NOTES FROM RAMSEY LIBRARY; 2009-9

“Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.”

~ Heinrich Heine
REMODELING TO ENCOURAGE PERIODICAL USE

For those of you who could get away, welcome back to campus! For the many who pushed on through the summer, NOTES FROM RAMSEY hopes you did have some good time away and that the fall semester is off to a great start for you. Many of you may have missed this announcement in an earlier NOTES FROM RAMSEY LIBRARY, so like the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION in dealing with its summer vacation, NOTES wants to share our new periodicals layout with you one more time.

Under the expert eye of Noel Jones, one of Ramsey Library’s able circulation supervisors, keen minds and strong backs recently completed a no cost rearrangement in the current periodicals area of the main floor to encourage the reading of current magazines and journals. The project consolidated shelving of the majority of paper periodicals, grouped by subject according to their Library of Congress classification, into an area nearer the windows of the periodicals area in order to create more space for group work and comfortable seating. In addition, the library pulled some of the more popular titles from the single subject grouping and added new titles selected as a result of a student, staff, and faculty survey to create an easily accessible range of popular magazines suitable for browsing. Older titles included in this new grouping include:

American Craft

Ebony

Ecologist

Economist

Harper’s

Mother Jones

Ms.

Newsweek (NOTES FROM RAMSEY hates the new format!)

NYT Book Review

Rolling Stone

Scientific American

Time

U.S. News

Women’s Health
New titles added in response to survey requests include (note: less popular titles in the survey were canceled to allow for the change):

The Believer

Bitch

Bust

Dwell

Make

Men’s Health

Mental Floss

Paste

ReadyMade

Shambala Sun

Spin

Vanity Fair

Veg News

Week

See photos at: https://sites.google.com/a/unca.edu/ramsey-library-pop-periodicals/ and be sure to stop by for a visit!!
RESEARCH CENTRAL CANCELED

“Research Central” was the name for a commercial product embedded on the library’s web main page which allowed you to put in a search term or phrase and retrieve results from the catalog (books, primarily) and the library’s electronic databases (largely citations to articles and full text) all in one search. This is a feature known as “federated searching” for all you library groupies out there. Library staff had worked with this product for about a year while making it available to you in “Beta.” While we felt there were still functional problems we also recognized that some faculty and more students found this an easy and productive way to search. Unfortunately, it also cost us $6,500 a year. In light of the anticipated limitations of this year’s budget and the somewhat less than dependable performance, the library recently canceled the product so that we can spend the $6,500 on books and electronic information content that we would otherwise not be able to provide. When the library’s budget begins to recover (and it will!) we’ll return to our search for an affordable and functional federated search engine.
RECENT NEWS OF NOTE

* Google Hopes Readers Can Download, Share, and Use Books
“The company announced . . . that it will work with Creative Commons to let authors decide how their works can be used and cited.”

*A Laboratory of Collaborative Learning

“How can we put the library back at the center of undergraduate education where it belongs?”

AND FOR THE ANNUAL BACK TO SCHOOL REALITY CHECK

* Beyond the Experience of Today’s College Freshman: Johnny Carson and the KGB
blockquote>”As professors dust off their lecture notes in preparation for the new academic year, they might want to vet their cultural references with the folks at Beloit College.”