Category Archives: User Services

Introducing Bestsellers!

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The library has just put a new collection on the shelf – current bestsellers! This month’s selection of ten titles (including Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U, Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife) will grow by five each month until next spring, when we will begin rotating this year’s books out and introduce new ones. These will be popular fiction and non-fiction works, generally leisure reading that we wouldn’t necessarily add to the permanent collection. We hope they’ll appeal to a wide slice of the Milligan community.

Bestsellers are available to all patrons (Milligan students, faculty, staff and alumni, Emmanuel students, and community borrowers). The check-out period for all is 14 days, with one (14 day) renewal allowed. They’re located on the “New Books” shelves, in the Reference Area.

Is there a title you’d like to see? Contact Meredith Sommers (mksommers@milligan.edu/461.8902)[slideshow]

Million Pennies Campaign Update, May 2011

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Milligan College Library is proud to announce that you, our loyal library users, contributed $158.00 in cash and change to our Million Pennies Campaign in April 2011. We have now raised $3,081.06 since the start of the campaign in April 2010, which means we’ve exceeded 30% of our goal!

The Library staff would like to extend a hearty thank you to our April contributors: Clint Holloway, Ryan Hughes, Mary Jackson, Wesley Jones, Katie Payne, Alan Stengel, and Adam Tomlinson. 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!

Ryan Hughes is the winner of our monthly drawing. He will receive the paperback Looking for Alaska by John Green. Congratulations, Ryan!

Next month’s prize is the hardcover The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Donate to the campaign, write your name on a slip of paper, and place it in the box. On June 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 the library blog. And remember you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well. Thank you!

“The library is the hub about which the academic wheel of education turns”

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Librarian John W. Neth, Jr., with his student assistants. Photograph from the 1954 Milligan College yearbook.

This post was originally published on my personal blog, Voyage of the Paradigm Ship on May 25, 2009. I am in the process of de-commissioning the Paradigm Ship but plan to periodically republish relevant posts here.

The other day a professor handed me a photocopy of an article he stumbled across while browsing back issues of The Stampede, Milligan College’s student-run newspaper. The article was entitled “Library News,” and was dated Tuesday, October 15, 1953.

The article reported on the recent arrival of the new librarian, John W. Neth, Jr., and changes he was instituting in the Library. In 1953, the Milligan College Library was not housed in its own building, but occupied several rooms in Derthick Hall, the main administration and classroom building. A floor plan of the reorganized library was included in the article.

I read the article with a mixture of amusement over how much has changed in libraries and librarianship over the past 55 years, and admiration over how much has remained the same.

The users of the Milligan College Library are noting a definite trend toward a more efficient arrangement of the available facilities in relation to usability … [The] atmosphere of the library is taking on an air of interest.

Giving priority to “usability” and providing an “atmosphere of interest” for users remain very important in the contemporary library. Of course, deference to the user had its limits.

[T]hese changes have been accompanied by correspondingly necessary rules.

Well sure, we still have “rules” today—print periodicals and reference works do not circulate, and we still expect the “return of circulated books on or before the due date”—but we have broken down other long-standing library mores. We no longer prohibit “bringing…soft drinks namely cokes, into the library,” and student discussions (talking) in the library are no longer limited to “subjects relative to their search.” Today we merely ask students who bring food or drink in the library to clean-up after themselves, and while we no longer shush students for talking, we do ask that they consider and respect their neighbors as they interact.

The old rules reflect an understanding of the library as a place primarily where information resources are stored and searched. Emphasis was placed on protecting these resources and controlling the study environment. Today we have a primary desire to make the library a more open and welcoming place. We are less obsessed with control. We recognize that learning is a social activity, and learning is best facilitated when the study environment is comfortable and (even) domestic (I got this term from Scott Bennett).

In 1953, students had to come to the library because that was the only place where information resources could be accessed. Today, while we still stock our physical shelves with books to support the research needs of our students, the storage function of the library has diminished significantly in the face of anywhere/anytime access of information resources in electronic format just a few clicks away, starting from the library website. Students no longer have to come to the library. Whether or not they will depends on the library being more than a storage facility. The question of whether the relaxation of “rules” is pandering to the user, as I imagine Mr. Neth might have insisted, is way past moot. The role of the library itself has changed that much.

But what about the role of the librarian? Rule 5 presents an interesting paradox:

The last resort in any research problem is seeking the assistance of the Librarian. [Consult] the Card Catalog, the encyclopedia and dictionaries, the special reference collection and periodical indexes, and then finally consult the Librarian. However, no one should leave the library without an answer to the question at hand until all the above have been consulted.

The last resort?! At first I was taken aback by the brashness of wording that could be construed as communicating the librarian’s time was too important to be pestered by students seeking assistance with their research questions. But in fairness to Mr. Neth, he was the only full-time staff person, running all the functions of the library with the help of some student workers. Today we have three full-time librarians, a part-time librarian, two part-time paraprofessionals, and a small army of student workers. Even considering that the library was significantly smaller in 1953, Mr. Neth’s time was definitely at a premium.

Seen more positively, this rule (even if originally motivated by pragmatic concern) provoked students to take greater ownership for the research process, and propagated in them a self-service attitude well before its time. Although there are still students who come into the library (often at the last minute) hoping that a librarian will do all their resource searching work for them (yeah right), the democratization of information access fostered by the Web has encouraged all of us to rely less on professionals and experts as authoritative mediators—at least initially. We like being able to seek-out our own answers. The librarian’s role has shifted from mediating information to instructing students how to search effectively for information, and how to better evaluate the quality and relevance of that information for the intended use. Librarians are also more involved educationally in getting students to think-through their research topics, and composing a manageable thesis. We then set them loose. Assuming we aren’t leaving students entirely to their own devices as we endorse a self-service attitude, the rule has a very contemporary ring to it. I like it.

I also like the way the article closes. Mr. Neth expresses a key affirmation of the function academic libraries should play on every college or university campus—both symbolically and in actuality. This affirmation remains every bit as timely and relevant today as it did over half a century ago:

The library is the hub about which the academic wheel of education turns. It is as much a tool in the process of gaining knowledge as is any other individual tool in that program.

Million Pennies Campaign update, April 2011

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Milligan College Library is proud to announce that you, our loyal library users, contributed $10.00 in cash and change to our Million Pennies Campaign in March 2011.  We have now raised $2,923.06 since the start of the campaign in April 2010, which means we’ve achieved nearly 30% of our goal!

The Library staff would like to extend a hearty thank you to our February contributors: Leah Anderson, Ian Burt, Gary Daught, Kelly Devault, Curtis Gibson,and Bine Opulenticity Villiams . 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!

As promised in the last Million Pennies blog post, we’ve decided to hold a monthly drawing using the names of each month’s donors. Ian Burt is the winner of a like-new hardcover of the 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks!

Next month’s prize is the paperback Looking for Alaska by John Green.  Donate to the campaign, write your name on a slip of paper, and place it in the box.  On May 2nd, 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!

Unicode Fonts for BIblical Studies

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Whether you’re a Times New Roman, Baskerville, Garamond, or Comic Sans kind of person, the fonts, or typefaces, we use can positively or negatively affect the way people perceive our writing. While font selection may seem somewhat novel to the casual typist, authors who have to mix Roman and non-Roman (e.g. Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Kanji et al.) characters into one document know that “simple” font selection isn’t always so simple. At Milligan, this is especially pertinent to Bible majors, for whom referencing non-Roman (esp. Greek and Hebrew) characters is often a necessity.

In the late Spring of 2006 I turned in my first major exegetical paper containing non-Roman characters—a tragically puerile reading of Romans 8:28–30, if you must know. After emailing the document to myself, printing the paper at the library and heading to class, I made the horrifying discovery that every Greek word in my paper printed as a series of garbled symbols not at all resembling the Greek script. Not wanting to encounter the same problem for my next paper, I set out to find the best way to type, save and print documents using non-Roman scripts. Now, half a decade (and a few biblical languages) later, I’ve decided to share my insights into using biblical language fonts to their fullest potential. The following is intended as a guide for students and faculty who use non-Roman scripts in their research and writing.

An Introduction To Unicode

The Problem:

Computers read numbers, not letters—and even at that, computers don’t read numbers so much as they read sets of ones and zeros that represent numbers. Traditionally, each letter in a text file was assigned a value between 0 and 128—corresponding to each possible numerical value in one byte of data. This system provided sufficient unique numbers for assignment of the entire Latin alphabet (in both cases), all Arabic numerals, and most common punctuation. If one wished to use a different character set (e.g. Greek), one would have to use a different font.

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