As the title suggests, we here at the library had white boards installed in all of the group study rooms.
And shiny new markers to go with them! So now you can write your Diophantine equations in some lovely calligraphy.
So have fun kids. Express yourselves. Artistically, academically, emphatically…
Choose Privacy Week is a new initiative of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Library users are invited to join a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age.
You can find more information about this initiative at the privacyrevolution.org Web site.
Join The Revolution! Fill out the short form on this Web site to join other privacy advocates across the nation. Your identity will be safe and secure, but your sentiments will be amplified in Washington.
This short film introduces some of today’s most interesting and complex privacy issues.
So the week of April 19th was our first celebration of Earth Week here at the library. For those of you that haven’t been keeping up, we created some displays to try to become more environmentally conscious, and hopefully inspire some of the students to waste less. Our green tactics included stickers on printers, scanners and paper towel dispensers reminding you that the paper “comes from trees.”
But everything that we did was covered in a post from the beginning of Earth Week. What I’m here to focus on is the suggestions that we got from students, which we are going to be taking into consideration as we focus more on sustainability.
There were some especially good suggestions that we’d like to mention.
Some of these suggestions may not come into immediate effect, but we are going to try for some. Keep and eye out for recycling bins though, we have those on every floor.
And remember, please only print what you need. We go through a lot of paper every week.
April is National Poetry Month, and, as Fr. Pilarz has pointed out, today, April 29, is designated as the official occasion to celebrate. One way that you could celebrate is by visiting the Heritage Room on the 5th floor of the Weinberg Memorial Library. Enjoy the beautiful paintings by Trevor Southey, but also notice the poetry written on the wall beneath these images. Each quote is from a diffrerent poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century Jesuit poet. You can search The Columbia Granger’s Wold of Poetry to find out which poem each quote comes from. There is a Quick Search on the left-hand side of the page. Type “Gerard Manley Hopkins” in the search box under Poet and click on the Go button. Click on Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89) for a list of his poems (my favorite is Pied Beauty) or click on [bio] to access some biographical information.
If you’ve been in the DeNaples C-Store lately (or as it’s now officially known, the P.O.D. Market), you might have seen this “cheerful” photo behind the counter:
Front row: Tom O’Neill and Chris Zoeller. Back row: Herbert Lebovits, Joseph Molasky, and Jack McHale.
This photo from 1952 comes from the Weinberg Memorial Library’s University Archives, where it’s safely preserved for posterity in an acid-free folder. In 2009, we digitized the Archives’ whole set of football-related photographs and made it available online in our digital Football Collection. We recently just posted this photo to our Flickr account as part of a sample from the collection, to help users find us:
We here at the Library are proud to help our students get to know the University’s history. After all, according to one of our favorite archived University fight songs, “Today we’re Royals in the game, / Tomorrow we’re Royals in the world! We’re Royals, Royals, Royals!!”
The 2010 Weinberg Memorial Library Book & Plant Sale starts today at 4pm with a special preview sale for Friends of the Library and Schemel Forum members. The sale opens to the public tomorrow, April 24, from 9am – 9pm and Sunday, April 25 from 12pm – 4pm.
While surfing the Web I came across a website which makes focusing on your work all that much more difficult.
StumbleUpon is a website which leads you to other websites.
The webpages you stumble upon could range from Government Fact Sheets, National Geographic Images, YouTube Videos, Flash Games, News Articles, Blog posts, just about anything you can imagine.
My first result was a great set of images which help to scale galactic objects in comparison to one another… http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/9LspdV/www.rense.com/general72/size.htm
After that I stumbled on a game where you try to tranquilize sheep running from your herd. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1F2W83/www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/reaction_version5.swf
Then an extremely interesting video from YouTube. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1mWEMo/www.youtube.com/watch%253Fv%253DlUMf7FWGdCw
Lastly, a photo of Earth at Night from NASA. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2hI6DU/antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg
You do not need to sign-up in order to use this site, but for people who do a lot of surfing I would suggest making a free account. Account members can chose what kinds of websites they most frequently enjoy. As you are lead to a new site you can decide if you Like or Dislike the site. The more you rate websites the more likely you are to be lead to sites that you’ll enjoy.
Happy stumbling!
Our friends at the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE) asked us to remind graduating seniors put in their votes for the 2010 Teacher of the Year award.
CTLE says…
Each year the Graduating Senior Class selects its “Teacher of the Year.” Beginning Monday, April 19th, 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 19th and 5pm on Friday, April 23rd. The award will be presented during Class Night on Friday, May 28.
Class of 2010, your vote counts – so be sure to remember and recognize a faculty member whose teaching has inspired you!
This semester in the Technology On Your Own Terms series, we’ve had some great discussions about digital photography, photo sharing, and privacy settings in Facebook. We’ll be wrapping up the spring series next Wednesday with one last workshop for our University of Scranton faculty and staff.
Most people have heard the word wiki (even just in reference to Wikipedia), but not everyone knows what it means. In a workshop titled “Wiki Wiki WHAT?!: What You Need to Know to Understand, Create, and Maintain Wikis,” public services librarian George Aulisio will help participants understand not just what the word wiki means but why wikis are useful tools. In this session, George will help attendees set up a wiki account and add content to a wiki page.
The workshop will be held Wednesday, April 28th in Weinberg Memorial Library room 306 from 12pm-1pm. If you’d like to attend, please register at www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration.
Image courtesy of Flickr user nojhan under a Creative Commons license
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and we green-minded folk here in the Library will be celebrating all week. Since this is our first year officially celebrating Earth Week, we thought we’d put up a few displays to encourage everyone to start thinking about how the Library could be more sustainable. So if you visit our building this week, be sure to take a look at:
1) Our 5’3″ stack of paper in the second floor computer lab, which represents the 45,000 sheets of paper our Library printers use up each week.
2) Our growing collection of recycled paper, showing how much paper is thrown into the recycling bin in the computer lab each week. While we’re glad that this paper is being recycled rather than just thrown away, we hope to impress upon all of our patrons just how much paper is wasted each week. Please only print when necessary!
3) Our “These Come From Trees” reminder stickers, now on every Library printer, copier, and paper towel dispenser.
4) A display of sustainability-themed books in our fourth floor Quiet Study Room.
5) Recommendations for sustainability-related resources from our faculty and staff, on the first floor right inside the Library’s terrace entrance
6) A big sheet of paper (reused, naturally!) where you can write down your own ideas and suggestions for how the Library should go green in 2010.
Also, check back here at Infospot @ WML throughout the week for green-themed books that we’ve just recently added to our collection.
And when you’re not in the Library, be sure to participate in some of the joint University of Scranton/City of Scranton Earth Week activities, starting with tonight’s concert by alternative rock band Monty Are I and culminating on Friday with the popular Fair Trade Fair.
