Help with Word, PowerPoint...

A confession: while we're glad to help with your questions regarding Office software, we don't always know the answer ourselves! When, for example, someone wants to know how to set up a table of contents in Word, we may follow the wise old adage, "when all else fails follow directions ;-)"

So don't be shy about asking for help, but that "help" function in Word and other Office products is actually pretty, well, helpful a lot of the time!

Late night hours

Are you a night owl? Enjoy diving into that research or paper writing at midnight? You're in luck, because we are open Sunday through Thursday until 1:45am. This goes right through finals week. Good luck on those final papers and exams!

There is a librarian here to help you during those late hours too.

Primary sources

Sometimes people need "primary sources" for their research. Primary sources are information materials either from the time in question, or accounts of that time made later on by participants in it.

For example, if you were researching WWI, magazine articles from 1914-1918 would be primary sources. You could locate them using our Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, which goes back to 1899 (REF AI3 .R48.)

Or, for books, try searching our catalog, doing for example a subject keyword search of world war 1914 personal narratives to find personal accounts of soldiers and other participants experiences in the war.

There are many more possibilities, ask one of us to learn more about them!

A few tips

A few tips for getting through these last several weeks of classes:

• Don't waste time trying to figure out some library question on your own, ask one of us! You have enough to do already ;-)
• Putting together that big paper, not sure about getting it in proper APA, MLA, or University of Chicago format? Use our handy Citation & Bibiliography Styles page.
• Need a PC to use? The library has 85+ PCs on the main floor to use, plus there are a few upstairs. We hope to see the Kiefer Room with it's PCs on the ground floor reopened before too long, but with construction it's always a little hard to say. Don't forget that there are many PCs in other sites on campus, at Dailey Hall for example.

Library construction update

The asbestos removal continues on the ground floor preparatory to renovating that space. While the Kiefer Room, and its PCs, are still inaccessible, our helpful library IT staff brought some of those PCs upstairs and set them up around the pillars by the circulation desk.

From today through this coming Monday the elevator will be out of service due to the construction. Thank you for your patience, and please ask if there is anything you need!

COCID 2008

The 2008 "COCID," or Conference on Computing in the Disciplines, just concluded yesterday. It was held here at SUNY Brockport, and was chaired by Drake Library's very own Jennifer Little. The theme was one of Integrating Library Services into a Learning Management System.

This is a very timely topic, focusing on how libraries can better offer their services in the online world of Angel, Blackboard etc. The conference had well over a hundred attendees, from a wide range of schools and regions.

PCs in the library

The construction continues on our ground floor, future home of IT staff and labs from Dailey. This means the Kiefer Room downstairs, and its PCs, are not available for the time being. However, in case you weren't aware of it, there are some PCs on the top floor.

There is a seminar room (Rm234) with 7 PCs in it, that print to printer #4 on the main floor, and the several PCs along the line of the central stair case do print, to #2 on the main floor.

Remember too that Drake is wireless, so if you have a wireless laptop you are always welcome to bring that here. You can print from wireless laptops in the library, here are the instructions.

Alma Mater

Alma Mater? Sure, we have an alma mater. You can learn some of the words and music on this part of the college archive's web pages!

Pictured here is Marie Lillian Weldon, Class of 1916, who wrote the song.

D.C. Voting Rights? Women in Politics?

These are just the two latest reports from CQ Researcher. It's a reference title we got for years in print, and now it is online. Each report (they come out weekly,) is a factual, objective look at a particular issue of the day. its history, pros and cons, the timeline, a bibliography of more to read and much more. Have a look sometime, it's on our webpage under E-Reference!

Duck and cover!

Some of you may remember the "duck and cover" civil defense drills of the Cold War era, and that cartoon coach of the duck and cover move, Bert the Turtle. Of course, there is so much more to the Cold War than Bert, and a good place to learn about that period is our new five volume Encyclopedia of the Cold War, REF D840 .E63,

MetroCenter Librarian

For all you downtown students and faculty especially, but also anyone interested in our college's offerings downtown, there is going to be a ribbon cutting tomorrow for the new Library Commons in the MetroCenter. The ceremony will be at 5:00 pm in the "Grand Hallway" on the ground floor where the new area is located.

This is a new area in the building set up to better support research and student success. It will provide a wonderful setting within which to make use of the services of our downtown librarian, Linda Hacker. Linda's hours downtown are M-Th, 11-7. Her office is on the 3rd floor, Rm 346. You can email Linda at lhacker@brockport.edu, and phone her at 395-8476.

Construction in the library

Construction is beginning this week in the library on the ground floor to renovate those open spaces where the registrar etc. were a year ago. Those areas are being rebuilt to house IT staff from Dailey, as well as several computer labs, and a new service, the "ETC," or Educational Technology Center.

Please watch your step as you walk downstairs, and ask us if you need any help getting through or finding things. The service desk downstairs will continue to be open.

Faculty, invite us over, please!

Faculty, please feel free anytime to ask one of us to come over and talk to you and any interested colleagues about, well, anything library and information related. If you have questions about how to access the articles from a particular journal online, or want to talk about your department's journal subscriptions, or how your students can get research help from us, anything at all along these lines, do contact us.

More specifically, each of us serves as liaison to several academic departments. If you check this list, you can see which one of us is your department's liaison. Each department has a faculty member who is that department's coordinator with the library. If you're not sure who that person is in your department, check here.

The Top 10 Historical Hoaxers

A fun April Fool's Day read from the Times of London! (Pictured here is one of the Cottingley Fairy photos, taken by two young cousins just after WWI in England, and mentioned it the article.)

Curious about fairies? Try Fairies in nineteenth-century art and literature, NX652.F34 B69 2001.