Due to a power outage, the MacRae Library has closed and will remain closed for the rest of the day. We apologize for the inconvenience. 
Easter Weekend Hours
The Kellogg Library Learning Commons (CHEB), as well as the Killam and MacRae Libraries will be OPEN from 9 a.m.–4 p.m. on Friday, April 2 (Good Friday). All other Dalhousie Libraries locations will be CLOSED on Friday, April 2.
The rest of the weekend, our spaces will be open with their usual weekend hours. We will also be open on Easter Monday. LiveHelp will NOT be available Friday through Monday. A reminder to book your time in our spaces before coming in. Don’t forget your mask! https://roombooking.library.dal.ca/
Research Bootcamp: 2021 edition
For the 7th year, the Dalhousie Libraries is offering Research Bootcamp, a suite of modules designed for teaching and research assistants and graduate students. It’s also open to faculty and staff. If you know of someone who could benefit from developing effective research and writing skills, please share this information with them.
This year, Research Bootcamp will occur completely online via Brightspace. From May 3–June 4, this 5-week program will include asynchronous modules on the following topics:
- Getting started with research
- Writing literature reviews, abstracts, and grants
- Citation management
- Copyright
- Searching in various subject areas: PubMed, humanities resources, grey literature, legal resources, and Canadian data and statistics
- Mastering Excel
- Research data management planning
- Research synthesis methods
- Open Access & predatory publishers
- Creating conference posters
Participants are not required to complete all modules, but can pick and choose modules based on individual interest and skill level. Faculty can recommend the program to their RAs/TAs or register on their behalf. All module content will remain accessible to participants until July 1, 2021.
A complete list of modules and descriptions is available here.
Program website, including schedule, module descriptions, FAQs: https://dal.ca.libguides.com/ResearchBootcamp
Register at: https://dal.libcal.com/event/3604004
Eating Permitted in the Dal Libraries Once Again
UPDATE, APRIL 22: Due to tighter COVID-related restrictions in Nova Scotia, eating is not currently permitted in the Dalhousie Libraries.
Starting Monday, March 15, eating will once again be permitted in the Dalhousie Libraries.* Please eat in the same area where you are working. If you are at a computer, please do not eat over the keyboard.
As soon as you have finished eating, please return to wearing your mask for the safety of everyone in our spaces. Do not leave your workspace without your mask.
*Eating is not permitted in the Sir James Dunn Law Library.
Extended Study & Exam Hours
NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE INFORMATION ABOUT THE SIR JAMES DUNN LAW LIBRARY (as of March 24, 2021)
NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WALLACE MCCAIN LEARNING COMMONS (as of April 8, 2021)
The Killam Memorial, MacRae, and Sir James Dunn Law libraries as well as the Wallace McCain Learning Commons will be extending library hours in April to provide a place to study and/or write exams. Please note you must book time in advance of arriving to all Dalhousie Libraries spaces.
KILLAM MEMORIAL LIBRARY AND WALLACE MCCAIN LEARNING COMMONS EXTENDED STUDY & EXAM HOURS
Saturday, April 10–Friday, April 23:
8 a.m.*–10 p.m.**
To book, go to roombooking.library.dal.ca/schedule.php
*To enter the building at 8 a.m., please book the 9 a.m.–12 p.m. timeslot.
**To remain in the building until 10 p.m., please book the 5–8 p.m. timeslot.
MACRAE LIBRARY EXTENDED STUDY & EXAM HOURS
Monday, April 5–Friday, April 9:
9 a.m.–9 p.m.**
Saturday, April 10:
8 a.m.*–2 p.m.
Sunday, April 11:
1–9 p.m.**
Monday, April 12– Friday, April 16:
8 a.m.*–9 p.m.**
Saturday, April 17:
8 a.m.*–2 p.m.
Sunday, April 18:
1–9 p.m.**
Monday, April 19:
8 a.m.*–9 p.m.**
To book, go to roombooking.library.dal.ca/schedule.php
*To enter the building at 8 a.m., please book the 9 a.m.–12 p.m. timeslot.
**To remain in the building until 9 p.m., please book the 5–8 p.m. timeslot.
SIR JAMES DUNN LAW LIBRARY EXTENDED STUDY & EXAM HOURS
Monday, April 5–Thursday, April 8:
9 a.m.–8 p.m.
Monday, April 12–Thursday, April 15:
9 a.m.–8 p.m.
The Sir James Dunn Law Library is bookable for students in the Schulich School of Law. For more information about booking time in the law library, please contact lawref@dal.ca
Add Your Voice, Influence Dal’s Academic Future: Dalhousie’s Academic Landscape
Despite social distancing, COVID has bought us together in more ways than one to support each another in our teaching and learning. Are you interested in where we go from here? If so, please join us to explore the idea of the “Dalhousie Academic Landscape” (DAL) and to offer your input about our future directions. This session will begin with a short overview by former Provost Teri Balser and will highlight the many ways in which teaching and learning are supported and enhanced at Dalhousie. Participants will then have the opportunity to engage in two of five possible breakout sessions to discuss how we can best build community and support teachers and teaching at Dal. Join us to learn more about how DAL works and how you can get involved.
Wednesday March 10, 11 a.m.—12:30 p.m.
Online via Teams Meetings
Register
Breakout sessions will include:
Exploring ideas for a cross-Dalhousie teaching community: A Dalhousie Teaching Academy?
Anne Marie Ryan (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences)
Teaching Academies are common at top universities worldwide, and provide opportunity for cross-university peer-interaction and community focused on teaching and learning. If you have ever wished to connect with like-minded colleagues around teaching ideas, with whom you can share your teaching journey and develop a sense of belonging, join us for this session on building a Dalhousie Teaching Academy! Help define parameters for the Teaching Academy, and provide input into how such a community could best meet your hopes and needs, while providing a safe space to interact with faculty from within and beyond your own unit.
Building connections beyond Dal: Explore the LEARN/CIRTL North American network!
Angela Siegel (Faculty of Computer Science) & Erin Careless (College of Continuing Education)
CIRTL is a network of 38 universities across North America focused on the development of teaching and learning for grad students and faculty. Dalhousie is a new member of the network, and we are developing our programming as part of it. This session will provide an introduction to how CIRTL can help you advance teaching within your discipline, and how you can join a larger teaching and learning community across North American universities. You will also be invited to provide input about how a CIRTL “node” at Dal might best serve our faculty, staff, and students.
Teaching with technology: Using the tools available through Brightspace
Les Tyler Johnson (Centre for Learning and Teaching) and Michelle McDonald (Academic Technology Services, and Dalhousie Libraries)
The Brightspace LMS is a robust tool that supports teaching and learning, both through the platform itself and its integrated technologies, such as Panopto, Urkund, Collaborate, and more. In this session, facilitators will support you in your selection and use of the various tools available. Do you have a question about how to use a specific tool? Is there a specific activity or assessment you’d like to implement in your class and like to discuss what technology might help you bring it to life? Facilitators look forward to supporting these and related conversations on the suite of educational technology tools available at Dal.
A New Academic Web Portal: Building skills, careers, and community
Marlo MacKay (Dalhousie Libraries) and Suzanne Le-May Sheffield (Centre for Learning and Teaching)
In an effort to bring related but often discrete elements of Dalhousie’s academic landscape together, we’re creating a web portal based on the pillars of skill building, career building, and community building. This portal is meant to be the virtual place where instructors and faculty will find professional development and skill building opportunities, as well as opportunities to connect with colleagues both within and beyond Dalhousie. Join this breakout room and help us develop the content you’d like to see featured on the portal.
Elevating the Dalhousie graduate students and post-doctoral fellows experience: Your voice matters
Mabel Ho (Faculty of Graduate Studies) and Jill McSweeney-Flaherty (Centre for Learning and Teaching)
How can you make the most of your experiences at Dalhousie? Join us in this session where we invite you to tell us about your experiences at Dalhousie, what would you like to see, and explore how we can work together to build community and opportunities across campus.
NEW! Browse the Stacks (by appointment)
If our electronic resources and curbside pickup service are not meeting your research needs, current Dalhousie students, faculty, and staff can now book an appointment to browse the stacks at all five* Dalhousie Libraries.
STEP 1: Log in with your Dalhousie NetID and password to book an appointment.
STEP 2: Select “Stack Access Appointments” from the drop down menu at the top of the page.
STEP 3: Select which library you want to browse in.
STEP 4: Choose the date and time. The software will prompt you to provide additional details.
STEP 5: Wait for your confirmation email.
STEP 6: When coming for your appointment, bring your DalCard and wear a mask.
*Please note the stacks in the Sir James Dunn Law Library are only open to current students, faculty, and staff in the Faculty of Law. Appointments must be arranged by emailing lawref@dal.ca.
Publish APC Free with SAGE: Dalhousie Libraries & CRKN partner in a publisher transformative agreement
by Ann Barrett
On behalf of academic libraries across the country, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) has reached a transformative open access agreement with academic publisher SAGE that significantly increases open access options for Canadian researchers. Through the agreement, authors affiliated with participating CRKN institutions, like Dalhousie, may now publish their articles as open access with no Article Processing Charge (APC) in most of over 900 SAGE Choice journals (a few journals are excluded from SAGE Choice and are listed here). With the elimination of the standard SAGE article processing fee of $3,000 USD, Dalhousie authors who seek to publish in a hybrid SAGE journal will see substantial savings.
In addition, the agreement includes a 40 per cent discount on APCs in SAGE’s gold open access journals. (See the title list of participating gold journals.)
How does it work?
Processing of the APC waiver for SAGE Choice journals and the discount for gold open access journals is done automatically via the SAGE Open Access Portal (SOAP) when authors identify themselves as affiliated with a participating CRKN institution. SOAP is a dashboard for authors to submit their article, select a copyright license, assign a bill payer (if applicable), and view article status. A Creative Commons license CC–BY (Creative Commons-Attribution) will be applied to open access publications unless a different license is requested by the author.
What is a Transformative Agreement?
There are many “flavours” of transformative agreements, but they generally all espouse the core principles of:
- shifting from paying for library subscriptions to paying for publishing, with inclusion of clauses that favour open access.
- requiring that copyright be retained by the author and not transferred to the publisher through a CC–BY license (allows copy and distribution of the material in any medium or format and adaptation, so long as attribution is given to the creator and changes indicated)
How has this agreement been achieved? The agreement includes a total package price increase of 6% over three years to cover the costs of open access publishing that in the past were often paid through researcher funding grants or discretionary funding at universities.
This is a major step forward for Open Access publishing at Dalhousie. Please check out this and other APC discounts that the Dalhousie Libraries have arranged through publisher agreements, memberships and sponsorships.
Fair Dealing Week 2021: Beyond fair dealing
This is the fifth and final part in our series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2021 (February 22nd to February 26th, 2021).
by Lachlan MacLeod
Fair dealing is only one exception from the Copyright Act, but it receives a lot of attention. There are numerous other exceptions and resources that overlap and supplement fair dealing allowances in an educational setting.
One exception is Section 30.04(1) of the Copyright Act that provides for an exception from copyright infringement for copying, communicating and performing in public by an educational institution or a person acting under its authority for educational or training purposes of a copyright protected work that is available through the Internet. However, this use is subject to several important restrictions. To find out more about the educational exception for works available through the Internet, visit our website:
Under Section 29.5 of the Copyright Act, films may be shown by faculty, staff to students, without permission of or compensation to copyright owners, provided the screening takes place on the premises of an educational institution, the recording is a legally acquired copy, used in pursuit of education to an audience consisting mainly of students with no admission being charged. There is no longer the need to ensure a public performance license is in place if these conditions are met. Works may be performed live (such as a play) without permission under these conditions as well. For more information on showing films in a classroom setting, please visit the following section of the Copyright Office website:
https://libraries.dal.ca/services/copyright-office/for-faculty/showing-films-on-campus.html
These exceptions and others are explained in detail on the Copyright Office website. Please note that all of these exceptions are subject to specific restrictions and guidelines. When in doubt, contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca
Fair Dealing Week 2021: Fair dealing and students
This is part four in a five-part series of blog posts celebrating Fair Dealing Week 2021 (February 22nd to February 26th, 2021).
by Lachlan MacLeod
The copyright landscape in Canada has undergone significant changes recently. To ensure a fair and reasonable approach to the use of copyright protected materials on campus, Dalhousie has sought to balance the rights of users with those of creators. To help accomplish this, the University has established a Copyright Office and has most recently adopted updated Fair Dealing Guidelines.
As students of Dalhousie University, you may copy materials for which the university (e.g. the Library) has negotiated licenses, according to the terms of the individual license agreements. In addition to license agreements, fair dealing allows you to make use of a work for yourself for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, news reporting, education, parody or satire. As an example, this means you can copy one article from a journal, or one chapter from a book for the purpose of your studies and research.
Without fair dealing, any time you wished to make use of a copyrighted work in your course, you would need permission from the copyright holder, perhaps even paying a licensing fee. This short presentation illustrates uses that we might take for granted and would not be legal without fair dealing:
For more information on how fair dealing affects Students, please take some time to read about Fair Dealing for Students, and consult our Fair Dealing Guidelines. Please feel free to contact the Copyright Office with any questions or comments at copyright.office@dal.ca