NOTES FROM RAMSEY LIBRARY; 2008-8

LIBRARY IMPROVEMENTS
You’ll recall from the previous NOTES FROM RAMSEY our plans to improve the appearance of the current periodicals area while beginning the evolution of that area into a Collaborative Learning Commons. We very much appreciate your patience with any disruption or inconvenience the work may have caused you, but are very pleased to invite you by the library to see the results. With a tremendous amount of hard work and creativity, Bryan Sinclair, Laurie Edwards, Sammy Hughes, Noel Jones, and Jason Reed planned the project and put a lot of physical effort into moving periodicals and even ranges of shelving. NOTES FROM RAMSEY congratulates and thanks them for a job very well done!

When you get a chance, be sure to stop by and see what you think. For more on future planning, check out Bryan Sinclair’s “space planning project” page athttp://facstaff.unca.edu/sinclair/spaceplan/.
NEW ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE 
Ramsey Library is very pleased to announce the availability of a new electronic data base. GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records. From the library home page, you can find GreenFILE under the “sciences” listing of electronic resources.

GreenFile
“MY READING HISTORY”
In collaboration with our WNCLN partners (the libraries at ASU & WCU) we have enabled a new function on the online catalog, ‘My Reading History’. If you choose to use this feature, after you enable your Reading History, the system will start collecting a list of items you check out from the library from the that time. Items currently checked out at the time of opting in will not be added to your reading history. Please note that Reading History is set so that you must log into your library account and enable Reading History by clicking the Opt In link. You may then opt out at any time by choosing that option. The system will not let you opt out until you have deleted your entire reading history list. You may also delete selected circulation history entries at any time by checking the entry in the *mark* column and clicking the “Delete Marked” link or delete all circulation history entries by clicking this “Delete all” link.

PLEASE NOTE: Deliberately, the library currently does not retain a record of materials you’ve checked out beyond the record when you were the last person to check an item out. The next time it circulates, your information is permanently separated from the item record. We do this to ensure the greatest feasible privacy for our patrons. While all circulation data is confidential, it is always subject to disclosure in response to legally executed search warrants or subpoenas, and, in some cases, requests for information under the Patriot Act. If you do choose to take advantage of the “My Reading History” feature, its contents will be subject to the same legal requests for records.

See “my account” in the right block on the catalog search screen.
GLOBAL COMPETITIVENESS REPORT 
For those of you who have been waiting, the 2007 / 2008 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report has finally arrived and is available in Reference under the call number REF/HF114.G559.