The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Feature

  • Libraries Get Social at Social Media Summit

    The Libraries’ first Social Media Summit was held on Tuesday, April 19. More than 20 of our colleagues gathered at Alexander Library or attended remotely for a day-long program focused on all things social media at the Libraries and beyond.

    The morning began with a presentation by Karen Smith, assistant director of new and emerging media for Rutgers University. Smith discussed the key elements of building an effective social media strategy as well as the most popular social media platforms and their uses. She also shared best practices developed from the experience of managing the university’s primary social media accounts (RutgersU on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat).

    The emphasis for RutgersU social media is encouraging conversation — asking questions, posting interactive materials, highlighting student contributions (everyone likes their 15 minutes, and the RU Speaks campaign featured below is a good example of this). Some takeaways:

    • Rutgers invites a student to guest post on their Instagram each week – creates lots of student-friendly content and interest.
    • Tease out big news by asking “Guess who?” or “Guess what?” questions. We tried this for our Rutgers Day John Morton reveal and it generated a lot of chatter and feedback.
    • Run lots of contests for prizes like mugs (they will do person on the street — “show us your follow on any social media and you can win a prize”)
    • Try to create an accessible, authentic space by avoiding overly moderating contributions and academic language and jargon.

    The afternoon was highlighted by a presentation from Aaron K. Ginoza, social media and community engagement coordinator for the University of Maryland Libraries (UMDLibraries on Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat). Ginoza gave an overview of the evolving social media landscape at the University of Maryland, provided case studies of UMD Libraries’ most successful social media campaigns, and offered his own set of best practices for generating online engagement.

    umd
    During Exam Wars, UMD Libraries hosted yoga classes.

    Some of the social media campaigns UMD has run in recent months are

    • Parody music videos
    • Light painting (great for nighttime study breaks!)
    • Exam Wars campaign (utilizing Star Wars visuals for reading time promotions and stressbuster activities)
    • Throwback recess (complete with potato sack and three-legged races)
    • Zombie, Pokemon, and Game of Thrones-inspired scavenger hunts to encourage exploration of the libraries
    • An extensive campaign for Alice in Wonderland exhibit.

    The program was wrapped up by Jessica Pellien, director of communications, who discussed a proposal for a Social Media Taskforce that was recently reviewed and approved by Cabinet. The Taskforce members will be selected with input from the Libraries’ Cabinet and will hopefully begin work over the summer.

  • Rutgers University Libraries at NJLA Conference, May 16 – 18

    njla

    Many of our colleagues will attend or participate in the 2016 Annual NJLA Conference this month. The conference will run from May 16-18 and will take place at Harrah’s Waterfront Conference Center in Atlantic City. Perusing the program, it looks like the following sessions will feature people from Rutgers University Libraries. If I’ve missed one, please send me a note and I’ll update this post.

    Tuesday, May 17:

    Poster Sessions
    “Embracing Challenges in Times of Change: NJ Academic Librarians Identify Opportunities Presented by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”
    Leslin Charles
    11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

    Best Practices in Internal Communications
    Jessica Pellien
    11:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

    Awesome Outreach by Academic Libraries
    Megan Lotts
    3:10 p.m. – 4 p.m.

    Music Advisory: Connecting Books, Music & Readers
    Jonathan Sauceda
    4:10 p.m. – 5 p.m.

    Wednesday, May 18:

    College & University Section Research Award Forum
    Gracemary Smulewitz
    2:30 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

    Training Tips & Tricks: Templates and Strategies for Training New Staff
    Zara Wilkinson, Moderator
    3:40 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

    Some of our colleagues from Rutgers SCI will be presenting as well:

    Tuesday, May 17:

    The Changing Face of Education for Information Professionals
    Ross Todd, PhD, Rutgers University
    Lilia Pavlovsky, PhD, Rutgers University
    Joyce Valenza, PhD, Rutgers University
    Chirag Shah, PhD, Rutgers University
    3:10 – 5 p.m.

    Wednesday, May 18:

    Will Librarians be Ready When Professors and Students Move from Print Research Papers to Multimedia Presentations?
    11:30 – 12:20
    Dan O’Connor, Rutgers LIS
    GoUn Kim, Rutgers LIS

     

  • The Winner of Our Giveaway Is…

    reading publicThank you to everyone who entered our giveaway for a copy of Tom Glynn’s new book, Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754-1911. We are delighted to announce that our winner is:

    Stephanie Bartz

    We hope you enjoy the book, Stephanie, and congratulations again to Tom on publishing such an important new, award-winning book!

  • Tara Maharjan’s visit to Kaiser Library in Nepal [Photos]

    Special collections and university archives processing archivist, Tara Maharjan, recently traveled to Nepal, almost one year after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake. While in Nepal, she took a trip to the 120-year old Kaiser Library, the oldest library in the country. The library building, as well as one-third of the 28,000 books, were damaged. The books from the four floors have all been moved to the ground level, the only part of the building which is somewhat structurally sound, and are now in plastic bags until the building can be reopened to the public. In the mean time, the small library staff serves patrons from a tent outside the building, where people can view newspapers and a few books.

    Here are just a few of Tara’s images from the Kaiser Library:

    • OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

  • Call for Submissions to Featured Collections

    featured collections
    What would you feature in this spot on our homepage?

    In order to better represent the magnitude and diversity of materials the Libraries hold, we are opening up the Featured Collections block on the Rutgers University Libraries homepage to submissions. We can include a photograph and a brief description of a physical or digital collection or other materials you think will be of interest to our users.

    To be included, please send Mary Ann Koruth an image with a caption and a description with a link (if available) to any item that you feel deserves to be showcased on the homepage. These could include photographs, prints, videos, maps, books, collections, items relating to science and medicine, oddities from the archives–you name it.

    We’d like to extend a special thanks to Caryn Radick and Tara Maharjan in Special collections in Alexander, for the wealth of material they have brought to our notice over the past years.

    Please take some time to peruse through collections in your specialty and send in a submission that grabs your eye and piques your interest!

  • Win a copy of Tom Glynn’s award-winning book, Reading Publics

    Win a copy of Tom Glynn’s award-winning book, Reading Publics

    reading public

    As you may have noticed in the Staff News, Tom Glynn’s new book, Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754-1911, has won three major awards:

    His publisher, Fordham University Press, was kind enough to give us a review copy of his book for a giveaway. This giveaway is only for faculty, staff, student workers, interns, and other employees of Rutgers University Libraries. See below for details on how to enter. You can receive up to 3 entries if you complete all three actions:

     

    a Rafflecopter giveaway

  • New research impact panel

    New research impact panel

    altmetricsCheck out the new Research Impact panel on the Information for Researchers and Scholarly Communications website: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/services_researchers. Intended for the libraries users, it includes an overview of traditional citation analysis tools and metrics, as well as an Altmetrics description and useful links.

    Send any questions about scholarly metrics to: scholarlyimpact@rulmail.rutgers.edu.

  • 5 Things to Know about the New RefWorks:

    5 Things to Know about the New RefWorks:

    refworks jpg

    1) ProQuest is merging RefWorks and Flow into a single platform known as the new RefWorks. Flow users have automatically been moved to the new platform. RefWorks users can choose to upgrade by logging into their account and clicking “Move to the newest version of RefWorks.”

    2) Notable features of the new RefWorks include the ability save references and full text with the click of a button, automated recognition of uploaded documents, auto-completion of references, integration with Google Docs and Dropbox, and built-in document reading, highlighting, and annotation.

    3) The old RefWorks platform is scheduled to be retired by January 2018. However, Rutgers users will be migrated to the new platform some time before then. The exact date has yet to be determined. Until then, Rutgers users will continue to have access to both versions of RefWorks.

    4) Although it offers many new features, the new RefWorks does not have all of the same features as the old RefWorks. Features that are currently not available include support for multiple file attachments, public sharing, folder-level deduping, and global citation editing. The new RefWorks is also not fully compatible with older versions of Internet Explorer as well as Microsoft Word for Mac 2016. ProQuest continues to add features and functionality to the new RefWorks and aims to have full parity by late 2016.

    5) For more information see the RefWorks FAQ on the library website or the Upgrade FAQ on the RefWorks support site.