The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Feature

  • Quick Takes on Events and News — September 2017

    Native Arts Expert Visits Alexander Library on September 19

    Join the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission and Rutgers University Libraries at Rutgers–New Brunswick in welcoming John Haworth, senior executive emeritus of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, as he shares his knowledge about cultural and arts issues impacting Native Americans, including key museum practices, repatriation, and social change. For more information, visit our events page.

    Welcome Days Events Return to Libraries in New Brunswick

    The Libraries at Rutgers–New Brunswick will host fun events for new and returning students during Welcome Days again this semester. A preliminary schedule is below—stay tuned for information on more activities!

    • September 6 & 7, 2 p.m. Cookies and coffee at Douglass Library.
    • September 7, 1–2 p.m. Popcorn on the steps of the Art Library and Zimmerli Museum
    • September 7, 2–3 p.m. Snack break at Carr Library
    • September 12, 2–3 p.m. Snack break at Carr Library
    • September 26, 1:30–2:30 p.m. Snack break at Alexander Library
    Student Publications on Display at Rutgers–Camden

    Relive the rich history of student art and literary magazines at Rutgers with By Ourselves: Rutgers Student Literary Journals 1923–2017, a joint exhibition of the Robeson Library and the Rutgers–Camden Writers House from September 1 through October 31. Spanning nearly a century and two campuses, this exhibition highlights the creativity and initiative of Rutgers students through Quintessence, The Anthologist, and other publications. Are you a former student editor or do you remember your name in these pages? Share your memories on social media with the hashtag #ByOurselves.

    WWI Exhibit Extended through September 22

    Special Collections and University Archives’ exhibit “Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken!”: New Jersey in the Great War has been extended through September 22. Featuring one-of-a-kind documents, photographs, and artifacts reflecting the wartime experiences of New Jerseyans both at home and abroad, this display is a must-see for Garden State history buffs and WWI aficionados alike. Don’t miss out on your last chance to view it!

    Mimi Smith on Display at Douglass Library

    In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Douglass Residential College, the work of renowned feminist artist and Rutgers graduate Mimi Smith will be on display at Douglass Library from September 5 through December 15. Embodying the relationship between everyday life, intimacy, anxiety, and time, Smith’s works include clothing made from plastic and steel wool, traditionally rendered drawings, drawings made from knotted thread and tape measures, clocks, and knitted sculptures. Mark your calendars for Smith’s October 24 lecture and learn more about the exhibit on our website.

    Fall Data Workshop Series

    This fall, Data librarian Ryan Womack will offer a series of workshops on statistical software and data at both Alexander Library and the Library of Science and Medicine. The topics include “Introduction to SPSS, Strata, and SAS”; “Introduction to R”; “Data Visualization in R”; and “Reproducible Research.” For more information, visit the Research Data Management Services webpage.

    ROCK New Brunswick Weekend Kicks Off with New Brunswick Music Scene Archive Panel

    The New Brunswick Music Scene Archive in Special Collections and University Archives will kick off Hub City Sounds’ ROCK New Brunswick music festival weekend on September 8 with a discussion panel featuring Dennis Diken of The Smithereens, Sharief Hobley of Sharief in Burgundy, Makin Waves columnist Bob Makin, Audrey Rose of The Wichts, and Spina Records’ Andrew Spina. Interested in attending? RSVP on Facebook!

    Art Library Celebrates Banned Books Week

    With support from a Freedom to Read Foundation grant, the Art Library will host a number of programs celebrating Banned Books Week from September 24 to September 30. The activities will provide students, faculty and staff, and community members the opportunity to explore the ideas of intellectual freedom, censorship, and banned books by creating and displaying original art. To learn more or get involved, visit the Banned Books Week LibGuide or contact art librarian Megan Lotts.

    Dana Library Turns 50!

    John Cotton Dana Library will commemorate its 50th anniversary with a host of free events and activities throughout the academic year. Exhibits showcasing the history of the library and its namesake as well as a birthday party during Rutgers–Newark’s Fall Fest will highlight the fall schedule. A number of guest speakers will visit the library to share their wisdom throughout the spring semester, and the year will culminate with a special event on Rutgers Day. Additional details are forthcoming, so stay tuned to our website for the latest on the #RutgersDana50 celebration.

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  • Fellows Learn Jazz and Archives in Institute Program

    • 2017 Institute of Jazz Studies Fellows, from left, Ana Niño, Jeannie Chen and Adam Berkowitz, tour an exhibit at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Leading them through Harlem jazz history is Ryan Maloney, a former employee of the Institute and director of education and programs at the Museum.

    Three archives students from across the country, each with strong musical backgrounds, undertook to learn jazz as a second language as they burnished their archival credentials from the classroom in an intensive two-week program at the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) this past June. They were the fifth class of Jazz Archival Fellows, a program underwritten by Jon Van Rens, a longtime IJS supporter and administered until earlier this year by the late Ed Berger, the previous IJS associate director.

    The selected candidates who came to Rutgers University-Newark were:

    • Ana Niño, a student at the University of North Texas who works in a Dallas-area library and plays guitar in an all-female rock band.
    • Jeannie Chen, a student at UCLA who has a background in classical piano that propelled her into international piano competition
    • Adam Berkowitz, a MLIS student at University of South Florida in Tampa who is also a professional percussionist interested in jazz and classical music and music educator with a special interest in Jewish musicians and composers.

    During their time at IJS, they arranged, described, and produced a finding aid for over 400 taped interviews with jazz musicians and other figures on the jazz scene designated as the Institute of Jazz Studies Collection of Jazz Oral Sound Recordings. Materials in the collection were made between 1956 and 2007 and include mostly audiocassettes and some reel-to-reel tapes.

    Field trips afforded the fellows a glimpse of how other area repositories and museums conduct their work. These trips have proven to be one of the more popular features of the fellowship experience, and this year was no exception. The fellows visited the Louis Armstrong House/Archive, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the New York Philharmonic Archives, the Carnegie Hall Archives, and the Thomas Edison National Park in West Orange.

    In addition, Niño, Chen, and Berkowitz received an overview of issues in managing oral history collections from Dana Library’s digital humanities librarian Krista White. Archivist Elizabeth Surles spoke on rudiments of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a program utilized to post archival finding aids on the web. IJS archivist Angela Lawrence also worked closely with the students as they processed the interviews.

  • Librarians at the John Cotton Dana Library win a Research Award

    Roberta Tipton, Bonnie L. Fong, Krista White and Minglu Wang (l to r).

    Librarians Bonnie L. Fong, Minglu Wang, Krista White, and Roberta Tipton were presented the 2017 ACRL-NJ/NJLA CUS Research Award for their article, “Assessing and Serving the Workshop Needs of Graduate Students,” (The Journal of Academic Librarianship) during the NJLA Conference in April 2017.

    Each year, the Research Committee of the NJLA College and University Section (CUS) and the ACRL New Jersey Chapter selects the best published research completed by a New Jersey librarian during the past year for this honor. Fong, Wang, White, and Tipton’s journal article was one of two winners in 2017. Their research determined which workshop topics graduate students in the humanities, science, and social science disciplines are most interested in, and what their preferences are for workshop formats, times, and communication. What made their study unique was the comparison of student and graduate program director viewpoints on topic importance. In addition, they compared and contrasted Master’s and doctoral student training needs.

    The John Cotton Dana Library and other Rutgers University-Newark campus units are already using the research results as they develop workshops and other services to more fully support graduate students’ research, grant, career, teaching, and technology training requirements.

  • Tips for videography; promotional items inventory; new signage templates from the Communications Department

    Tips for videography; promotional items inventory; new signage templates from the Communications Department

    promotional item samplesThe communications department has made some more useful items available on our website.

    A promotional item visual inventory. This website lists all the promotional items we currently have in stock. Many of these items are available in limited quantities, for Libraries events. To place a request, please send Ken Kuehl an email with the quantities, item names, what they will be used for, and an address for shipping.

    Helpful Hints for Videotaping Interviews. This Microsoft Word document contains some tips and tricks for planning for and improving the visuals of taped interviews. We hope this is helpful to anyone planning to record video for the Libraries. It is listed on the Communications Department website.

    New signage templates. On our signage template web page, you can download Word files that you can update with your library’s information (name of library, URL, specific text, images) and print in black and white or color. We will work on converting them to Powerpoint over the next month. We’ve added the following to the Shared Sign Library:

     

    • Allow Us to Reshelve Your Books
    • Please Do Not Reshelve Your Books
    • Keep Your Belongings Safe
    • Please Bring Your Own Change

    sample policy sign imageWe’ve also added a Policy Signs and Toolkit. During our recent signage inventory, we saw lots of individual policy signs posted all over the libraries. These new Policy Signs and Toolkit will allow you to create signs that address multiple policies in a single page and hopefully eliminate the need for multiple single policy signs. The toolkit includes a vertical and horizontal version of this sign and a zip file of icons (hopefully live by the time this newsletter publishes) to use for signage.

    We have more signage templates on the way, including staff only and a replacement for the popular Can’t Find a Book signs. Stay tuned.

     

     

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  • Deep Dive: JAMAevidence

    Deep Dive will give a bit more insider’s info on some of our resources. Here, Roberta Fitzpatrick gives us some more information about JAMAevidence.

    In 1990, Dr. Gordon Guyatt, Internal Medicine residency program director at McMaster University in Canada began to teach using a new method which he called “Scientific Medicine.” He felt that many clinical decisions were not necessarily rooted in scientific fact and taught his residents to make such decisions based in part on evidence found in the published literature. It eventually evolved into what is currently called Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) or Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) or Evidence-Based Health Care (EBHC), combining a clinician’s experiences, well as information about the specific patient with the best evidence from journal articles.

    JAMAevidence, an information resource new to Rutgers and found at https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/indexes/jamaevidence, is a natural extension from Gordon Guyatt’s original ideas and educational program. In order to assist health professionals in the practice of evidence-based health care, JAMAevidence provides guides to the systematic consideration of validity, importance, and applicability of problems and outcomes in health care. It consists of three textbooks, user tools, and forms useful to the critical appraisal process. Textbooks contained in JAMAevidence are:

    • Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd ed.
    • The Rational Clinical Examination: Evidence-Based Clinical Diagnosis
    • Care at the Close of Life: Evidence and Experience

    Contents of the first two textbooks have been published as an article series in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. The User’s Guides are key to understanding the process of critically appraising an article. The Tational Clinical Exam series and subsequent textbook walks the reader through the process of conducting a physical exam of a patient.

    Tools in JAMAevidence include Education Guides, which consist of a library of PowerPoint slides useful in providing instruction on evidence-based medicine concepts; a glossary of over 900 EBM terms; calculators; and two types of worksheets, ones for critical appraisal of articles and those for charting an information cycle.

    JAMAevidnce is simple to use; a navigation bar is located at the top of each page and allows the users to review the contents through pointing and clicking. There is also a search box that allows for retrieval of searched key words. The resources is available on a monthly basis.

    Those who are interested in learning more about EBM may want to consider a review of an article titled “History of evidence-based medicine” by Roger L. Sur and Phillip Dahm from the Division of Urology, UC San Diego, published in the open-access Indian Journal of Urology, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263217/.

     

     

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  • The Kopp Dataset Is Now Available in RUcore

    The Research Data Exploratory Team and members of the Software Architecture Working Group collaborated with Professor Robert Kopp and D.J. Rasmussen to ingest and provide access to an impressive collection of county-level climate change projection data that is now available in the RUcore Research Data Portal at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SF2Z93.

    Rasmussen, Kopp, and collaborator Malte Meinshausen generated projections of future temperature, precipitation, and humidity by combining the probability of different global average temperature outcomes over the 21st century with spatially detailed projections from several state-of-the-art global climate models. The projections also include daily to multi-year weather variability, which is needed for economic models that estimate the impacts of climate change. The resulting data set is a 1.3 TB product that is freely available for use by researchers, decision makers, and climate change communicators. The need for local climate change projections is growing as decision makers are increasingly demanding estimates of the economic costs of future climate change and the value of avoiding associated damages.

    The climate projections from Rasmussen, Kopp, and Meinshausen were used in the book Economic Risks of Climate Change: an American Prospectus. This prospectus provides a climate risk assessment that estimates the economic impact of climate change on the U.S. and provides local estimates of economic risks in multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, including labor, agriculture, and energy. The complete dataset in RUcore provides open access to all data and methodology for the physical climate projections so that results can be reproduced and improved in future studies. The technical analysis in the prospectus was commissioned by the Risky Business Project. This effort was led by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Bush administration treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer. The aim of these three business leaders was to inspire risk managers in the business community to incorporate climate change related financial risks in their decision making process.

    The RUcore repository architecture provides a set of unique features that enables researchers to easily access the parts of this dataset that are most important. Each major directory, of which there are twelve, has its own Digital Object Identifier and can be individually cited. Perhaps most useful is that file and directory names are preserved and the user can walk the directory tree to select individual files and directories for download. This feature is important since downloading a complete directory in the order of 200GB will take hours. As an alert to prospective users, we provide an estimate of how long it will take to download the requested files and directories. In addition, one of the directories includes the software for processing the data, enabling users to repeat or augment the original authors’ findings. As part of the Libraries’ exploratory process, we learned a great deal about how to ingest and manage large datasets greater than 100GB. We had to revise our memory management strategies to accommodate directories with thousands of files. As part of our process, we validated the transfer of the 1.3TB dataset from the original site to the RUcore server to insure that there were no corruptions in the transfer process. All in all, we believe that this dataset and the access to it provided by Libraries will significantly contribute to the ongoing research in climate science.

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  • Annual Celebrations for Staff and Faculty of Rutgers University Libraries (2017)

    The University is recognizing faculty and staff who are celebrating a decade increment of employment at Rutgers. We are delighted to announce that 14 of our colleagues were included in the festivities and hope you join us in congratulating them on these accomplishments:

    10 Joseph Abraham (NBL)

    Martha Barnett (Shared User Svs)

    Abigail DiPaolo (Admin Svc.)

    Jie Geng (TAS)

    James Hartstein (NBL)

    Robert Vietrogoski (Smith)

     
    20 Roman Frackowski (TAS)

    Stephen Modica (Smith)

     
    30 Tracey Meyer (TAS)

    Nita Mukherjee (NBL)

    Robin Pastorio-Newman (TAS)

    Jeffrey Teichmann (NBL)

    Drue Williamson (NBL)

     
    40 Dianne Hamlette (RBHS)

     

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  • Rutgers Connect Tips and Tricks

    How to create a calendar appointment from an email message

     

    With so many events publicized via distribution lists like RUL_Everyone and other University-wide lists, it may be difficult to keep track of meetings, webinars, training sessions, speakers, and other events you might wish to attend.  The best way to make sure you do not miss these opportunities is to add them as appointments on your Rutgers Connect calendar.

    It is very easy to create an appointment on your Rutgers Connect (OWA or Outlook) calendar without having to retype the details from the email message. We have prepared step-by-step instructions to show you how.

    If you have questions, or need assistance with Rutgers Connect, please contact IIS via email at support@rulhelp.rutgers.edu, or by phone at 848-445-5896, option 7.

     

    Tracey Meyer, Information Specialist, Integrated Information Systems

  • The Numbers Are in! Rutgers Giving Day Final Report

    Back in November, we reported on the preliminary Rutgers Giving Day results and the news was good. Now the final numbers from the Rutgers Foundation are in, and we are proud to say that the news is even better!

    Our initial goal was to roughly double our number of donors from the inaugural Rutgers Giving Day and reach 50 donors this year, but we wound up seeing an outpouring of support that greatly exceeded expectations—thanks in no small part to your support.

    According to the final reports, the Libraries raised a total of $16,544.22 with gifts from 172 donors—a 647% increase in the number of donors and an 829% increase in the total amount of funds raised over the previous year. These numbers include the early give phase, the day-of-phase, and the challenge money leaderboard.

    The leaderboard was used to determine how $80,000 in challenge money would be awarded across the university ($20,000 each for Rutgers–Camden, Rutgers–Newark, Rutgers–New Brunswick, and RBHS). A unit’s standing on the leaderboard was based on the number of individual donors for that unit during the day-of phase compared to the total number of donors for its “parent institution.” So, in other words, if there were 100 gifts total to Rutgers–Camden and Robeson Library received 10 gifts, it would receive a bonus 10% of the $20,000 in challenge money, or $2,000. Here’s how the leaderboard numbers broke down:

    Unit Total distinct donors Total dollars Percentage of “parent institution” leaderboard donors Challenge money awarded (of $20,000)
    Robeson Library 9 $170.00 1.66% $331.49
    Dana Library 19 $1,433.08 2.61% $521.26
    Institute of Jazz Studies 2 $65.00 0.27% $54.87
    New Brunswick Libraries 95 $11,609.99 3.21% $641.46
    RBHS Libraries 6 $300.00 0.78% $156.05

    As you can see, we have much to be proud of. Many thanks to everyone who went out of their way to set up a donation station, make support sheets available to their patrons, or give a gift of their own to support the Libraries. Our tagline for this year’s campaign was “We can do great things together,” and you’ve all made it abundantly clear that there is real meaning behind those words. Thank you!

  • Quick Takes on Events and News — April 2017

    Rutgers University Libraries are cosponsoring two high-profile events in New Brunswick this month:

    Alice Aycock: Selected Works
    Douglass Dean’s Colloquia: Conversations

    In partnership with Jacquelyn Litt, dean of Douglass Residential College, the Libraries are delighted to welcome Rutgers alumna Alice Aycock to the Douglass Dean’s Colloquia: Conversations with Extraordinary Women on April 6, 7 – 8:30 p.m. at the Kathleen W. Ludwig Global Village Living Learning Center. RSVP here.

    Joy Reid
    “Truth and Consequences: What We Know and Why It Matters”
    Senator Wynona Lipman Chair in Women’s Political Leadership

    The Libraries are proud to partner with the Center for American Women and Politics and others to welcome Joy Reid, national correspondent and host of AM Joy on MSNBC to Rutgers University-New Brunswick on April 4 at 7 p.m. at the Douglass Student Center. RSVP is required. See website for details.

    Two WWI-themed exhibits opened last month:

    Camden, World War I & the New York Shipbuilding Corporation at Robeson Library
    This exhibit relates the history of the New York Shipbuilding Corporation (or New York Ship for short), an American shipbuilding company that operated from 1899 to 1968, ultimately completing more than 500 vessels for the United States Navy, the United States Merchant Marine, the United States Coast Guard, and other maritime concerns.

    “Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken!”: New Jersey in the Great War at SCUA in Alexander Library
    This exhibit focuses on the individual experiences of these Jersey doughboys and servicewomen who bravely went “Over There,” and the families and neighbors who remained behind, “Over Here.” The exhibit includes loans of 29th “Blue and Gray” Division artifacts and souvenirs from the National Guard Militia Museum of New Jersey, wartime medical supplies from the Johnson & Johnson Archives, and postcards from the Special Collections of the George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.

    Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries – Vol 68(2) now available

    The second part of the Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries’ special issue on the 250th anniversary of Rutgers University is now available. Entitled “From the Revolutionary War to the 21st Century,” this issue completes the discussion of Rutgers’ early history begun in “The Life and Times of Henry Rutgers” and turns its focus to the present day. David Fowler contributes the second and third installations of “Benevolent Patriot: The Life and Times of Henry Rutgers,” the most comprehensive biographical investigation of the university’s namesake to date. Additional articles explore the early history of Livingston College and the history of the Rutgers University Police Department from its roots as a parking authority to its current status as a professional law enforcement agency.

     

    WWI Poetry Reading – April 18

    Mary Ann Koruth designed beautiful broadsides like this for the exhibit.

    Michael Joseph is planning a WWI poetry reading event for April 18 to complement the themes and poetry included in the “Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken!”. If you are interested in attending or participating in the event, please check in with Michael.

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