Research 'R Us!

The heat is on! Fingers are flyin', tempers are flaring, and a whole forest has been consumed in paper this week. I have noticed that several times (more than five) this week, students are writing papers on the research computers in the ERC.

Repeat after me:

ERC=Research
Computer Lab=Writing

Students tie up the ERC machines for too long writing papers. Thanks for being respecful to your fellow students by writing upstairs.

I'm Baaaaack!

Wow! It is great to be back! Students look really busy getting projects finished up. The Quiet Zone has been packed almost all day! Best wishes for a good week of studying. Again, it is wonderful to be back amongst all the fun!

From a distance-Bette and Me

I know...you hate the song as much as I do but it alludes to my situation for another week. Struggling to even type the sentence I formed in my narcotic-filled brain, I am longing for normalcy. I had BIG surgery last week (see photo except my surgeon was a female!) and have another week to get myself together before getting back to work. I miss you guys but am hardly good company as things stand! My husband watched me take one-half hour to unpeel a flap on a caramel wrapper. The next half hour, I got the next flap undone. Yes! I did get to eat the caramel as a reward. I even tried to knit. Holy Cow! I couldn't remember from one stitch to the next where I was. I tried to go it alone without the pain meds but Wow! Slammed -- as with a ball peen hammer, freight train, Mack truck…you get the picture.

My point is that in the last half-hour before the next pain med and the first half-hour before it kicks in, I have a lucid hour to do homework for my reference class. This week's focus is on ready reference sources. I long to answer my questions in the Reading Room, running from First Facts to The Statistical Handbook of the U.S. but having to work "at a distance" I have to confine myself to online resources. I found two cool ones in our list of databases: Brittanica Online and World Almanac. They have a database search box like the other databases and you can choose the focus of the search to just World Almanac but also Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia. Once again, Pierce's ERC resources save my bacon! Bye! Pain meds R making me Zzzzzzz.

Who's your Daddy?

Busy morning! There was more searchers than neurologists looking for Britney Spears' brain! This got me to trying a few search engines and coming up with such differing results. Sally, the Boolean logic queen, has skills to tame the most unruly search engine but still gets frustrated. Ken and I had a discussion about which search engine to use and we decided that if you rely on one search engine to do your business-think again! Like Google Scholar, for instance. How do you know what resources they are pulling from? How do you know how comprehensive it is? How can you be sure that any search engine is not serving up yesterday's lunch or just corporate sites that have paid to be there? How can you trust anything you read on the internet? This left me with the thought...who's your daddy? You are! You decide what to trust by teaching yourself to look for trustworthy sites of integrity. Here's a site to start with that: Evaluating Internet Sources

Bring your own popcorn!

Lisa just hooked movie tutorials to some of our database titles in our list of databases on the library webpage. I don't know about you, but some of the databases have many elements to choose and it is bewildering to me. I have listened to the tutorials and they are illuminating. Here's what one (Academic Search Premier) looks like in the listing of the databases:

Academic Search Premier Large database of scholarly and popular journals covering variety of academic subjects; includes full-text journals back to 1985, abstracts back to 1984, peer-reviewed articles and some newspapers. Click here for a tutorial

Try it! Just click on the link and learn all about it!! Pass the popcorn!

My secret wish for cellphones in the library!

Leaping Literature!

We have a new database! It is called Literature Resource Center and is found in our database list at http://pierce.eou.edu You can search by using the author's name, by type of author (nationality, ethnicity, genre, theme, and literary movement. You can search by document type and title of a work. This is one-stop shopping for information on literature and 120,00 authors! It has timelines so that you can place an author into historical perspective, bibliographies of the author's works and about the author, reviews of their work.....it has it all! Oh, except the paper you have to write. We'll leave that to you!

Let's Be Civilized-Turn the Dang Thing to Silent!

We know you are addicted to communication devices. How do we know? The dang things go off here every day. To get into the library, patrons pass at least one sign that states library policy-"Silence your cellphone." I don't remember there being a line on the sign that says "This policy applies to everyone but you."

Let's try harder to not disturb our fellow learners! Turn them to silent when you enter. Besides, that little buzz in your pocket is pleasant!

Keep ya' posted!

EBSCO (one of our database vendors) is offering us a cool new feature! You can have the tables of contents of journals delivered to you via email. Say you are following a topic in a journal that you want to keep on top of and don't wnat to remember to look in that journal every single month or issue date. This service just lets you know,based on your keywords, that an article has been published that you need to see.

Here's how you do it:
Creating a Table of Content Alert from Ebscohost

1. Open an EBSCO Host database from the Pierce Library page. Use the first one "Academic Search Premier."
2. Click on “Sign into my EBSCOhost” link (top left.)
3. Click on “I’m a new user” link or login if you have a login already.
4. Fill out the form and submit the info.
5. Click on the “Publications” link.
6. Select the journal you would like to receive alerts of TOC in your email
7. Click on the “Journal Alert” on the right side of the screen
8. Fill out the form (Run alert time, email address, and subject) and then click
save (if you would like to setup for multiple emails then put a semicolon between each address)
9. Repeat #5-8 for each title you would like to add.

How much fun is that?

Whatta ya call that web page again?

Ever try to cite a webpage in a bibliography but have no clue what the title is? It happens a lot because web pages follow no standard protocol. Check this out...Even cats have websites http://www.mycathatesyou.com

The title is the text within the title tag when you select View/Page Source from the menu bar. That would make the title of this page as follows:

title="My Cat Hates You"

You will see this text displayed at the very top left corner of the window above the menu bar. There's more than one way to skin a...ooops! Sorry, Fluffy!

Industrious ILL!

We can't pay these people enough in my book! As a distance student, I am surviving by the graces of the ILL staff here at Pierce and at the Buley Library at my grad school, Southern Connecticut State University. I am writing a paper on Sarah Byrd Askew, an early library pioneer during the New Deal (she is fascinating!) and her writings are hard to secure and so are the reference books with biographical information. On several occasions, they have found just the article I needed!

However, sometimes I create more work for them than necessary because I cannot see the table of contents to guarantee if Sarah Askew is listed. The entire reference book comes in (some of them are huge!) for no reason. I check the table of contents and if she is not there....back to its home it goes creating a lot of work for the ILL folks for my five minutes of scanning.

Enter a solution! Google Books! Go to http://books.google.com and type in the title of the book you want to use. Try "Book Lust" as a demo if you can't think of anything. As soon as the cover of the book appears, the Table of Contents is on the top left in the navigation page. Cool? Yes. No more asking for a book through ILL without knowing if it will really help me!

Free word processor...no, really!

So, you are sitting at a computer that does not have Word installed. Bummer. You really want to start that paper but don't want to have to type it over or have some funky filter in Word interpret "It was a dark and stormy night" into "Is &t8s98y 9 808yu098u%$%$%$%$%" Or, imagine this! You have a document on your flash drive and just want to put some final touches on it and print it out. No Word--sunk deeper than whale poop.

Try Zoho Writer found at: http://www.zohowriter.com/Home.do It writes like Word, saves like Word, it's free. What's not to love????

Messka, Mooska. . .

Mouseketeer! We have new mice on the Macs in the ERC! Now, you can right-click and be able to run the contextual menus with the big dogs!

Two times last week, students lost files using the ERC computers. They worked so hard on assignments and left them on our hard drives, expecting to retrieve and print them out on Monday. Every evening, our computers dump all documents so the files were gone. Even using a data recovery program was not successful. Heartbreak reigned. I would recommend using your iPod as a hard drive or a flash/thumb/gizmo USB drive to backup your data. It will be the best $40 or so you ever spent! They sell them at the bookstore on-campus. A the very least, email a copy of your files to yourself.

The university provides storage space for your files at http://www2.eou.edu/myfiles/
Follow the directions on that page to pull-down the server you are interested in: staff/faculty or student and then enter your account name. The account name is the part before the @ symbol in your EOU email address. Example: This " jdewey@eou.edu" email account would yield "jdewey" as the account name. This service does not extend to off-campus work but will serve as a keen place to backup your files as you move around the buildings and labs here at EOU.

Forewarned is forewarmed. It will save on Kleenex, too!

Let's Get One Thing Straight!

Yeah...the Vendacoder card! It needs to be on an even plane to work properly in the machines. This Vendacoder is old and cranky. The company who makes it is out of business so we are babying it to make it last as long as possible. When you pull out your card, look at it BEFORE you booger up the machine! If it is creased, has a split in it, looks like it may have survived the Korean Conflict, we will replace it for you! Do not insert it into our curmudgeonly machine to jam the sucker up until staff (me) returns for the next work day.

Last term, a student got his card stuck in the copy machine and instead of asking for help, convinced his buddy that it would be a great idea to stick HIS card in as well. Everyone knows that two stuck cards are better than one, right? Luckily, I was here with my handy toolkit.

So, go easy and get it straight!

Speaking of Lost!

Two wallets were lost in the library this past week-both returned to grateful owners. They were turned in by honest folks. Aren't we lucky to have such a community here at EOU? Unfortunately, it is not ALWAYS like that. I got my wallet stolen in Portland at the Portland State university hotel by going from my booth in the restaurant to the buffet table 10 feet away to get orange juice. I did not notice the wallet missing until I started to pay the bill. Backtracking across the parking lot to the car, retracing my steps to the hotel room, and then back to the restaurant (we always think it is our action that has misplaced an item) yielded no wallet. Circling back from the parking lot I spied my wallet behind a trashcan by the restaurant entrance. The cash was gone but all the credit cards were intact. People say I was lucky. It is sort of sad to consider yourself "lucky" to just have the cash stolen. The police dutifully wrote up the report. I am sure in Portland the range of crimes and their severity puts my issue pretty low on the roster of "things to follow up on." I kicked myself all the way back to La Grande. I mean, I am a person who locks the doors when I am in the house. I lived in Cincinnati for 17 years and learned a lot about being "city smart." Here at Pierce, we do all we can to assure your safety but do not use me as an example. Be aware that you are not in your living room. Our Lost and Found items are at the Circulation Desk and valuables we secure elsewhere. Ask me for those in the ERC.

Lost in Space (in my head!)

I started back to school yesterday-carrying nine graduate hours. Giddy with possibilities for projects, I could hardly sleep. I must get things mapped out and get super-organized. Lisa says it is the key to survival. Working on a proposal for cataloguing the archives that would require a mentor. Ken?

I feel much empathy for our students who are working and balancing school and some even have families. YOU are awesome!

Google This (way)!

Sure I use Google. I use Teoma and MSN.com, too! I sometimes use Vivisimo as my search engine. I am an opportunistic searcher. Whatever works best for the search topic I am going for, that's the one I use. Love the one you're with, I say. (Or was that CSN and Y?)

Most folks are using Google these days. It's even a verb. In the Advanced Search mode, there are some hidden cool features to help you narrow down (enhance your precision-in librarian terms!) your search results. In the Advanced Search mode in Google, you can simply master the domain (No, this isn't Seinfeld!) and eliminate the .com sites from a scholarly search. No more cellphone ring tone ads cluttering up your searches!

Fruitful Federation!

Of course you are too young to remember Carmen Miranda but I have included a photo of her so you can see what you missed. Maybe you think wearing fruit on your head a bit eccentric but her joie de vivre lives to this day in some of us. I often want to break out of the "goldfish bowl" and don the fruited chapeau! In an effort to make your searching in the databases more fun and fruitful (Ah, yes! There is a connection here!) we have added federated search capabilities to our database list.

Off our main webpage here at Pierce, there is a heading labeled "Find Journal/Newspaper Articles." Below that is a link "By Database Subject." Once you have clicked that link, you will encounter a long list of disicplines. Let's click on "Literature" and that click results in a list of specialized databases for literature. Halfway down, there is a link to one called EBSCO Humanities Search (see illustration below.) This is a federated search tool that enables you to search six or so databases in one swell foop! Very handy. As you search other disciplines you will find other federated searches amoung them. They all begin with EBSCO, our happy vendor who supplies us with this capability.

Try it! You'll like it! Now don that banana hat! Let's mambo!

The Company You Keep

We have a new database here at Pierce that gives you info on practically any company you are interested in finding out about. Mergent Online provides the usual information about a company but also includes the history, officers of the company, property owned, balance sheets, and more! An interesting feature is the historical pricing and the graphs that show longitudinal revenues. Mergent Online can be found at http://0-www.mergentonline.com.eos.eou.edu/compsearch.asp
Now you can find out what kind of profit is being pocketed when you buy a pair of Nikes!

Lateral (Paper) Pass!

I know squat about football but I do know that a lateral pass or a backward pass in amateur play is a pass from teammate to teammate that is not used to advance yards. It serves as a maneuver to gain advantage on the field of play. This comes to mind when I see students printing a half ream of handouts at the beginning of the term. It is SOOOOOO convenient for professors to post their syllabi, handouts, assignments, etc. online now. Posting online assures that the materials are available wherever there is a computer. This is a tremendous advantage for the students, for if you lose a handout, you can retrieve another one.

However, here's the rub. The cost of printing has been passed to the student. Departmental budgets are not used as much for copying. Students pony up for paper and the library (supported with tech fees) ponies up for the ink and maintenance. Does this work for you? Do the advantages outweigh the cost for you?

New term!

Why does the new term make me wish for new notebooks full of empty sheets of paper ready to be filled with my class notes? Even though I don't start back to grad school until January 23rd, I am anxious to get going. I paranoically checked my textbook list to make sure I had the right ones ($300 worth!!) and then thumbed through them to get an idea of what was in store. Until the syllabi are posted, it is a guess. Like our students, I am trying to squeeze lots of fun activities into the time I have left, knowing that when the curtain falls on the vacation, a different energy is required. I hope our students feel engaged in their term they are starting today. I love the increase in traffic here in the ERC. Coffee bar begins tomorrow!!!! Yippee!

New Student Orientation Today!

We participate in the new student orientation today! I can't wait to meet the new students over in Hoke at noon and then we have the library tour at 3 PM. We have a drawing after the tour for a flash drive. The winner must be present to be awarded the prize! Fun! We have brochures to give out listing all our contact and staff info and a map of Pierce LIbrary. I hope we see these guys often!

PIN the tail on the Barcode!

Yes, yes...the PIN calls are beginning to come in. Distance students are gearing up and students not yet back from vacation are accessing Electronic Reserves. If you have never used your PIN before, just make one up. If you already made one up and you forgot it, after we finish laughing at you (kidding!)- we just delete it from your record and you can make up another one.

No problema! Call us at 541.962.3780 or Yahoo IM us at pierce_erc or email us at sporter@eou.edu Name your mode of communication---we are there! (Oh, except podcasting-but we are thinking about it!)

Happy New ERC!

As advertised!! We have revamped the ERC area to allow for the addition of more computers. It looks so open and inviting compared to the steel file cabinet decor we had before! (See blog on December 8th, 2005) Goodbye, Battleship----Hello, Feng Shui!

Have a safe and happy winter break!

Nature abhors a vacuum-and so a plan is hatched!

Seeing the feng shui space opened up by moving the microform cabinets, Lisa and I launched into a re-decorating frenzy. We found two underutilized oak tables from the last move, measured to see if they fit in the ERC, and drew a floor plan. When we get back from Winter Campus Closing, on January 2nd, we will move the tables down, add two computers to the three already there and set the tables perpendicular to the windows looking into the Reading Room. The plan looks like this: may be hard to read but you can see the tables coming perpendicular to the windows. I can't wait!

Wishing Well but Feeling Like, uh... Hades

We said goodbye today to two of our beloved co-workers. Diana and Glenna. Diana has served as the Gov Docs librarian or four and a half years and has taught LIB 307 for the last two years. She recently tried to bring us all up to speed in finding cases in the Law Library. She is absolutely a fine professional to watch in motion! Her attitude toward patrons is always focused and patient....no matter how tired she is. She remains one of the most interesting people I know....What a thinker. She will be sorely missed. UNLV has got a live one on their hands now! Darn them!

Glenna has worked on the Sage Library Grant and is seeing the end of that grant tomorrow. Her outreach efforts have been enjoyed in the region. We have all benefited from her travel information and all the English phrases she has introduced to us. I am so appreciative that she brought me the shoulder bag I was dying for all the way from London. That is a friend! So far, she is staying in the area so she will be amongst--at least close by.

I know we are supposed to be glad for them and their future endeavours (Thanks, Glenna!) but I am sad to not have their offices to pop into and kibbitz! Vaya con Dios, mi amigas!

Benzene spill 10 miles from Khaborovsk, Russia

News from Khaborovsk, Russia. . .this is hard to believe-- the centralized heating system will be compromised by the closing of the water intake valves to avoid the benzene from entering the water supply. I have so much empathy for our friends there. They struggle so and maintain great dignity through most difficulties. This---is unimaginable. I just could not get into buying presents this year when so many suffer.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-ha!

Anyone who is out walking around today for anything other than necessity is NUTZ! I drove today--rare--since I walk to the library because this morning my gym partner and I practically crawled to the gym. I thought I would stand a better chance with a car with new snow tires-wrong! I was floating the whole way, three blocks over the slickered ice. Yikers! Then, donning the Yak-Trax (ask Santa--they could save your head from meeting unyieldable surfaces) , I made my way into the wind to get to the library. It's another La Grande hair day!

Best and Worst of Technology 2005

Want to know if the best, hottest tech thing that you enjoyed last year was the pick of Dan Tynan of PC World Magazine? How can Google get the best and the worst in the same category? I agree with Dan. Google's avaricious project, Google Print, makes me a bit nervous, too. Having copyright owners have to opt out of the project is a bit backwards to me. Google should contact the writers first-not depend on them to opt out. Some of my best friends are lawyers. I hope they get a piece of the action!

I loved the coin of the phrase "Apple-achia." As a girl from the hills myself, I like the positive spin on it. Of course, I am one of the delusional, yet hopeful, Macintosh fans!

A Friend in Need----Indeed!

A friend of mine just trekked in Nepal this summer and came back with over 200 slides of the most glorious scenery and glimpse of exotic life there. She wanted to make a slide show of them to show on people's televisions. "Oh, I can do that on my Mac" I told her, "That's what they are made for." So, for an hour before she arrived with camera in hand, I discovered that I had not ordered the SuperDrive model of the Mac Mini--so no DVD burning capacity. Rats!

I had to punt. I found a $30 shareware program on the internet called DVD PixPlay. It seemed in the description to do all I wanted so, I downloaded it on my PC that has a DVD burner. After the free trial run, I paid for it. Wow! Lots of bang for my buck! In no time, we had her slides arranged in order, worked on a title slide, tried to talk her into adding Nepalese music (no, she wanted to narrate) and then burned the show onto a CD-R disk as a VCD formatted-disk. I had never heard of VCD until then-pretty cool! I only had Mac DVD disks (why???) laying around at home-no disks for PC. Having a program that burns CDs that can be used as DVDs was the ticket. It is supposed to play on 97% of DVD players and it worked beautifully on my old garage sale DVD off-brand player.

Now, to ask Santa to buy a Super-Drive for my Mac Mini! Ho, ho, ha!

EBooks - Eeeee-xactly what I needed!

So, I was looking for a book with a very recent copyright date in school law. Our print collection had many volumes but I needed something very current. Lo, and behold-the eBook! I found it in the webpac along with the other holdings and it had an icon that reflected that it was electronic. I clicked on the link and after verifying that I had a barcode and username associated with Pierce here at EOU, I was in! I checked it out for 6 days and I was set. The table of contents that runs along the left side, helped me dip in and out of the content I needed. The navigation of the pages was easy. This sure is a great way to access current material. I didn't want to read the whole thing which reflects stats on the usage of eBooks...the average use is 5 to 15 minutes. Try it...you will like it!

Progress is our most important product

I have been observing the progress made in the the BIG microfiche cabinet move. Cart after cart of Oregon documents have passed by my desk in their seemingly endless march to the mezzanine level on the second floor. The trek is arduous-all the way around the first floor to the elevator and back the same distance to the other side of the library on the second floor to the mezzanine. By Thursday, the Oregon Room will be empty, awaiting the final move of the microfiche cabinets to their final destination. We can't wait for our feng shui experience!!!!!! Light! Sight! Space!

Slippery Slope!

Yikers, it's slick out there! Any incline --the merest angle--is treacherous. This is a chiropractor's dream! It is a precarious day, too, for students. Grades came out and it has been a mixed bag here. We've seen pretty much all ranges of emotion from "I can't believe I hosed that final!" to "Whoa, Dude! I passed!"

So, you can access your grades here every day until 5 PM! Come on down!

Take a break! Learn AND laugh!

Preparing browsing sleeves for the new DVDs that Pierce has acquired, reminds me of how much time I have spent in front of the tube! Yikers! It must have been during the summer -BEFORE I went back to grad school!

One of the films I prepared a sleeve for today is called "Good bye Lenin!" Winning six prestigious European Film awards, this coming-of-age adventure blends the fall of communism with the salient emotions of a family's love. To protect their mother (an ardent supporter of the Socialist East German state) from having another heart-attack, her son launches a plot to keep her from learning that the Berlin Wall has fallen. It is at once hilarious, yet tender as he rescues his plot from near-disaster, several times. It has English subtitles and is spoken in German. Well-worth the 121 minutes I spent watching it!

Does anybody REALLY know what time it is?

Yes, we care! (To answer the lyrics of this "Chicago" song) It's time for exams to be over. Best wishes to all of you on success in your classes!

Our schedule is changing and looks like this:
December 10-11 closed (sleep late!)
December 12-16 Open 8 to 5
December 17-18 closed (sleep late!)
December 19-22 Open 8 to 5
Dec. 23 - January 2 Campus closed
January 3-6 Open 8 to 5
January 7-8 Closed (sleep late!)
January 9 Regular Hours begin again!

P.S. The bird resting above is the state bird of my homeland. Isn't he handsome!!!!?

The Barcode 's the BOMB!

Turn over your student ID! There is the barcode that unlocks all the online resources of Pierce Library when you are traveling to Tibet or just to Troutdale. Just access our webpage from any browser, anywhere you have an internet connection, using this URL http://pierce.eou.edu
and when prompted, enter your barcode and PIN number.

Don't have a PIN?.....Leave the original PIN field blank, press "Submit" (even though you are really submitting nothing at this point) and a new page will pop up. Make up a PIN and submit it. You are in business!

If you already have a PIN and forgot it....stuff happens!....just call us at 541.962.3780. We will cheerfully remove your old PIN and you can make up a new one. No problema!

Renovate! Renovate! Dance to the Muuusic!

If you know the tune to sing this "Three Dog Night" song alluded to in the title of this post, you are older than Moses! But we have reason to celebrate! We are shifting the Oregon documents to the second floor to the same section as the U.S. documents (mezzanine area) and the vacant Oregon document room is going to hold....(fanfare! roll of snare drums!)....the microform cabinets! In the ERC, we have peered around those to see the daylight for years! Nothing like being greeted to gray steel when you enter the library! Yuck! That will open up the entrance on the first floor to allow in more light, look better aesthetically, and situate the microforms closer to their kin-the periodicals. When you come back from Winter Break, we will be transformed into a lovely swan!

Oh, Baby! Browser Bibliography!

Researchers at George Mason University are developing a plug-in for the Firefox browser that will help academics organize sources and properly cite them. The tool is designed to harvest bibliographic information from online sources and organize it for someone doing research on the Web. Assuming the bibliographic elements are formatted in a way the software can recognize, the application will parse title, author, and other information and correlate it with the source. Daniel J. Cohen, assistant professor of history and one of the developers, said it can be thought of as "incredibly smart bookmarking.... You're not just bookmarking the page, but you're automatically [capturing]...all that info that scholars want to save." Unlike commercial products that organize sources, the new application will tie directly into the browser, eliminating the step of manually collecting citation details. The open source application is expected to be completed next year and will be available for no charge from George Mason's Web site. Cohen said he believes the application will make unintentional plagiarism less likely than if a researcher were keeping sources organized manually. Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 December 2005

My EBSCOHost---way cool!!!

Did you know that you can customize the EBSCO Host databases to hold your favorite searches, to alert you to journals that match subjects you want to know about as soon as articles are published, and a host of other services....all for free!!!!! Well, neither did I!

View the tutorial found at:

http://support.epnet.com/CustSupport/Tutorials/MyEBSCOhost.html
and get started tonight!!!

Kindness in the smallest things!

I just overheard one of our student assistants, Ashley Lawson, ask a patron, before heading to the 2nd floor stacks, if he preferred the stairs or the elevator. He was a guest of our library from another town. I was stuck by the simple request that spoke so loudly. We often tear around here thinking of the next thing we have to do. Flying up the stairs is just my mode of getting there quickly but some patrons don't want to move that fast or can't. Ashley was thinking of the patron first. Well done! Flying Fish time!!!!!

The sun came up!

Despite the fear that the world had ended with my disastrous final exam on Saturday, the sun has come up every day since. There is a reason for living! That is SOOOO Saturday and much fun has occurred since. We had a lively "afterglow" following the Holiday Music Festival's last performance on Sunday. The gift exchange was fun and we almost had enough chairs for everyone. The EOU students and community members worked very hard to make these concerts a memorable kick-off to the holidays! Great job, everyone! I feel like breaking out my kazoo!!!!

Final Exam-Bombs Away!

Oh-My-Goodness! That was hard! I just finished my final exam in ILS 501. It is the first comprehensive final exam I have taken in about 20 years. All my other Masters' work was project-oriented. Wow! It was shocking. My prof found every chink in my armor! I did not bring my textbook with me as I figured my note-taking skills were excellent. Wrong! Lesson learned--bring everything with you! A whole set of encyclopedias if you have to!

So, I sit here lamenting my low-A that just sank lower than whale poop.

BYOP.....Bring Your Own Paper, that is!

In the ERC, you have paid for the ink and maintenance on the printers through your technology fee monies. You have to supply your own paper (sorry!) It can get kind of ruffly in your backpack so we do sell packets of paper for one thin dime at the Information Desk in the ERC. We can't break folding dough, though, so shake your little sister's piggy bank for change!

News from Khaborovsk, Russia (Benzene spill)

Irina, our dear friend in this lovely town, tells us that they are advised to take carbon tablets and the scientists have said that the Amur River will be off-limits for three years for all activity-swimming, fishing, bathing, drinking, all household uses. The benzene spill is 80 kilometers long and should arrive there soon. Her husband, Slava, is in the hospital with diabetes complications. Life is very hard. Oy!

The news:
Chemical Spill

If Blu Ray fought HD DVD, who would win?????

There was an article on c/net today about who will dominate the DVD technology race. Fox Entertainment gives Blu-Ray the edge over HD DVD. This is a big deal in who wins as it was when VHS (a some-say inferior medium) won over the Beta format. Do you care? Do you know who is backing which medium? It is interesting to see who is lining up in each camp.

Here is the story:
Blu-Ray Gaining Edge

Trying to print more than one copy?

Did you ask the printer to print out more than one copy of your document? Did you get a funky-doodle page full of HP squiggles? Well, that is because the printer driver (the little piece of software that tells the printer what to do) isn't sophisticated enough to handle your command. It prints one copy...that is all you get unless.... you send the job over several times. At that point, unless time is no object for you, you might as well print additional copies on the Toshiba copier.

Location! Location! Location!

That's the buzzword when buying property-and looking for a book here at Pierce. When you have found a title in the Webpac (new word for the card catalog online) make note of the Location box in the item's record. We have several special collections: Government Documents, Native American Collection, Law Library, Oregon Collection, Safe/Archives, Curriculum Library, Video/DVD, and Children's Collection. The call numbers can be identical across many different collections as they all use the Library of Congress classification to organize them within that collection.

So, make a note of where you are heading in the library BEFORE you leave the Webpac screen. It will save you time and frustration to be in the right part of the library to find your item. If you need a map of Pierce Library, or directions, just stop and ask the friendly staff members around on the floors.