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The LibVine

What's going on at Dalhousie Libraries

Archives for Marlo MacKay

Killam Library Closing at 5 p.m. on Thurs., Aug. 9

The Killam Library will be closed from 5-9 p.m. on Thurs., Aug. 9 due to a major, widespread water outage. After water service is restored, there may be some discolouration of the water noticed. This is supposed to subside fairly quickly as water usage flushes out the system.

LeMarchant Street will also be closed (between South Street and University Avenue) from 7 a.m.-midnight on August 9.

 

A map detailing the street closure on August 9.

Both of these disruptions are due to the removal of existing water and sewer services and the connection of new water for the LeMarchant Street Mixed Use Building.

Also, don’t forget that the Killam is closed this coming Monday, Aug. 6 for the Natal Day holiday.  Have a great long weekend everyone.

Intern Season: Catherine McGoveran

Catherine is spending her summer at the Killam Library, where she has daily information desk shifts. She is working on a number of ongoing projects this summer, including:

o Working with Open Journal Systems to make available archive volumes of The Dalhousie Review

o Researching information visualization and graphics to feed into a planning document for the library’s instructional program

o Updating LibGuides

o Digitizing the Proceedings of the Nova Scotian Institute of Science and uploading them into the institutional repository

o Contributing to the development of Dalhousie’s institutional repository, DalSpace, with a focus on creating a faculty research directory

Catherine in the stacks at the Killam.

Catherine will be entering her second year of Dalhousie’s MLIS program in the fall. She has a degree from Carleton University, with a major in political science and a minor in French. Between graduating from Carleton and starting graduate school at Dal, Catherine worked for a year at the Library of Parliament, supporting the research and information needs of parliamentarians and parliamentary committees. Her other library experience includes having worked in technical services at Carleton and in circulation at Dal. She will continue to work at the Killam part-time during the school year.

“Having the opportunity to collaborate with many different library employees and to work on a variety of projects, ranging from the very technical to more research-based, has made the internship a very rewarding experience. The Information Desk has also been a highlight – you learn something new every day with the diversity in information and research requests. I really enjoy working with patrons, whether it’s giving an introduction to the library’s website, helping them gather potential resources for a paper, or teaching them how to locate a book in the stacks,” says Catherine.

She is also a member of the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management (DJIM) executive. The DJIM is a student-led initiative aimed at publishing Dalhousie graduate student work of the highest quality and significance in all areas of management.

 

Atrium Reopened, Work Ongoing

If you’ve been to the Killam this summer, you probably noticed that the atrium has been closed for improvements. We are happy to report that the atrium reopened on Monday, along with two of the food establishments: Subway and The Second Cup.

 

A view of what the atrium will look like in September.

The work is still ongoing though, so for the time being there is limited seating in the atrium and it can get quite noisy. The work is scheduled to be complete in time for the beginning of classes in September. If you haven’t seen the renderings showing what the completed atrium will look like, you can view the rest of them here.

 

Intern Season: Sarah Visintini

Sarah is doing her summer internship at the W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library, where she can be found at the circulation desk, answering reference questions, and working on special projects.

“It’s great to interact with students from such different disciplines, and helping members of the public find resources and information is incredibly rewarding as well. I think working on reference is probably my favourite part of the job because questions can vary so much from person to person and can require a lot of creativity and problem solving, which makes every reference interview a fun challenge,” says Sarah.

Last summer, Sarah worked in the library of the Atlantic Provinces Special Education Authority (APSEA), an institution that supports children with visual and/or hearing disabilities. The library is integral to these patrons because it provides special reading materials for children in a variety of formats such as: Braille, print and Braille, and special electronic versions. The library also carries specialized resources for families, interpreters and teachers. “It was there that I got a real taste of special libraries and how important they can be to support specific patron groups’ needs,” says Sarah.

This past spring, Sarah completed her practicum at the Nova Scotia Cochrane Resource Centre under the supervision of Lara Killian and Robin Parker. “This was a fantastic experience and served as a great introduction to health sciences information, evidence-based medicine, systematic searching and the ins and outs of health databases. I also really liked this practicum because it gave me a sense of librarians’ roles outside of the traditional library setting, and our field’s potential in contributing to health research and supporting health professionals,” she says.

Sarah holds a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major in French and English, from Mount Allison in New Brunswick. She’s entering her second year in the MLIS program at Dal where she is also the Special Library Association Co-chair.

 

Dalhousie Libraries Has Purchased Two Outstanding Digital Archives

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) from Gale Cengage is one of the most ambitious scholarly digitization projects ever undertaken, a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the Long Nineteenth Century. NCCO brings together full-text, fully searchable content from a wide range of primary sources selected with the guidance of an international team of experts. Archives published in the program include works in Western as well as non-Western languages and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other institutions around the world.

 

Nineteenth century collections online.

As a multi-year program, NCCO will be composed of numerous collections to be released over several years. Four archives are now available:

British Politics and Society
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection
Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange
British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture

The New York Times Digital Archive from ProQuest includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1851. The database provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. News stories, features, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements are all indexed. Access to the full text online currently goes to the end of 2008. A further year of digital content will be added on an annual basis.

 

Read articles from 1851 and onward.

More recent content from the NYTimes is available in Factiva and LexisNexis Academic.

The purchase of the New York Times Digital Archive was made possible through the University’s Strategic Initiatives Fund.

Intern Season: Riel Gallant

Riel Gallant is spending his summer working as an archives assistant in Archives & Special Collections (located in the Killam Library) through the Young Canada Works program. His summer project is digitizing Dalhousie yearbooks.

Riel scanning a yearbook from the 1960s.

The goal is to preserve high-resolution TIFF files of every yearbook page on the Archives & Special Collections’ server. Those files then get converted to PDF format, and made available to the public on Dalhousie’s DalSpace. “We’re trying to capture the feel of an old yearbook in a digital format,” says Riel.

Riel is enjoying the digitization process, even though he encountered some unexpected technical challenges at the outset. Now that he’s mastered techniques for the various scanners and software, he’s developed a process that will allow future digitizers to produce more in less time.

“Digitizing as a method of preserving is a process I find fascinating and worthwhile—it is one of the main reasons why I wanted to enrol in the Library and Information Studies program and work at the Archives. I look forward to seeing my work uploaded onto Dalhousie’s server where it will be accessible for years to come,” he says. Riel will be entering his second year of Library and Information Studies at Dalhousie in the fall.

One of the unexpected side-benefits of this project is seeing the changes at Dal through the years. “As I go through these old yearbooks, I see the styles change along with the changing political climate. It’s interesting to see that students at Dal were holding both anti and pro Vietnam rallies, that’s not something I expected to see,” says Riel.

 

 

Intern Season

Ahh, summer at Dalhousie. Besides enjoying the beautifully landscaped campus, one of our favourite things about summer is welcoming the summer interns to the libraries. We love the enthusiastic can-do attitudes of these eager people who take on summer projects that make the libraries better.

Over the next couple of weeks, the LibVine will feature profiles of these fantastic folks and highlight the great work they’re doing.

 

Interns may not be exactly as shown. (source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Open House at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College

The Nova Scotia Agricultural College will be hosting their Open House this Thursday, July 19, from 10 a.m.-2 p.m., rain or shine.

This annual event is open to everyone. There will be tours of the beautiful gardens, a barbeque, wagon rides, live music, games, gardening advice, face painting and more. The staff of the MacRae Library will serving cake just outside of the library, so make sure you visit them.

A view of the stunning rock garden.

Library staff member Jolene Reid has created an activity book for children based on the Open House theme of Be Great, Do Good. There will be tables outdoors by the library where children can work on their activity books. Library staff will provide crayons, markers and colored pencils.

This is a perfect opportunity to see the campus, meet the faculty and staff and learn about the interesting initiatives at what will soon be known as the Dalhousie Agricultural Campus.

If you need transportation, a bus will be available for Dalhousie employees. Please contact Katherine Rudolph at 494-7806 or katherine.rudolph@dal.ca on or before July 17 to confirm a place for transportation.

Guided tours of the campus will be available at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Please meet at the Registrar’s Office in the Cox Institute for either of those times.

Hope to see you there.

"Ewe" won't want to miss it!

 

Killam Library Atrium Improvements in Pictures

Work on the Killam Library’s atrium began on June 25. Since then, the atrium has been closed to allow for the major work to take place. Atrium access is expected to be restored by approximately July 30. We were initially expecting the atrium to reopen on July 16, but the workers encountered challenges stemming from differences between the drawings they had versus the reality of what they uncovered when they dug up the floor.

Work will continue throughout the summer. The job is scheduled to be completely finished just before school starts. Below are some images of what the atrium will look like when the work is finished. It’s going to be a beautiful and welcoming space, with more seating and new greenery.

New seating area.

New seating areas from another angle.

The new patio and other improvements.

Booth seating. And greenery!

An aerial image.

Jazz Season in Halifax

Every July, Halifax hosts the largest summer festival in the Atlantic region, the TD Halifax Jazz Festival. If the festival has put you in the mood for even more jazz, why don’t you check out the music collection at the Killam Library? We have an exceptional selection of jazz albums.

In the spring of 2011, an excellent collection of 442 classic jazz CDs was donated to the Killam Library music collection by the widow of Douglas McQueen. She wanted to share her husband’s love and appreciation of quality jazz with future generations.

Most of the collection was produced over the last decade by such famous jazz record labels as Blue Note, Concord Jazz, Verve, Sackville and Vanguard. Noted jazz artists represented in the collection include Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff, Dave Brubeck, Nat King Cole, Kenny Davern, Ella Fitzgerald, Scott Hamilton, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges, Keith Ingham, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing and Ben Webster.

The McQueen collection  is a perfect fit with Dalhousie’s music program and is a most welcome update to the Killam’s strong pre-2000 jazz collection. Due to the efforts of our hard-working music cataloguer Paul Duffy, all of the CDs are now fully accessible via the catalogue.

All members of the Dalhousie academic community and the general public are invited to enjoy this carefully selected collection of jazz recordings. For more information, contact the music librarian Karen Smith or phone 494-8803.

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