250th Anniversary of the French & Indian War

Yes, not necessarily an anniversary on everyone's mind, but it does commemorate an important event, something that has often been considered the first world war. Fought on several continents, much of this tremendous conflict between France and England took place in this country, often in what is now New York; think of the 1990s film Last of the Mohicans, Fort Niagara, Fort Ticondaroga... Here at the library, among many other titles, we have Fred Anderson's impressive "Crucible of War," written in 2000, an excellent account of the war, E199 .A59 (also available from amazon.com)

Moving bookshelves!

As part of the constuction taking place on our ground floor, a special moving crew was here last week to move our print government documents shelving. A very interesting operation in which they moved entire sections of shelving as one big unit! They used special jacks mounted on wheels, which not only slide arms under the shelving but also had hydraulic arms which pressed into the shelving from the sides, binding it as a unit so it would hold together. Some sections where there were many loose paper documents they also shrinkwrapped.

Catalog your home library? Try it with LibraryThing!

We've been talking here in the library about our catalog, and catalogs in general. Realizing that they aren't always as user friendly as they might be, we are looking at some other models than traditional library catalogs. Our new head of technical services, Jennifer Smathers, has mentioned a fascinating site, LibraryThing, where you can easily catalog your books, share them with others, it's almost a MySpace for personal libraries.

e-portfolios

Lot's of people are working on e-portfolios these days; the college Angel site has that option. And we have some books on doing e-portfolios, including this one.

Is this really how students see the library?

OCLC, a major library land organization, has a report out that looks at how college students perceive the library, what they tend to use for information sources etc. You can skip around the report online pretty easily, and there are some interesting figures and ideas to consider.