Betsy Beaulieu's Book List

Today we hosted our Meaningful Books Series with Betsy Beaulieu. It was wonderful. While her overviews of her books were brief, they were passionate and intriguing.

A number of people who attended asked for a copy of the booklist. I imagine that some of you who couldn't attend might be curious as well. A number of these books are on display at the MIC. As for the others, check the catalog to see if the books are available.

Many thanks to Betsy for such a wonderful talk!


Betsy Beaulieu's Most Meaningful Books

1. Bread and Jam for Frances, Russell Hoban and Lillian Hoban
2. Nancy Drew series
3. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
4. The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, Fannie Merritt Farmer
5. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
6. The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
7. Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
8. Beloved, Toni Morrison
9. A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
10. The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo, Tom Feelings
11. Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
12. Feminism Is For Everybody, bell hooks
13. Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald
14. The Dream of A Common Language, Adrienne Rich
15. Images from An African Journey, Mark Patinkin
16. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

Books That Have Stayed with Me
17. The Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst
18. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
19. My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
20. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards
21. The Girls, Lori Larsens

ArtStor

ArtStor, the most comprehensive database of images, is an incredible resource. I just finished introducting it to a professor and despite the tediousness of registering, logging in, and turing off his pop up blocker (all of which are necessary for a successful ArtStor experience), he was amazed at the quality of the images and the sheer number of images available. The best part is once you are in an image, you can zoom in...and in...and in to see the texture of the paint, even the texture of the canvas!

I know ArtStor will be useful to our Core curriculum but wouldn't it be great to see it used in other programs?

If you are interested, come by the Library and we can think about how to use ArtStor in your projects, papers, or classroom.

It's a Core Blog!

Look to the right.

Notice that serious thinker over in the big, black, blog roll. That serious thinker is a great new addition to the library's Feevy: it is the Core Development Team's new blog!

This new blog offers anyone at Champlain the chance to keep up on how the new Core is developing. In just a few postings, I have learned a great deal about the next semester including its theme, the texts, the central questions, and how global modules will fit in.

Thanks to David Kite, Jen Vincent, and Bob Mayer (the CDT Team) for entering the blogosphere and keeping us all up to date!

Meaningful Books Series highlights Betsy Beaulieu

The Miller Information Commons’ “Meaningful Books” Series highlights

Dr. Betsy Beaulieu

Thursday, Sept. 27th at Noon,
Miller Information Commons, Vista Room
(Refreshments will be served)

Welcome and get to know Betsy Beaulieu, Dean of Champlain’s new Core Division.

Betsy’s list of meaningful books reflects her love of reading almost everything – African American literature (her specialty in grad school), pedagogy, poetry, and smart women’s fiction.

A voracious reader, Betsy cut her reading teeth on Golden Books. She progressed to the Nancy Drew series, developing a love of mysteries. Her first grown-up friend was the Children’s Librarian at the public library, who introduced her to Little Women, the first book that made Betsy cry, so closely did she identify with bookish Beth.

Join us on Sept. 27th to find out more about Betsy’s love of reading and the books that have made a difference in her life.

Preview some of Betsy’s meaningful books in the glass case on the Main Floor of the MIC.

3 Cheers for CC students

Students in Linda Miller's Accounting Information Systems class and Erik Kaarla's CREW2 class, thank you for your participation on Thursday the 13th and Friday the 14th as we milked those library databases! We discovered ways to find reliable and useful accounting websites and which databases can turn up valuable reports on topics ranging from physics to alien abduction. We covered the invisible web, a list of evaluation criteria to use when reviewing websites, I highlighted databases ranging from Mergent Online to MarketResearch.comAcademic, I shared my funniest (of the month) YouTube--"The Best Horse in Europe"--and we listened to Goldfinger on the library's Naxos Music Library database. I received a round of applause from the accounting students, and I saw many of Erik's students printing reports from (Yes!) library databases rather than Google (Google, of course, turned up some good reports as well). Go figure.....can life at the library get any better than that?

Shakespeare at the MIC

“A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene” (Henry V, Prologue)

The stage is set at the MIC…
Join us on October 4th at noon in the Vista Room at the Miller Information Commons as we discuss some “swelling scene(s)” of Henry Vth.

Before attending the Champlain Theater performances (Oct. 11-13th), familiarize yourself with the play and get a taste of the characters in this informal discussion session. We will be reading and discussing excerpts from the following scenes:

The Prologue,
The St. Crispin’s Day Speech, and the Wooing of the French Princess.

We have the stage, we have the scenes…a kingdom for princes to act.

Hoping to see you at the Library.

Super Busy at the MIC bring Technology out into the Open

School started today and getting the Library ready for the influx of 475 new first years as well as returning students, new faculty, new deans, and new adjuncts has been a whirlwind. But the results are outstanding. Largely this is due to our library crew embracing and taking technology to a whole new level. We are starting out the year with a series of new initiatives that are pretty cool. Here are some of the highlights:
1. We have started using wikis to create subject guides. What a relief! You can actually update and modify the pages to accomodate instructor's needs, students' feedback and new additions to the collection. Awesome and very well received. Hopefully they will be very used.
2. We are trying chat reference. We've held back from chat in the past because we are such a small staff but with more of our students going abroad and a new librarian in the mix, we thought it was time to give it a go. More on that as the school year progresses...it's hard to know how that's working on day 1.
3. We are blogging (as you well know since you are reading it!) We are maintaining a library blog to highlight events at the library but also things the librarians think are cool. (Oh, there are so many).
4. We are tracking reference questions using a free, online tool from zoho. We just stareted it today but it was so much easier to keep track of questions. We kept the screen open and the form is easy to fill out and WHAM, we've got improved data on reference.
5. We have been spending most of the summer adding our newest additions to the collection into Flickr. I think it will be a cool way for faculty, and maybe even students, to share books with one another, comment, suggest other books, and get to know our collection better, which is changing rapidly.

We are giving these technologies a go and I am so proud to work somewhere that is willing to take that chance. It's a great way to kick off the school year: invigorated, excited, and trying new things. It might make all of us insanely busy, but it feels insanely great.

A First for First Years

Orientation has been growing like crazy at Champlain so this year the Library decided to participate in the Scavenger Hunt. It's a first for them and a first for us!

Here's how it goes, each group of students will receive a question that once answered will take them to a spot in the Library that we wish they would know about.
Here are some of the spots in the MIC that are included:
Newspapers
Writing Center
Math & Accounting Lab
Quiet Study Rooms
Main Stacks
Circulation Desk
Reference Desk

To answer the questions, the students have to use skills we wish they'd use:
Find a book in the Stacks and in Reference
Look up a book in the Catalog
Ask a Librarian for help
Find a book on Reserve

How would you do? If you are scratching your head as to where to find any of these spots or how to do any of these things, come by the MIC and ask! That's why we're here.

And yes, we will give you a new MIC bookmark too!