New blog from the American Psychological Association

If you’re a frequent user of databases and electronic resources from the American Psychological Association (PsycArticles, PsycINFO, PsycBooks) you may want to follow the new APA databases and electronic resources blog.
Watch the blog for announcements about online and in-person training opportunities, new or updated training materials, and new features in APA Databases. Blog posts will also highlight new journals and include the monthly list of books added to PsycBOOKS.
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Introducing Kanopy, an online video streaming service

Kanopy logo
The Alfred University libraries recently introduced a new online video streaming service, Kanopy.
Kanopy‘s collection includes thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases.
The collection includes films by leading producers, such as the Criterion Collection, PBS, Kino Lorber, New Day Films, The Great Courses, California Newsreel, and hundreds more.
Click here to start watching.

To find to Kanopy in the future, choose the Databases A-Z option on the Herrick or Scholes library homepage.

 We hope you enjoy the films!

Eva Sclippa with her award from the SCRLC

Eva Sclippa Wins Public Relations/Exhibition Award

Congratulations to Eva Sclippa, winner of this year’s Public Relations/Exhibition Award from the South Central Regional Library Council! Eva, an assistant librarian at Scholes Library, was nominated for her leadership and organization of the Harry Potter’s World exhibit and events, which took place this fall.
Last spring, Eva wrote a proposal to bring a National Library of Medicine Exhibit, “Harry Potter’s Eva Sclippa with her award from the SCRLCWorld,” to Scholes Library. She went on to organize a whole series of events to supplement the exhibit, including scholarly talks by Alfred University faculty, a Horcrux scavenger hunt for incoming students, a juried art exhibit, a Harry Potter themed trivia night at Herrick Library, a film showing of “Discovering the Real World of Harry Potter,” and a student Halloween ball.
Faculty responded enthusiastically to Eva’s invitation to examine Harry Potter’s World from a scholarly point of view, presenting talks on the idea of magic, the role of herbs in medicine, leadership styles as examined through characters in the books, the psychological impact of the Harry Potter series on readers, and more.
The Harry Potter events also included partnerships with local organizations, including the Alfred Farmers Market, the Alfred Box of Books Library, and the Almond Public Library.
Ellen Bahr, an associate librarian at Herrick Library, nominated Eva because she felt that “her vision and leadership of the Harry Potter’s World events is worthy of special praise and recognition. The Harry Potter’s World events have created new connections between the libraries and the communities we serve, and generated excitement and interest around the scholarly aspects of the Rowling books.”
Eva attributes the success of the events to “the incredibly broad popularity of Harry Potter,” and notes that,”fans could be found in all the strata of our community, from professors and college students to local parents and children.”
Mary-Carol Lindbloom, Executive Director of the South Central Regional Library Council (SCRLC), presented the award to Eva at the organization’s annual meeting in Ithaca on Friday, October 30. SCRLC is a non-profit, multi-type library consortium working to strengthen library services, programs and resources. It leads and advocates for member libraries by promoting learning, collaboration, and innovation.

Time Travel Sunday and Leadership Monday!

What a fabulous turnout for last night’s owls (and snake)! We’re getting to the halfway point of the Harry Potter’s World series, so if you haven’t had a chance to come to one of the talks, you might want to get on that. Fortunately, we have back to back talks this coming week:
ArithmancyLecture_timetravel
 
Arithmancy Lecture – “Time Turners and Time Travel Are Totally True”
Sunday, September 27th  •  4:00 pm  •  Herrick Library Seminar Room
Dr. David DeGraff
The idea of time travel, and being in two places at the same time may seem to require a witch’s or wizard’s skill, but the laws of physics do not forbid time travel.  What are the rules of totally true time travel? What could you do, and what would be forbidden? We will also look at some actual time machines you can build in your basement (if only you could find that one missing part). 

 
DATDALecture_leadership
 
 
Defense Against the Dark Arts Workshop – “Accio Leadership Skills: Lessons in Leadership Theory from Harry Potter”
Monday, September 28th  •  12:00 pm  •  Judson Leadership Center
Ana Gauthier
This workshop will explore classic leadership theories and styles through the lens of Harry Potter, using the characters as examples of varying styles, and levels of leadership development. We will examine the Social Change Model of Leadership, the Leadership Challenge, Kohlberg’s Morality Scale, and Chickering and Reisser’s Vectors of Human Development. Brown bag lunch workshop.

‘Camera Without Borders – the World of Caroline Littell’ to be on display at Herrick

Kalahari_Bushman_Caroline_Littell_Photo
A retrospective of travel photography by the late Caroline Littell of Alfred will be on view Friday, June 12 through Wednesday, July 15 on the main floor of Alfred University’s (AU) Herrick Memorial Library. The public is invited to an opening reception for “Camera Without Borders – the World of Caroline Littell” from 2 to 4 p.m. June 12.
The library’s summer hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday. The library is closed weekends.
Littell was a freelance photographer whose images illustrated articles on tourism and travel in several dozen newspapers and magazines in this country and in Europe. For more than 30 years, major publications featuring her photography included The Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure Magazine, The San Francisco Examiner, The Chicago Sun Times, The Milwaukee Journal, The Athens (Greece) News, The Denver Post, The New Orleans Times Picayune and Ocean Navigator Magazine.
In Western New York, her work appeared regularly in The Buffalo News, The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, The Hornell Sunday Spectator, The Olean Times Herald, and The Alfred Sun.
The 60 black-and-white photographs to be displayed at Herrick portray landscapes and people in locations ranging from Greece, Colombia, Thailand, and Burma to the American West and the plains of East Africa.
Born in Egypt of English parents, Littell was educated in England and later studied languages in France, Spain, Austria, and Greece. She immigrated to the United States in 1962, moving to Alfred in 1968.
As a photographer, Littell was entirely self-taught except for a brief period of instruction at AU. She worked for the most part in film, experimenting with digital formats only at the end of her career. But whether in film or in digital, her photography displayed a technical mastery of a demanding craft as well as an unerring eye for balanced composition.
Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French pioneer of modern photojournalism, Littell had the uncanny ability to capture on film that decisive moment of facial expression or body attitude that defines mood or personality.
Littell died earlier this year in Pasadena, CA, after a long illness.

JSTOR – 2015 Champion

JSTOR
 
After four rounds of voting JSTOR stands victorious as the 2015 Database Bracket Champions.
A favorite among both librarians and students, this database has some of the highest usage stats at Alfred as well. It’s no wonder too, covering over 50 academic disciplines collections on JSTOR include the full archival record of each journal from the first volume and extending within 3-5  years of the current issue.
And since any great wrap up includes the stats here ar the JSTOR statistics
Since January 2015 @ Alfred
Searches – 4,748
Full-text requests – 7,508
That means in the last 124 days
You made over 38 searches per day!
Downloaded 60 full-text articles per day!
That’s a lot of research!

Congratulations to our Senior Student Workers!

The AU Libraries would like to extend congratulations to all of our senior student workers. You have been a tremendous asset to the success of both libraries and to the AU campus as a whole. We thank you for your continued commitment and enthusiasm to making Herrick and Scholes welcoming and wonderful environments for both our staff and patrons. We appreciate you, we will miss you, and we wish you the very best in the future!
As a small token of appreciation, Herrick has created a book display to honor our senior student workers and their service to the library. Each book and DVD has been chosen by the seniors themselves. The display is set along the wall to the Computer Lab on the main floor of Herrick. We encourage you to check it out!

Senior Worker Book Display 2015

Books & e-books — preferences & benefits

Recently I attended a library orientation session where i overheard someone talking about their strong preference for books over e-books.  When the instructor noted that most of the libraries resources are online now, he sighed.  He clearly wished that he could access to more books in paper. One of our student workers shares that love of the physical book.
book happy
I imagine the person I overheard wouldn’t enjoy reading all of a book online.  He might be a little glum, like this student worker staring at the screen like she wished she were doing something else.
e-book unhappy
Like that student and like many of us, the experience of a book is a unique pleasure.  Touching the book, holding it, smelling it and, of course, reading it are all part of the pleasure.  It has many benefits. You can take it anywhere, read without a power source, you never have to wait for it to boot up, you can get right back to the page you left off at by just leaving it open, you can leaf through the pages to spot that section you liked and you know was on the lower right page — somewhere. My basement has shelves and shelves of favorite books that I go back to savor again and again. So I’m not anti-book, but why are we focusing on expanding the electronic resources?
COST
I have to admit — I’m an administrator, so I think about cost.  A recent example of a decision we made was to add a new collection of electronic books.  The collection costs about $3,000 per year.  It has 125,000 book titles in it. So access to each of those books, for every Alfred University student, faculty member or staff member, costs about 2.5 cents a year. We bought it knowing that 75,000 titles overlapped with other collections we already owned.  So why did we buy it? Because we’re still getting 50,000 unique titles at a cost of about 6 cents a year. To put that in perspective, if we used that $3,000 and bought books in paper, assuming that the average cost of each book and its book processing at about $50, we could buy just 60 books, instead of getting access to 50,000.
ACCESSIBILITY
The physical library is open quite a bit, 108 hours a week during the semester and library users can come in and browse to their hearts content.  But the electronic resources are available all the time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  If you want to work at 3 in the morning, or work from off campus, or are part of the downstate programs you will only be able to access our online resources. And most, thought not all, of the libraries’ online collections are available to multiple users, so that you don’t have to wait until someone returns the book you want. Here’s another of our student workers enjoying her access to electronic materials.
e-book happy
CONDITION
Books that patrons like will get used, and begin to wear out.  They can get dropped in the bathtub, or a mud puddle, they can get sticky pages from people eating and reading at the same time, they can drop pages out, and sometimes patrons tear them out.  Each new person who looks at an e-book gets the same fresh copy, and the pages of an online file can’t be torn, written on, or pulled out, although you can set up a person account and mark your own personal copy of the online book.
FEATURES
While you can’t browse an e-book in the same way you browse a paper book, you can search for specific words which you can’t do with a book. OK, you can do that with a book, it just takes forever. No, I’m not forgetting about indexes in paper books, but virtually all indexes are selective, and some of them are pretty quirky. Many of the databases provide citation tools that let you build your bibliography in a specific style sheet as you find each resource for your project.  You can e-mail links of books to other members of a study or class group for the project you’re working on.  Another one of our student workers is frustrated with looking through a pile of books, when he wishes he could search online.
book unhappy
Books will never entirely be replaced by online resources and we continue to have extensive collections of paper books. However, in the interest of providing the best service and most extensive collections possible to Alfred University both on campus and at branch locations, our online collections make sense for us.  We do continue to buy paper books, but online has become our major focus, for so many reasons.  So enjoy both at Herrick Library!
book and e-book happy
Please share your thoughts about this topic with Steve Crandall, fcrandall@alfred.edu, I’d love to hear from you!

And then there were two…

Champions-of-Social-Business

With all the votes in we have come down to the final two databases

JSTOR  &  Academic Search Complete

While we here at the libraries are tempted to say that these two databases are equals, awesome in their own right, and Goliaths of the search. Only one can hold the title of #1
Let’s take one last look at our competitors

JSTOR

Name: “The Non Profit”
Publishers: 900+
Disciplines Covered: 500+
Full Text Journals: 2,000+
Primary Resources: 2 Million+
Coach: Ithaca
Claim to Fame: “We Collaborate with the academic community”

Academic Search Complete

Name: “Coverage”
Temporal Coverage: 1887-Present
Indexed Journal Titles: 13,780
Full Text Journals: 9,000
Full Text Peer-Reviewed Journals: 7,850
Coach: EBSCOhost
Claim to Fame: “The world’s most comprehensive, scholarly full-text database for multidisciplinary research”
[polldaddy poll=8811706]