These are divided into six sections which can be viewed by selecting images from the navigation bar on the left. Select a small image of the card from these pages to display the outside and inside of each card at its actual size.

You can view the exhibit here.

The Libraries Web Team ran the survey during October and November. The survey asked the users what they like and dislike about using the Libraries website. The Libraries will use the responses to improve the site for the users.

Larijani is an in-state student from Charleston and the recipient of a PROMISE scholarship, which helped influence his choice to attend WVU. He is a Finance major and enthusiastic follower of the Mountaineers football and basketball teams. Larijani said “I like coming to the downtown library because it provides an excellent study environment. The library provides a place for me to come and study with limited distractions. The libraries website provides access to numerous databases. These databases enable students to use credible sources of information when writing research papers.”

In addition, he appreciates the Libraries efforts to get the students’ feedback about the site in order to make changes and improve library web services: “The libraries survey is a great way to receive feedback from the student community. Students are the most frequent users of the library as well as its website. Their input allows the University to make the necessary enhancements to maintain this great source of information.” Larijani plans “to use the money to do some holiday shopping for friends and family. The extra money really comes in handy this time of year.” He recommends completing library surveys: “Take five minutes out of your day to give the librarians your feedback. You might even be rewarded for your input.”

Web Services Librarian Beth Toren hands the prize of a one-hundred dollar Visa gift card to Anthony Larijani. He won the drawing for the prize from over 1,100 entries.

For Dead Week, the Downtown Campus and Evansdale libraries will open at 9 a.m. Sunday and remain open until 10 p.m. Friday, Dec. 10.  They will be open from 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 11.

For Finals Week, the Downtown Campus and Evansdale libraries will open at 9 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 12, and remain open until 10 p.m. Friday, Dec. 17.

For more information, check out the Libraries’ calendar: www.libraries.wvu.edu/hours

Carroll Wilkinson, Director of Instruction and Information Literacy for the WVU Libraries, expects a closer examination of what the Libraries’ students are learning about finding and using information following participation in the program. This will in turn help to enhance the academic experience throughout the University.

“Campuses that establish a good assessment plan, including learning outcomes that focus on information literacy, are able to measure learning and prepare for upcoming accreditation reviews. Assessment is a strategic leveraging tool,” Wilkinson said.

This month, Wilkinson attended a training session titled Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (RAILS), funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It is an offshoot of the larger Association of College and Research Libraries Assessment Immersion program, which Wilkinson also attended.

RAILS is based at Syracuse University School of Information Studies and led by Assistant Professor Megan Oakleaf. The three-year project seeks to measure information literacy skills of college students. It is designed to help librarians and academic faculty develop and test rubrics that evaluate student learning and information literacy.

“Previously, librarians have been relying on tests to assess student work and skills and not looking at their research papers and projects,” Oakleaf said. “There are limitations on what we can test, and students aren’t always motivated to really work hard on a test that doesn’t impact their grade.”

Wilkinson will use what she learned as she reviews work samples by about 100 students from introductory, discipline-specific, and graduate level courses. Part of the study’s overall goal is to normalize evaluation of student information literacy and establish rubrics to measure teaching effectiveness in libraries.

Her goal is to determine if students are valuing and using what they learn from librarians in library science classes and if what they learned is linked to the University’s mission to provide a challenging academic environment. To assistant in the process, Oakleaf will visit the WVU campus in the spring.

“What it will all boil down to is that this learning will help me identify best practices in information literacy education. Then we can link the Libraries’ educational program to the new strategic plan’s objective of insuring a more challenging academic environment at WVU,” Wilkinson said. “I definitely want to contribute to that and so do my colleagues.”

Dr. Tim Warner, a geology/geography professor, and Linda Blake, science librarian, were one of five teams to participate in the WVU Libraries’ Information Literacy Course Enhancement Program, a joint effort between the Libraries and the Provost’s Office, during the 2010 academic year. The program’s goal is to incorporate information literacy concepts into the curriculum.

Their results will appear in the Winter 2010 edition of Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, an online journal published by the Association of College & Research Libraries, Science and Technology Section.

“People associate information literacy more with the humanities, where there is often a strong emphasis on term papers and writing,” Warner said. “I thought they’d be interested in how we’re doing it in a science class.”

Warner, who uses the Libraries heavily in his teaching, understands that students can often be overwhelmed by the flood of available information available online when they undertake a research project. He considers the ability to find quality materials a priority for students.

“It’s not like you can go to one or two places to find information and then you’re done,” Warner said. “There’s so many different sources. They vary so much in reliability and quality, and they can be in obscure places. That’s how a professional librarian helps me.”

The pair collaborated to provide students in his Introduction to Remote Sensing class with an understanding of how to evaluate scholarly literature, how to develop a more sophisticated approach when researching a topic, and how to avoid plagiarism. Warner dedicated two class sessions and two labs to the project.

In his teaching, Warner focused on assessing the reliability of materials. He explained the peer-review process and the role of publishing in a scholar’s career. He also touched on non-peer-reviewed material such as general Internet sources, the popular press, and gray literature.

Blake focused on the process of searching for information and explained that the Libraries maintain subscriptions to thousands of electronic journals indexed in hundreds of databases. Rather than using Google to scour the entire web, she directed them to the Libraries’ digital holdings. She also explained how to craft searches to net the best results.

“There are just so much information out there, and it’s not going to get less; it’s going to get more,” Blake said. “It’s largely uncontrolled on the Internet. That’s why it’s real important in the sciences to use library-funded sources to weed through it.”

The final piece was a lecture on plagiarism. Prior to the lesson, most students said they were aware of what constitutes plagiarism and were confident they were working within the rules. Afterwards, students said they will be more cautious when writing papers.

“Plagiarism is more complex than students realize,” Warner said. “Even professionals can get blasé. It’s easy to not think through something.”

Blake and Warner evaluated their efforts by surveying the class before and after sharing the information literacy curriculum.

Across the board, the comments were extremely positive, and almost all students expressed that they felt their information literacy skills had improved.

Warner and Blake saw a significant change in how students approach library resources. Students said they would previously go first to Google or Google Scholar. Now, the first place they go is the Libraries’ website. They will still use Google Scholar, but it will be a supplemental source.

Students’ enthusiasm about what they learned pleased Warner. He noted a student who said one of the research tools she discovered changed her life.

“She was obviously indulging in a little bit of hyperbole, but I think it shows that if you’ve been struggling and then see something that handles the concern so well, it really is life-changing,” Warner said.

Pavani serves on the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Board of Directors and has been instrumental in implementing the national Brazilian ETD program as well as in development of the Latin American ETD Consortium. At PUC, Pavani has designed and managed the implementation of an institutional repository. The current collection contains ETDs, senior projects, journals, books, articles, and courseware.

Pavani is interested in evolving the Brazilian national ETD program. During her visit, she will seek advice from WVU Libraries faculty and staff regarding implementation of multimedia applications in ETDs as well as preservation methodologies.

Whether writing about immortality, space, dreams, death, demons, magic or the end of the world, award-winning science fiction author James Gunn has covered it all.

On Oct. 26, Gunn will visit West Virginia University speak about the contributions of another renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. His presentation, “Isaac Asimov: Science Fiction to Science Fact,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Mountainlair ballrooms. The talk is part of the 2010 David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas.

Gunn has covered a variety of genres with his writing. He has written plays, screenplays, radio scripts, articles, verse and criticism – the majority of which have been in science fiction.

His works include “Human Voices,” “The Immortals,” “Gift from the Stars,” “The Dreamers,” “The Magicians,” “Breaking Point,” “The Witching Hour” and “Isaac Asimov: The Foundation of Science Fiction.” In total, Gunn has published more than 100 stories in magazines and books, written 28 books and edited 13 books.

Gunn currently serves as the director for the Center for the Study of Science Fiction and professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas.

He has won numerous awards, including the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement and the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching. He has lectured all over the world, including Denmark, China, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan and Yugoslavia.

A reception and book signing will be held following the presentation.

In conjunction with Gunn’s presentation, WVU Libraries is holding a celebration of the Isaac Asimov collection. Tours of the collection will be given by Associate Curator Harold Forbes at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. To register for a tour, visit http://universityevents.wvu.edu/asimovexperience2010 .

The Asimov collection will also be part of an upcoming symposium, to be held in April 2011.

The David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas is named after WVU’s former president who created the lecture series. Each year, the festival brings key figures from the fields of sports, politics, business, entertainment, research, scholarship and culture to Morgantown.

The series is supported in part by the David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas Endowment.

Other festival speakers will be announced in the coming months.

For more information on the 2010-11 Festival of Ideas, visit http://festivalofideas.wvu.edu/ .

Open-access journals are peer-reviewed and provide free online access to full-text scientific and scholarly material. The articles are available to anyone to download, copy, and distribute for research purposes.

The speakers will be Dr. Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and Dr. Cameron Neylon, Senior Scientist, UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. Their presentations will be pre-recorded.

Dr. Varmus has been an unparalleled Open Access advocate – from introducing the topic of wider access and launching PubMed Central to increase public access to the literature as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, to helping to found the Public Library of Science, a leader in open-access publishing. Dr. Neylon will highlight the kinds of scientific advances Open Access can facilitate, and discuss current examples along with future opportunities.

Following their talks, there will be a short discussion about current publishing practices, mandates for open scholarship, and copyright.

For more info, contact Molly Dolan, Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication: molly.dolan@mail.wvu.edu

 The software, called EngineAPI, lets users rapidly develop web interfaces. An API, or application programming interface, is an interface implemented by a software program that enables different pieces of software to interact.

 “It takes a lot of the tedious work and puts it behind the scenes, so it’s easier and quicker for a programmer to develop redundant applications,” said Mike Bond, the software’s creator. “It allows me to program a whole application in 15 minutes as opposed to a few days.”

 EngineAPI helped Bond to revamp the Libraries’ new e-Reserve system in two months instead of about a year.

 Although Bond designed it with libraries in mind, the software has multiple uses, such as validating data, creating forms and templates, managing content in one place and displaying it in another, and producing RSS feeds from any page.

 Visitors to the Libraries’ website unknowingly reap the benefits. For the Libraries’ digital collections, the module combines an image database and a text database making them appear as one system on one website. The software also detects Smartphone users and directs them to the Libraries’ mobile webpage.

 “The software that Mike Bond created will lead to many efficiencies in the Libraries’ work in the future, making both our lives and our users’ lives easier,” said Bill Rafter, Head of the Libraries’ Systems Department.

 Bond began working on the software two years ago when faced with the need to enable a new employee to quickly develop software while maintaining security standards. The software sanitizes certain data automatically and helps prevent someone from creating security problems by accident. After using and studying the 1.0 version for a year, Bond took what he learned and updated it.

 He demonstrated his creation at a digital libraries conference in Ann Arbor, MI, this summer and received good feedback. Representatives from several research universities expressed interest in returning home with the software and putting to use on their campuses. They, in turn, will work to develop the software for more uses.

 “I’ve been using open source for years, so it’s nice to be able to contribute back to the community,” Bond said.

 Dave Olsen, a professional technologist with University Relations – Web, considers offering software to the greater community through open source as fulfilling the University’s land grant mission.

 “By open sourcing, we take a larger and more active role in higher education in terms of being a leader in whatever the endeavor is,” Olsen said. “The Libraries are taking a leading role in their field.”

 The URL for the software: http://systems.lib.wvu.edu/engineapi