Although fewer and fewer students are taking courses under the old Core Curriculum, there are still a fair number of transfer students who are not yet part of the GenEd curriculum. All of these students still taking the Core Curriculum were required to take and pass a library research tutorial called TILT, Temple’s Information Literacy Tutorial. But no more. As part of the President’s initiative to reduce the burdens of the University’s dysfunctional rules and policies, a decision was made to eliminate the TILT requirement. Here is the exact language of the Committee that voted on the change: The Education Programs and Policies Committee of the Faculty Senate agreed to revise the Core Curriculum at their November 19th meeting: • the Temple Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) will no longer be required to graduate. This change is effective immediately, i.e. this applies to Core students graduating January 2010 and forward. Since this is effective immediately the Temple University Libraries will remove the presence of TILT from our website. As we move forward, current and new students will learn how to become effective researchers through the GenEd program. Though TILT served us well and is now going away, self-guided tutorials do have their place in learning effective research methods. We will continue to develop instructional tutorials and other materials that will help students to become better researchers through self-guided methods.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) initiated its Primary Source Awards program in the fall of 2009. Primary Source Awards recognize the contributions of research and teaching faculty, librarians and library staff, graduate students, and others within the CRL community for their creative use of primary source materials in three arenas: research, teaching, and access. The awards will enable staff at CRL libraries to share creative strategies for the usage of materials in CRL’s major collecting areas: newspapers, archives, government documents, and journals. Awardees will receive a gift certificate for Powell’s Books. Awardees will be announced on March 1, 2010, and recognized at CRL’s Council of Voting Members Annual Meeting and other appropriate events, and publicized through CRL media. Nominators of the eventual awardees will receive an iPod touch. Online nominations can be submitted by research and teaching faculty, library staff, graduate students, and administrators within the CRL community and must be received by January 31, 2010. To submit your nomination or for more information, please visit http://www.crl.edu/primary-source-awards.

Friday, June 19, marks the opening day of the new Simmy and Harry Ginsburg Health Sciences Library. This stunning facility, located in the new Medical Education and Research Building at 3500 Broad Street, will serve the health sciences community at Temple. Practitioners, researchers and students can access study space, reference help and a rich collection of electronic and print resources at the new library space. Some highlights of the new Ginsburg Health Sciences Library include:

• over 175 public workstations;
• seating for nearly 1,000 throughout the library;
• two classrooms to meet the library’s instructional needs, one of which can be converted into a conference room;
• over 30 group study rooms;
• wireless access throughout the entire library space;
• flat-screen panels with directory information, hours, and other essential information for navigating the Ginsburg Library;
• ten collaborative learning rooms that include flatscreen panels for displaying and reviewing electronic information.

We welcome the entire community to visit this wonderful new facility.

Library Express! arrives just in time! The new Obama administration is hailing Library Express! as one of the most essential tools in helping to kickstart our economy. The president is lobbying all Temple faculty members to contact their librarian immediately to take advantage of this offer.

As Obama recently commented, “Here’s how it works. Faculty contact librarians. Librarians create customized online course guides for classes. Faculty insert guides into Blackboard. With quick access to excellent sources, students do superior research. Everybody wins…And let me add one more thing: though the current generation of students didn’t get us into this mess, we’ll need everyone to get us out of it. Information is power. Talk to your librarian.”

We are entering terra nova. Students need every possible advantage. Providing quick access to articles, databases, tools and services in Blackboard will lead students to high quality information and improve research quality. Temple’s subject specialists are eager to create customized course guides that fit curricular needs. Integrating them into Blackboard is quick and easy. Subject Specialists // Blackboard Library Sampler // Integrating the Library into Blackboard If you’re a faculty member, contact your librarian. If you’re a student, contact your faculty member. If you are neither faculty, student, nor librarian, just sit back and watch the economy grow.

—Fred Rowland