Ames Library Blog

(from the IWU News Blog)

Laura Murray, a senior Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) art major, has been chosen to receive the fourteenth annual Ames Library Art Purchase Award.

Murray’s winning artwork, titled “Design & Music,” is a graphic design poster. Her other pieces in the Senior BA/BFA Art Show included a branding identity, a package design, logo designs, magazine spreads, poster and book layouts and charcoal drawings.

“I feel very privileged to have a piece of work that reflects my college experience at Illinois Wesleyan hanging in a beautiful building where future students can appreciate it,” Murray said.

Since 1996, The Ames Library has purchased a piece of artwork every year from a collection of work done by a senior BFA art student. The chosen piece is displayed on the entry level of The Ames Library for one academic year, after which it is moved to the permanent collection of student artwork on the second floor.

For additional information, contact Robert Delvin, fine arts librarian for The Ames Library, at (309) 556-3003.

To view images of past Art Purchase Award winners, please visit our online collection.

Rachael Miller ‘09, who will be graduating in May with a double major in Hispanic Studies and Greek and Roman Studies, has won The Ames Library Artistic and Scholarly Research Strategies Award. The award was established to recognize outstanding information access strategies used by students in the development of their scholarly and artistic/creative projects while at Illinois Wesleyan.

Miller’s research, “Las bibliotecas públicas y la comunidad Latina (Public libraries and the Latino community)” was completed for her Spanish for Social Justice class with Professor of Hispanic Studies Carolyn Nadeau. Miller’s research analyzed the library resources needs of the growing Hispanic population in our community. In her winning essay, Miller chronicled her research journey that took her from library databases and research discussions with Ames librarians to interviews with librarians in both the Bloomington and Normal public libraries. Professor Nadeau’s letter of support for the application cites Miller’s work as “…an extraordinary example of the well-researched paper that Illinois Wesleyan students are capable of producing.” In addition to a $500 award, her essay is online in Digital Commons, the online archive that houses IWU student journals, vetted student artistic and scholarly research, and faculty scholarship. (As reported IWU’s Campus Weekly)

Two new exhibits are now available in The Ames Library as part of our continuing series honoring the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

The first exhibit was prepared by guest curator Dr. Robert Bray, R. Forrest Colwell Professor of American Literature. His exhibit is available from now until June across from the Circulation Desk. Dr. Bray describes this collection as follows:
“Over the decades, professor Robert Bray’s chronic bibliophilia has occasionally erupted into acute bibliomania–with peculiar results such as you see [in this exhibit]. After a long period of relative remission, a kind of pax liberum we might say, the pox returned with new virulence with the advent on IWU’s campus of president Minor Myers, jr. Alone, Bray had managed to keep his disease in check, but in tandem with Myers the fever raged: capricious trips to phantom bookstores in small towns, browned fingers from rusting leather bindings, and, worst of all, eyes dilated and streaming after gazing too long at lines of 6-point type. . . .
“These several titles represent Bray’s most recent folly: an attempt to possess editions of books Abraham Lincoln read that are contemporary with the time in which he read them. He hopes you will enjoy the experience of going blind by trying to read immortal titles like the microscopically-printed Coles’ Concordance: Mk 3.25.”

The subject of the second library exhibit is the presidency and assassination of Abraham Lincoln as commemorated in popular sheet music of 19th century America. Visitors will find a variety of musical items from Lincoln’s presidency and the American Civil War. Selections from the Ames Library as well as reproductions from the Library of Congress are available from now until June on the library’s third floor outside Thorpe Digital Center.

Tags: Books, History, Music

Effective immediately, the Ames Library is sponsoring an Archives Exploration and Research Award designed to increase faculty awareness of archives and special collections material available on campus and as a means for encouraging integration of this material into their coursework and research.

The Faculty Development Committee approved a program description and submission guidelines document today and will act as the review authority.

Tate Archives & Special Collections has launched a blog describing collection highlights and offering links to known portions of the collection. Many unexplored corners in the vaults on the 4th floor await!

Additionally, the Archives is devoting one page of its blog to photographs that need additional description. As viewers offer leads, photos will be moved into the official photo site for the historical IWU images.

You can subscribe to keep up-to-date with new additions to the Archives & Special Collections blog or you can stop by the 4th floor and ask in person!

Tags: course develpoment, funding, primary sources, research

This semester, the Ames Library is offering the university community access to a Newsbank database that we are beta testing.  It is called Access World News, and it can be found in our A to Z list of databases here:

http://www.iwu.edu/library/resources/AtoZ_dbaselist.shtml

Access World News provides full text access to a large number of local, Illinois, national and international news sources, including newspapers broadcast transcripts, newswires, news blogs, news Web-only content and video.

This is a good resource for smaller newspapers in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States, as well as many international news sources that might not be available in our other news-oriented databases, such as LexisNexis or Academic Search Premier.

Let us know what you think.

Interested in helping the library understand what you need in order to do your research for class assignments?

Want to receive a $10 gift certificate to the IWU book store?

You can do both!  We need students to participate in the following research activities:

• an interview with an anthropologist (about an hour)
• videotaping your research process (about an hour)
• taking photos of some of your daily activities and favorite places

If you are willing to participate in one of the above activities, please contact Andrew Asher at libstudy {at} iwu(.)edu or x3362.

All the Honors Theses from the Tate Archives are now available full-text online.  To view, please visit Digital Commons @ IWU and click on the “Honors Projects” link for your department, school or program.

Student peer-reviewed journals are also online in Digital Commons.  All issues of Res Publica, Park Place Economist, Constructing the Past, The Delta and Undergraduate Economic Review are now available for browsing.  In addition, you can search across all issues of a journal.

If we’re missing any thesis from your department or if you have questions about Digital Commons, please contact Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian (sdaviska {at} iwu(.)edu).

Attention All Student Tutors!

Are you tired of having to look for a place to work?  Look no more!  There is now a room available in The Ames Library just for you on the entry level floor from 5:00pm to 1:30am Monday through Thursday, and all weekend hours.

Take advantage of this room that is equipped with a computer, printer and whiteboard by reserving it for your tutoring hours.  Reservations can be requested through Resource25.  You will need to ask for the Information Common student to open the room when you are ready to use it.

For additional information please contact the Information Commons at x3350 or Sue Stroyan at x3358 or sstroyan {at} iwu(.)edu.

Local public radio station WGLT ran a nice piece this morning remembering author John Updike, who died from cancer.  The piece features comments from IWU English Professor James Plath, and recalls Updike’s 2002 visit to Illinois Wesleyan.

To listen to the story, go to:

http://www.wglt.org/newsroom/audio/090128updikeappreciation.mp3

Tags: Illinois Weslyan, James Plath, John Updike

Free printing is an attractive benefit for Ames Library patrons but please consider some environmentally friendly steps you can take to help reduce paper usage: http://www.iwu.edu/library/support/print_smart.shtml

Conscious printing is one way we can all help lessen our impact on the environment. Library staff have also taken the following steps to decrease The Ames Library’s enviromental footprint:

• All printers in The Ames Library default to double-sided mode with the toner at the lowest possible setting. Campus Printing & Mailing Services Office supplies us with recycled paper made of 30% post-consumer fiber and our building custodians from Physical Plant recycle all paper that makes it into the appropriate containers.
• Public computer monitors dim after 15 minutes of the screen saver.
• All public Laser printers in the building also utilize power management features, and a power saving mode is enabled after 30 minutes of inactivity.
• Excess black is cropped out when scanning electronic reserves. Extra black requires unnecessary amounts of toner/ink if electronic reserves resources are printed out.
• The Instruction Lab, Project Rooms, and half of the computers at Scholarly Workstations and in the Information Commons are shut down for the summer and during Winter break in order to reduce energy consumption; when the building is closed for extended breaks and 3-day weekends, all public computers and printers are shut down and staff are reminded to turn their office systems off.
• Printing & Mailing Services Office replaced our old Xerox machines with 7 Canon/Xerox multifuctional devices which offer a scan-to-email function in addition to printing traditional photocopies. The power saving mode is also activated on these machines and they have been set to print and copy at their lowest settings. All staff have received instructions on these features and are willing to train anyone interested in them!

Tags: be green, environmental awareness, paper waste reduction