Peter Gilbert

Author: Peter Gilbert

Mudd Library Services Update

Building Access: To minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission, the Seeley G. Mudd Library building remains closed until further notice. Although the building is closed, your Library colleagues will continue to support the university community with a range of services to enable and enhance remote teaching and learning.

Access to Information Resources: See http://www.lawrence.edu/library for remote access to electronic resources, including journal articles and other digital resources.

Research Help: Reference Librarians are standing by! Start with the Ask a Librarian page. If the chat service is offline, send your question via email, and we will reply as soon as we are able. Contact Reference Services: reference@lawrence.edu

Library Instruction: Contact the Library Instruction Coordinator for consultation on integrating digital sources into remote courses, to schedule a Library instruction session with remote classes, and to plan library assignments designed for remote learners.

Interlibrary Loan: We will continue to request articles and book chapters that can be fulfilled electronically, but we will not be placing requests for loans of books or other returnable items. Patrons who currently have ILL loans can request a renewal by logging into your ILL account. For more information, contact: lucialib@lawrence.edu

Archives: While the Mudd Library building is closed, the Lawrence Archives will also be closed. If you have any queries, questions, or needs please email the University Archivist at archives@lawrence.edu

Instructional Technology: See http://www.lawrence.edu/faculty/it for service updates, hours, and contact information.

Technology Services Help Desk: Technology Services staff are still hard at work. Service updates, hours, and contact information are available on the website: https://www.lawrence.edu/info/offices/technology_services

This information is current as of 5pm, Monday, March 23, 2020 and is subject to change at any time — but you knew that.

Open Access Monographs!

During Open Access Week, we’re highlighting a variety of open access resources. Today is Book Day!

JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/open/?cid=soc_tw_JSTOR
More than 2,000 Open Access ebooks are now available at no cost to libraries or users. These titles are freely available for anyone in the world to use.

Knowledge Unlatched:  http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/
KU’s vision is “a sustainable market where scholarly books and journals are freely accessible for each and every reader around the world.” There’s a browsable list of books they’ve made available.

MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/open-access
The  MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing. They support a variety of open access funding models for select books, including monographs, trade books, and textbooks.

Luminos: https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/
Luminos is University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as their traditional publishing program, Luminos is  built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

OAPEN: http://www.oapen.org/home
The OAPEN Library contains many freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.

As always, if you have questions about these resources, please ask your librarian!

 

 

 

It’s Open Access Week!

Open Access Week, October 23-29, is an “opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of open access issues and express support for free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research.” What’s not to like about that?

The Mudd Library supports open access in a number of ways:

We link to open resources like arXiv.org which offers open access to more than a million e-prints in a variety of scientific fields, SocArXiv.org, the “open archive of the social sciences,” and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  We subscribe to several open access journals like PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine and PLoS Biology (search the library catalog for PLOS).  And, of course, we provide open access to a wide variety of scholarly and creative work from Lawrentians through Lux, the repository for “scholarship and creativity at Lawrence.”

If you want to know more about how open access works (and who doesn’t?), watch this Open Access 101 video from SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. And for even more information about open access:

ICPSR

ICPSRAs I’m sure you know, Lawrence is a member of something called the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). As part of that cool and geeky group, Lawrence joins with approximately 700 colleges and universities in the acquisition, preservation, and distribution of social science data.

<standard ICPSR text>
Are you interested in determining the average age at which men versus women begin smoking? What if you need to know whether age at marriage differs between your region of the country and other regions, or about differences in political attitudes based on age, gender, education, race, or ethnicity? These and many other questions can be answered by studies in the ICPSR data holdings. Note that ICPSR does not provide publications, reports, or ready-made statistics. What ICPSR does supply are the numeric raw data used to create publications, reports, and figures.

ICPSR, established in 1962, provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction and offers training in quantitative methods. To ensure that data are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR preserves data, migrating them to new storage media as changes in technology warrant. ICPSR also provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis to conduct secondary research and write articles, papers, and theses.

In addition to the general archive, ICPSR hosts a number of special topic archives, including the Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA), Child Care and Early Education (Research Connections), Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS), Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR), the Resource Center for Minority Data (RCMD), the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), the National Addicition & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA). Data from all of these topical archives are conveniently available at the ICPSR website.
</standard ICPSR text>

All Lawrence University staff, students, and faculty have access to these extensive ICPSR data holdings via any campus computer. Access is direct and quick: Connect to the ICPSR website at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu. First-time users will be asked to create an ICPSR MyData account; thereafter, you’ll just need your email address and password to download data. Need assistance in locating, accessing and analyzing ICPSR data?  See our ICPSR LibGuide or ask a reference librarian!

New Library System!

We’re pleased to announce that, thanks to the hard work of a lot of people, the Mudd Library will be introducing a new search system as the school year begins!

Some things to know:

1. OneSearch (its working name) allows you to search the Library’s catalog PLUS hundreds of thousands of articles, images, etc. at the same time. OneSearch combines our library catalog with a very large database of online resources and makes it all searchable at once. This is great for interdisciplinary projects or just as a starting point — kind of like Google, but more scholarly. You can cast a wide net and (if you choose) use facets (resource type, subject, author, full text availability…) to focus your results.

2. You’ll still be able to search the Library catalog by itself or link to individual specialized databases (RILM, Historical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, etc.) the way you’ve always done.

3. We’ve been working hard on this but there’s still more to do. Please be patient as we learn how to make the most of the new system.

4. Ask! We’re here to help. Let us know about any questions you have or issues you find.

Sian Beilock Convo!

Before or after you’ve attended the Sian Beilock convo, you’ll want to read more.Sian Beilock

Search LUCIA, the Library catalog for Sian Beilock or check Academic Search Premier for articles by her.

There are, of course, plenty of pertinent web links:

Enjoy!

Remembering Bob French

Bob FrenchRobert French ’48, a great friend of the Library and of Lawrence, died Saturday, July 13, 2014 at his home in Appleton. He was 90.

Bob had a wide range of interests but his passion was Abraham Lincoln. Bob felt that “if we follow Lincoln’s footsteps, we’ll learn to live with different races not only in our own country but in the world…I think that’s my great interest in Lincoln.” He bought his first book on Lincoln in 1941, with money he received as a high school graduation gift. From there his collection grew to include thousands of books, pamphlets, government documents, art work, sculpture, a Lincoln autograph, and more.

His excellent collection was made so by the fact that it was not collected willy-nilly, but strategically. Bob consulted many bibliographies including the Library of Congress Civil War bibliography, and systematically (with the help especially of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago) went about building his collection –  then gave it to Lawrence. In 1992, Bob made the initial gift of his collection and in 1998 he gave a gift for the construction of the Lincoln Reading Room in the Library which was dedicated in 2000 in the memory of Bob’s mother.

But that wasn’t the end of it. For the rest of his life, Bob was a regular visitor to the Library, coming in regularly to check on the collection, talk about it, and make additions to it. After the room was built, he continued to give current scholarship resulting in an impressive collection that includes significant works of contemporary Civil War and Lincoln scholarship as well as historical works.

Of course, Bob was more than a donor and a visitor. He was a good friend to many at Lawrence and we’d look forward to hearing his voice on the phone or seeing his face in the doorway. Since Bob never owned a computer, once Lincoln scholarship began moving online, he would regularly call or stop by the reference desk to ask us to check “on the computer” for this book or that article. He was great storyteller and would always have stories about his time at Lawrence or a report from up at the lake or one of his many world travels. He was eager and very willing to talk with others about Lincoln and the Civil War in general. If you were interested, the discussions were lively and the information he imparted was remarkable. He will be missed by many at Lawrence.

A memorial service will take place at 2 pm on Thursday, July 24, in the Nathan Marsh Pusey Room of the Warch Campus Center.

Scholarly work of Lawrence Alumni: Joe Siegel ‘01

A bit about me, Joe Siegel (LU class of 2001)Joe Siegel

How do people learn to listen? It’s something that most people don’t even stop to think about. The ability to listen in our first language develops with little effort or explicit attention, but listening competency in a second language can be an arduous task, something that takes significant time and effort.  I’ve been interested in how listening ‘works’ for a long time, particularly in a second language, and I’m amazed by what an incredible ability it is. Biological, psychological, and auditory aspects combine to help us understand the aural messages we receive, and the communicative importance of listening, whether in a first or second language, makes it a fundamental tool.

I’m currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at J. F. Oberlin University in Tokyo, Japan. In the classroom, I teach courses on general English as a foreign language (EFL) with a specific focus on the development of aural abilities in a second language. Such skills include recognizing the beginnings and endings of words, parsing the speech stream into meaningful chunks of language, and confirming or rejecting predictions we make about what we hear. As a researcher in the field of applied linguistics, I’m interested to learn more about teaching methods and learning styles for second language listening. This work has included MA and PhD dissertations and grant-funded research supported by the Ministry of Education in Japan.

The liberal arts education I received at Lawrence was a great preparation for my career, since my particular area of research focuses on the intersection of biology, psychology, education, and foreign language teaching and learning. A number of classes I took at LU have had a great impact on how I go about research and academic writing. Freshman Studies was a wonderful interdisciplinary experience, and I benefitted from the challenges of relating different works, genres, and themes to each other. I remember one Freshman Studies teacher who gave us the autonomy to choose any two works we had covered during the semester and write a paper on any aspect that linked the two. What a fantastic assignment for freshman students! What freedom!

Creativity, analytic thinking, and the need for clarity of expression: all of these have been indispensable in the work that I do now.

I majored in English at Lawrence, and the comparative and close analyses of important works of literature have definitely prepared me to do background reading of academic works and to construct clearly-written yet sophisticated literature reviews for academic publications. The two independent studies classes that I completed at LU gave me the opportunity to set up, plan, resource, and execute small-scale projects on my own. These courses, which I completed in my junior and senior years, were practical bridges that allowed me to transition from work done purely for grades and research done in the ‘real world’ for the benefit of students, colleagues, and the language teaching field in general. Further, at Lawrence, I had chances to interact closely and collaboratively with professors, which gave me much-needed confidence and thick skin that I’d need when dealing with peer reviewers and editors working for journals and publishing companies, who can sometimes be a picky bunch.

Listed below are some of my main and more recent publications, mostly on topics related to second language listening pedagogy:

Siegel, J. (2013). Methodological ingenuity for second language listening. In J.  Schwieter (Ed.), Studies and global perspectives of second language teaching and learning (pp. 113-139). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

Siegel, J. (2013). Exploring L2 listening instruction: Examinations of practice.  ELT Journal, 68(1).

Siegel, J. & Siegel, A. (2013). Empirical and attitudinal effects of bottom-up listening activities in the L2 classroom. ELT World Online, 5, 1-25, http://blog.nus.edu.sg/eltwo/.

Siegel, J. (2012). Second language learners’ perceptions of listening strategy instruction. Innovations in language learning and teaching, 7(1), 1-18.

Siegel, J. (2011). Thoughts on L2 listening pedagogy. ELT Journal, 65(3), 318-321.

Siegel, J. (2011). Learner development through listening strategy training. In K. Irie & A. Stewart (Eds.), Realizing autonomy: Practice and reflection in language education contexts (pp. 78-93). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

In the future, I plan to continue investigating current methodologies in language teaching and to develop and trial other alternative ways of teaching second language listening. I’ve also recently become more interested in pragmatic development, especially concerning university students who complete study abroad experiences.

Alumni Librarians: Jennifer Chamberlain, ’96

Editor’s note: We invited Lawrence alumni who have gone into library work to share with us what they do and how they got there. Here’s another in a series.

The Roundabout Road from the Mudd or How I Accidentally Became a Librarian

by Jennifer Chamberlain, ’96

To me, the Seeley G. has always been more than a concrete fortress beckoning to procrastinating Lawrentians. From 1992-1996, it was my second home as an unexceptional English major with disparate interests and a remarkable capacity for getting side-tracked. Armed with a steaming cup of coffee from the Grill (this is commonly referred to as the pre-latte era) and a steeled resolve to hit the books, I spent many hours tackling my homework and papers with an inefficient, yet well-intentioned outlook. I adored the research process, but hated writing papers. I could spend countless hours refining a topic or following an obscure research lead only to find myself pulling out my hair in the final hours before a paper was due trying to synthesize a mountain of citations. Professor Spurgin could likely attest to the fact that my works cited pages always read a lot better than the paper itself.

The Mudd is also the place I spent a fair number of hours studying (ok, shamelessly flirting) with my then-friend and now-husband of 14 years. Who knew that sixteen years post-graduation, I’d sit on the other side of the reference desk helping college students tackle their research projects (while watching them shamelessly flirt with fellow students)? Never underestimate the power of romance in the library.

I graduated from Lawrence in 1996 with a B.A. in English and Certification in Secondary Education ready to tackle a low paying internship as a museum educator at the Illinois State Museum. After a series of jobs in museums morphed into a semi-career in nonprofit fundraising, I found myself unhappy with the direction my professional life was taking. I was an educator that didn’t want to teach in a K-12 school and an English major without the yearning to pursue an MA (all that paper writing). I distinctly remember the day a mentor asked me my career goals. Struggling to appear like a gal with a plan, I quickly revealed a subconscious desire to become a librarian. My mentor laughed, and there’s no motivator quite like laughter. Problem was I didn’t have the first clue how people became librarians. I didn’t know anyone who worked as a librarian. As a kid, the librarians at my public library seemed a mystifying other-worldly folk that rarely stepped foot outside of the library. Even in college, I’d never really gotten to know the librarians on a personal level, despite the fact they bailed me out countless times. It seemed as though librarians were a higher life form, on par with the Elves in Lord of the Rings, who existed beyond the normal realm. Plainly put, librarians knew a whole lot about a whole lot of things. I wasn’t sure I fit the bill.

Fast forward a few years when my husband took a job in the rural Northwoods running a YMCA camp. By some act of luck, I landed a job as the director of the local, rural library. Thanks to some antiquated state statute, librarians at the smallest of public libraries are not required to hold an advanced degree in library science. It only took one day as director of the Boulder Junction Public Library for me to realize I’d found my dream job. I quickly pursued a Master of Library Science from UW-Milwaukee, and for the next ten years I held a variety of reference and administrative positions in southeastern Wisconsin public libraries.
In 2009 I was tapped to serve as the Interim Library director and later appointed Director of Library Services for the University of Wisconsin-Washington County, a freshmen/ sophomore campus of the UW System. Working in the UW System offers me the power of a large academic institution in terms of colleague caliber and strength in resources, yet I get to interact with students in an intimate campus setting a bit smaller than Lawrence. I think about the skills I acquired at the Lawrence library on a daily basis working with students one-on-one. When I educate students on information literacy strategies and watch them wade through the vast information resources at their fingertips, I think about all those hours I culled through books and resources at the Mudd. During formal library instruction sessions, I tell students they arguably have it harder in today’s digital world than I did as an undergrad when it comes to seeking and evaluating information. I share with them my memories of researching in my college library (I can still here the “shunk” sound of the Mudd’s turn style) and how I took for granted the credibility of the information I found there in print. As a small college library director, I get to administer a dynamic student-centered library similar to what I experienced at LU – and I love it.

The switch from public libraries to academic libraries was a great opportunity for my career and personal growth. Not until writing this blog entry did I realize what a homecoming it was for me. As a guide for students in the research process, I relive a bit of those college years and I find myself remembering my days at the Mudd with tremendous fondness. I feel lucky to have a job that appreciates, even encourages me to embrace my generalist-self that still enjoys chasing divergent research leads wherever they take me. And the best part is I don’t have to stay up until 3 a.m. writing that final paper.
I treasure the years I bumbled my way through the Mudd library collection. I reflect on that time frequently as I work with undergraduates learning to navigate the physical and virtual collections in the UW System. From my perspective, a career as a librarian is a glove-like fit for the type of person Lawrence inspires you to be: curious, tenacious, widely-read — a first-class generalist.