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.

Campus Ledger: Summer Reading

“Beta” seems to be the excuse for “things don’t quite work perfect yet.” Well, here’s one of those excuses.

The Campus Ledger, JCCC’s student newspaper is now available online from beginning to 2006. Peruse it here before we get it ready to announce across campus. We’ll build it a pretty search page and gussy it up for prime time.  It is just a long time comin’.

Accidental Billionaires

Chances are that you, your kid, your brother, or plenty of other people you know use Facebook.  This library even has a Facebook page.  But what’s funny is that the two founders of one of the most recognized social networking tools don’t even really like each other.  at least, that’s what Ben Mezrich’s book, Accidental Billionaires, claims.  In it, you’ll discover an account that begins with the hacking of a Harvard student image database to rank how hot the female students are, and ends with the youngest billionaire ever.  That’s a lot of ground to cover in the middle, but should be an interesting read for anyone with a Facebook profile or an interest in social networking.

Or getting rich quick.

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.

This is the New Scam; This is the New Book (of the Day)

If the title of Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s book, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, sounds familiar, you’ve probably opened some spam in your day.  Perhaps a Nigerian Prince needs your bank account to secure his fortune, but will soon pay you back, or perhaps a sure fire business deal overseas needs a modest investment to get going.

Hopefully, we now all realize that this is BS.

But here’s a fictitious story about the people behind sending those e-mails. A recent Engineering graduate, Kingsley, can’t find work in his home country of Nigeria.  His lady leaves him, he’s stuck with his family that he’s expected to assist in supporting, and his fancy degree isn’t amounting to squat.

Enter Kingsley’s uncle, Cash Daddy.  I think the name should be the first deterrent, but it turns out that, if he works with Cash Daddy, he can make a modest living running e-mail scams.  What follows is fairly predictable hi jinx, but hilarious nonetheless. As funny as the book is, it reminds us that, even if you find it despicable, people usually do what they do for a reason, be it family, necessity, or the occasional greed.

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.