smoss's blog

The University Library is pleased to announce that all Portland State University Alumni with an alumni card are eligible for free borrowing from the University Library’s print collection, as well as online access to electronic databases when inside the Library building. Alumni will be allowed to check out up to five books at a time for up to three weeks, with one renewal.

To check out items from the Library, PSU alumni should bring their official alumni card to the Library. Alumni cards can be requested through the PSU Alumni Association. Sixty (60) credits are all that is needed to apply for free membership in the Alumni Association.

The University Library is proud of our alumni and happy to invite alumni back to the Library to use our growing research collections.

This exciting change to borrowing policies is the result of a renewed partnership with the PSU Alumni Association. (In the past, Alumni Association members received various benefits including a reduced price on a borrower card at the Library as part of their annual membership fee.)

Questions regarding this new service can be sent to Molly Blalock-Koral, Library Access Services Manager, blalockk@pdx.edu or Jyoti Roy, Alumni Association Communications Coordinator, jyotiroy@pdx.edu.

The Library would like to thank the more than 800 PSU students, faculty, and staff who participated in LibQUAL, a survey about library services at Portland State University. We appreciate your time and input, which will help us improve the library for everyone. And congratulations to student Ryan Bender from the School of Social Work, who won our random drawing for a new iPad! Ryan told us that while she wishes the Library were open 24 hours every day, she appreciates being able to access library resources from home at anytime.

Thanks to Ryan and all of our survey participants.

Portland State University Library wants to improve our website based on what you think! And one lucky participant will win a $50 gift card to Powell’s Books! We are conducting an online card-sorting exercise, which should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. You will drag and drop items to create categories, and choose the names of your categories. It's easy, and there are no wrong answers!

Get started: http://goo.gl/HndUv

The winner will be randomly selected; only current PSU students, staff and faculty are eligible to win. The survey will close May 22, 2013 at noon, so don't delay.

Contact Content and Usability Strategist Sherry Buchanan at sherryb@pdx.edu or 503-725-3877 if you have any questions. Thanks for your help!

PSU Library is pleased to welcome new Associate Professor and Assistant University Librarian for Public Services Jeanne Davidson, who started on March 29. In this position, Jeanne oversees library services including Access Services, Reference, Instruction, Government Documents, and Special Collections and University Archives.

Jeanne comes to PSU from Arizona State University Libraries, where she began as Head of the Noble Science & Engineering Library and was promoted to Head of Academic Program Services. Prior to ASU, she worked as Physical Sciences Librarian at Oregon State University and Science Librarian at Augustana College in Illinois. Jeanne has a master’s degree in library science from the University of Missouri-Columbia as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming, respectively.

Says Davidson, “I’m excited to be joining PSU Library as Assistant University Librarian for Public Services. The staff and faculty in the library are very dedicated and I look forward to working with them to ensure that PSU Library’s services for faculty, students, and staff are the best they can be.”

We are delighted to have Jeanne at PSU!

The Summit system will be unavailable starting on Tuesday, April 30th at 11pm until Wednesday, May 1st at 11 am (at the latest), while important upgrades are being made.

If you need to request materials through the Summit Consortium during this time, you can do so through the Interlibrary Loan office (https://ill.lib.pdx.edu/Logon.php) and the ILL staff will place the hold on you behalf.

We apologize for any inconveniences. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at circ@lists.pdx.edu

The 2013 McNair Scholars Online Journal, Exploring Transformation: An Analysis of Culture, Identity & Borderlands, is now available in PDXScholar, the university's institutional repository. The McNair Scholars represent majors in diverse fields across the academic spectrum, and their range of interests is reflected in the variety of topics found in each volume. The newest volume includes articles ranging from "Drug trafficking organizations in Mexico" to "E Mau Ana Ka Haʻaheo," a work on the revitalization of indigenous Hawaiian language.

With the addition of the 2013 edition, PDXScholar now contains seven volumes of the McNair Scholars Online Journal, going back to 2004. Browse the volumes by author, title, subject or date.

Established in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Education and named for astronaut and Challenger space shuttle crew member Ronald McNair, Portland State University's McNair Scholars Program encourages students to pursue graduate studies by providing opportunities to define goals, engage in research, and develop the skills and student/faculty mentor relationships critical to success at the doctoral level.

Portland State University Library is happy to debut its University Archives Digital Gallery. This new online resource makes over 6000 historic Portland State images available anytime anywhere. The Digital Gallery allows visitors to browse photos by date or to search by name, location or subject. Create a user account to assemble custom collections that can be shared with others.

Each photo is accompanied by the descriptive information that is currently available to the University Archives. We hope that you will help us make this an even more valuable and useful resource by sharing what you know. Click on “Tell us!”--located under each individual image--to send us a message about a particular photo. We can add names, dates, locations, and any other information you give us. This will improve search results and let others learn more about the rich and unique history of Portland State.

The University Archives will continue to add more images as they are digitized and cataloged. Next up: Photographs of campus life from the 1950s and over 500 images of Portland State athletics spanning three decades.

University Archives Digital Gallery
http://archives.pdx.edu/digitalgallery
Learn more about Portland State University Library and the University Archives!
Follow the University Archives on Twitter: @PSULibArchives

The Library has instituted a 2-month trial for BrowZine. BrowZine is an iPad app (coming to Android tablets later this month and to smartphones late in the year) that brings together online journals from multiple publishers for browsing. You have access to all the journals to which we subscribe from the listed publishers (this won’t include journals for which our only access is through sources like the EBSCOhost resources).

BrowZine is designed for browsing individual journal issues and reading articles of interest, right on your tablet. You can mark journals to follow and will receive a push notification when a new issue of that journal comes out. You can read and save articles in BrowZine, or send PDFs of articles of interest to Zotero (and soon Mendeley) or whatever PDF reading and annotating app you use on your tablet. This app recreates the experience of browsing new journal issues to keep up and find interesting articles on the tablet.

Download BrowZine for free from the iTunes Store, and give it a try. Let us know what you think!

Questions? Please contact Librarian Michael Bowman at bowman@pdx.edu or 503.725.3690.

Portland State University Library wants to know what you think about our services and resources.

LibQUAL® Lite is a confidential online survey which takes only 10 minutes to complete. It has been used by hundreds of universities around the world and allows libraries to gauge their performance as well as compare themselves to other institutions.

Your responses will:

• Help us better understand the Portland State community's view of Library services and how we can improve those services;
• Let us know where we can concentrate limited resources to best serve you;
• Allow us to assess Portland State’s results against other libraries to determine best practices.

The survey is available from Monday, April 8 through Friday, April 19. All faculty, staff and students are encouraged to participate.

For more information and to take the survey, visit http://library.pdx.edu/libqual_survey.html.

The Library has expanded its successful student loaner laptop program with the purchase of 40 new laptops. The new laptops are Dell models running the same software as the lab computers, including Adobe products, SPSS, and Microsoft Office. Availability is first-come, first-served, and students may borrow laptops for use within the Library building for three hours, with no renewals. Check here to see how many laptops are available.

Students may borrow a calculator for four hours, and calculators may leave the building. These are also first-come, first-served.

Borrow laptops and calculators from the Library Circulation Desk on the first floor.