The Daily Athenaeum, September 30, 2008

By Ryan Hoffman

By the start of the Fall 2009 semester, the West Virginia University Evansdale Library will feature a brand new coffee house and other renovations.

“The whole idea is to reconfigure the first floor,” said Mary Strife, Evansdale Library director.

Although the numbers are not final, the renovation, including the cafe is expected to cost between $750,000 and $1 million, Strife said.

The money will come from the Office of the Provost and WVU Libraries, although the details are not yet final.

The spending plan must be finalized by June 30, 2009, the end of the fiscal year.

All monies must either be spent or designated to a specific area of spending; otherwise the funds will be lost.

“We are very excited about the renovations and hope that it is a very busy summer for us,” Strife said.
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The Daily Athenaeum, September 23, 2008

By Katlin Stinespring

The West Virginia University Libraries are mailing 10 books this week to Fort Wayne, Ind. to be digitized for public access from any location via the Internet.

This plan is part of a grant project which makes digitized copies of books available online on www.archive.org, and makes out-of-print or out-of-copyright books available to anyone. The books are scanned and imported to the online archives.

The University is sending books selected from the rare books collection, many of which are written on the history of West Virginia, WVU and the Civil War.

The digitization of the rare books makes the content more accessible, where in the past, patrons had to make an appointment or in some cases, come to Morgantown.
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Think you know how to read a book? Good battery life on your laptop may one day be as important as good lighting.

The West Virginia University Libraries are among 14 institutions picked to participate in a book digitization pilot project. The goal of the project is to digitize a selection of rare and significant books from the participants’ collections and make the electronic versions available via the Internet.

“I hope books never go away, and I don’t think they will, but digitization makes a book available to anyone, anywhere in the world, who has an Internet connection,” said Frances O’Brien, Dean of the WVU Libraries. “I think that’s valuable for people who live a distance from a research library.”

William Rafter, Head of the Libraries’ Cataloging Department; Frances O’Brien, Dean of Libraries; Jo. Brown, the Libraries’ Appalachian bibliographer; and Harold M. Forbes, Rare Books Collection Curator; examine a sketch in one of the books selected for the book digitization pilot project.

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