Alexander Street Press has resolved the technical issues they experienced with the VAST collection and it is operating normally.
The Alexander Street Press VAST Collection is Temporarily Down
The Alexander Street Press VAST collection is experiencing technical difficulties and the videos are not playing. Alexander Street Press is investigating this urgent problem. Thank you for your patience during this downtime.
Volunteers and Donations for the Library’s Annual Book Sale
The Library will host its Annual Book Sale the weekend of April 27th. As always, proceeds will benefit the Friends of the Library endowment fund in support of WML’s collections and services. If you are a student and would like to earn service hours, please consider volunteering. We will need help pricing, organizing, and selling the books. For more information or to sign up, please contact Ellen Judge at Ellen.Judge@scranton.edu or stop by the Center for Service & Social Justice, DeNaples 205B.
The Library is also seeking donations of tag sale items and current hardcover and paperback books in good condition. No encyclopedias or old textbooks please. You may drop off your contributions in the donation boxes at our Monroe Ave entrance.
University of Scranton Basketball Collection
Here’s something we’ve been working on for a while as part of our ongoing digitization of materials from the University Archives: The University of Scranton Basketball Collection. We haven’t yet digitized the whole archival collection, but we thought we’d go ahead and make the part that *is* done available to all of you – especially with the University’s 125th Anniversary coming up!
So far, the digital Basketball Collection includes more than 600 photographs and documents, dating from 1917 through 1979, that relate to basketball at St. Thomas College and the University of Scranton. The collection includes team and player photographs, game programs, rosters, and selected newspaper clippings. Most of the material is from the 1920s-1950s, but we’ll be adding content from more recent years as we’re able to digitize it. Don’t forget, of course, that the original photographs and documents are available in the Library’s University Archives and can be viewed by appointment.
We hope that the collection will interest our alumni as well as our current students, faculty, staff, and friends. Please let us know at digitalcollections@scranton.edu if you have questions or suggestions for us — or if you recognize one of our unidentified photographs! If you like what you see, make sure you take a second to browse through our other digital collections.
Spring Game Night
We’ll be holding our Spring Game Night on Monday, March 4th from 8-11pm in the Heritage Room of the Library. We will have our new Kinect with Just Dance 4 (our favorite!), XBox and PlayStation, Super Mario and RockBand! There will be free pizza, snacks, and soda. Stop by for a snack and a quick game or stay the entire time! 
Call for Artists
The library will be hosting the 3rd Annual Environmental Art Show during the University’s Earth Week Celebration (April 18-25). The purpose of the Art Show is to showcase the artistic talents of our students, staff, and faculty while promoting sustainability and the environment.
As always the Art Show is comprised solely of University of Scranton student, staff, and faculty submissions, so the success of the show relies on the number of submissions we receive. All types of artwork are accepted for display in the Art Show, but they must be your own creation, and they must be environmentally themed. Our definition of “environmentally themed” is understood very liberally and includes: nature scenes, animals, environmental degradation, sustainability messages, recycled goods, and so on.
Please consider submitting to the show before April 12 and attending the Art Show’s Reception on Monday April 22 from 5-7 pm. All submissions will be returned to the artists before the end of the Spring semester.
Technology on Your Own Terms
On behalf of the Weinberg Memorial Library and the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, we invite University of Scranton faculty and staff to the first of our Spring 2013 Technology On Your Own Terms (TOYOT) workshops.
Password Security
Adam Edwards (Director of Information Security)
February 20, 2013 – 12:00-1:00PM in WML 305
This session will teach you some techniques for creating memorable passwords, give you some tools that can be used to improve password security, and tell you some ways that you can keep your password safe. This session will give you some tips on how to recognize if you are being targeted as a social engineering victim. This is when someone attempts to get your password by tricking you into thinking that he is someone else.
A light lunch will be provided.
Sessions are open to all University faculty and staff, but seats are limited, so please let us know you are coming. You can register at www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration – under Technology on Your OwnTerms.
American Hands Exhibit and Schemel Forum Event
The Library’s Heritage Room is currently hosting American Hands: A Visual Celebration of Traditional Tradespeople, a traveling exhibit of work by photographer Sally Wiener Grotta.
American Hands is Sally Wiener Grotta’s ongoing narrative visual celebration of those individuals who are keeping alive the traditional trades that built our country’s diverse culture. She has documented the work of artisans including a spinner, weaver, blacksmith, bookbinder and others. She has returned to their workshops over the course of months and years to document the different stages of their creations. She documents the craft processes as well as the personalities of the individual tradespeople.
Sally began the exhibit as Pennsylvania Hands. The constantly changing exhibit has been seen around the state and has now become a national project and renamed American Hands.
Sally is widely considered to be a pioneer of digital photography and computer graphics. She has served as chapter president for the American Society of Media Photographers and has traveled on assignment to every continent including Antarctica. Sally co-authored (with Daniel Grotta) the groundbreaking work, Digital Imaging for Visual Artists which is considered one of the first important works on the subject. The PC Magazine Guide to Digital Photography and The PC Magazine Digital SLR Photography Solutions are among their other books. Her photographs and articles have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and books.
There will be a reception featuring a talk by the artist on Wednesday, February 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the Heritage Room. The reception is free and open to the public. The exhibit, lecture, and reception are cosponsored by the Friends of the Weinberg Memorial Library and the Schemel Forum. You can register for the event here.
The exhibit will be on display through the end of February.
Archiving the University Web
Thanks to combined support from the University of Scranton’s Academic Affairs and Planning and Information Resources divisions, the Weinberg Memorial Library has partnered with Archive-It (a subscription service from nonprofit Internet Archive) to capture and preserve University-related websites for the enduring future.
Part of the Weinberg Memorial Library’s mission is to “preserve and promote the history of the University,” and our University Archives has long collected and preserved photographs, documents, and other records from the past.
Increasingly, though, our students, faculty, and staff communicate using dynamic digital media instead of paper or film. For example, the University’s undergraduate catalog is no longer a print publication but a database, and instead of finding printed newsletters in our mailboxes, we get our weekly University news digitally via Royal News. And unfortunately, this kind of web content is surprisingly vulnerable to digital degradation and loss over the long term.
We could preserve a paper version of that dynamic information (say, by printing out Royal News each week) or take a PDF or image screenshot of it, but in doing so we’d lose its interactivity and searchability. Ideally, in the future we’ll want to be able to access archived web content the same way we access it now — that is, by browsing and searching.
That’s where web archiving comes in. Archive-It’s web archiving service allows us to crawl and capture web pages in ways that preserve their dynamic and functional aspects – including active links and embedded media like images, videos, animations, and PDF documents.
We’re certainly not the first ones to recognize the importance of web archiving in higher education. 97 other colleges & universities have already signed on with Archive-It, including fellow Jesuit universities Georgetown, Creighton, and Marquette, and fellow Pennsylvania schools Penn State, Drexel, and Bucknell. Several universities have created web archives that document important topics or events, like the American University in Cairo’s January 25th Revolution project or the University of Virginia’s collection of web and social media content relating to the resignation and reinstatement of President Teresa Sullivan.
Here at the Weinberg we plan to focus our early web archiving efforts on our own University web content (like our main website and our athletics site) and the University-related social media sites (like our YouTube channel and many Facebook pages) where our community shares its stories. Over time, as we develop expertise (and hopefully secure recurring funding!), we’ll work with faculty to identify and explore the possibility of collecting external websites relevant to current and future scholarship at the University of Scranton.
Our first step, though, is to seek input from our campus community regarding what is most important to preserve for the future. We invite members of the University community to send us questions, concerns, or suggestions. Take a peek at our first experimental crawls, and let us know if you’d like to be involved in web archiving at the University of Scranton!
Library wants Student Feedback!
FEB 1-28 the library is offering students the ability to reserve group study rooms as a test. At
http://tinyurl.com/wmlbookit
the two newest group study rooms on the second floor can be reserved by student groups of two or more, up to one week in advance, for up to two hours per day. The person reserving the room will receive a confirmation e-mail, which also gives a quick link for cancelling the reservation if necessary.
During this period we are requesting that these rooms ONLY be used with a reservation. The test will help us determine if the software is helpful, and if reserving study rooms is a service we will be able to offer more widely in the future.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think!