Get Cooking, JCCC: It’s Almost Thanksgiving

We’ve got a lot of cookbooks here to help you through your Thanksgiving and holiday season. Check them out here. Among our new books, we’ve got Baking by James Peterson, which promises you 300 recipes to guide you in your pursuit of baked goods.

Here at the library I offer you a secret family recipe:

Royal Thanksgiving Turkey

  1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees.
  2. Take thawed turkey, rubber glove, and begin removing the Pile of Nasty lodged inside it.
  3. Baste turkey, using brush, with mixture of 2 quarts bourbon, 1 stick of butter.
  4. Apply a seasoning mix of garlic, pepper, chives, and questionable spice found in cabinet when reaching for the garlic powder.
  5. Place stuffing inside. It doesn’t really matter if its cooked or not, surely something magical will happen. Turkey’s a mystery, you know.
  6. Remember that you forgot to take the center rack out of the oven: using an oven mitt (DO NOT FORGET THIS STEP [again]). When you realize you have nowhere to set rack, throw it outside. If you rent, prepare excuse for landlord explaining grid-shaped burn mark in grass.
  7. Take battery out of smoke detector.  Actually, you shouldn’t really do this step; I’m guessing it’s illegal. For law-abiding citizens, grab noise-cancelling headphones.
  8. Place turkey, in pan, on the bottom rack, and set the timer for what seems like an eternity. No really, just make up a time. How bad could it be?
  9. Apply one (1) full contents of fire extinguisher to inflamed bird. Use foot to hold back Labrador retriever. Curse yourself for falling asleep. (In your defense, it isn’t your fault that the Detroit Lions insist on playing every freaking Thanksgiving.)
  10. Apologize to appropriate neighbors and civil service employees.
  11. Place keys in ignition, proceed to nearest International House of Pancakes. Pancakes taste better than turkey, anyway, and your vegetarian family members will show visible relief. Turns out, they don’t actually like tofurkey!

Have a good break, folks. We’ll be back Sunday.

Veterans Day

wall memorial

 

On this Veterans Day, we invite you to check out our Veterans Affairs LibGuide. We put this together in order to better serve our students, staff, and faculty who have served in the Armed Forces. Hopefully, they’ll find the resources useful.  We have links to bibliographies and filmographies, streaming video resources, articles from our databases, and local organizations who exclusively serve veterans and their families.

The library extends our thanks to those who selflessly serve our country.

Campus Ledger

The Ledger is almost up to present.  This year’s volume is currently the only thing we have left to enter, so check it out here.  If you’ve tried to use our catalog today, you know our server is hiccupy, so stay with us while we go through the pains of updating.

Digital Resource Usage

In checking out the digital projects we provide (not subscriptions like journals or e-books), we found some interesting things.

First, the most popular resource we have is our LibGuides collection, which received an insane number of hits over the last two years. The most popular guides are the Gay and Lesbian Film Guide, Autism & Asperger Syndrome Guide, Graphic Novels, and Italian Films & Music.  Now, we made the Autism guide in conjunction with the Autism conference held on campus, so we knew that it would be popular, and the graphic novel guide is one of our oldest.  The biggest from the guides was the Italian Films & Music resource.

Now, even though those guides got good hits, our college repository, ScholarSpace, had a few articles with significant downloads. Hopefully this raises awareness of the resources we have, and hopefully gets more contributors as time goes on.

Here are the Top 20 individual resources:

  1. Gay and Lesbian Film Guide (LibGuide)
  2. Autism & Asperger Syndrome (LibGuide)
  3. Graphic Novels (LibGuide)
  4. Italian Films and Music (LibGuide)
  5. World War II Novels (LibGuide)
  6. The Interactive Research Guide: Will Function Bring Users Content? A Project Model Illustrated by a Proposed Paper-Writing Guide (article by Barry J. Bailey)
  7. Taking Sides (LibGuide)
  8. Into the Great Wide Open… (presentation by Nick Greenup)
  9. Holocaust Fiction (LibGuide)
  10. This Month (Campus Publication): February 2008 (full issue in ScholarSpace)
  11. Japanese Films and Music (LibGuide)
  12. Chinese Film and Music (LibGuide)
  13. Library Newsletter: Spring 2008 (newsletters are stored in ScholarSpace)
  14. Novels About Aging (LibGuide)
  15. Fighting Neurelitism (article by Mark A. Foster from campus publication Many Voices)
  16. Informé 2007 (field report by William McFarlane)
  17. Ethical Dilemmas in Film (LibGuide)
  18. Anthropology Fiction (LibGuide)
  19. The Rolling Stone: Fiscal Close and Fund Structure Design (presentation by Judi Guzzy)
  20. Muslim World: Film and Music (LibGuide)

Welcome Back

So, hey, what’s up?

Welcome to the first day of Fall Semester ’09! The library has a lot of new resources like Mango (learn languages… lots of them!), new LibGuides to help you research, and plenty of new books to help you cheat… at video games.

Okay, you have to do your own coursework… but we’re certainly here to help you along the way.

And we’re able to be reached multiple ways:

  • Leave a Facebook note
  • Reply or Direct Message @jccclib on Twitter
  • Use our chat client (to your right!)
  • Shoot us an e-mail
  • We also still answer the phone
  • And we exist in person

Despite the weather today, it’s going to be a good year.

Yes, They Are Real

We’ve installed these things called Cones of Silence into our media area.  The idea is that you can play something with audio underneath one and it will limit the sound to you and the person right next to you.

If that didn’t sound too sci-fi for you, please gander at these photos of our 3 Cone of Silence stations.

Try’em out, let us know how they work.

Behind the Scenes: Inching Closer

So this process has been pretty crazy.  We’ve got a batch of ten items photographed and cataloged, and now we have to meet with a fashion expert and the photographer to make sure we’re doing it right.  After that we’ll be ready to roll on forward.

Until then, here’s a link to the test collection: http://bit.ly/Oyd8p. We’ll be manipulating this, cleaning it up, then adding to it at a fairly rapid pace.

2490 garments to go… eesh.

Summer at the Library

What’s up? This blog is getting dusty, and that’s because the slowness of summer is the excuse we use here at Billington Library to start getting more done.  Some things end up getting skipped over: you’re looking at one of them.

DSC_0001That right there is a gaggle of dress forms. I’m not comfortable with them hanging out so bare, so they’ve been covered for the time being.  The reason they’re around is because we have this fashion collection out here at JCCC, and we’re ready to digitize it all.   We’ll be throwing dresses on these and hammering our photographs for the rest of summer, and then fall… it is likely a year or two year project. And it is time consuming. Eek.

Meanwhile, we’re still getting quite a bit of new books, and still doing instruction for classes throughout summer.

Coming up soon is SIDLIT, the summer conference for distance learning. JCCC’s ScholarSpace is the new home for digitally archiving the conferences proceedings, and we’re super-psyched to be attending and collecting presentations.  We’ll probably be following it at our Twitter account, on SIDLIT’s Twitter account, or collectively at #sidlit, starting when the conference goes down: July 30th – 31st.

Also, supposedly in the next two weeks, we’ll have the Campus Ledger in our posession: digitally.  From creation to 2007, the only gap being one year that seems to have left this earth in its entirety.  Exciting? Yes. I hold my breath, though, in anticipation of its arrival.

And yet, there’s more.  I’ll talk about it when it is more solidified.

Congratulations, Cindy Clark!

cindy_employee_of_the_mellinneumDoes she look surprised?  Yes she does.  But she shouldn’t be, because Cindy Clark has earned the EXCEL Award for JCCC Employee of the Year. That’s right: of every staff member on campus classified as Maintenance/Service or Office/Technical, full or part time, the library’s very own Cindy Clark has been named supreme champion.  So congratulations!