Category: Announcements

ScholarSpace Redux

Do you write?  Do you present?  Do you have papers, reports, presentations, handouts from conferences, or any other intellectual property produced by you during your reign of employment or enrollment at JCCC?  Then I challenge you!

ScholarSpace is our Institutional Repository, and while I’ve mentioned it here before, it has been awhile.  Chances are, if you’re faculty, I’ve already made plans to knock on your door.  But you are henceforth challenged to approach me first!

If you are not faculty, help me!  I can only go department to department and ask for your intellectual output.  The whole point is to capture the work of everyone, including faculty, staff, and students. Please, if you are a student and have a work you’re really proud of, then speak with your instructor, speak with me, and we’ll see if ScholarSpace is the appropriate spot for your work.

It’s pretty awesome.  Your work has its own page where people can download it, get the proper citation for it, and you can even bump a notification to your facebook page or digg account about it.

An Institutional Repository is fancy-pants talk for the collected material of one entity (JCCC in this case).  If a work is put in the repository, it is by all means published.  What better way to show your pride, our value, and the quality of students we have than by showing what those students, their teachers, and the supporting staff around them can create?

It may look small now, but it is ready to grow. If you have a work that doesn’t fit into a department, just e-mail bbaile14@jccc.edu, and we’ll get it set up.  If you have any questions, stop by my office.  JCCC, you’ve been challenged to help store our legacy!  Let’s get it going!

El Libro del Día

Poetry From the Latino Heartland
Primera Página: Poetry From the Latino Heartland

Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland
Latino Writers Collective
Scapegoat Press, 2008

Members of the Latino Writers Collective, a local writers group, will read selections from their book, Primera Página, at Johnson County Community College in the Nerman Museum’s Hudson Auditorium, Thursday, Sept. 24.

Along with the group’s veteran members, the reading and discussion will feature the collective’s JCCC student members.

Rigoberto González, author of Butterfly Boy and Men without Bliss, examined Primera Página in a posting on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors.

“Fourteen distinct voices contribute to this anthology, showcasing an impressive range of subject matter and poetic traditions that make it difficult to pin down ‘poetry from the Midwest.’ If anything, it’s interesting to see how a number of the poets bring to the work other landscapes, like Mexico, the Southwest, the East Coast and even Europe, although it’s clear that the Midwest is home, or the home away from home.”

The Latino Writers Collective appears as part of the college’s Hispanic Heritage Month celebration and is sponsored by newly formed Hispanic student group, LUNA (Latinos United Now and Always), and the college’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The Latino Writers Collective: readings and discussion
Welcoming reception begins at 6 pm.
Readings start at 7 pm.

Hudson Auditorium in the Nerman Museum,
Johnson County Community College
Overland Park, Kan. 

Reminders and Thank Yous

Clicking the image will let you check out a video on LibGuides.
Clicking the image will let you check out a video on LibGuides.

This has been a very busy month for our LibGuides site, and its only two-thirds over with.  Currently, we’ve received 240 guide hits, more than the last two months combined!  And while that’s not a lot of hits overall, keep in mind that LibGuides are not yet advertised on campus, or even linked from our Web site.  All JCCC traffic has been from limited promotion on this page, and a few demonstrations to faculty and students They’re looking pretty good, and while plenty of people have begun updating, reformatting, and adding features, we’ve still got some fixing to do.

Here’s a page just for you readers:  It is a LibGuide made for our Autism & Asperger’s conference coming up in October.  As you can see, it is still being constructed, but it shows off some of the features that other LibGuides on our page haven’t used yet. You’ll have to follow the link because it is not available from JCCC’s libGuides homepage. Once it is complete, it will be listed, but until then, feedback is appreciated from our blog readers.

Book of the Day

It is pretty much self-promotion that gets libraries posting on blogs, and our “Book of the Day” can be seen as self-promotion for our collection.  This week’s book goes beyond that to an overall Library Mission promotion.  Banned Books: 2007 resource book, put together by Robert P. Doyle, highlights battles libraries have had to defend over time.  The pattern is often this:

  • User finds a book offensive.
  • User rallies community members.
  • Librarian defends the book.
  • User remains outraged.
  • Book gets taken off shelf.
  • User celebrates, and immediately forgets the problem.
  • 2 months later, the book is back on the shelf.
  • No one cares.

But what is interesting about this is the reason a lot of these books have been put away, and the make-up of the communities that ban them.  The information for each known ban is listed.

If you’d like to see it, come down to the Reference Desk, where it is on special display for the time being!

Calling all readers: join JCCC Booktalk!

Did you know we have our own book club here at JCCC?  It’s called Booktalk, and the group meets once a month to discuss inspiring titles both contemporary and classic.  Booktalk is open to all members of the campus community.  For more information, join the Booktalk listserv by e-mailing mfitzpat@jccc.edu.

Here’s the roster of books selected for discussion during the 2008-09 school year:

9/26 — Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

10/24 — Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

12/5 — A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

1/30/09 — Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2/27 — In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

3/27 — Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

4/24 — Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Twitter – Social Networking

The library is now on Twitter

With a forced minimum of less than 200 characters, Twitter is a way to follow library happenings in digestible formats.  Adding the library as a Twitter friend will inform you of minor happenings, when we add blog posts, when a new subject guide is created, when special events take place, and if needed, possibly some policy reminders!  Add us as a friend, and don’t hesitate to start a message “@JCCCLib: to ask us a question.

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, check it out here.  We’ll let you know as more creative uses develop!

ScholarSpace: The Academic’s Place

Today, Judi Guzzy and I announced ScholarSpace, the institutional repository for JCCC. Soon, this space will become populated with journals, conference proceedings, occasional papers, and other documents which represent our collected scholarly output. This is a big step, not just for our library, but for our institution as an academic presence on the Web. To learn more, e-mail me, comment, or sign up at scholarspace.jccc.edu.

digitalLabs: A work in progress

visit digitalLabs
visit digitalLabs

I’m quite proud to announce that our digitalLabs page at JCCC is in full swing.  Many of the projects, including this blog, which are considered experimental, are available for your perusal.

As the projects become available, updates will be made known on the blog.  Projects available include a New Items RSS feed, the libraryMobile page, and this blog right here.  Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think!