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The Olive Tree |
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The Olive Tree |
Our Spring semester has begun with the first major snow storm of the winter.
Those of us who welcome the Maine winter weather are happy to finally have snow
for skiing and other activities. I am also pleased that as we move into this new
semester that we have the services and resources our users need for their
classes and research.
The projects that we began a few months ago have been highly successful. The
Information Commons has exceeded our expectations with a significant increase in
the number of questions answered at that desk. The staff expertise brought
together at one desk has resulted in much better service to our users. We will
continue to develop the commons as we respond to the users’ needs. The exhibit
from the William S. Cohen Papers titled “Cohen, Congress and Controversy:
Rediscovering Civics in the Archives” is now at Bangor Public Library, the
fourth stop on the tour across the State. The exhibit uses facsimiles of
photographs, handwritten notes, speeches, and campaign memorabilia from the
former congressman’s political papers to bring the legislative branch into
focus. This display showcasing the wealth of information in the Cohen Papers
archive has been very well received in the host communities and we expect it
will continue to generate interest in that collection.
New projects include iPod tours and scanning. Library staff are working to
create library tours, both audio and visual, that are downloadable to an iPod.
To take advantage of this new technology staff are creating scripts and asking
library departments to participate in the filming of the tours. The tours will
be descriptions of the departments and the resources and services to be found
there. The iPod tours will be available from the Fogler Library web page. The
library is also using new equipment to scan collections and make them available
through the online catalog. This is an exciting new venture for the library and
will eventually make many of our unique collections available to users anywhere
in the world.
We also have new resources available, two of these are news@nature.com and
Journal Citation Reports. News@nature.com is an online current-awareness
resource from the Nature Publishing Group. It includes breaking news from Nature
journals, as well as compilations of articles and news channels by topic.
Journal Citation Reports allows the user to evaluate and compare the impact of
journals. Journals can be displayed by subject area and organized by impact
factor, total citations to the journal, immediacy index, total number of
articles, and cited-half life. JCR indexes over 5,900 journals from the sciences
and over 1,700 journals from the social sciences.
Also this semester we will be asking some of our users to answer a survey about
the library. We will use the Association of Research Libraries LibQual survey.
This survey will collect data to identify best practices, analyze deficits, and
effectively allocate resources. We will use the results to help us identify and
develop services that better meet our users' expectations.
As you can see the staff are busy ensuring that Fogler is the best library for
our users and we will continue to expand our collections and services to meet
their needs. Please call, write, or stop in to see what we have been doing and
take a tour of the Library. I hope you are pleased with what we are doing and
will continue to support us in the future.
Spring 2007 Home
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