Speak Up! Series – “Language of the Heart”

Randy Kidd, Visiting Professor in History, presents “Language of the Heart”: The Implication of William Harvey’s 1628 Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood.”

When: Tuesday, Feb. 9th at 4:00 p.m.
Where: Wyckoff Room, Cullom-Davis Library

Book Club- Spring 2010

The Bradley Book Club will return Wednesday, February 24th at 8 pm. The meeting will be held in the Wyckoff Room on the first floor of the library. It is open to all faculty, staff, and students.  For this month, we will be discussing any book to movie adaptation. What is it that makes book-to-movie adaptations work or not work for you? Come discuss your favorite and least favorite attempts at visualizing literature. For more information, contact: Bryan Clark, baclark@bradley.edu

Welcome back, Fall 2009!!!

I’m delighted to welcome returning students back to the hilltop and new students to the Bradley family! You’ll be happy to know we kept busy while you were away for the summer. I want to list some of the projects we’ve completed and will be giving you more info on these later. I just want to give you a heads up.

First is printing. This is something you have been wanting–a new and improved print management system. Well, it’s here! The library is the pilot site for what will become a campus wide printing system. You can choose to print in color or black/white and…ta da!! from the wireless laptops. We truly believe this is an improvement and hope you feel the same way. We have prepared a video walking you through printing from library computers and will be working on one to walk you through printing from your own laptops. Check out the first item under what’s new on the library website.

Second, they are putting the finishing touches on the library cafe on the first floor of the library. The cafe will open 31 August with a grand opening ceremony on 2 September at 10 a.m. The hours of the cafe will be 10 a.m. til 12 midnight. We have also done some rearranging to create casual seating with some tables outside the cafe. I hope you plan to meet your friends here and relax in the library. We will have a naming contest for the cafe later in the semester.

Third, and something I’m very excited about, we will be offering quick reference service via text messaging. Yes, you can text a reference question to the library and receive your answer on your cell phone. I’ll blog more about this later but if you want to use this service now, text 309-222-7740 and enter BUL (our code) then ask your question. Current service hours are M-F 8 a.m. – 10 p.m. and Sat 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. We hope to be adding more hours as the semester progresses.

And, when you walk in the library, you will notice a new Information Desk. Instead of trying to figure out which desk you need to go to, ask your question here and the staff will help you as quickly as possible.

So as you can see, we’ve been keeping busy and getting ready for your return. It’s great seeing the campus come alive and we are ready and eager to help you as you begin your studies and research. Please drop by and see us and once again, WELCOME!!!

Popular Reading Lists

College Students Reading Lists

Chronicle of Higher Education’s “What They’re Reading on College Campuses.”

Harvard Bookstore’s Top 100 Books.

St. John’s College Reading List.

The Telegraph (U.K.) Top 100 Books.

UC Berkeley Summer Reading List.

University of Maine Honors College Reading Lists.

Best Sellers News from The Publishers Weekly.

New Books at Bradley University Library.

 

Bradley University Island opens on Second Life

The Library received an Innovative Teaching grant this year to build an island on Second Life and explore the possibilities for education and outreach. We are ready to open the island up officially and will kick it off on Sunday, 30 March 2008, with a concert from Professor Beliveau, known as The Professor in Second Life and as Dr. Ed Lamoureux in real life, or first life. The concert will begin at 11:00 a.m. on the roof of the Student Center and features some of The Professor’s original work, including one about Bradley. You can spot the Student Center by the huge Dance sign and the picture of squirrels playing football, made for us by Judge Canning, a BU alum.

In addition to the concert, we have several sites you may want to see, including a Shinto Shrine and replicas of the library and, more importantly, the Robertson Memorial Fieldhouse and the Lydia Moss Bradley House. We also have kiosks around the Founder’s Circle, with our own Lydia Moss Bradley statue, representing each of the Colleges. You can click on a banner in the kiosk and get a note card giving you information about that college. You can also teleport from the kiosk to that college’s building on our Second Life Campus. We have a winter wonderland complete with polar bears, a snow globe that you can walk into and an ice skating rink with free skates.

We have also decided to feature the work our students and share their talents and knowledge with the world. Below is a list of the exhibits and where they are located on the campus.

On the campus grounds–Joseph Benedict Greenhut display, created by students in the Graphic History course which was a collaboration between HIS 303 (Urban History) and ART 405 (Graphic Information Sytems)

Student Center–Art work by Phoebe Johnson and the final photography portfolios of graduating seniors on the first floor. The second floor has games you can play, including chess, checkers, air hockey, pool and darts.

Cullom-Davis Library–Award winning photos from the Study Abroad competition is on the second floor.

Education and Health Sciences–First floor has poster created by Ashleigh Johnson for an independent study on nutrition. Third floor is dedicated to the Grief Curriculum created by Dr. Lori Russell-Chapin’s ELH620 class.

Engineering–Viewers show photos of the bridge construction event sponsored by Civil Engineering and of the formula race car event from Mechanical Engineering. There is also a viewer showing pictures of a 1967 Aston Martin which is being converted by the Senior Design Team 6 into an alternative fuel vehicle to compete in the Great Race.

Liberal Arts and Sciences–Viewer showing a museum exhibit on the Shelton Gang prepared the Graphic History course is on the first floor. There is also an exhibit featuring covers, art work and poetry from Broadside, a student creative publication.

Slane Communication and Fine Arts–Viewer shows a museum exhibit presentation on Bartonville hospital prepared for the Graphic History course.

Robertson Memorial Fieldhouse–Viewers with pieces from the publication Victory, Honor, Glory and pictures of our basketball teams.

We invite you to come, look around, learn a little, and have some fun. If you have any questions or need any help, please let me or one of the following librarians know: Denise Johnson, Skip Burhans, and Todd Spires. We all have avatars in Second Life and would be glad to help you. If you are in Second Life and would like to be part of the Bradley University Group, please let me know and I will add you. See ya in world.

What should we do now???

I want to start a student advisory group to advise me on what students think is important for the library. Since I’ve been here, we have adjusted the hours to go with the ebb and flow of the semester, added 24/7 for the first floor right before finals, designated some quiet study zones, adjusted the food and drink policy, redesigned our website to make it more interactive, made more electronic materials available, and began Midnight Munchies, to name a few changes. We have also created a presence in Second Life and now have a MySpace page. What else should we be doing? If you want to spend about 1-2 hours per month meeting with me and fellow students about what the library can do or should look at doing, please let me know. I’d like to start meeting in September so please let me know ASAP. I know there HAVE to be some students who have opinions and ideas for solutions. I want you to tell me those ideas and opinions. You can send me email (barbara@bradley.edu or bgalik@gmail.com), call me (677-2830), IM me through gmail or MSN, or contact me in SL (Puglet Dancer). Just get in touch!

Straight to the desktop

While you were away the librarians were very busy, as usual, looking for ways to stretch our budget and to provide more resources the way YOU want them–online and right to your desktop. We made a lot of progress on that this year and will be flipping the great majority of our paper titles to electronic so you can access them from anywhere. Some of this won’t take affect til the end of the year, but it is coming and it is great news.

Even better news is that we have canceled the last of our microform subscriptions and will be getting those electronically as well. We will still have some older titles only in microform but we are slowly phasing out our collection and will be relying more heavily on electronic. The funds that were used to cover these will be diverted to cover the cost of the electronic titles.

You will be happy to know as well that we now have Science and Nature available. While these are so basic to many areas of study at Bradley, we have been hesitant to add as they are very expensive and we did not have the money. By flipping to electronic and canceling microforms, we were able to divert funds to cover these titles.

Why, you may ask, was this not done sooner? Well for a variety of reasons including cost, availability, and resistance to change. I think everybody, students and faculty, are all on the same page now and we can finish our move in the direction of electronic access to many, if not most, of our critical resources.

MySpace/Bradley Library

Yes, the library now has a MySpace page, thanks to Todd Spires, our intrepid Conan the Librarian. Come be our friend! You can ask questions here, tell us what you think, and just stay in touch. We will be adding and changing it as we go along plus sending out info. Once my personal page has more on it, I’ll post that here. But, if you want to watch me TRY to develop a half way decent page, my niece says you just have to search my name. Go figure! LOL

Second Life at the Cullom-Davis Library

One of the big projects I have been working on is to create a presence for Bradley University and especially the library on Second Life.  For the uninitiated, Second Life, or SL as it is known to the residents, is a MUVE (multi user virtual environment) where all the objects, buildings, clothes, land–everything that exists in SL are created by the residents.  First, let me provide a little background on the library and SL.  I began hearing about SL in April 2005 when I would ride to meetings of the Alliance Library System (ALS) Board of Directors with the staff.  The Director of Innovation was very excited about this new virtual world and, I must admit, I could not wrap my mind around it.  I kept listening, though, as she talked about the possibilities for education and for libraries in this virtual world, I became fascinated with the possibilities.  On 10 August 2005, I chose my avatar and was “born” in SL as Puglet Dancer.  It took me quite a while to get up the courage to get off Help Island where the noobs (new residents of SL) learn how to move around, change appearance, create and move objects, and other useful skills.  I was teleported off Help Island to Info Island in late August and have been learning about SL ever since.

What is Info Island, you may wonder.  Info Island was created by ALS under the guidance of Lorelei Junot, aka Lori Bell, Director of Innovation at ALS, and is a place to find information.  We began in April creating Info Island and as of 12 February, we now have 14 islands or sims dedicated to libraries, museums and education. 

In September I formed a Second Life Task Force, comprised of Denise Johnson (Takver Twin), Skip Burhans (Polaris Lyon), Al Quiros (Watsnu Pussycat) and Chuck Frey to build a presence for Bradley in SL.  We were very lucky that Al has been in SL for over and year and is an experienced builder.  He built the Cullom-Davis Library in SL and is our primary architect.  Chuck is our ideas and digitizing man while the rest of us roam SL, answering questions and helping noobs find their way.

We are planning a grand opening of the what we call the Bradley campus on Info Island II on 28 February.  If you are a resident of SL, please contact one of us so we can add you to the Bradley University group.  I am planning it give you more information about SL in future posts.  I hope to talk a little about every aspect of it and would like to focus my direction on your interests.  Let me know what you’d like to know about and I will add that to the list.  If you have comments, questions or concerns, please let me know that as well.

Can we talk? Blogging with Barbara

Welcome!  Hope your semester is going well.  If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them here or message me.