New Student Study Space

If you've been in the library lately, you probably have noticed some missing shelves. We made some changes over the Christmas break, including taking some of our reference materials in front of the study rooms and moving them to the basement classroom. Those materials are still accessible, but the space leftover from their removal has now become a large student study space.

You will find three extra-long tables with plenty of chairs back by the study rooms. There are also three large dry-erase whiteboards for student use. We've also made a little more room for our comfy blue furniture near the big window that faces E. 14th street.

We've also added some popular reading material on the long shelf in front of the study tables. Here you will find plenty of popular fiction arranged alphabetically by author. These books are on the honor system so you don't need an ID to check them out.

So if you're looking for a good place to study or a good book, come check out our changes on the 1st floor!

Orientation Sessions

Professor Judge from the English department shares her thoughts with us on library orientations.

"In fall 2009 my First Year Composition class met in the library three times. Usually, I introduce English Composition students to the library with one visit with instruction from librarians that is designed to help students with research projects.

In the future, I will continue to schedule multiple classes with a librarian for First Year Composition students. The reasons? Multiple visits benefit students by giving them customized help with their research projects and greater familiarity with our library’s systems and resources. Typically, students complain that they can’t find enough material for their research papers, but not one student ran into that problem last fall because of the extra help they had in locating material. Also, students found better sources because they received three times as much instruction on how to do this.

I think that visiting the library more than once also helped students to be comfortable in that space because I know that a number of them routinely use the library as their place to study."

Therese

Feel free to leave a comment or email us with any thoughts.

Access

It's a situation you are probably familiar with: you find an article or a book that you need for your work, but it's nowhere to be found in the Grand View library.  What do you do?

One of our goals at the GV library is to make sure you have access to lots of resources and not just the ones that we have here.  In other words, if you need an article you can ask us to get it for you.  If you need a book, we can get that for you too.  Just send us an email to library[at]grandview.edu and give us the citation for your item.  If you need further help asking for an interlibrary loan, watch our videos on how to do one.

You should have as many resources as you need.  Take advantage of our interlibrary loan services as often as you need them.

New Books!

Our library is always ordering new books. We display all of our new material on the 1st floor of the building so people can peruse them as they casually walk by our low shelves. What new books have come in lately? Here's a sample of some of our new ones:


How Life Began: Evolution's Three Geneses



America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat



Why History Matters



Last Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge



From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776

Come check them out and look for other books in our catalog.

Are You Preparing to Write?

November is just around the corner.  You probably have a number of different papers or projects to finish for your classes.  Have you started working on them yet?  If you have, great!  If you haven't, it's time to get started.

The Grand View Library can help you to get started with your work.  You will probably need books for your research, so go find some here.  Your professor mentioned something about using scholarly journals too, right?  Take your pick from any number of databases that we have.  These will help you search for everything you need.  Do you need to cite your information?  Of course you do!  Take a look at some of these resources to help you with that.

The best thing you can do, though, is come visit us at the library.  We're open until Midnight Sunday-Thursday and we're right in the middle of campus. 

Good luck!

National Information Literacy Awareness Month

On October 1st, President Obama signed a proclamation officially making October "National Information Literacy Awareness Month."

What does that mean, exactly?

The proclamation explains it thusly,

"Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise."

In a nutshell a person is information literate when they have the tools and the skills to evaluate information effectively for some purpose. We cannot simply assume everything we read is true or that all information is created equally. We need skills to determine what information has value and what we can do with that information in our daily lives.

Information literacy skills are important for students in their research projects, but they are also helpful to regular everyday citizens as well. For example, if you're about to buy a house, send a child to college, create a retirement plan, or start a small business, you're going to need quite a bit of information to get you started.

Who, what, and where do you turn for help? Slowly sift through the information you have and evaluate it carefully. Ask a librarian for help. We enjoy helping people develop the skills necessary to become life-long learners.

So the next time you read something that makes you raise an eyebrow, consider your information literacy skills and get to the bottom of the issue.

What Did We Read?

At last week's read-in, we had a number of students, staff, and faculty share some of the books that had impacts on their lives. Here's a list of some of the books they brought last Wednesday:

• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• There's No Such Place as Far Away by Richard Bach
• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Watch for emails for our next read-in this October!

September Read-In

The Grand View Library will host its first Read-In of the semester on Wednesday September 30^th from 11:30-1:30 in Holy Grounds Coffee Shop.

For this event, bring a book that has had a unique impact on your life. Why is this book so important to you? How did it help you or change you? We will share passages from our books and discuss.

This is a Humanities Passport Event.

If you have not been to a read-in before, come try it. We're simply sharing our books and our thoughts on particular writings and authors. We try to have one read-in each semester and future read-ins will have particular themes, such as poetry, African-American history, and Shakespeare.

Welcome Back!

I hope all of you had a great summer. We had a good summer in the library as well. Here are a few new things for you to check out at our website, http://library.grandview.edu:

We now have video tutorials! There are nine videos available to teach you, in four minutes or less, how to find books, articles, interlibrary loan materials, and other important tasks. Check out our link and see what you think.

The Wall Street Journal is now available, online and in full-text, through the Grand View Library! Even if you're not a Business major this newspaper is still one of the best sources of news in the country.

Also, if you ever need to know when the library computer lab is booked, check out our online calendar. This will tell you when a class will be in there so you can plan ahead.

We'll post again soon.

Good luck this semester!

Summer Hiatus

We're going to take a summer break here on the blog.  We'll see you again in August when everyone returns to campus.

Enjoy your summer!