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Tip of the Week #1

Library Tip: Check all IDs for barcodes! If you are planning to assign homework assignments for your students that need access to library materials, have them check their college IDs for barcodes and ID numbers on the upper back side of the ID. That barcode and number ensure their access to borrow books, media and equipment; request interlibrary loans; and obtain remote access to the library databases. So if the barcode has never been attached or it is an older one and scratched or hard to read, send them to the library for a new one. Attaching a new barcode takes about 2 minutes and it provides access to a tremendous amount of library information. [This is true for everyone, not just students!]

Library information update, or? Star Trek said it could happen! According to an article in the May 14, 2006 New York Times,

• From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published?" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod.?

Source: Kevin Kelly, "Scan This Book!" New York Times, May 14, 2006 - full article available via Lexis-Nexis by selecting -- News  - US News - Northeast Regional Services and searching for the author and title.

And for those who never heard of a petabyte, check out the serious/humorous definition from techterms.org --

• "A petabyte is 2 to the 50th power, or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. It can be estimated as 10 to the 15th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes and precedes the exabyte unit of measurement. Since even the largest hard drives are measured in terabytes, petabytes are only used to measure the storage space of multiple hard drives or other collections of data. And no, "petabyte" is not what you do to make a byte purr."
  

Ed Tech Tip: Clickers. Clickers - soon to be available? The Library is getting a purchase order ready to obtain some clickers so that we can start offering this type of personal response system to measure student learning. We are looking to purchase a system like that demonstrated at the May Ed Tech workshop. [If you need to know more about this technology, be sure to check out the EDUCAUSE paper on 7 Things You Should Know about Clickers]. I am interested in knowing how many faculty are interested in using them and the largest size class in which you anticipate using them. Contact Rosemary Deegan (rdeegan@alb.edu or 610-921-7202).

• I'm in a renovated classroom and I want to use all of the bells and whistles -- How can I learn how to use them? Just contact AV Services (AV@alb.edu) or call Elizabeth Fields (x7207), George Missonis (x7203) or Tam Do (x7234) if you need assistance in learning how to use the equipment installed in any of the classrooms. And watch for the upcoming Library Link to see more about the technology that is newly available here at Albright.

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Tip of the Week #2

Library Tip: New Library printer - do you accept papers with printing on both sides? The new library system printer is set to automatically print in duplex mode (prints front and back) for anyone who uses it. We set it that way to save paper when students are printing out long journal articles. However this summer we added access to the full Office suite software on all of our computers. This move was very popular and a lot of students are now using these computers to finish off and print their homework papers. However, despite some signage, we find them printing out their papers twice ? once in duplex mode and then, after they see them, once in single-sided mode. So if you are willing to accept papers in duplex, please tell your students not to re-print. And if you don?t accept duplex, please tell your students to ask how to switch the settings BEFORE they print. We hate to see a paper-saving idea generate even more waste paper!

New databases coming soon -- Selected paper journals and microfiche titles should convert to electronic format by January 2007.

Watch the Tip of the Week next week to see the final list of print journals (not trade publications) and microfiche titles being converted to an electronic format. By canceling about 65 redundant titles, some low usage databases, such as Ingenta, and making a number of in-house economies, the Library we should be able to add three major online databases ? SciFinder Scholar (ACS chemistry indexing and modeling), Science Direct, College Edition (1,890 Elsevier social science, physical sciences and health/biological science journals) and the basic research level collection from Project Muse (hundreds of humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers). Since online access to journals is the preferred choice of our students, the Library is canceling the print and microfiche versions of any title available in these collections, any title in microfiche that has equivalent online access, and a few more extra print titles (with departmental approval).

Ed Tech Tip: Advance notice -- Blackboard upgrade scheduled
The library has scheduled a normal software upgrade to the Blackboard course management software for Thursday, December 28th. The Albright BB site will be down all day Thursday, and part of Friday (36 hours). Hopefully this future time slot will not interfere with any normal faculty or student work.

Microsoft Word 2003 Users ? Want to disable the ?reading? layout that displays?
Microsoft Word is usually set to do a lot of things automatically, e.g., correct certain typos, make sure that the letter I always is capitalized, etc. But you do have the option to change those options easily. One possible option is the new ?reading? layout that can automatically appear when you open any Word document. This scan mode may interfere with the information presented and may have to be canceled to read tables and lists more accurately.
If you'd like to disable this feature and open documents in the default (Print Layout) instead, follow this tip.

1. Open Word and click the "Tools" menu and choose "Options" category.
2. When the "Options" box appears, click the "General" tab.
3. Uncheck "Allow starting in Reading Layout" at the top right.
4. Click "OK" to close the dialog box.

To use the ?reading? layout mode on an individual document basis, you can open Word and click the "View" menu and choose "Reading Layout" to see the current document in this mode.

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Tip of the Week #3

Library Tip: Selected paper journals and microfiche titles should convert to electronic format by January 2007. Contact the Library Director to view the print and microfiche journal titles that will be canceled because their online coverage will be as good as or better than our current subscription, once we have access to the new databases -- Project Muse and Science Direct. We are looking to cancel 63 journals in order to add 175 titles from Project Muse (Basic Research Collection) and 1,890 titles from Science Direct.

Project Muse is now available for you to start searching. Just log in at http://muse.jhu.edu/search/search.cgi. This link is available on the Library Resources page and you will soon be able to find those titles in the Journal Locator and from the Remote Login database list. Watch the Tip of the Week for more information.

Library Hours for Saturdays changing. Starting on October 7, the library will be open on Saturdays from noon ? 5:00 pm. The cut in hours is a cost-savings measure to help absorb some of the impact of the student assistant pay increases that takes effect in January. The early Saturday hours were very poorly used by students or faculty. Watch the Tips next week for the announcement of 24/7 reference support to help cover times when the Library is closed.

Ed Tech Tips: Getting data from web pages. If you ever had someone send you a web page or you located a web page with tabled data, such as that on a government webpage, you may not need to re-enter it. Web queries offer a handy way to import data from selected tables into a worksheet and the instructions from Pull data into Microsoft Excel with Web queries by Justin James could save you a lot of time and energy

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Tip of the Week #4

Library Tips: The Library is totally WIRELESS.The third floor of the library has just been wired (thanks to facilities and IT) so you can use the college wireless services on all three main library floors. If you still need to register your laptop, contact the IT HelpDesk today at x7676 or helpdesk@alb.edu.

Reference 24/7 ? is available now. The Library has joined the Ask Here PA library group to help provide online reference service to our students whenever the library is closed or librarians are not available. This new online service lets students, faculty and staff ask for help from a professionally trained librarian anytime day or night, weekday or weekend. This service will be highlighted on the new Library home page, expected to debut next week. For now, you can ask questions by clicking on the Ask Here PA button above and then selecting the "Connect to a College Librarian" link.

Second Reminder -- Library Hours for Saturdays changing. Starting this Saturday, the library will be open on Saturdays from noon ? 5:00 pm. The cut in hours is a cost-savings measure to help absorb some of the impact of the student assistant pay increases that take effect in January. The early Saturday hours were very rarely used by students or faculty.


Ed Tech Tip: Care and feeding of classroom educational technology. Now that so many rooms have some type of ed tech in them -- overhead projectors, computer projectors, LCD projection screens, TVs with DVD/VCR units or speaker systems ? we would like to remind everyone of some common sense rules of care. Please contact Media Services (x7207 or av@alb.edu) immediately in any of the following situations:

• if you think that the equipment is working improperly or is broken. Do NOT try to fix it yourself since we are considering a version of ?you break it further you bought it? as a new policy.
• if the equipment was there the last time you used the room but is now missing. PLEASE TELL US ASAP since we have lost several expensive pieces of classroom equipment. We will know if it has been moved for other reasons.
• if the equipment needs replacement parts, like a new overhead bulb. Please report things like that immediately rather than forcing the next person to deal with an unworkable piece of equipment.
• if your suspect that the equipment has been moved to another classroom. We do not advocate moving ANY equipment outside of its designated classroom, but if you do, return it. We would like the equipment musical chairs problem we are now experiencing to stop.
• if you need a last minute because the equipment broke, we will attempt to deliver a replacement machine (if possible). We highly recommend that you call in advance to guarantee that something will be there for you for pickup in the library.
• if you are having sound problems with any installed classroom speaker system. Please do not adjusting the dials since that can make our job of diagnosing the problem much more difficult.
• if you accidentally remove a remote from its tether. We are now missing a number of remotes from the classrooms and do not always have a replacement remote to offer. Tethers may be cumbersome, but they do assist in keeping the right remotes in the right rooms.

Another piece of the common sense advice is to be very careful with the equipment, cable, cords, remotes, etc. These items tend to be extremely susceptible to damage by even moderate mishandling. Before you leave a room, ensure that everything is put away, extra lengths of cords and cables are gathered together and all of the remotes connected to the podium.

The classroom (not lab) policy is to report every problem except Internet problems directly to the library. If we cannot solve the problem, we will contact the department that can. Lab issues should be reported to the HelpDesk.

Screen Shot, Anyone? Have you ever been asked to provide a picture of what is showing on your screen so that someone remotely has a clue what kind of error message, text or graphic is showing there? If so, you have been asked to provide a screen shot of your monitor screen. If you don?t has a clue how to proceed, look at the steps below because it is really easy to do.

1. Have the information on your screen that you want to see on the picture (screen shot)
2. Find your Print Screen key (it is probably at the top of your keyboard and may require that you hold another key down, if you are using a laptop or small keyboard)
3. Push the print screen key ? this will put the graphic into the clipboard, a sort of short-term memory bank
4. You can display and edit the picture in a graphics program (e.g., PAINT, which is free with PCs), or display it in a word processing program, (e.g., MS Word) or an email program which supports graphics, (e.g., Outlook).
5. For this example, we need to load and use the graphics program so that we can save the image for future use. To access PAINT on Windows XP (used at the college), click on the Start icon at the bottom of the screen, select the All Programs icon, then the Accessories link and finally the Paint link.
6. To load the information from the clipboard, click on the Edit ? Paste option.
7. To save the picture as a graphic, click on the File - Save option and save as either a JPG or GIF.
8. If you want to edit the picture, you can do it using the editing icons on the left side of the screen. If you need assistance in using them, contact the Media Services Office (x7207).

If you are doing this on a MAC, the capture command is CTRL-SHIFT-3 to save the information as a file ? you don?t need the extra steps in PAINT.

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Tip of the Week #5

Library & Ed Tech Tip: Here?s our new Library Homepage look! See below for more details.

What?s on the page? For the purpose of this explanation, we have sectioned the page into 5 parts.

• Section A. This section provides links to customized information for our different constituents.
• Section B. This section contains the most popular database link, the remote user link and the Bb link.
• Section C. This provides easy access to the online catalog ? you can search for books, CDs, DVDs.
• Section D: This is the heart of the web page with links to 7 sections ? mouse over each link to see the options:
  • General Information ? links to info on the library, jobs, events, services hours, policies, publications, staff contact info and the Tip of the Week.
• • Books and Videos ? provides access to OPAC (our library materials), WorldCAT (worldwide materials), ACCESS PA (statewide materials), lists of other libraries, and PSU MediaNET (academic media rentals).
  • Journal Articles ? links to current Library Resources page, a list of the top databases (by discipline) with direct links, a complete list of all databases (with descriptions and direct links) and the Journal Locator tool.
  • Subject Research ? links to the web pages created to support each subject area, and the Gingrich Guide, the information literacy training website for first year students.
  • Library Services ? provides info and access to circulation policies, online renewals, interlibrary loan requests, reference help, recommendations for the purchase of new materials, requests for classroom library instruction, library room reservations, Special Collections and Holocaust Center Library information. It also links to several print form options.
  • Bb and EdTech Support ? provides access to Media Services information, the library equipment that can be borrowed, a request equipment form, Blackboard help, form to request a faculty Bb site, reserve library lab, view Classroom Technology Directory (incomplete), and the computer requirements for connecting to library systems.
  • Help ? provides links for feedback on library services and issues as well as reference help options.
• Section E: Introduces a new service, 24/7 reference support. Now you can get reference support from a Pennsylvania librarian (not necessarily an Albright librarian) anytime the library reference staff is not available.

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Tip of the Week #6

Library Tips: Ask Here PA reminder. Need some reference assistance and it is 3 am and the Library is closed? You can now get reference assistance 24/7 from a librarian by using the new Ask Here PA service provided via the web by the library?check the new Library homepage for the link. Although you won?t get any of the regular Albright librarians at 3 am, you can get professional assistance in doing research. We highly recommend using this service when the library is closed and regular assistance is not available.

Need to reserve a library room for a class? You can now reserve the Library Studio (classroom) or Media Classroom I (computer lab) online for a class, as well as ask for the equipment setup you need in that room. The reservation form will tell you if the room is already reserved and a library staff person will confirm your request by email within 1 day. We ask that you give us 2-3 business days notice of your request so that we can have the rooms ready for you and your class. These rooms can also be reserved for administrative type meetings and demonstrations although academic requests have the highest priority.

Ed Tech Tip: Our laptops need their sleep too. If you borrow a laptop from the library, you should know that the Library laptops are not set to turn off automatically when you close the lid. They usually go into a state of hibernation and then they don't easily wake up when you open the lid. Because of this setting, we ask that you TURN OFF the computers BEFORE they are placed in their cases and returned. If not, the battery charge is lost for the next patron. This tip is important for all library equipment that switches to battery power support when the electric is turned off.

Computer projections not clear when using the large classroom LCD screen? If you hook up a laptop to the LCD TVs and are having trouble seeing the image on the screen, try adjusting the computer?s screen resolution. Often it looks like it's not working, but what's really happening is that the resolutions are incompatible, so the LCD TV is zooming in on the middle portion of the desktop, which of course means you can't see the icons or anything helpful. You can change the resolution on a library PC by right clicking on the desktop and selecting Properties ? Settings. Try any of the screen resolutions until you find a good compromise between the laptop and the TV screen. Mac users need to go to System Preferences ? Displays ? Resolutions to fix the problem.

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Tip of the Week #7

Library Tip: COMING SOON

Ed Tech Tip: COMING SOON

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Last updated on February 19, 2008