Author Archives: Steven Bell

New Students Gather for ceLIBration 2009

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On the afternoon of Friday, August 28th it was not business as usual at Paley Library. As it has for the past two Welcome Week Fridays, the Library was the scene of a party for our new students. With a DJ spinning the tunes, the students gathered for food, games, raffles, and other entertainment. ceLIBration is designed as a fun, non-library way to learn about the library. Several hundred students, some with their parents, visited Paley Library, and many explored all that the Library has to offer.

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This year students were invited to participate in several arcade game tournaments that featured popular games such as air hockey, foosball, basketball toss and skeeball. The Library also offered a variety of board games for students who wanted to have fun with their friends. Jimmy Johns generously brought over lots of samples of their sandwiches. So while it was uncharacteristically noisy in the Library, it was for a good cause – and a good time was had by all.

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Federal Online Documents Access Disrupted

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For many years we have listed tens of thousands of United States government documents in our online catalog of holdings together with URLs to their online equivalents hosted by agencies of the federal government. These URLs have been provided to libraries nationwide by the GPO (Government Printing Office).

On August 24th the GPO server providing these URLs suffered a catastrophic failure. GPO attempts to restore service have thus far been ineffective. As of Tuesday 9/1 only 6,000 out of 116,000 URLs had been restored. On Wednesday 9/2 the GPO server went completely offline.

This is a nationwide problem. Users of the Temple University online catalog who seek to access online U.S. government publications they find through the catalog should look at the full catalog record and use the second alternate URL if one is provided in the catalog record. The purl.access.gpo.gov link will not work until further notice. We will continue to monitor the situation and will announce restoration of PURL services by GPO.

Welcome Back! Preview Our New Homepage

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The staff of the Temple University Libraries welcomes all of our new students and faculty and all those returning to campus. We look forward to being your partner in helping everyone to achieve academic success this fall. Over the summer we have worked to improve the Libraries. You will find new computers in many areas of the Libraries. All of the computers at the Science, Architecture and Engineering Library are new. We have also replaced many of our laptops, added additional laptops and even a few netbook computers – all availble for loan at our Circulation/Reserve Desk. One of our big summer projects was to develop a prototype for a new Libraries homepage. We hope you will look at our preview and provide us with your feedback. We will introduce the new homepage at a later date. Best wishes for a great fall semester and academic year.

Google Book Previews Added To Library Catalog

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Google Books may contain information about a title that can help in making decisions about a book’s value, and it might even contain needed text. Having access to even limited text may be helpful at times. To facilitate your access to Google book content for titles in the Temple University Libraries’ collections we have added the ability to quickly view Google book records for books we own. The icon for “Google Preview” is located in the individual record for each title for which it is available (not every book we own is found in Google Books). Here is an example: googbookprev.jpg Simply click on the Google Preview icon and the information will appear is a new browser window. We are looking for new ways to make our library catalog more valuable to you. Please share your suggestions.

New Paley Printers Will Improve Service and Save Paper

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You asked – and suggested – and we listened. You wanted more reliable printers. You wanted more efficient printers. And you wanted printers with two-sided printing to save paper and institutional resources. Today we replaced our two aging and not-so-efficient Dell printers with two brand new HP printers. The new black & white printers are more efficient, have greater paper capacity (less empty trays) and we’ve instituted default two-sided printing to save paper and resources. We hope these two new printers will make your time in the library more effective and enjoyable. If you have any comments or concerns about our computer printing please contact Steven Bell, Associate University Librarians for Research & Instructional Services.

Web Service Makes Corrupted Files Easy to Send

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In this day and age it is often surprising to receive a corrupted document from a student or colleague. Most of us know how to properly save our documents and either send them as e-mail attachments or upload them to an external site, such as a Blackboard course. But a new web business sells corrupted files that can then be sent in order to meet a deadline, but which the receiver won’t be able to use. The site, Corrupted-Files.com charges $3.95 for a corrupted file. The information on the site makes it clear that it is intended for students who need to buy more time to complete their work. The idea is that the student submits the corrupted file to meet the assignment deadline. Then, after a few days, when the professor is unable to read the garbled document he or she e-mails the student to request a working version of the file. The student feigns surprise about the corrupted file and then proceeds, several days later, to send a working file. Thus the student technically meets the assignment deadline yet actually has extra time to complete the work.

News about Corrupted-Files.com was originally reported in InsideHigher Ed, and it was interesting to read that the site creator just set up the service as a joke and really didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. Yet when he started getting requests from students and others for corrupted files he decided to make a profit off the service. It is worthwhile to review the comments to the story from faculty, some who are amazed that any student would go to such efforts to avoid an assignment deadline to others who offer advice on how to prevent getting duped this way, and yet others who point out that Microsoft products aren’t perfect and that sometimes files really do get corrupted. While the site is still up and appears to be doing business as usual, the “secret” the site asks you not to share is now out of the bag. It now is just a question of time as to whether or not students will realize their professors are going to be a bit more wary about the old “corrupted file” excuse.

Important Announcement – Health Science Kresge Library Closes Wed. June 17 – New Facility Opens Fri. June 19

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This Friday, June 19th, the new Simmy and Harry Ginsburg Health Sciences Library will open its doors to the health sciences community at Temple. Located in the New Medical Education and Research Building, this stunning new facility offers a centralized location for the resources and services formerly found at the Kresge and South Branch Libraries. The process of closing our old facilities and opening a new one has been complex, and we must truncate services for this week only.

Please keep in mind the following while accessing library services and resources over the course of this week:

  • Kresge Library is closing as of Wednesday, June 17th.
  • The only library facility that will be open on Wednesday, June 17th and Thursday, June 18th, is the South Branch Library, which will offer the following services:
    • Book Requests and Paging: requested materials will be acquired from any point in the relocation path. Once the material is retrieved, patrons will be contacted by telephone or email. If, for some reason, the material cannot be found quickly, library staff will request it on interlibrary loan
    • Reference services
    • Thirteen computer workstations for patron use
  • The Simmy and Harry Ginsburg Health Sciences Library and South Branch Library will be open concurrently from June 19th through June 26th.
  • As of Friday, June 26th, South Library will be closed and all health sciences services and resources will be available at the Simmy and Harry Ginsburg Health Science Library, located at Broad and Tioga Streets.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we look forward to seeing you in our new library. If you have any concerns about the move of the Health Sciences Libraries or need special assistance during the move please contact either Mark Allen Taylor, Library Director, at ext. 2-2402 or any member of the Health Sciences Library staff at ext. 2-book.

Have A Suggestion? Use Our Newest Blog to Share It

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Everybody who uses the Temple University Libraries has at some point probably thought of something that could be improved, done better or made more efficient. If you have an idea for improving the library we want to hear from you – or even if you have a general complaint.

That’s why we recently upgraded our old virtual suggestion box to a brand new suggestion blog called What’s Your Suggestion. We found ourselves answering the same questions repeatedly for different individuals. We believe the blog will help to make your suggestions and our responses more transparent to the Temple University community. All suggestion blog postings will be stripped of personal information to ensure confidentiality. There is a link to the suggestion blog on the Libaries’ home page. Just look for the “Suggestions” link.

You can submit to the suggestion blog anonymously or include an email address if you prefer a personal response. Submissions to the blog are first reviewed by a staff member so any request to refrain from posting the suggestion to the blog will be honored, and a personal response will be made instead. We hope you will use “What’s Your Suggestion” to let us know how we can improve the library and better serve the Temple University community. For more information about the suggestion blog please contact Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian.

Libraries Conduct Survey To Get Your Opinion

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To continuously improve library services for the Temple University community we need to hear from our students, faculty and staff. Many of our service improvements come directly from comments and suggestions from the community. To facilitate this process the Temple University Libraries are currently conducting a campus-wide satisfaction survey. LibQual + is a standardized survey used globally by all types of academic libraries. LibQual+ differs from standard satisfaction surveys that use a Likert scale to measure satisfaction on a range from 1 to 5 or some point between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”. Instead LibQual+ seeks to determine someone’s minimum expectation for services, their desired level of services and then asks them to identify at what level they currently perceive the quality of the service. The other advantage of LibQual+ is that it is a standardized, national survey which makes it possible for the Temple Libraries to compare their findings to peer institutions.

As with most surveys LibQual+ is a randomized survey instrument. Therefore only certain members of the Temple University community will receive the e-mail message asking you to take the survey. However LibQual+ is being conducted on the main campus, at all the health sciences-related locations, the law school and the Ambler campus. Any member of our community at any of these Temple locations may be randomly invited to complete the survey. If you are one of those who does receive the invitation please take some time to complete the survey. Since we launched the survey on Wednesday, March 18 several hundred individuals have responded but we would greatly appreciate your response. The average time to complete the survey so far ranges between 9 and 12 minutes – so it takes very little time to complete.

LibQual+ is scheduled to end on April 2. We hope those who received the invitation will take the survey. Everyone who does is entered into a random drawing to receive some great prizes. For more information about the LibQual+ survey please contact Steven Bell.

Text Message Feature Added to Library Catalog

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You finally found that book you’ve been wanting to read or that DVD that the rental shops don’t stock right here in your library…and it’s available! All you have to do now is find a piece of scrap paper, hunt down a pen that has ink, and write down the call number to take with you to the book stacks or Media Services desk. Or, you could text it to your phone!

Save yourself time and be green with the latest feature in Diamond: the library catalog. While viewing any item, just click the “Send via Text Message” button. A new screen will appear – see the example below. Just enter your mobile phone information, and click “Send.” In seconds, you’ll get a text message with the location, call number, and title of the item. Normal carrier charges may apply.

We hope you enjoy this new feature in our library catalog. Please share any comments or concerns with Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research & Instruction.

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