Milligan Library Life

by the staff of P.H. Welshimer Memorial Library & Seminary Library

Million Pennies Campaign raises $19.50 in September 2011

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Milligan College Library is proud to announce that you, our loyal library users, contributed $19.50 in cash and change to our Million Pennies Campaign in September 2011. We have now raised $3,295.78 since the start of the campaign in April 2010, which means we’re getting ever closer to 1/3 of our goal!

The Library staff would like to extend a hearty thank you to our September donors: Doris Bailey Douglas, Justin Hill, Gabe Rees, and Brennan Tracy. Remember, if you’d like us to thank you by name, please write your name down on the slips of paper in the tray next to the donation box, and we’ll let everyone know about your generosity!

Community borrower Doris Bailey Douglas is the winner of our monthly drawing. She will receive the paperback Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon. Congratulations, Doris!

The next prize is the 2010 hardcover America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag by Sarah Palin. Donate to the campaign, write your name on a slip of paper, and place it in the box at the Circulation Desk. On November 1st, we’ll draw a winner from the names in the box!

We still need your help in raising funds to help us reach our goal of a totally renovated library. Bring your loose change and help us get closer to $10,000. Remember, when we raise the money, we’ll allow you, the contributors, to name a study room whatever you like. Every penny helps! If you’re not familiar with the Campaign, check out original post on the library blog. And remember you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. Thank you!

E-books now better than ever: Easy access, clean interface, off-line reading (Part 1)

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Back in April, Mary Jackson wrote about significant improvements coming to many of the library’s e-books as a result of EBSCO Publishing’s acquisition of NetLibrary from OCLC in early 2010. These improvements have arrived, and I think they were worth the wait.

Introducing EBSCOhost eBook Collection

The P.H. Welshimer Memorial Library has a substantial collection of over 68,000 e-book titles that migrated from NetLibrary into what is now called EBSCOhost eBook Collection. (The library has e-books from other publishers and vendors–Mary noted we have over 73,000 titles in total. But this is by far our largest collection.) Library users familiar with our EBSCOhost databases (e.g., ATLAS, CINAHL, Education Research Complete, Humanities International Complete, PsycINFO, SocINDEX, etc.) will instantly feel at home navigating this e-book collection, because it actually is another EBSCOhost database. The only difference (though no small difference) is that it searches and displays book content instead of journal article content.

It has been our observation that students tend to prefer using journal articles in research because the search tools connected with accessing articles–especially full-text articles–make this easier, more convenient, and more productive. I believe applying this same capability to books will encourage greater use of this information resource format in student research. (As an aside, students need to appreciate that books and articles are different information ‘animals.’ They serve different functions. It isn’t simply that books are long and articles are short. Rather, books lend themselves to broad and developed treatment of topics, whereas articles tend to be very narrowly focused on a particular aspect of a topic. Because of their format and mandate, articles often do not have the luxury of providing the reader with extensive background or context. Consequently, over-reliance on journal articles can actually hamper a student’s ability to properly understand the development of a topic, its history, or the range of issues at play.)

The “problem” with books isn’t that they’re in print–in fact, students appear to still appreciate and in many cases prefer the printed book format. The “problem” is that print books are not easily searchable (though tables of contents and indexes intend to help). The search tool most strongly associated with finding books is the library catalog. But the catalog doesn’t search the content of a book. The catalog only searches records that point to their associated books (or media). A book record typically includes such things as title, author(s)/editor(s), publication information, subject headings (a controlled system of describing what the book is about), and maybe a table of contents. But not the content itself. This is an inherent limitation of a library catalog (which originated to efficiently organize descriptions of physical, print books). It’s not the catalog’s fault, of course. And for what it is designed to do, a library catalog is still a pretty nifty and powerful tool.

When we enter the digital realm of electronic books where space isn’t an issue–where a catalog record, as it were, can contain not just a “shorthand” description of the book’s contents but literally the entire text of the book–it suddenly becomes possible for a book to be entirely searchable, eliminating the “problem” described above. This is the really powerful capability provided by having our e-books on a platform like EBSCOhost eBook Collection.

In Part 2, I will take you on a quick tour of our EBSCOhost eBook Collection to demonstrate searching, e-book display and navigation, expanded printing, and a new capability for off-line (including to some mobile device) reading.

Homecoming Book Sale Art Contest: Display your art & WIN MONEY!

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Can you produce a work of art that’s better than Ol’ Sticky here? If so, the library would like to see it!

Yes, the library is once again having an art contest! The 4th Annual Homecoming book sale is coming up and we’re looking for a creative student to put his or her talents to work to design the promotional material for the library’s biggest event of the year.  If you win, your original work will be the poster and postcard image for this year’s sale. Additionally, the winner will receive 2.5% of the book sale proceeds! Last year, that was about $50, but thanks to your eye-popping image, we expect this year’s sale to be bigger and better!

Entries must be two-dimensional, no larger than 11” x 17”, submitted in a sealed envelope (with contact info and a brief bio) to Jeff Harbin by 5:00 PM Friday, September 30. You may also email submissions to jeharbin@milligan.edu. The library staff will add text regarding the book sale to your image. Entries are limited to current Milligan students only.

For a little inspiration, you can check out our 2009 and 2010 contest winners, and see a full gallery of last year’s submissions on our Facebook page.

If you have any questions please contact Jeff Harbin, User Services Librarian, at jeharbin@milligan.edu or 423-461-8495. We are excited to see and display your artwork!

Introducing MCSearch: One search box–for the good stuff

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The P.H. Welshimer Memorial Library is pleased to introduce MCSearch to the Milligan College community. What is MCSearch? We think our tagline says it all: “One search box–for the good stuff.”

One search box. Students are familiar with Google and other popular web search engines. They like the ease and convenience of being able to type a few keywords into a search box and get tons of results. But how relevant, reliable, or current is this information for academic research purposes? This is a serious question. Students need to acquire skills for evaluating information accessed from the open web. (The Library provides instruction to students in information literacy skills like information resource evaluation.) However, given a choice between digging hard for the best available information resources or the convenience of a Google search, students are often satisfied with “good enough.”

What if there was a tool available that provided the ease and convenience of a Google search, but the information resources searched and results returned were those provided by the Library? Students could get to the stuff that was truly good instead of just good enough. This is exactly what MCSearch does.

The good stuff. Every year the Library spends tens of thousands of dollars to provide Milligan College students and faculty with high quality information resources to support their coursework and research. Books, media, print and electronic journals and magazines, e-books, subject-based print and electronic reference works (encyclopedias and dictionaries), and numerous subject-based and multidisciplinary databases for accessing journal articles online. We also provide an array of tools such as online library catalogs, journal finders, link resolvers, and database interfaces to help students and faculty search these resources. We make this investment because, frankly (and contrary to much conventional current day “wisdom”), you can’t get everything you need on the open web. Academic information resources are costly to produce, publish and distribute. Although there is a slowly growing open access movement in academic communication online, generally speaking, the good stuff isn’t free.

One search box, again. The “killer feature” that makes a search engine like Google so powerful and compelling is that a single query is applied simultaneously across a multitude of sites and resources on the World Wide Web. Can you imagine having to browse or search each site on the web individually to try to find information you were looking for? I’m showing my age here, but I first got online in 1994, almost 5 years before the Google search engine started attracting attention on the Web. I still remember when Yahoo! was literally just a running list of websites. But enough about that. My point is that search engines have profoundly altered the way we search for information. What if it were possible to apply some of this kind of power when searching the Library’s information resources–a single query applied simultaneously to the Library catalog and databases, rather than searching each of these sources individually? This is exactly what MCSearch does.

The emphasis is on discovery. As the Library evaluated the various print and electronic information resources it provides to students and faculty, it occurred to us that in many ways we have enough stuff. What we felt we needed was a way to make the stuff we have more discoverable. MCSearch is not about “dumbing down” the research process, or pandering to the bad study habits of lazy students. Using a search engine effectively still requires skill and discernment. But because MCSearch applies a search query across a range of Library resources and formats at once, it can bring to the surface information a student may not have otherwise discovered through conventional means. This brings a delightful element of serendipity to the research process.

Filter on the way out. Because general or broad keyword searches tend to return too many results that are not necessarily relevant, conventional catalog and database searching with limited features encourages the user to formulate precise search queries in advance to get the best results. MCSearch also allows the user to apply limiters to search queries in advance to narrow search results. However, a particularly powerful capability of MCSearch is the ability to filter results after the search is completed. MCSearch includes the ability to easily refine or “facet” results by various criteria (date, format, subject, provider, etc.). This capability removes the “problem” of too many results, while still providing the opportunity to discover valuable resources from unexpected sources.

Try it out now! We will be providing more usage assistance in subsequent posts and instruction sessions. But right now I would like to encourage you to just take some time to play around with MCSearch and get familiar with its capabilities. Feel free to contact us with any questions, and we especially welcome your feedback.

Million Pennies Campaign raises $20.00 in August 2011

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Milligan College Library is proud to announce that you, our loyal library users, contributed $20.00 in cash and change to our Million Pennies Campaign in August 2011. We have now raised $3,276.28 since the start of the campaign in April 2010, which means we’re getting close to 1/3 of our goal!

The Library staff would like to extend a hearty thank you to our August donors: Charlotte Anderson, Ben Carpenter, Kendra Fiddler, Curtis Huskins, Corrine Kaisand, Tommy Parker, Jubal Roe, Bev Schmalzied, Lauren Tomlinson, and Brennan Tracy . Remember, if you’d like us to thank you by name, please write your name down on the slips of paper in the tray next to the donation box, and we’ll let everyone know about your generosity!

Tommy Parker is the winner of our monthly drawing. He will receive the paperback The Shack by William P. Young. Congratulations, Tommy!

The next prize is the paperback Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon. Donate to the campaign, write your name on a slip of paper, and place it in the box at the Circulation Desk. On October 1st, we’ll draw a winner from the names in the box!

We still need your help in raising funds to help us reach our goal of a totally renovated library. Bring your loose change and help us get closer to $10,000. Remember, when we raise the money, we’ll allow you, the contributors, to name a study room whatever you like. Every penny helps! If you’re not familiar with the Campaign, check out original post on the library blog. And remember you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. Thank you!