The Weinberg Memorial Library would like to congratulate our senior work study students on their graduation! We’re so grateful for all of their hard work, and we’ll miss them all dearly.
The students were honored today with a luncheon, where they received a certificate of appreciation. Each student also will have a book in their major added to our collection in their honor (ask them which book is theirs!).
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Forty Two, under a Creative Commons license
Just a reminder that the Library will be closing early this week for Easter. Here’s when you’ll find us here:
Thursday April 21 8:00 a.m.– 4:30 p.m.
Friday–Sunday April 22-24 Closed
Monday April 25 Noon – 11:30 p.m.
Enjoy the holiday, everyone!
We’re in the Scranton Times-Tribune today! Many thanks to reporter Josh McAuliffe and photographer Michael Mullen for sharing the story of our exciting Civil War project. Here’s what it’s all about:
This semester, students from Dr. Kathryn Shively Meier‘s Civil War and Reconstruction class (HIST314) partnered up with the Weinberg Memorial Library, the Lackawanna Historical Society, and the Everhart Museum to get a hands-on feel for local Civil War history. Dr. Meier designed the class project in collaboration with Digital Services Librarian Kristen Yarmey to give the students a taste of what life as a historian, curator, or archivist is like while they simultaneously learned about the experience of the common man during the Civil War.
The class project kicked off with a visit to the Everhart’s exhibit “With bullets singing all around me”: Regional Stories of the Civil War, where the students got to chat with curator Nezka Pfeifer about how the exhibit came together. The class of 33 students, most of whom are history majors, then split up into five groups, each with a specific task. The first group worked at the Historical Society with executive director Mary Ann Moran-Savakinus and Pennsylvania Conservation Corps member Sara Strain, going through genealogical files to search for original, Civil-War era correspondence. A second group of students focused on preserving those found letters in appropriate archival storage and prepared them to be lent to the Weinberg Library.
A third group of students spent time here at the Weinberg, digitizing the found letters and describing them. The fourth group of students got a primer in 19th century handwriting from Dr. Meier and is currently working on transcribing the documents. A final, fifth group of students will design a web page layout to interpret the digitized letters for the public.
The end result of the project will be a set of fully searchable, digitized, Scranton-related Civil War documents. These documents will all be made freely available to the public as part of a local collaborative digital history collection called “Out of the Wilderness,” hosted by the Albright Memorial Library.
Our partners in crime over at the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) asked us to remind graduating seniors put in their votes for this year’s Teacher of the Year award.
CTLE says…
Each year the Graduating Senior Class selects its “Teacher of the Year”. Beginning Monday, April 11th, please vote for the faculty member who you believe best exhibits the following characteristics:
• Maintains the highest standards of academic excellence and fairness.
• Inspires interest in the discipline through personal enthusiasm and dedication.
• Is consistently effective in communication.
• Is available outside of the classroom.
To vote, make sure to cast your electronic ballot between 9am on Monday, April 11th and 5pm on Friday, April 15th. The award will be presented during Class Night on May 27th.
Class of 2011, your vote counts – so be sure to remember and recognize a faculty member whose teaching has inspired you!
On Wednesday, April 6, our Spring 2011 Technology on Your Own Terms series will wrap up with E-Readers and Tablets: The Hype and the Facts from 11am-3pm in WML305.
Nook, Sony, Kindle, iPad, Galaxy… There are so many e-readers and tablet computers available that it’s getting harder to know which product to choose to fill a certain need. Want some answers? Drop in any time during our four hour showcase of e-readers and tablet computers at the Weinberg Memorial Library. Best Buy will have many products on display and provide knowledgeable staff to answer your questions. You will learn about the Weinberg Memorial Library e-books available for download as well as where you can find free e-books and how to convert regular documents to ereader formats. Light refreshments will be served. (With representatives from Best Buy, the Weinberg Memorial Library, and the CTLE)
As every Scrantonian knows, the big excitement in town this weekend is Parade Day. Whether you’re planning to watch the parade or stay home and avoid the crowds, it’s also a nice weekend to reflect on St. Patrick and the history and traditions of Ireland.
Here in the Weinberg Memorial Library, we have several biographies of St. Patrick as well as the texts of his two surviving writings – the Confessio and the Epistola ad milites Corotici. And of course we have a lot of resources on Ireland, including some great films and media resources. You can also find a lot of interesting articles about St. Patrick, Irish history and culture, and the history of St. Patrick’s Day by searching our Academic Search Elite, America: History and Life, and ProQuest Central databases.
There are also some great resources out there on the web. Take a few minutes to check out:
Each year at the University of Scranton, graduating masters and honors students demonstrate their research prowess by writing and defending a scholarly thesis. Since 1955, the University Library has preserved these works in print form in our Special Collections.
Now, the Weinberg Memorial Library is proud to introduce the new Electronic Masters and Honors Theses Collection, a new digital home for University of Scranton masters and honors student scholarship.
The collection currently includes 359 graduate and undergraduate theses written by University of Scranton students from 1955 to the present. While the digital collection does not yet include all of the theses the Library holds in print, we are continually adding newly digitized and newly submitted works. With the permission of their respective authors, these theses are either available to the public or restricted to on-campus users only.
If you’re an alumnus who wrote an honors or masters thesis as part of your University of Scranton coursework and would like to include your thesis in the collection, please visit our Thesis Permission page to find out how you can request that your thesis be digitized. As in the past, your original printed thesis will still be preserved in the Library’s Special Collections.
Questions or comments about the Electronic Masters and Honors Theses collection may be directed to the Digital Services department at etheses@scranton.edu or 570-941-7003.
Foursquare users should be sure to check in to the Library each time they visit – our Mayor wins a free Library water bottle!
So far, we’ve had 87 check in a total of 570 times. Our goal is to be more popular than the DeNaples Center, where 134 people have checked in 936 times.
Keep an eye out for other Foursquare specials on campus – they’re coming soon!
On March 9, our Spring 2011 Technology on Your Own Terms workshops will continue with The Changing Face of Facebook, to be held from 1pm-2pm in WML305.
If you are a Facebook user, you have probably asked yourself at least once, “Why does Facebook make so many changes to its site?” In this session, librarian Donna Mazziotti will present an overview of the latest wave of changes made to the Facebook user interface. She will also offer a rationale for why Facebook is an ever-evolving tool, as well as reasons why users should embrace Facebook’s mission to always improve its product. After this session, attendees will grow from passive to proactive Facebook users, able to educate themselves about changes made to Facebook as the changes occur. A light lunch will be provided during the discussion.
All faculty and staff members are welcome, but seats are limited, so please register at www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration (under Technology On Your Own Terms).
On February 16, our Spring 2011 Technology on Your Own Terms workshops will begin with The Insider’s Guide to Smartphones, to be held from 12pm-1pm in WML305.
In this workshop, digital services librarian Kristen Yarmey and technology services analyst Diane Jachimowicz will discuss some of the technology behind smartphones like iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. We’ll talk about what terms like 3G, 4G, tethering, and jailbreaking mean in plain English, what sensors like accelerometers and compasses mean for average users, how operating systems like iOS and Android differ, and what phone features to look out for in 2011 and beyond. A light lunch will be provided during the discussion.
All faculty and staff members are welcome, but seats are limited, so please register at www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration (under Technology On Your Own Terms).
