May 07 Newsletter

Online Newsletter of Roxbury Community College Library

May 2007

NEW ART DONATION

Stephen Rosenfeld of Jamaica Plain has donated to the college an exciting addition to the library’s collection of original art. It is the painting Glass of Water (1988) by Boston artist Aaron Fink. This large and striking piece, 7 feet tall by 5 feet wide, is now displayed on the first floor in the library. Aaron Fink is a nationally known painter who has had dozens of exhibits around the United States and Europe over the past 30 years. His works appear in major museum collections all over the country such as the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Denver Museum of Art. Fink has gained recognitions for masterfully depicting ordinary objects that we all see around us like sandwiches, light bulbs, coffee cups, fruit, flowers, matches and water glasses. For many examples of Fink’s works, go to http://www.alphagallery.com/artists/fink.html.

Glass of Water (1988)

Aaron Fink

Boston-area artists and art collectors in the last year and a half donated all but two of the 23 pieces of original art on permanent display in the library. This was done in conjunction with The Art Connection, Inc. of Boston. The Art Connection is truly an amazing organization. Over the past eleven years it has facilitated the donations of thousands of works of art to non-profit entities in the Boston area that do not have art budgets. For more information, go to their web page at www.theartconnection.org.

The Art Connection donations, in addition to other art on campus, give RCC a very good art presence compared to other community colleges in Massachusetts. See especially:

· The excellent exhibits in the Joan Resnikoff Gallery, Media Arts Center (Jennifer Hughes, curator). See http://www.rccmainstage.com/welcome/ for information on the current exhibit “Dianne Zimbabwe: 5 Kilometres” through May.

· Also, to see the new online gallery of permanent original art at RCC, click here (or go to www.rcc.mass.edu/lib à Archives and Special Collections à RCC Library Digital Displays à Art at RCC).

Librarian Bill Hoag created this gallery to answer numerous reference questions about art pieces on campus. Thanks to Milton Samuels for many of the pictures. The gallery is part of the library’s growing online archives. Anyone with more information about any of these art pieces, contact mlawrence@rcc.mass.edu.

NEW PROFESSIONAL LIBRARIAN

Totsaporn (Ted) Intarabumrung started in the RCC library in April. He is in charge of circulation services and does most of the reference work and library instruction classes in the mornings. Ted is a graduate of the Master of Science program in Library and Information Science at Simmons College. He has most recently worked at Gibbs College and the Boston Public Library. He has also worked part-time at Bunker Hill Community College and Northeastern University. Ted is in charge of collection development in the following areas: Humanities, Business, ESL, Literature, Languages and Nursing. He has already begun doing outreach to some of these departments. If you haven’t met him yet, stop in. His office is behind the circulation desk.

Ted Intarabumrung

The library has added two multi-cultural databases, which will hopefully be of great interest to the college community: the African American Experience and the Latino American Experience.

The African American Experience

The African American Experience database is an outstanding and easy-to-use online collection of African American materials. It was voted Best Online Reference tool for 2006 by Library Journal. Contents:

375 online reference books—fully searchable;
4,000 slave narratives collected in the 1930s by the WPA;
100s of primary documents: manuscripts, speeches, court cases, laws, quotations, letters;
67 classic Negro University Press texts from late 1700s to 1970;
Downloadable audio files of music and interviews;
Timeline from 1492 to present;
Vetted Web sites;
Lesson plans tied to primary sources and images;
100s of photographs, maps and other images.

The Latino American Experience is a sister database and is the first full-text database focusing on the history and culture of Latinos living in the United States. It’s content spans from the pre-Columbian Indigenous civilizations of the Americas, through the Spanish and Mexican settlement of much of what is now the United States, to the triumphs and challenges of present-day U.S. Latinos. Contents:

150 fully searchable online reference works;
1500 images;
100s of primary documents;
Spanish language content;
Timeline;
Coming: resource center for educators featuring lesson plans

To access either database:

Go to the library website, www.rcc.mass.edu/lib,
Select Databases under Electronic Resources,
Select Subject list,
Select the Multicultural link at the top right,
Select On Campus for the appropriate database. For Off Campus access, your RCC library barcode number is needed.

Visual Search

Visual Search is an interesting new option in the EBSCO databases. Instead of just giving you a list of articles in the traditional way, Visual Search displays a visual map with imbedded articles. This map is composed of circles corresponding to the topics associated with the search term. If you search for “crime”, for example, Visual Search displays ten circles on the screen, each related to a topic related to crime. If you click on one of the circles, it appears to move toward you to take up the whole screen. Labeled sub-circles (subtopics) are inside it. Clicking on a sub-circle makes it move toward you to fill the screen and displays sub-sub-topics and/or squares that are really links to actual articles. You can move back to the top of the hierarchy again by clicking outside circles or squares. Only the 250 most relevant articles are accessible in Visual Search to create the visual maps so using regular search is still necessary to get a comprehensive list. The real value of Visual Search is that it displays, in a graphical way, the relationships among topics and subtopics of the search term being sought. Seeing those relationships helps students consider parts of a topic that might have been missed and also helps them narrow a topic in interesting ways. Graphical search applications have been around for a decade, used for specialized purposes. Ebsco is the first major library database company to use one. Graphic applications of some kind are likely to be part of the future of how online searching is done. To take a look at Visual Search, go into any Ebsco database and choose Visual Search in blue at the top of the screen. To find an Ebsco database:

Go to the library website, www.rcc.mass.edu/lib,
Select Databases under Electronic Resources,

· Select Alphabetical list.

· Select Academic Search Premier, the first one in the list.

EBSCOhost

BORROW A BEST SELLING BOOK.

	FICTION		NON-FICTION
	Plum Lovin’ Janet Evanovich		Thunderstruck Erik Larson
	Shopaholic & Baby Sophie Kinsella		State of Denial Bob Woodward
	For One More Day Mitch Albom		Infidel Ayaan Hirsi Ali
	Next Michael Crichton		Innocent Man John Grisham
	Shadow Dance Julie Garwood		I Feel Bad About My Neck Nora Ephron

To build a better college library and provide superior customer service, we need your comments. Send both praises and gripes to mlawrence@rcc.mass.edu.

If you missed earlier issues of Welcome to the Library, click on “Read the Library’s newsletter” on the library website http://www.rcc.mass.edu/lib.

Welcome to the Library, published by Roxbury Community College Library, Roxbury Crossing, MA

Mark Lawrence, Library Director

May 2007

FICTION

NON-FICTION

Plum Lovin’

Janet Evanovich

Thunderstruck

Erik Larson

Shopaholic & Baby

Sophie Kinsella

State of Denial

Bob Woodward

For One More Day

Mitch Albom

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Next

Michael Crichton

Innocent Man

John Grisham

Shadow Dance

Julie Garwood

I Feel Bad About My Neck

Nora Ephron