Questions: Please ask here or at the "Ask a Librarian" Address

We welcome your questions about specific assignments, research, or about our resources and services in general. Please let us know how we can serve you with your library and educational technology needs. For email use our strange address: library.calendar@alvernia.edu
Phone us at 610-796-8223.

Transcultural Nursing and Journal Access

Leon Weber has prepared a special resource guide for this class being taught by Terri Adams.

Look here to see special instructions for gaining access to a key journal in the field.



http://www.alvernia.edu/library/guides/transcul.htm#art



With so many electronic journals available now, it's almost impossible to keep up with all of the ways we can gain access to them. We'll try to keep you alerted.

CIAO: New Database for International Relations and Political Science

CIAO: New Database with Full-text Resources for International Relations and Political Science

http://0-www.ciaonet.org.alvin.iii.com/ This resource also contains an atlas.

To get directly to the library home page:

http://www.alvernia.edu/library

Get Ready for the Edible Book Celebration

The first annual Edible Book Day will be celebrated in the Franco Library on April 1st. Turn your favorite book into something to eat, and you could win a prize. Stay tuned for more details.

Get a Brain If You Ask a Librarian

Have you seen our stress balls that are shaped like brains? You'll see them in the library and in class if one of us come over to do a class. Why would we give out stress balls? Brains? To remind you to use our resources.

OT Assignment again-- Books by Relatives or Friends are ok.

According to the professor, students may also use books written by relatives or friends about a physical or mental challenge. For example, "Riding the Bus with My Sister" would be a good choice. Let me know if you think of some other good ones.

OT Assignment: Autobiographies on Mental or Physical Challenges

For an OT assignment: Find an autobiography by someone who has faced a mental or physical challenge.

It's hard to find this kind of book in a regular library catalog. Write me personally if you want to know the details. marti.smith@alvernia.edu

In helping a student tonight, I went to amazon after not finding her first choice in the online catalog. http://www.amazon.com/

The student had asked if we had the book called "The Monster Within." We didn't, but I looked it up on amazon so that I could get some titles that might be on the same subject. Then she could look up some of the titles to see what we did have. Unfortunately, we don't have any autobiographies, as far as I could tell, that deal with eating disorders. Please let me know if you find any. I might have looked under more specific eating disorders, but I suggested that she fill out an Inter-Library Loan form for the book she really wanted.

http://www.alvernia.edu/library/resources.htm Look here for the ILL form.

Searching on amazon lead me to some good titles that I will suggest we order for the collection. In addition to "The Monster Within," a book by Marya Hornbacher called "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia" got good reviews. There was a list of others for those of you interested in the subject.

Now I'm going to do some more searching so we'll be able to help other students in the class. Please let me know if you have ideas for good books for this assignments. Other topics I'm going to explore include depression, blindness, earing loss, MS, lupus, missing limbs, and bipolar disorder.

Spring Semester-- Welcome Students

Welcome back students and a special welcome to new students.

Take a look here and see how we can help you with your assignments.

Finding articles: Do you need journal articles for an assignment? We have over 20,000 full-text periodicals available online.
Click here: http://www.alvernia.edu/library/resources.htm

Finding books: Check our online catalog
http://alvin.iii.com/

PowerPoint: Do you need to print slides from Pp? Six to a page? Three to a page?
The key is to save your PowerPoint before you try to print.

Now Open for Comments

I have now enabled this blog for comments. Please do.

Librarians on the Move: Look for Us Outside the Building

Beginning with Spring Semester, librarians will be roving around the campus with laptops. We want you to use our services and resources. Look for us.

Saturday Workshop on Searching the Databases

Interested. Let me know. We could meet as a group or individually on Saturday between 10 and 2. A librarian is on duty every Saturday. Comment here and we'll get something scheduled.

Invite a Librarian to Class

Alvernia has five librarians who are available to teach classes. We can come to you or you can bring your class to us. Two of us, Leon and Curtis, staff day time hours (8am to 4pm); Kristin works late afternoon until 10:30. Sharon and Marti are also available. Most weeks Marti works on Wednesdays and Thursdays until 10:30 and other days from 10am-7pm. Call or email us and we'll figure it out! We can also prepare materials for you to use on your WebCT course site or to email your students. We're working hard to get students into our electronic databases through hot links. Look here for more ideas.

Adjunct Faculty Orientation

Ask questions in the comments.

Google Book Search

http://books.google.com

Would you believe it, last semester I found the full-text of a book written by an obscure German writer in Google Book Search? The student I was helping only needed some biographical information, but we got that and the whole book with a picture from the book cover. What a surprise. Try it for yourself.

Why Google Scholar?

Try Google Scholar using terms from your course(s) and see what you find. It's my favorite tool at the Library Commons Help Desk. You'll find lists of articles, books from Google Book Search, articles cited by other scholars, sometimes full-text.

Now many of our expensive full-text journals are linked through Google Scholar, so you can get access to thousands of articles because we have subscriptions. Try it and see. Will it sometimes be frustrating? Certainly, but think of your searching as an adventure. Most often you will find something really good and useful. The Alvernia linking software is new to us so it will take some time to get the bugs out. Try often.

http://scholar.google.com/

Off campus you may need your external access information to get to the full-text subscriptions. Some articles are free to everyone, but many are not. Sometimes even finding a title or abstract is a help. It's worth a look.

New Faculty: 10 Things You Need to Know First

10 Things You Need to Know First about the Franco Library Learning Center Resources and Services




10. Call 610-796-8223 for library help. Email to a reference librarian: library.calendar@alvernia.edu


9. Call 610-796-8398 for WebCT or classroom technology help. We have lots of DVDs, VHS, and CD's for classroom use.


8. Call 610-796-8395 or email marti.smith@alvernia.edu for Dr. Marti Smith. Complaints, suggestions, and rave reviews! See her for copyright questions.


7. You and your students have 24/7 access to over 20,000 full-text, mostly scholarly, electronic journals and a bunch of ebooks. We can show you how to use them.


6. We are happy to do classes in the classroom or in the library. For day classes, contact Leon Weber (8352) or Curtis Datko (568-1534); for late afternoon and evening classes, contact Kristin Brumbach (5635) or Marti Smith (8395). We have a librarian on duty every Saturday available to teach classes. Watch the blog for further details.


5. We can direct students to citation guides and how to use the guides. The Learning Center in Bernardine Hall (610-568-1494) has citation workshops and helps students with papers.


4. Locations: IT and I.Q. Web, and WebCT help are upstairs with the book collection. The Library Learning Commons, multi-media stations, reference collection, and library services are downstairs.


3. On the first floor you will also find coffee/hot beverages stations for for $1 per cup. Spring water and a vending machine are located in the same area.


2. Our electronic resources are available 24/7. Make sure you know how to get in off campus. resourcesUse your network login to get into the Franco LLC computers.


1. Always, always ask for help.

Where are the books?

Where do I find the books?

Our book collection is upstairs on the 2nd floor arrange in order using the Dewey Decimal Classification. If you are not familiar with Dewey, look at the signs on the sides of the stacks or ask for help. We're happy to help.

Click here to see the basic divisions from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_decimal


A tour of the Dewey Decimal System http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/tour/


More on Dewey? http://library.thinkquest.org/5002/

Alvernia Library: Essential Web Sites

Library and Technology Home Page
http://www.alvernia.edu/library

Databases and Other Electronic Resources
http://www.alvernia.edu/library/resources.htm

Online Catalog
http://alvin.iii.com/

External Access for Adjunct Faculty

See below for a link to an excellent full-text article on leadership and learning styles from Training and Development publication. To see the article you will need special access information.

To access the Alvernia proprietary databases off campus, you will need to be entered into the library database. For this, we will need your name, address, phone number, etc. We will also need your Alvernia ID#. We will be glad to help you if you call 610-796-8223.

Some of your students may have access. For those who don't, please have them contact us.

http://0-search.ebscohost.com.alvin.iii.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=27746437&site=ehost-live&scope=site/

Welcome to Spring Semester: What's New in Library and Educational Services

What's new?

• Six more computers in the Library Learning Commons
• Five new laptops for library check out (total of eight)
• Relocated computers upstairs (in the next few weeks) with nursing and Praxis software
• (Coming soon) Access for more color printing and for scanning
• Jane Austen display in the locked case (January)
• Black History Month display for February (coming soon)