Leddy Library News

There are two beautiful displays gracing the Leddy Library at the moment. In front of Williams Coffee Pub is “A Look At Windsor’s Past” with images from The Walkerville Times.

And in the Leddy Library Lobby, there is a display commemorating National Social Work Week.

National Social Work Week was established by the Canadian Association of Social Workers and each year they address a particular theme with this year’s being poverty.

The Academic Data Centre has relocated from the basement of the west building to room 1104,  main floor of the main building, Leddy Library. We’re still a little disorganized at present, but we’re open for business!

The Leddy Library has commemorated the start of the Chinese New Year with a beautiful display across from the Williams Coffee Pub in the Leddy Library.

You can also keep up with Canada’s Medal Count via the Olympics Display in the Leddy Library front lobby. Please be aware that the picture below is already out of date!

The Library will be performing a major upgrade of the Conifer system on Monday, February 15th.  The work will begin at 8 p.m. and should conclude by approximately 10 a.m. the next morning.

While the upgrade is underway, the public catalogue will be unavailable and you will be unable to renew books online.   Access to remote resources such as Scholars Portal will still be available using your UWin ID.

The Leddy Library is operating at reduced hours on Monday February 15th from 8am to 8pm in observation of Family Day.

From today’s Daily News:

Karen Needham is remembered by her campus colleagues for her sense of humour and her commitment to excellence in library service. Needham—who joined the university’s staff full-time in 1982 and worked since 1985 in the Leddy Library—died Monday at the age of 50.

“Karen was very devoted to the needs of our students, and her commitment extended beyond the campus to local high schools in an outreach to the future students of the university,” said Gwendolyn Ebbett, university librarian. “We are all shocked and saddened by her passing. She will be deeply missed.”

Needham began her UWindsor career as a switchboard operator and moved in 1985 to the Leddy Library’s reserve reading room, where she was made supervisor within a year. In 1991 she was promoted to reader services assistant and worked most recently as a library assistant in the access services department.

Funeral services will be held Thursday and campus flags will be lowered in her memory. For details, read her obituary.

We miss you, Karen.  We will keep you in our hearts.

From today’s Daily News:

Conifer, the integrated library system developed by the a consortium that includes the University of Windsor, will receive two provincial awards at the Ontario Library Association’s conference later this month.

“It’s great and welcome news for everyone who has worked so hard to make this project a success,” said Annette Demers, reference librarian in the Paul Martin Law Library.

Conifer, an implementation of the open source Evergreen system, is automated software to manage librarial functions, including circulation, cataloguing, acquisitions, patron records, and serial control. Consortium partners will share the Ontario Library and Information Technology Association Award for Technological Innovation and the Ontario College and University Library Association Award for Special Achievement.

It went live in May 2009 after a hectic production schedule, said Cathy Maskell of the Leddy Library.

“My hat is off to the systems librarians for the phenomenal amount of work they did to get it up and running,” she said.

The system continues to be refined as users become more familiar with it.

“It’s getting better every day,” Maskell said. “Conifer is really going to provide us with the flexibility we need to serve our community.”

The Ontario Library Association conference is February 24 to 27 in Toronto.

Project Conifer is a consortial installment of the Evergreen Open Source library system. This is the first academic consortium to implement Evergreen and largest bibliographic database supported by Evergreen and went live in August 2009.

Member institutions include: Leddy Library, J.N. Desmarais Library, Algoma University, Wishart Library, University of Sudbury, Hearst, Bibliothèque Maurice-Saulnier, Huntington College Library, Paul Martin Law Library, Northern Ontario School of Medicine (West), HRSRH Health Sciences Library, Northern Ontario School of Medicine (East), Xstrata Process Support Centre Library, NOHIN, Instructional Media Centre, Laboratoire de didactiques, E.S.E., Vale Inco, Mines Library, Willet Green Miller Centre, Art Gallery of Sudbury, Curriculum Resource Centre, Sault Area Hospital and Centre Franco-Ontarien de Folklore.

The OLITA Award Reception will be held on Friday February 26, 5:45 pm, in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in room 204. Please celebrate with us!

NFB.ca is a web site where you can watch hundreds of films produced by the National Film Board of Canada.  The NFB’s mission is to make these films accessible to all Canadians and as such,  it’s free for personal use.

The Leddy Library has subscribed to NFB.ca to allow for educational use of their films in the classrooms of the University of Windsor.  Teaching guides to NFB films are also available.

Don’t know where to start? Start here to explore all the documentaries, animations and dramas that the National Film Board has to offer.

By the way, the promotional image used on the Leddy Library front page is from RIP! A Remix Manifesto:

Join filmmaker Brett Gaylor and mashup artist Girl Talk as they explore copyright and content creation in the digital age. In the process they dissect the media landscape of the 21st century and shatter the wall between users and producers. Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow also come along for the ride.

That’s something close to this librarian’s heart. That, and The Log Driver’s Waltz.

The Library has bought and continues to purchase Springer eBooks collections (from 2005-current) making it possible for registered library patrons to order soft cover editions of selected titles for their personal use. Within each book on springerlink.com look for the “M” book logo and statement “Buy a Print Copy of this Book for $24.95 Including Shipping”, or the orange MyCopy box and button found on the right hand side of the webpage, to determine the eligible books.

The MyCopy offer is currently valid for more than 11,000 electronic Springer books published since 2005. The new soft cover edition is branded as a MyCopy book with a colour cover and black and white book content. All books will be sold at the same price, US$ 24.95. This price includes shipping and handling within the USA and Canada.

For more information, see the Springer MyCopy information page.

If you have any questions please contact Jennifer Soutter, Digital Services Librarian at jsoutter@uwindsor.ca

The Leddy Library is pleased to announce our new eBooks platform, Books @ Scholars Portal. Now, our users can search and access our collection of over 40,000 ebooks from such scholarly publishers as Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis and Springer from one source.  And in addition, readers also have access to over 200,000 ebooks from Open Access publishers such as the Internet Archive. Using Books @ Scholars Portal you can

• Browse books by subject
• Print or download parts of a book
• Save citations to RefWorks, Endnote and Zotero 
• Read books online through an elegant interface

Perhaps, just in time for a certain computer company’s launch of a certain product?