Online Newsletter of
September 2011
ONE BOOK, ONE CAMPUS
To support the first year of the One Book, One
Campus program at RCC, the library has developed a webpage of resources about
this year’s book The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
The book is about a young African-American mother who died of an
aggressive form of cervical cancer in 1951.
During her operation, her doctor kept a sample of cancerous tissue for
experimental purposes without her knowledge or consent. Those cells have mysteriously never died and
have been invaluable to medical science ever since, including work on the cure for
polio. One Book, One Campus is a program
on hundreds of college campuses in which all students, staff and faculty are
encouraged to read the same book. To
access the library webpage of resources on the book and the related Moodle site
to leave comments, click here.
DIGITIZING RCC’s HISTORY
Cover of 35 year old
RCC yearbook
The
RCC library is pleased to announce the digitization of several categories of
RCC archival materials: commencement
programs, yearbooks, student handbooks and course catalogs. Many other categories will follow in the
coming months. This exciting project was
made possible through the LYRASIS Mass Digitization Collaborative. The project is partially funded with a grant
from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It
has made digitization easy and affordable for libraries and cultural institutions. All items were scanned from cover-to-cover
and in full color and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive provides online storage
space for archival materials from hundreds of academic libraries across the
country including several at Massachusetts community colleges. To view
the collections, go the Archives and Special Collections link on the library
website and choose Internet Archive. Or
just click here here. If you have any questions about this project
and the works that have been digitized, please contact Autumn Haag at ahaag@rcc.mass.edu.
FACULTY/STAFF
PUBLICATIONS
Community College faculties are not especially known
for publishing, compared to those in four year colleges and universities where
there are publishing incentives. That
doesn’t mean that publishing doesn’t take place, though. The library has started documenting the
intellectual work of RCC faculty and staff including books, published articles,
conference papers and several other categories.
Over 360 items have been collected so far. Take a look at the list right here, sorted
alphabetically by faculty/staff name. (It
is also available from the Faculty Services link on the library website.) When possible, live links to documents are
provided. If you would like to add to
the list, contact Autumn Haag, who is in charge of this effort, at ahaag@rcc.mass.edu.
Every fall, the media has stories about students complaints
about textbook prices and about an accelerated move to online textbooks. See, for example, this September 1 article in the
Boston Globe. For faculty who want to
offer free online textbooks, the library offers a list of
sources. Go to the Faculty Services link
of the main library website at www.rcc.mass.edu/lib and look
for the open source link. Or just click here. The list was compiled by Jenene Cook, Dean of Academic Technology and
Bill Hoag, Reference Librarian.
GOOGLE TV FOR STREAMING VIDEOS
The library has added a Google TV for student video
use. It is housed in the Group Video
Room, opened last year inside the Group Study Room. Groups of students can now watch the
library’s 1,400 regular videos as well as 6,700 library streaming videos using
this special TV equipped for Internet reception. Regular television service is not
available. The group video room became
popular in the spring semester of 2011 and the addition of the Google TV should
add to that popularity.
GIFT BOOKS FROM DONALD
COLLECTION
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Prof. Donald and
friend. |
In the
summer, the library staff went to Lincoln, MA to select gift books from the
estate of David Herbert Donald. Before his death
is 2009, Prof. Donald was arguably the greatest scholar of Abraham Lincoln in the country.
In 1995, his book, Lincoln,
was a New York Times bestseller. It has been called the best biography of the
sixteenth president. Prof. Donald won
two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography---of abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and novelist Thomas Wolfe. For
decades, Prof. Donald taught history at Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and
Harvard. He wrote thirty books. His academic work concentrated on Lincoln,
the Civil War, Reconstruction and the South. He collected 12,000 books over sixty
years.
RCC
librarians selected hundreds of Prof. Donald’s books that are most appropriate
for a community college library.
Subjects include the Civil War, biography, art, and African American
history. This is a timely gift. The year 2011 is the sesquicentennial of the
beginning of the Civil War. Many of the
books from the Donald collection are included in a display on the war,
available for viewing throughout the fall on the library’s first floor.
Also,
see the new online research guide: African Americans and the Civil War. Go to
the main library webpage, click on Research Guides and find in the list. Or just click here.
DRAMATIC PICTURE ON LOAN
The library is pleased to host a painting entitled
“Root” by Boston painter and illustrator Stephen Hamilton.
This large and evocative 46” x 56” painting is on loan in the Group
Study room. Be sure to come to Group
Study to see it or look through the library windows from the first floor
hallway in the Academic Building. To
view dozens of other works by Stephen Hamilton, see the blog archive at his
webpage at http://akin1987s.blogspot.com/. Thanks to Marshall Hughes and Pam Green of Media Arts for facilitating this display.
STAFF
UPDATE
AUTUMN HAAG: NEW LIBRARIAN
ARCHIVIST
After a lengthy search, the College selected Autumn Haag in
May to be the new Librarian Archivist at RCC.
Autumn graduated from McGill University in Montreal after spending a
year abroad at Oxford. She received a
Masters of Information Studies in Library Science at the University of
Toronto. She has experience in libraries
in New York, Maine and Massachusetts. Before
coming to RCC, she was a Reference Archivist at the Massachusetts State
Archives in Dorchester. Autumn does
reference service and library instruction with students, catalogs all new
library materials and organizes the College’s archival collections. Autumn is also the first member of the
library staff to be a contestant on the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Here
she is with host Alex Trebek accepting her $1,000 winnings.
TED
INTARABUMRUNG EARNS 2ND MASTERS DEGREE.
In May, Totsaporn (Ted) Intarabumrung was awarded a second
masters degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston. All professional librarians have a masters
degree in Library and Information Science.
Ted has just completed a second degree, a Master of Education in
Instructional Design. This additional
education is directly related to a part of his job duties, teaching library
research method classes to students.
WANDA YOUNG JOINS LIBRARY
STAFF
Wanda Young has been at RCC for
ten years, first in Human Resources and, since 2004, as Executive Staff
Assistant to Vice President Stephanie
Janey. Wanda will
continue to work for Vice President Janey but has also accepted a part-time
position as a library assistant. Wanda
brings her calm and helpful presence to the task of assisting students in the
library during evening and Saturday shifts.
We are very pleased to have her.
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 “Library Newsletter” on the library website http://www.rcc.mass.edu/lib.
Welcome to the Library, published by Roxbury Community College Library,
Mark
Lawrence, Library Director