Leddy Library News

The Windsor Construction Association hosted their Awards of Construction Excellence 2011 banquet on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts to celebrate the construction achievements for projects built through the period of 2002 to 2010.

The University of Windsor, Leddy Library received an Award of Distinction in the area of Green/Environmental Construction – Any Project Type for the Leddy Library Terrace Green Roof project.

“The Leddy Library is so pleased to receive this award, which is a beautiful glass globe that we will proudly display in the Library. Thank you to Dan Castellan and his team at Facility Services for all their work in making this project a reality,” noted Gwendolyn Ebbett, University Librarian.

In all, 51 specific projects were awarded Excellence, Distinction and Merit awards in over 12 distinct categories, ranging from residential, industrial, commercial, institutional, roads and highways, environmental etc.

The banquet was attended by close to 500 industry representatives and customers. Awards for each project acknowledged the general contractor, Architect/consultant, owners, sub contractors and suppliers for each of the 51 winning projects.

During an upgrade of the Leddy Library’s catalogue, some of the records of the library’s ebooks became suppressed.

This problem has now been resolved and library catalogue records describing these ebooks are now publicly visible again.

Thousands of websites including Wikipedia went dark Wednesday protesting internet censorship.

Suggested viewing:

1. Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto — a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Some suggested reading:

1. Stop SOPA or the Web really will go dark
2. 4 reasons why the Web hates US anti-piracy acts
3. Canadians join website blackout
4. Stop SOPA: Michael Geist’s website

Access is restored. EBSCO was suffering from network outages Friday through Sunday which resulted in intermittent access for 22 databases including CINAHL.

S.T.E.P.S. is a program that offers a variety of sessions for students that can help you develop the Skills to Enhance Personal Success.

Today (Wednesday January 11th) at 3pm there will be a S.T.E.P.S. session dedicated to time managment being held in the comfy seating area of the first floor of the Leddy Library. A description of the session is below:

Taming the Chaos (Time Management)

As a student, you may have to juggle many responsibilities, which might include academics, a part time job, and family obligations. At the same time, you probably want to have a social life and get out into the community to pursue your hobbies. This presentation will give you some tips on how to deal efficiently with your seemingly chaotic university life.

Learning outcomes: Students who attend to this session will be able to:

1. Describe what being proactive means in regards to time management
2. Recognize procrastination
3. Apply strategies to better manage their time
4. Apply strategies to avoid procrastination
5. Create and plan a realistic and organized study time
6. Identify other factors that influence their grade outcomes
7. Evaluate their short-term goals
8. Create new short-term goals that better reflect their long-term goals

Interested? Just drop in!

The recent Conifer upgrade has resulted in the suppression of some e-book records in the catalogue. This means a catalogue search may not display e-book titles to which the Leddy Library has access. Technical staff are working to resolve this issue but the immediate work around is to reset the branch location to “Leddy Library.”

To reset the branch location in the catalogue, use the drop down menu on University Libraries, “Choose a different library …”, expand “Windsor System”, and select “LeddyLibrary”.

We’re running a poll on the Leddy Library Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/questions/10150570525431558/?qa_ref=qd

The question is: what promotional item would you want to receive from your friendly neighbourhood library?

(Hate Facebook? let us know what you’d like in the comments!)

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

Recently, we got a question from a reader who was interested in adding library books to her new ereader and wanted to know how to go about this. I thought I would share my answer for all those other folk out there who also received a new Kobo, Kindle, or Nook over the holidays:

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.

We’re open! But only until 6pm for today, Tuesday, January 3rd and tomorrow, Wednesday January 4th.

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