Date: Tues. May 25, 2010
Time: 1:30 p.m.
Place: Munroe Room (Room 109), McKillop Library

The Faculty Staff Book Group invites the Salve community to join in the discussion on Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains explores the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, including the work that he is involved in in Haiti. The group will explore two themes, what makes community, and what does it mean to create a sense of place?

Read reviews ...

Check for available copies or read the book online anytime or read it on the library's Kindle.

Faculty and staff are invited to a retirement reception for Joan Bartram on Wednesday, May 19, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. in McKillop Library's Munroe Special Collections Room.

Joan has been a librarian at Salve Regina University for 19 years and is retiring to pursue her artistic interests.

Click here to take survey on study space in the library

The Faculty Staff Book Group will be reading Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. Mountains Beyond Mountains explores the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, including the work that he is involved in in Haiti. The group will explore two themes, what makes community, and what does it mean to create a sense of place? The discussion will take place after Commencement. The date and time TBA. Read reviews ...

Check for available copies or read the book online anytime.

In light of the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, and many others who are impacted by the natural disasters and extreme weather that occur in the world each year, ebrary has been working to gather authoritative, public domain information from government websites and creating a highly interactive, searchable database. The hundreds of important government documents related to natural disasters and extreme weather, is now available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/disaster.

Last November, ebrary made the H1N1 Searchable Information Center, which is freely available at http://h1n1.ebrary.com. All of ebrary's searchable information centers feature extensive research capabilities including the following:

• Multiple options for searching, navigating, and browsing
• ebrary InfoTools™ which turns every word into a portal to additional information on the web
• Notes and highlights
• Ability to copy/paste and print text with automatic citations and URL hyperlinks back to the source
• Personal bookshelves with moveable folders that can be emailed to others

Some of the databases provided by the library now have special interfaces for mobile devices. These can be used with your smart phone or other web-enabled mobile device. The mobile application is tailor-made for the smaller screens of mobile devices, and offers the most important features and functionality right in the palm of your hand. Clicking on the smartphone icon by a database name will direct you to a mobile device interface.

The library has added a RSS feed of the library's news. You can add this feed to your favorite RSS feed reader. The URL is: http://library.salve.edu/rss/rss.xml. You can learn more about RSS feed on our About RSS page.

Julie Swierczek, our technical services specialist, is blogging daily about interesting arrivals that cross her desk. In the blog she provides a link to several new items with a link to a review and to the catalog. Not every new arrival is mentioned in the blog; she just focuses on new materials that catch her eye. Follow the blog "From the Cataloger's Desk" and see what Julie has chosen!

The award-winning collection Women and Social Movements in the U.S., 1600-2000, Scholar's Edition, is available for the Month of March.This online collection is edited by Professors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin of SUNY Binghamton. This extensive collection of primary historic documents, books, images, scholarly essays, teaching tools, and book and Web site reviews documents the history of women's activism in public life. Organized around document projects written by leading scholars, the collection is a powerful research and classroom tool designed to help users develop the skills needed to analyze primary documents and conduct research. Document projects are organized around interpretive questions, each with 20-50 primary documents that address the question. Some examples are:

• How Did the Ladies Association of Philadelphia Shape New Forms of Women's Activism During the American Revolution, 1780-1781?
• How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves During and After the Civil War, 1863-1891?
• How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?
• How and Why Did the Guerrilla Girls Alter the Art Establishment in New York City, 1985-1995?
• How Have Recent Social Movements Shaped Civil Rights Legislation for Women? The 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

The Scholar's Edition also includes more than 40,000 pages of full-text sources, including:

• Proceedings of all women's rights conventions, 1848-1869
• Proceedings of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874-1898
• Selected publications of the League of Women Voters, 1920-2000

Also newly added to the Scholar's Edition are:

• Notable American Women, the five-volume biographical dictionary
• The Collected Publications of federal, state, and local Commissions on the Status of Women, a digital archive with 90,000 pages of publications, 1961-2005

The New Releases display features award-winning books, so if you're looking for something good to read, check it out. Some of the awards covered are the Pulitzer prize for fiction, the Man Booker prize for fiction, and the Independent Foreign fiction prize. For those who also enjoy non-fiction, the awards include Pulitzer prize for history, Ralph Waldo Emerson award, and Bancroft prize.

The display will be up from 2/5/10 until next Friday, 2/12/10. Take the books home and enjoy!

In keeping with the University's mission, which recognizes that "all people are stewards of God's creation, the University encourages students to work for a world that is harmonious, just, and merciful," McKillop Library is incorporating sustainability into its long-range strategic plan. Read more ...

To highlight the United Nations COP15 - Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, December 7-18, McKillop Library's New Releases display will feature materials about the environment for the next two weeks. You can view more about the conference here: http://en.cop15.dk

As a call for decisive action at the Copenhagen conference, there will be a candlelight vigil in Newport's Washington Square: Friday, December 11 from 5 to 6 p.m.
This event, organized by members of Salve Regina University, is one of many such vigils occurring worldwide. For more information on the vigil or the organization behind it, please visit: http://www.350.org/node/13436/

Some suggested readings and on display:

• A Moral Climate: the ethics of global warming by Michael S. Northcott
• The Rising Sea, by Orrin H. Pilkey
• The Green Campus: meeting the Challenge of Environmental Sustainability
• Click for more ...

President Obama has declared October as "National Information Literacy Awareness Month". This proclamation highlights the need for all Americans to be adept in the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Information Age (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary). Read the entire proclamation.

McKillop Library Guide to Information Literacy
Cathy Rowe, Coordinator of Reference and Instructional Services, says that information literacy rises to the level of possessing a worldview that acknowledges that there is a wealth of information available and that an educated citizen should possess the ability to harness it to enhance her own life and the lives of those around her. Cathy indicated that it is appropriate that the importance of information literacy is acknowledged at the national level.

The celebration of the opening of the Learning Commons in McKillop Library was held on Sept. 23, 2009. The area, displaying handcrafted kites by Sue Letourneau, was redesigned and changed into a collaborative and socially interactive environment through the support of a grant from the Champlin Foundation.

The redesigned first floor now offers more workspace, advanced technology and comfortable seating. New carrels have been constructed with space for students to work together on any of the many new computers, including four iMacs and 15 PCs. The library has also added data ports to accommodate more laptop use, as well as new printers with enhanced printing capabilities, including color and two-sided printing.

The classroom has been transformed into a multimedia conference room. The room has a central conference table complete with 14 built-in laptops. An interactive SmartBoard, a new teacher station, and twelve workstations on the circumference of the room have completed the transformation of this space for multiple purposes. The room may be booked by both students and faculty through the information desk, at 401-341-2289.

As public concern about Pandemic Swine Flu (H1N1 Virus) and the upcoming flu season continues to grow, the medical and nursing editors from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and Gale have provided informational portals.

Dr. Michael A. Budd, associate professor in Salve Regina's graduate program in humanities and undergraduate program in history, was featured by Providence Journal columnist G. Wayne Miller in a discussion about technology and the human experience. The filming took place in McKillop Library.
Read the full story in the Providence Journal...

The McKillop Library was one library featured at Library Journal's Design Institute East held in Hartford, CT on December 14, 2008.
Read the full story...

The McKillop Library website has been named "College Website of the Month" - May 2009 by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). The Communications Committee of ACRL features one or two college sites a month that they think possess noteworthy contents, features, designs, etc.

The Library's website was commended for its overall design which makes resources accessible from multiple points. In addition, some of the website's special features were highlighted: the McKillop Library Newsbrief, the online guides for locating resources, database user guides containing videos available on YouTube, and the rotating New, Events & Displays.

Read the full story...

Salve Regina was recently awarded more than $315,000 in grants to support the development of student and faculty learning centers within the McKillop Library.

Trustees of the Davis Educational Foundation granted the university $206,000 over two years to create a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) on the library's second floor. This new center, which will include an experimental classroom and will be staffed by a director, will support faculty development.

The Champlin Foundations awarded the university $110,700 to reconfigure the library's main floor as a collaborative Learning Commons to focus on students' academic success.
Read more ....

This service provides users with a simple and intuitive starting point for research. Databases grouped by subject can be searched at the same time or a user can create their own grouping of databases to search.

With some database searches the search results can be overwhelming. This service uses "Results Clustering" to dramatically reduce search time and effort. "Results Clustering" groups results by sub-topics, dates, journals, and authors to turn a long list of disparate results into a highly-faceted research interface.

The library has published the latest issue (volume 3, issue 1) of the Journal of Interdisplinary Feminist Thought. The theme of this issue is "Women and Social Justice" and is edited by Professors Johnelle Luciani and Sarah Littlefield.

This issue is also the first issue totally in an electronic format and thus the journal has gone "green" in respect to the environment.

This new electronic messaging board makes it fast and easy to create, manage, schedule and display virtual information about the library. The messaging board ocated near the main entrance of the library can display all types of media, such as slides, images, web content, and movies in various formats.
The marquee at the bottom can display ticker-style messages including news rss feeds.

McKillop Library maintains a collection of Pell Scholar honor theses and doctoral dissertations written by students as part of their degree requirements. Print copies of doctoral dissertations and senior honors theses from the undergraduate Pell Honors Program are housed in the Special Collections Room. Digital versions of a selection of theses and dissertations can be found online in eScholar@SalveRegina, our online scholarly repository.

Students can now submit their dissertation/thesis directly to the library on the web at Thesis and Dissertaion Submission.

Special Collections include unique items that have significance to the university, its individuals, and its programs. Most of the Special Collections are housed in the Munroe Room on the first floor of McKillop Library. The collections include rare books, faculty publications, material related to Newport and our gilded age mansions, and books related to the Religious Sisters of Mercy, our founding order.

Items in Special Collections may be used for research purposes, but they do not circulate. Appointments are strongly recommended because access to the Munroe Room is frequently unavailable due to meetings. Visit http://library.salve.edu/spec-col/ for more information.

The DVD collection has been relocated to an area on the east wing of the first floor, around the corner from the circulation desk, which is more accessible and provides extra space for its rapid expansion. New locking cases were acquired to facilitate faster checkout of DVDs.
The Browsing collection, which is being expanded to include more types of books, audio-books, and popular DVDs, is now located opposite the DVD area.
Current journals on the first floor have been shifted toward the East wing atrium to accommodate the new DVD collection location.
Newspapers are now shelved near the atrium with the current journals.
Government Documents have been brought together in the alcove on the east wing of the first floor.
The Curriculum Library has been completely redesigned and now occupies the entire west wing of the second floor.
All education materials with call numbers starting with L have been moved to the Curriculum Library. This includes all education books, journals, DVDs.etc.
Bound journals, which used to be in the west wing of the second floor, are being integrated into the main collection.

If you have any questions about where resources are located, please don´t hesitate to ask!

View the new Janet L. Robinson Curriculum Resource Center

Visit Salve Heritage, an online gallery of images from the University Archives that has been recently updated with more images and a new format.

Search and browse the new arrivals by title, collection or subject area.

New Databases ...

Featured Databases