New Congressional Record available to view

New Congressional Record available to view

For the political science nerds and those who love original source documents, this from the GPO:

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) partners with the Library of Congress (LC) to release the digital version of the bound Congressional Record from 1991-1998 on GPO’s govinfo. This release covers debates of the 102nd thru 105th Congresses. This era of Congress covers historical topics such as:

  • The Persian Gulf War
  • Bill Clinton’s Presidency
  • NAFTA
  • Enactment of the Family and Medical Leave Act
  • Republicans gaining control of both the House and Senate since 1954

You can read the rest of the release here, and access the records here.

Saturday Librarian: What a time to be alive!

Saturday Librarian: What a time to be alive!

Ya’ll, I’m truly geeking out on my new catalog, and I don’t expect you to understand. Its enough for me to know that 1) we have a computer in the library 2) we have a barcode scanner that is younger than I am 3) with their powers combined, I can pull MARC records into a catalog that 4) is visible on the wifi.

That’s a pretty big 2 weeks folks (and yes, yes I milking the excuse for my tardy blogging. Wouldn’t you?) The previous cataloging that I’ve done is on a virtual machine, which means its not actually live on campus. The stuff we’ve done the last two weeks? Totally live on campus!

Some other items of note:

  • Phase 2 of the Music Room is done! My wonderful workers were able to get the art and music collection moved into the Music room over the last two weeks. The fabulous summer crew, you’ll remember, cleared that out for me over the course of the summer. This allows us to process some art books that need to join the collection, and gives room to expand that part of the collection as we choose.
  • What did we do with our extra stack space? Shelve some of my lovely acquisitions hoard. Getting those onto shelves is step one to making it easily reviewable for the faculty.
  • I got a question about the periodicals we’re boxing– those are not being discarded, they are being stored off campus. There are many easier ways to access journal entries than by combing through hard copy, and we need to clean up the lower stacks area and set it to better use.
  • Finally, I just gotta brag on my campus. It shows to lovely effect on a fall afternoon:

The British Library’s Greek Manuscripts Project – Medieval manuscripts blog

New digital resource alert! This one is a fun one too. The British Library launched a new website with a large collection of Greek manuscripts, including the Athenian Constitution. The political science geek in me is in raptures, of course. Beyond the digital manuscripts, they have write ups and information the manuscripts and their contents. The blog entry linked below gives a general overview, and a link to the website itself. 

http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2016/09/the-british-librarys-greek-manuscripts-project.html

Saturday Librarian: The WiFi strikes back

Hopefully everyone had a lovely weekend and start to the week. I’m planning to start the Saturday posts again now that the semester has begun, and I have a few fun items from the library to highlight on Thursday’s as well.

This past week, I was able to introduce the students to the ILL program which was big for me. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but for four years I sat in the upper classroom of the library, soaking in all manner of thoughts, phrases, and ideas. Arguing and pondering and generally enjoying the years. And for a brief 15 minute window, I stood at the front of that classroom and I was the expert on one small area. A bit of the goosebumps with that one, no lie.

Saturday dawned with such promise. I had my first pumpkin coffee of the fall, got to campus nice and early since I had to leave early, and I had grand plans of finalizing the server set up that was interrupted by the lack of internet followed by locked down internet. I had confirmed that the WiFi was back up, unlocked, and strong with internet flowing like a river when I was on campus Monday.

You can guess where this is going…

Yeah, the unlocked WiFi network was flakier than a croissant, with nowhere near the connectivity I needed to make sure that the client box would continue to see the server without failing at some point. So back to the drawing board on that one– I’m not in IT, Jim, I’m a librarian darn it! (Oh come on, Star Trek turned 50 this past week!)

I did manage to get our lovely check out cards cut up and available for the students:

So I had that going for me! We also have all the library books shelved. Yes, ALL of them! I have 3 awesome student workers this semester which is the most I’ve had before and man are they quick with the shelving! With the WiFi declaring that we shall not catalog, the focus at the moment is moving the art and music collections into the Music room. That will fit better from a collection standpoint and clear nearly an aisle’s worth of shelf space in the Stacks, which we can use to hold acquisitions.

Lastly, I updated the official library website. Did you know we had an official library website? The plan was to run some WordPress plug-ins to simulate an online catalog but the move from development to production didn’t work out as planned and so the decision was made to abandon that half step and move to the complete catalog solution.

But! We have the site so we might as well use it. You can find the ILL policy and circulation policy, and I am curating digital resources for student use on the site as well. To see any of these, go to Library.thomasmorecollege.edu and check it out! Drop me a line if there are any digital resources you think would be helpful, or if you’ve tried to fined resources for a certain type of research and come up empty and we’ll take a look.

Digital Resource: the Hammer Museum and Digital Archive

Digital Resource: the Hammer Museum and Digital Archive

The Hammer Museum is on the campus of UCLA, so I imagine that a majority of folks haven’t been able to view the collection. I was able to visit the Hammer as part of a tour of LA Area museums (which is a blog for another time but also a totally worthwhile trip). The Hammer recently received a grant to digitize some of their archives and exhibits.

The first exhibit is an examination of African American art in Los Angeles during the 1960s. The art from the exhibit is online, as are the lectures, essays, and presentations that surrounded the exhibit. They are planning on two more exhibits with the same supporting information as well.

This is a good example of the rise of digital exhibits in the museum and library world– we can’t travel as often as we’d like or visit all the museums we may want to, and the rise of these digital archives allows us to see more exhibits, view more art, and hopefully experience more than we otherwise might have.

Good to Know: Harvard digitizing case law collection

For all the budding lawyers out there, WBUR has a write up on a digitization project going on at Harvard:

Historically, libraries have been collections — books, multimedia materials and artwork. But increasingly they’re about connections, linking digital data in new and different ways. The Caselaw Access Project is a state-of-the-art example of that shift.

“So what’s going to result from this project is a huge database of electronic, digital court decisions,” Ziegler explained. “And the world of law has never seen that before.”

I like the idea that all of the case law will be freely accessible (far more so than the books that are in storage currently.) And per the article, the physical books will still be kept in storage should anything go wrong.

…And we’re back

…And we’re back

Happy fall, everyone! School has been back now for about a week, and at least this weekend, the weather has turned decidedly fall-wards. That is to say, lightly breezy, low humidity, and cool enough at night to leave the windows open. The other plus side of this weather is that the library loses the stuffiness that comes with high summer, and its pleasant all the way through, not just in the stacks.

Lots of exciting goings-on to report as I enter year 2. First, today I’ll be running an orientation to the Library for both new and returning students, which hasn’t really happened before. I’m looking forward to running folks through the basics: how to read a call number, how to use the card catalog, and how to use our new Interlibrary Loan program.

Some of you may have seen the Instagram posts over the summer, but its true that we secured a server for the library with the goal of running a digital catalog! Koha is running and we just need to finalize the end user set up (also, we need a desk for our check out station in the foyer.)

Exciting as it is to have the digital catalog started, I feel the need to sound caution: we have limited MARC records and we must enter in the holdings one by one. Lest we have forgotten, that’s 45000 entries.

I am incredibly grateful to NHAIS for sending over the 6000+ MARC records that we had in the NH Union catalog. Its a wonderful starting point! I’m also blessed to have 3 student workers helping me out this year! For those keeping score, I started with 1 last fall, then 2 last spring. Having the increased support is marvelous.

Finally, Interlibrary Loan has arrived! As of, well, now, students and faculty have access to Interlibrary Loan through the NHU PAC, connecting us with the libraries of New Hampshire. For other institutions in the state, we absolutely lend as well, we just don’t have all of our holdings in NHU Pac, so make sure to email me if you are looking for something that is esoteric enough that we may have it. We also have non-esoteric holdings, but the odd, the old, and the humanities are kind of our wheelhouse.

Welcome back everyone!

New Hampshire poetry Festival

I know there’s been a bit of silence in this area of cyber space. Preparations for the new semester are underway, and an update on the catalog conversion will be forthcoming. In the meantime, check out the NH Book Blog for details on the Poetry festival coming up in September! 

2nd Annual NH Poetry Festival — September 24 http://nhbookcenter.blogspot.com/2016/08/2nd-annual-nh-poetry-festival-september.html

Saturday Librarian: To Boldly Go…

Saturday Librarian: To Boldly Go…

When I first showed up in my librarian capacity, one of our stated goals was to make sure that we got a digital catalog. Its not a new technology — digital catalogs began to show up in the 1980s and they were commonplace by the late 90s. Even now in 2016 the smaller libraries of the word find a way to digitize their catalogs, and the hope was that we would do the same.

At first, I considered an inventory to be our goal. After all, we needed to know what to load into the OPAC, right? Fast forward a year, and the inventory is decidedly off the pace I had expected, primarily because I was trying to make sure that we had the basics of a catalog record, just in case we couldn’t get full MARC records to start. A year is a good amount of time upon which to base a decision. You can base your decisions on the good and the bad and the middle of the road. And so we’re embarking of the catalog now and continuing the inventory in the new system.

Why? Quite simply, we have to be able to track circulation and Interlibrary loan material, and we have to have that system in place before the students return. Then too, the inventory is a lot easier when you’re only confirming the barcode is right and the book is on the shelf — MARC records can be pulled into our new system directly from NHAIS.

So what did we do today? We got the server, got it plugged in and got the operating system and basic installation of our new cataloging software installed. The main stumbling block had more to do with the suddenly disappearing internet, and Saturdays are hard to troubleshoot tech issues because of the number of players that are not working. The course of technology never did run smooth.

Lest anyone take the preceding paragraph the wrong way, this is not meant to imply that the installation is difficult or untenable, or that we run the risk of losing our catalog in a way that doesn’t exist with the card catalog. There are redundancies that will be in place on premises and off, and we will also reach the point where we have our catalog included in the NH State Library’s Union catalog, to help facilitate our ILL relationships. Its very difficult to be a good ILL partner with a card catalog.

In fact, sadly, I’m still on Excel spreadsheets. The installation could not be completed in a day, and so Excel is still our catalog– for the moment. Still, in the space of a day, we’ve come closer to our online catalog then we have before. The students will start to come back in about a month, Freshmen first for orientation followed by the returning Sophomores and Upper Classmen. My hope is that they will have a new catalog there to greet them and the choice of serendipity in the stacks or precision recall of materials, whatever the situation may call for.