The Library Website gets Better and Better

As if winning an award for the website wasn't enough...we've improved the Library Website. Some of the highlights include:
1. Renew Your Books. Get to know this link so you no longer have to receive reminder emails or look at those books on your desk guiltily.
2. Subject based Research Guides. These are wiki based, therefore easily editable and awesome. Keep your eyes peeled, more subject guides are on the way!
3. Ask a Librarian, Champlain's Live Chat Service. We are excited to try to implement a well-used technology with our students to answer questions Monday thru Thursday, 6 - 9 pm. We are powering through Meebo, which means that a variety of instant messengers will work to contact your favorite librarians.

So check out the website and click around. We are looking forward to a new school year and always trying to come up with ways to put the right information into your hands.

College Website of the Month!

Champlain College Library's website has been selected as the "College Library Website of the Month" by the College Library Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). In his letter announcing the selection, J. Michael Thompson, chair of the College Library Section's Communications Committee, explains the award this way: "The College Library Section recognizes that a library's Website, in addition to enhancing access to a library’s resources and services, serves in general as a major means of communicating with current and future users."

In their review of the Champlain Library website, the selection committee wrote: "Library Director Janet Cottrell and the staff provide a visually pleasant homepage. The links clearly identify the Library's services and resources to their patrons. The Find sections as well as the Research Advice, Library Services and For Faculty sections illustrate the Library's mission as stated by Cottrell in the latest annual report...." The committee's review goes on to identify elements of the Library website they found particularly helpful, including a link to guidelines for starting a research project and a new link (to be activated this Fall) providing chat-based reference service.

To have our work recognized by our peers is truly an honor. Like all college libraries, we work hard to communicate with students, faculty, and colleagues; this external recognition of our website lets us hope that we have built a site that does indeed communicate some of the wealth of resources and services that our library offers.

Many thanks to everyone in the Library who contributes to and maintains the website, and to our IS colleagues who helped with the original setup. We are planning some great enhancements to the Library website this Fall, so stay tuned!

Angela Battista

Our new diversity director has agreed to be a part of our Meaningful Books Series this fall! We can't wait to see what books Angela finds important to her!

Core Slide Show

I checked out the slide show of our new core books at Flickr, and it really is awesome. Thank you MIC staff for all the hard work you've done to make this work! It's a great way to browse the collection and encourage readership at the same time.

Cool idea

The July/August 2007 C&RL News had a fun article about a program at the University of Chicago called "Class Librarians." Check out their website at www.lib.uchicago.edu/classlibrarians. Food for thought.....

paula

Other cool blogs

In thinking about what else we could blog about, there are plenty of interesting blogs out there, library related or not, that give some ideas or are worth commenting on. That's what the Feevy is for! Feevy is a dynamic blog roll where we can see when blogs we like have new posts and the first few lines of that post. I have loved having it on my personal blog. If you have any suggestions for blogs you want to see added, let me know. Also, it would be a great way to highlight other campus blogs. I know Elaine Young blogs regularly...who knows who else might be at it.

to blog or not to blog

Let's try it! For example, we could talk about what we're reading. I just finished my first book by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. Don't Call It Night was a haunting and poetic story about the relationship between the couple Theo and Noa and their involvement in the establishement of a drug rehab center in the their small desert frontier town. Oz creates an atmosphere that lingers long after the book is finished!
paula

To blog, or not to blog...

To blog, or not to blog. That seems to have been our question for quite some time. One of the reasons I know I have hesitated to blog for the Library has been the question, "what will we blog about?" With the school year approaching, new books coming in by the truckload, and new faculty and staff joining us all the time, there seems to be quite a lot. But as Janet pointed out to me today, perhaps we don't just have to blog about ourselves. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to share with the campus the stuff we think is cool: website, articles, blogs, wikis, events, etc. Check out what Kenyon is up to: this blog is filled with simply good stuff. So that's where the title for this blog came from: "Good Stuff at the Miller Information Commons." It is by no means "the" name: we can change it. We can change everything you see here.

This is our blog: a place to point out cool stuff at the library, at the college, and in the world. What do you think?