Two Hours in Portland

By Michelle Eickmeyer

ACRL, here we come! Conference travel can be an interesting beast. I love experiencing the show with you (and hearing both your concerns and victories) but it can drag on a bit if I’m not careful. As an exhibitor, I’ll be spending 3 full days in Portland working, followed by a red-eye home. There will be down time, but often conference down time is not down enough. And very often it is filled with “regular work” from back at the office.

As a conference attendee, the list of sessions I want to attend is longer than the time I have to give. I have a list of people to meet, check in with, and catch up with. If you are one of those left behind at your library/university/office, conference travel can seem romantic and alluring. Yes, I’m traveling to Portland. No, I won’t actually get to see much of the city beyond the cab ride to the hotel, the walk to the convention center, and, if I’m lucky, a dinner or two. Beyond that, you’ll find me in the exhibit hall. (Seriously! Come find me! We’re in booth 427. And we’re giving away beer!)

What if YOU (or, dare I dream, I!) have some free time? What could you do with a few hours in Portland? A lot!

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New Titles Added to the InfoTrac Collections in February 2015

The titles below have been recently added and can be located in the product using Basic or Advanced Search forms. Titles can be found via Browse Publications within two weeks. For complete coverage information please see the product title lists.

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Partner Interview: SAGE

SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Founded in 1965, SAGE also publishes under the popular Corwin, CQ Press, and SAGE Reference imprints, among others.

In this post, Todd Baldwin, Executive Director of Online Library & Reference Publishing at SAGE, discusses his personal and professional philosophies, what makes the company stand out, the people served and the needs addressed by their titles, and one SAGE title on GVRL that gives him particular pride.

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Librarians Overcome Distance and Tradition with GVRL eBooks

GVRL eBook Success Story

Terry Beck, the Information Services Manager for Sno-Isle Libraries north of Seattle, knows firsthand how to deal with logistical nightmares. Beck is responsible for serving approximately 697,000 people in two counties across 21 community libraries. To complicate matters further, Beck lacks a central or main library location from which to work and was quickly running out of room for reference materials.

“We don’t have one great big place,” Beck bemoaned. “We knew we needed to grow our reference collection but we had no room for additional print materials.”

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In Other News: The Skeleton Video

A look at a current news item through the lens of different titles available on GVRL.

By Michelle Eickmeyer

Most of my colleagues know I write this post, and often ask me throughout the week what topics are in the running for the post. There is often one or two stories or events which immediately seem like good options. Once I even did two posts. But the idea that it’s easy to find something which you could explore, on a scholarly level, and find accredited, proper sources for a research paper or project is exactly the point of this blog. I do not write this to remind graduate professors how easy some students have it and how random those first years of honing a research skill can be. I write this post to encourage those who support the often rudderless-ships of undergraduate, introductory level, new to a topic or new to research students. Research doesn’t have to be scary, or daunting, or incredibly complicated to be appropriate, credible, and respected. Studies prove that the most difficult parts for inexperienced or beginning researchers are selecting an appropriate topic and finding good sources. Getting started is the hardest part. Hopefully, there have been take-aways in this series which have helped you show students that “research” can be found anywhere.

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Moving from Gatekeeper to Gardener: An Introspective On Librarianship

Jamie LaRue

By Jamie LaRue

I believe that librarianship is at the threshold of transformative change. Some of that change is society-wide. Some of it is specific to libraries. In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of my professional time exploring and talking about three key trends. Together, they make up my platform as a candidate for ALA president.

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History Made Awesome

By Adam W.  I was lucky to walk into a library with an amazing legacy that was invisible to most people on the campus. I say I was lucky because I was able to change it. I discovered a copy of the De Divina Proportione (Divine Proportion), which is a 1509 mathematical treatise illustrated by … Read more

Paving the Way for Women in the Sciences with Sally Ride

By Jennifer Albers-Smith

I was a Computer Science major for a couple years at the University of Michigan (before declaring an English and Sociology double major) and participated in the Women in Science & Engineering (WISE) residence program. One of the events on our radar was the Sally Ride Science Festival that took place on North Campus. Each year, I was amazed as the campus was swarmed with hundreds of children. The festival, which still takes place each year at colleges across the United States, it is a fun-filled day of science projects, workshops, and experiences for middle schoolers.

This festival struck me in particular because no one had encouraged me (outside of my chemist father and pharmacist mother) to turn my interest in science into a career. There weren’t programs for young girls (or at least none in my area) trying to promote scientific careers in a fun way. And as a pioneer for STEM education and the first American woman in space, Sally Ride deserves a shout-out for this month’s focus on Women’s History Month.

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A Grown Woman’s Tribute to Little House on the Prairie

By Jennifer Albers-Smith

If any of you happened to use Google on February 10, you would have seen the customized home page for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthday. Dead for 58 years, her name is still synonymous with Westward Expansion and the nineteenth century prairie. All these years later, her literature continues to have a life of its own. After all, few go through childhood without reading Little House on the Prairie.

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I loved the Little House books as a child (and now as an adult) and read them all several times. Her writing took me to another time and place, a place that I found fascinating, especially during a time when the game Oregon Trail was immensely popular on floppy disk.  And don’t forget the Little House TV series! When my parents and I traveled West on a two-week vacation, we stopped along the way at some of the places the Ingalls family stopped; we even saw the giant wagon ruts in Wyoming.

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