Thursday, April 5 at 8am to Friday, April 13 at 2am (24hrs)
Saturday, April 14: 10am to 2am
Sunday, April 15 at 10am to Thursday, April 19 at midnight (24hrs)

from Leddy Hours

Dave earned his Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario in 2011. He recently completed a contract position as Public Services Librarian at Mount Allison University.

Welcome!

Leddy Libraries’ Librarian Research Series will continue Friday, April 13th at 11:00 with Mita Williams presenting, “The Library as Interface for Public Space and Public Self.” Mita will explore the library’s potential to help bridge the digital divide and to play a key role in facilitating public space and the infrastructure of the Internet  as a means to share and engage with each other. Join us Friday, April 13 at 11:00am, Room 302 West Building, Leddy Library.

Our second talk in the Leddy Library’s Librarian Research Series is today, at 11 am in Room 302, West Building, in the Leddy Library.

Art Rhyno will be presenting his talk, Optical Character Recognition for the Masses: Digitization Options for Small Budgets and Big Collections.  Please join us!

Get a sneak peek at the new books coming into Leddy Library by visiting the New Arrivals shelf behind the Reference Help Centre on the main floor. Browse by subject.  See what’s new. Find your new favourite book.

What better way to kick off the new year than with words of wisdom from those who have threaded before us? That’s precisely the premise of advice to sink in slowly, a wonderful project enlisting design graduates in passing on advice and inspiration to first-year students through an ongoing series of posters [Brain Pickings]

Welcome back for another semester!  Here are some posters that we hope you find inspiring for the days ahead. There’s lots more too.

Design by Rebecca Cobb

Design by Thomas Barwick

Design by Gray318

Design by Temujin Doran

Design by Robert Evans

The world of ebooks is in a state of considerable flux at moment. There are a variety of file formats for ebooks out there and at the moment, all competing for market share. Most ereaders are able to read files in the epub format … except the Kindle, which uses the mobi format as its default. The file format that most ebooks, tablets and computers can read is the pdf format and almost all the ebooks available from the Leddy Library are in this format. Unfortunately, while pdf files can be opened by most ebook readers, they are really hard to actually read from them.

So while you can generally read any pdf ebook offered from the Leddy Library, you may be able to only download a portion of the book at a time. To make matters even more confusing is that each publisher is deciding how much of a book can be downloaded at a time — if they even let the reader do this at all.  Some of these services will require the reader to register at their website before the ability to download a work is made possible.

It’s a very confusing reading landscape out there.

Now, before you start cursing Santa out for not bringing you a tablet computer instead, please know that there are reading options for your ereader.

For recent, popular reading, the Windsor Public Library makes ebooks available through the Overdrive service.

For public domain material (mostly works before the 1920s), both the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg provide texts in a variety of formats, including epub and txt.  Canadian Public Domain material is also well represented in Scholars Portal Books which allows such works to be read and downloaded.

If you have any questions about ebooks and the Leddy Library, please let us know at leddyref@uwindsor.ca.

But Thursday we’re staying open to 2am just for you!

ARGUABLY: Essays. By Christopher Hitchens.
“Hitchens’s esophageal cancer inevitably throws a shadow over this spirited, provocative, prodigiously witty collection.”

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker.
“Are humans essentially good or bad? Has the past century seen moral progress or moral collapse? Pinker addresses these questions and more.”

BLUE NIGHTS. By Joan Didion.
“Mourning the 2005 death of her daughter, Didion presents herself as defenseless against the pain of loss in this elegantly written memoir.”

THE BOY IN THE MOON: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. By Ian Brown
“The truth Brown learns from his severely disabled child is a rare one: the life that seems to destroy you is the one you long to embrace.”

CATHERINE THE GREAT: Portrait of a Woman. By Robert K. Massie.
“Massie provides a sweeping narrative about the impressive minor German princess who became empress of Russia.”

THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick.
“Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.”

IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos.
“Against the orthodox view that a translation can’t substitute for the original, a scholar argues that the two need not be the same, but only similar.”

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. By Lisa Randall.
“A Harvard professor meditates on the nature of science and where physics is headed.”

THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov.
“In this challenging and often contrarian book, Morozov explores how the Internet is used to constrict or even abolish political freedom.”

THE QUEST: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. By Daniel Yergin.
“This comprehensive study makes clear that energy policy is not on the right course anywhere.”

THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern. By Stephen Greenblatt.
“The legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Renaissance book hunter who saved his great poem from oblivion.”

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW. By Daniel Kahneman.
“Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel in economic science in 2002, presents a lucid and profound vision of flawed human reason in a book full of intellectual surprises and self-help value.”

WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris.
“A Stanford historian argues that we face an immediate choice — East-West cooperation or catastrophe.”