The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Category: Articles

  • Quick Takes on Events and News – September 2021

    Patent and Trademark Webinars

    Rutgers Office for Research – Innovation Ventures and New Brunswick Libraries are proud to host a series of Zoom sessions ranging from understanding the basics of the patent process to filing for a patent and searching for prior art. All four sessions are conducted by the patent experts from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Rutgers faculty, researchers, students, and staff are welcome to choose one or more sessions to attend.

    Registration is required to receive Zoom link.  Please ​see register at https://go.rutgers.edu/patent2021.

    Graduate Student Workshops

    At the Dana Library this Fall, we are again co-sponsoring Graduate Student Success Workshops with the Graduate School-Newark. Here is the list of options—all offered as free Webinars, with registration required: https://go.rutgers.edu/9lli8v03

  • Welcome Week at Rutgers–Camden

    Paul Robeson Library faculty and staff were excited to welcome students back to campus with a series of events during Rutgers University–Camden’s Raptor Welcome and Welcome Week. Both Raptor Welcome and Welcome Week celebrated the return of the Scarlet Raptors with a theme of #ThePackIsBack.

    Raptor Welcome, new student orientation at Rutgers–Camden, was held on Monday, August 30, and Tuesday, August 31. Raptor Welcome is traditionally for new students, but this year the event was intended for both first year-students and returning sophomores who were remote for their first year. At Raptor Welcome, students trekked across campus to complete three activities, including “Mission: Library,” a scavenger hunt that highlighted library services and spaces. Robeson Library faculty and staff developed clues that led students throughout the building (and outside). At each stop, they collected a letter of the alphabet, enabling them to decode a secret phrase once all stops were completed. Approximately 640 students completed “Mission: Library” as part of their Raptor Welcome experience.

    Welcome Week is a campus-wide event series scheduled to run September 1 through September 12. At the Campus Involvement Fair on September 1, the library table invited new and returning students to engage with faculty and staff, pick up information about library services, and try their luck on the prize wheel. On September 2, Robeson hosted an outdoor Open House during free period and again just prior to the start of evening classes. During this time, the library staffed tables on the quad, offering snacks, giveaways, and a warm welcome to everyone passing by. In addition, new students who are part of the library’s Personal Librarian Program were issued a targeted invitation to pick up a special welcome gift during the Campus Involvement Fair or Open House.

    On September 8, as the last library event scheduled during Welcome Week, Robeson will partner with the Office of Disability Services to kick off Woof Wednesday, a therapy animal visit hosted on the first Wednesday of every month. Woof Wednesday, which began in 2019 and went virtual for the 2020-2021 academic year, features therapy animal teams from PAWS for People. On September 8, Woof Wednesday will take place outdoors. In accordance with the focus on wellness and stress management, representatives from the Wellness Center, Athletics and Recreation, and the Division of Student Academic Success will also be on site to provide information about campus resources.

  • Penman Collection Comes to Rutgers–Camden

    A selection of titles from the Penman collection.

    The family of Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times bestselling novelist, donated her research library to the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers University–Camden, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Several hundred titles have been given to Robeson. Penman wrote historical novels set in medieval Britain and was known for her meticulous research. Before her writing career she worked as a tax attorney and graduated from the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden. Penman lived in May’s Landing and died on January 22, 2021. Her works include standalone novels, such as The Sunne in Splendour, focusing on Richard III, and the Plantagenet series, five novels following the lives of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The books donated to the library cover a broad range of subjects, including medieval medicine, the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, history, literature, politics, the lives of women, and other related subjects.

  • Transforming Health Professional Education and Service Delivery for A Gender Non-Conforming Community

    Transgender patients experience discrimination in health care and encounter difficulty in finding compassionate health care professionals. In order to transform health professional education and service delivery for a diverse gender non-conforming community, Dr. Jeremy Sinkin, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, RWJMS created the video Masculinizing gender-affirming chest contouring surgery to address this issue. The video is now hosted in SOAR: Scholarly Open Access at Rutgers and can be shared broadly, increasing its reach. Other co-investigators of this project are Dr. Gloria Bachmann, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, RWJMS, Dr. Ian Marshall Associate Professor of Pediatrics, RWJMS, Kayo Denda, Head, Margery Somers Foster Center & Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, New Brunswick Libraries, and Mark Schuster, Dean of Graduate Student Life. The project was supported by the Rutgers – RBHS – IDEA Innovation Grant (2020-2021).   

    Dr. Sinkin and his colleagues are planning to create other videos on the topics of Gender Affirming Surgery (top and bottom), Hormonal Affirmation Therapy, Preferred Pronouns, Psychological and Social Well-being, Inclusivity, Sexual Transmitted diseases, and Addiction. The videos will be shared with the RBHS community educating health care providers.  The project partners are the PROUD (Promoting Respect, Outreach, Understand and Dignity) Center of NJ, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the Rutgers University Libraries, and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.  

    The interdisciplinary group working on this video project collaborates in other projects, including the monthly Babs Siperstein Humanities & Medicine Seminars – Focus on Transgender and also hosted the colloquium  “Affirming Medical and Mental Health Care for LGBTQAL+ Communities” (February 25-26, 2021).  

  • Summer Tales Book Club in New Brunswick hosts renowned authors

    In the summer of 2021, for the second time, the Summer Tales Book Club gathered students virtually in Rutgers-New Brunswick to take short mental breaks from their summer session studies.  #SummerTales is a three-month long program first offered online in the summer of 2020 and renewed in 2021. As a virtual reading club, it focuses on reading poems and short stories and discussing them in a forum with fellow students enrolled in summer courses.

    Designed from the start as “born virtual,” so to speak, the non-credit course was delivered in Canvas from June 1 to August 18. While in 2020 the program focused on an ongoing discussion of three short stories, this summer, in response to a renewed interest in poetry, four poems were offered in addition to two new short stories. A group of New Brunswick librarians and graduate students teamed up to facilitate the discussions.

    In addition to the benefits from an instant online community, the exposure to Rutgers Librarie

    In the summer of 2021, for the second time, the Summer Tales Book Club gathered students virtually in Rutgers-New Brunswick to take short mental breaks from their summer session studies.  #SummerTales is a three-month long program first offered online in the summer of 2020 and renewed in 2021. As a virtual reading club, it focuses on reading poems and short stories and discussing them in a forum with fellow students enrolled in summer courses.

    Designed from the start as “born virtual,” so to speak, the non-credit course was delivered in Canvas from June 1 to August 18. While in 2020 the program focused on an ongoing discussion of three short stories, this summer, in response to a renewed interest in poetry, four poems were offered in addition to two new short stories. A group of New Brunswick librarians and graduate students teamed up to facilitate the discussions.

    In addition to the benefits from an instant online community, the exposure to Rutgers Libraries via supplementary material from RUL also empowered students with valuable library research skills. During the summer they became more familiar with many resources and services the Libraries offer remotely, including finding additional reading material with QuickSearch, using LibGuides, and finding research help.

    Among the various live events, two guest authors visited Summer Tales virtually. After an inspiring  conversation with Joyce Carol Oates in 2020, this summer authors Carmen Maria Machado and Natalie Díaz were the guests for an hour-long conversation each. Open to the public, the two well-attended  events were moderated by graduate specialist Nicholas Allred, PhD candidate at the English Department, based on questions submitted by participants upon registration.

    Our guest on June 23, Carmen Maria Machado, is an American short story author and essayist. She is the author of two books: Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection, and In the Dream House, a memoir on her experience in an abusive queer relationship, published in 2019. In Summer Tales, leading up to Machado’s talk, students read and discussed “Eight Bites” from Her Body and Other Parties, a short story about a woman who struggles with her body image and eventually undergoes gastric bypass surgery. Students were most fascinated by the relationships in the main character’s life. Machado gave insight during the event about the mother-daughter relationship at play and the chorus role of the narrator’s sisters. She also spoke about bodily transformation and her personal relationship to the story.

    The second open session discussed poetry with Natalie Díaz as our guest on July 14th. Born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, she is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Most recently, she is the 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Postcolonial Love Poem. Díaz’s work focuses on the intersection of identity, language, and the impact of these ideas on the individual. The Summer Tales discussion of Díaz’s “My Brother at 3 A.M.” from her book of poetry When My Brother Was an Aztec has centered around form and language, two aspects of poetry which are of particular importance to the poet. The one-hour conversation was based on four poems read by Díaz––”My Brother at 3 A.M.,” “Why I Hate Raisins,” “Manhattan is a Lenape Word,” and “Run and Gun”––as well as questions submitted by over 380 registrants. Natalie Díaz has very generously allowed us to share our conversation with her online.  Two ASL interpreters were present, switching off at 15-minute intervals, at both events.

    Other than reading, Summer Tales also encourages creativity in all areas. The Summer Tales Creative Contest produced some exceptional results, such as Aaradhana Natarajan’s essay on Joyce Carol Oates last year. This year’s best works showed an incredible connection with the text, such as a book talk video by Harmony Birch on one of the short stories, or proved an extremely creative use of resources, as in the 3D image created by Alissa Renales. Both Harmony and Alissa also participated in the program as SC&I student assistants.

    A collaboration between New Brunswick Libraries and the Division of Continuing Studies, Summer Tales Book Club was brought to you by Books We Read, which was launched by Judit Ward as a pilot recreational reading initiative in the physical Chang Science Library in Summer 2019. The pages are hosted on the Rutgers WordPress site–– viewed 10,465 times since its inception––featuring blog posts written by librarians and students affiliated with the program. In addition to checking out the LibGuides Summer Tales 2020, Summer Tales 2021, and Poetry, everyone is invited to read some of the Summer Tales-related posts.

    -Submitted by Judit Ward and Nicholas Allred
    Harmony Birch and Alissa Renales also contributed to the article

  • OnExhibit at Paul Robeson Library: September 11, 2001

    September 11, 2001: The Day That Changed The World, is an educational exhibition from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum that presents the history of 9/11, its origins, and its ongoing implications through the personal stories of those who witnessed and survived the attacks. This exhibit includes archival photographs and images of artifacts from the permanent collection of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It explores the consequences of terrorism on individual lives and communities at the local, national, and international levels, and encourages critical thinking about the legacies of 9/11.

    Twenty years after the attacks, with terrorism still a threat today, the events of 9/11 and its aftermath remind us that we may never be able to prevent all the actions of people intent on harming others, but we do have control over how we respond to such events. Whether by volunteering in our local communities, serving our nation in the military, caring for the sick, or through other efforts, all of us can help build the world in which we want to live. As we witness history unfolding in our own time, the ways we choose to respond—both large and small—can demonstrate the best of human nature after even the worst of days.

    The exhibit was developed by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for Humanities.

  • Introducing Side-Nav

    Rutgers Libraries have adopted the side navigation (“side-nav”) layout for new and existing LibGuides.  Side-nav layout will result in more responsive web design on all devices.  All existing tab top guides will be switched over to side-nav by June 30, 2022.

    Information about LibGuide Side Navigation can be found on the Introducing Side Navigation for LibGuides guide.

    Documentation about how to create a new side navigation guide can be found here:

    We will schedule a demonstration of side-navigation soon. Please stay tuned for more information.

    Documentation about how to switch over your existing guide may be found here:

    If you have any questions or concerns, please send an email to support@rulhelp.rutgers.edu.

  • The ETD Submission Process Has Been Revamped

    Many graduate schools at Rutgers require that their students submit an online copy of their dissertation or thesis for archival in the Rutgers repository. For 14 years, the RUetd Submission System, developed in house, was used for uploading and reviewing the submissions.  This summer, it has been replaced with ProQuest’s ETD Administrator, a tool that is widely used by other academic institutions.

    The ETD Administrator guides students and graduate school staff through the submission process. It involves cooperation between students, graduate school staff, and RUL. Students submit metadata about their degree and dissertation/thesis, as well as the actual PDF. They can also request bound copies and request that ProQuest register copyright for them. Graduate school staff review the submissions for completeness and to make sure requirements are met. Once the submission is approved, the ETD is delivered to ProQuest for publication and to Rutgers for archival in the RUcore repository.

    RUL supports use of this tool for all ten graduate schools that require online submission. Students from the two schools that have August graduations have submitted their ETDs using this tool. The next ETDs will be submitted for October, followed by January and May. You can see the page being created for ETD submission help at https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/submit-your-etd.

    If you have questions or want to know more about ETDs, please contact Marty Barnett (martyb@libraries.rutgers.edu).

  • LibCal Has Many Uses

    LibCal’s Hours module powers our website hours.

    Now that the fall semester has begun on-site, we’re all becoming involved with new hybrid projects and tools. Many of us will have tasks that involve use of the LibCal application. To recap, LibCal, one of the LibApps applications from Springshare, has four modules that we use in RUL: Appointments, Events, Hours, and Spaces. We’re using the LibCal application in both new and revived ways.

    The Appointments module is particularly useful once we start having in-person meetings with patrons. However, as many of us know, it can also be used for online consultations.

    The Events module is in use, along with the new newly redesigned website, for posting events on the RUL calendar. Events, such as workshops and stressbusters, can be added to and displayed on specific-use calendars owned by local libraries. Registrations for events can be accepted and tracked as well.

    The Hours module has been used consistently, before, during and after the recent closure. It displays the times that our libraries’ buildings, desks and departments are open, in addition to giving links to additional help, where appropriate.

    Finally, the Spaces module, which had been used to make pickup appointment times available for Click and Collect over the past year, is now set up for patrons to make appointments to use study rooms at our libraries. These rooms, some of which are available for group study and some for individual study, are popular with patrons. More of these spaces for study are being created, such as the new Digital Learning Commons at Alexander Library.

    Take a look at the help page IIS is putting together for your convenience. It’s found in Staff Resources at https://staff.libraries.rutgers.edu/iis/libcal-help. If you have questions or need help with using LibCal, you can contact the LibCal Administrator, Marty Barnett (martyb@libraries.rutgers.edu).

  • Ex Libris Implementation Team Update – September 2021

    On August 12 all PALCI institutions moved to ReShare as the new platform to process and manage EZBorrow requests. We are so pleased to report that this transition has been successful and I would like to personally thank everyone for their patience and assistance over the past couple of months. Along with our partner institutions, we continue to provide feedback to developers to help make this new platform even better.  In the first week we have already made several improvements, including one, patron searches. Clicking on the EZBorrow button in QuickSearch will now automatically search the PALCI shared index and present related results. Patrons no longer have to manually repeat their search in the EZBorrow interface.

    EZBorrow patrons have received their final reminder regarding requests placed prior to the ReShare implementation. Access to these requests will not be possible after August 31. All users were provided with instructions on how to download a report of their requests from the old system prior to its retirement.

    Thank you for the support you have provided during this transitional phase. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding ReShare.