out for searching additional resources, e.g., Academic Search Complete and the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center.
• A new color scheme for results lists and individual records, including color highlighting for location information.
• Addition of icons in the search results list that indicate the format of an item, e.g., book, video, etc.
• Spellcheck for unsuccessful Keyword searches.
• Direct Export to RefWorks for individual records; if you save multiple items to a folder, you will still need to do the old two-step method of getting them into RefWorks.
• There is a toggle for Advanced Keyword search options and for all Help info.
• A new set of navigation buttons.

We’ve been running a survey on our home page, ‘What books do you like to read’. This is the latest update with some other suggestions thrown in.

Best book ever read?

• Song of the Lark
• Johnny Got His Gun
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
• Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with The Beatles, by Tony Bramwell
• The Shadow of the Wind
• Giovanni’s Room
• Twilight
• The Book Thief
• Great Expectations
• The Sparrow, by Maria Doria Russel
• Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
• The Bone Dolls Twin
• Extremely Loud and Incrediby Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
• And The Ladies of the Club
• Harry Potter
• The Bible
• The Traveler’s Gift, by Andy Anderson
• A Voice in the Wind, by Francine Rivers
• A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest Gaines
• A Team of Rivals
• The Red Tent
• The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
• Postcards from the Edge
• The Heart of the Matter
• The Idiot, by Dostoevsky
• 21 Balloons
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• The Last Lecture
• Roots

What book are you reading now?

• Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
• After the Ice: a Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Left Hand of Darkness
• A Really Nice Prom Mess
• My Sister’s Keeper
• Spectacular Sins
• The Argumentative Indian
• Red Star
• Egalia’s Daughters
• The Hidden City
• The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
• What is the What, by Dave Eggers
• Slaughterhouse Five
• A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
• The Gunslinger, by Stephen King (Book I of the Dark Tower Series)
• Even After All This Time, by Afschineh Latifi
• Harry Potter
• Founding Brothers
• Four Pillars of Investing
• The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis,
• The Meaning of Video Games
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• Atlas Shrugged
• Light in August, by William Faulkner

What book is on your list to read this summer?

• Fiction by new Japanese writers
• The Prophet
• Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, by Mark Doty
• Brave New World
• The Conscience of the Eye, by Richard Sennett
• Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
• The Name of the Rose
• Short stories by Dennis Cooper
• Coraline
• Anna Karenina
• The Post-American World
• Army
• Guns, Germs and Steel
• Run, by Ann Patchett
• Fallen
• Trash, by Dorothy Allison
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
• The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
• Harry Potter
• Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot
• A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
• Of Love and Dust, by Ernest Gaines
• The Intelligent Investor
• The Dark Knight
• Change of Heart, by Jodi Picoult
• Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy
• Whatever is assigned! lol
• Underworld, by Don DeLillo

From the Librarians Index to the Internet, a nice list of summer reading lists. Many more summer reading lists are in Rebecca’s Pocket.

Alden Library will be open during Summer Session from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday. The Learning Commons on the second floor will be open from 7:30 a.m. to midnight Monday through Thursday; from 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday; from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday; and from noon to midnight Sunday. These hours will start with the beginning of Summer Session on Monday, June 22, 2009 and run until Friday, August 28, 2009.

Library patrons may request that books be retrieved from closed areas in Alden Library from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, from 12 to 5 p.m. Saturday; and from 12 to 9 p.m. Sunday. These requests can be made at the Library Services Desk in the Learning Commons. During the same hours, faculty and graduate students may request a pass for access to the rest of the building.

For more information on the library’s summer hours and for hours between the end of Summer Session and the beginning of Fall Quarter, visit our Hours page.

Please take a moment to check out the library winners from the Research Expo. There work is exhibited on the second floor near the plasma screens.

The graduate winner was Jessie Truchan for “Genesis of Carbonate lakes on Perennial Siliciclastic Floodplains”

The undergraduate winner was John Schindler for “Go”. It is on display on the 2nd floor plasma screen– Come have a look!

The staff association award, given to a student assistant or staff relative, was awarded to student assistant Animesh Rathore for “Influence of Gender & Ethnicity on ICT Use in Higher Education: A Case of Arts and Social Sciences Students in Universiti Malaya.” Animesh works in CIC.

The librarian’s choice award went to Andrew Crabtree and Mike Deas for their movie “A Little Bit Crooked.” Show times are listed on the poster.

Retired faculty member Betty Hollow will be presenting as part of the Culture Showcase series on Tuesday, May 26 at 3 pm. The title of her presentation is One Cool Bobcat: Vernon R. Alden and the Push for Diversity in the Sixties and Seventies.

Hollow has been a resident of Athens since 1968 and worked for Ohio University from 1975-2005. She is the author of Ohio University, 1804-2004: the Spirit of a Singular Place.

Please join us for the Culture Showcase’s last presentation of the year, and what promises to be a very interesting presentation.

The International Photography Contest is now on display on the 2^nd floor of Alden. The annual contest, sponsored by the Office of Education Abroad and Lamborn’s Studio in Athens, features photos taken by OU students, staff and alumni. Some photos were taken while participating in study abroad programs, while others were captured during independent travel or research. Ghana, Mexico, Italy, China, Ecuador and Scotland are just a few of the many destinations featured in the exhibit.

Although only 125 photos are displayed, over 350 entries were received. Photos could be submitted in four categories: People, Places, Animals & Faculty/Student/Alumni. First, second and third place winners in each category were determined by a panel of judges: One photo (attached) was selected as “the best representation of OU students abroad”. Custom framing for the winning photo in each category was generously donated by Lamborn’s Studio in Athens.

Photo:  “Exploring Yagul” by Nora Merecicy was taken in Oaxaca, Mexico while participating in OU’s Art & Design in Mexico program. Yagul is a mazelike ruin of the ancient Zapotec culture.

Herman Leonard, a 1947 BFA graduate and world-renowned photographer whose images captured the history and movement of jazz, will speak at Ohio University’s two undergraduate commencement ceremonies this year.

As an undergrad, Mr. Leonard was a photographer, and eventually photo editor for the Athena Yearbook.

His yearbooks and a selection of period photography equipment are on view in the Fine Arts Library, Alden, 3rd floor, through the summer.

A new exhibit celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Alden Library debuts Friday, May 15, 2009 on the 5th floor of Alden Library. Learn about campus life in 1969, the year Alden Library opened its doors, as well as the history of the Libraries back to 1814! This exhibit was created by University Archivist Bill Kimok and includes a variety of photos and memorabilia from the University Archives in the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections