Category: Library News (Page 1 of 6)

Bantam Research Roost

September 30, 2024 / Susan Chatham

Our research & instruction librarians are flying the coop and setting up temporary roosts around campus to bring research support right to you!

Our Bantam Research Roost program, which debuted during the spring 2024 semester and has returned this fall, is a traveling librarian initiative designed to increase the library’s visibility and accessibility on campus, fostering a more inclusive environment and supporting student academic success. Whether you’re a student working on an assignment or a faculty member seeking new resources, the Bantam Research Roost brings the library’s expertise directly to you, making it easier than ever to tap into our wealth of resources and expertise, wherever you are on campus.

Once a week, throughout the semester, our research librarians and peer research assistants will visit a different campus location between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Stop by our table to get answers to research questions and learn about exciting resources, services, and events in the library.

Our friendly librarians can help you at any stage in your research, whether that’s brainstorming or focusing research topics or questions, finding relevant sources, evaluating sources, or citing and managing your sources. Faculty are also invited to begin a conversation about how we can support your courses through instruction sessions or assist with your own research needs.

As an added incentive the first student to speak with us each week will receive a $5 Peter B’s gift card (while supplies last)! We will have additional goodies including stickers and (usually) candy for everyone to enjoy when you visit our roost.

The Research Roost schedule can be found on the Campus Calendar and our location will be posted as a story on our Instagram account (@trincoll_library) each week.

Lastly, remember our friendly and knowledgeable librarians and peer research assistants are available to help you with your research beyond the roost. You can make an appointment to meet with us at a time that is convenient for you or send us an email. We are always happy to chat and help you find the answers you need.

Image of first Bantam Research Roost table.

Research & Instruction Librarians, Rosie (left) and Susan (right) sit at the Bantam Research Roost table in Mather during its launch in the spring 2024 semester.

Image of outdoor Bantam Research Roost table

Peer Research Assistant, Alex Golz sits at the Bantam Research Roost table on the Long Walk during the second roost of the fall 2024 semester.

New E-Resource Selection: What Makes the Cut?

September 12, 2024 / krinaldo

The bulk of the library’s collection budget goes towards purchasing perpetual access or maintaining subscription to e-resources of many varieties. But how do librarians decide which new resources to add? There are three main factors that drive our electronic resource acquisition: enhancing the existing collection, proactive selection of resources that relate to Trinity’s unique scholarship needs, and responses to requests of students and faculty for research support.

Streaming video resources are in high demand and when librarians learned that a new set of videos was being offered as an add on to the PBS Video Collection the library already owned we jumped at the opportunity. Experience told us these videos would be well used and a preview of the title list showed they were logical compliments to the videos already in the collection. In addition, this collection is often the only place where PBS releases some videos for streaming, so we knew there would be exclusive content unavailable anywhere else. All these factors told us that the purchase would be a direct enhancement to the library’s existing streaming video offerings.

PolicyMap was a statistical database the library considered in the past, but declined due to content overlap with similar resources like Social Explorer. But when a representative reached out with exciting updates on unique new datasets relevant to urban studies, climate studies, and environmental justice studies, among others, librarians thought it prudent to request a trial to take another look. This new data clearly supported the research needs of several disciplines and this combined with PolicyMap’s more user-friendly interface compared to our other statistical databases convinced the librarians this would be a worthwhile subscription.

It can be said that the most valuable resource helping librarians identify new electronic resources to purchase is the Trinity community itself. This is how librarians learn about some truly unique specialty resources like Human Relations Area Files: World Cultures, an ethnographic database with information on all aspects of cultural and social life for a wide variety of cultures and ethnic groups. Similarly, it was due to a faculty member’s report that librarians learned a previously open access journal incredibly important to ethnographic theory in anthropology, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, was placed behind a paywall and a subscription was duly purchased. Just as librarians are an irreplaceable resource for students and faculty research projects, students and faculty are also invaluable partners in helping librarians identify relevant and useful resources that fulfill our collection development goal of supporting current scholarship.

Digital Asset Management News

August 23, 2024 / Amanda Matava

Formerly Visual Resources until 2022, the Digital Asset Management team is comprised of Amanda Matava, Digital Archivist/Department Head, who joined Trinity in 2017, and Benny Bauer, the Digital Media Librarian, who joined Trinity in 2022.

JSTOR

Trinity’s institutional landing page in JSTOR (launched 2020).

Over the past year, Amanda and Benny have been adding to and restructuring our content in JSTOR, which serves as an institutional repository, image library, and digital archive. As the admin for JSTOR, Amanda also works behind the scenes with developers to improve usability and pilot initiatives. Please reach out to Amanda with any questions about JSTOR!

Among its highlights are the Art Collection, curated by Art Collection Manager Barbara Sternal; the Trinity Archival Image and Video Collection, which now contains over 2,300 items; and the Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean Archive, which contains digitized photographs, newspapers, and cultural heritage materials from the Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean in Trinidad and Tobago, a collection Trinity is assisting to digitize and process with the support of a Modern Endangered Archives Program grant.

For faculty and students seeking images for courses or research, visit the institutional teaching collection or browse JSTOR Images, which now includes the Artstor Digital Library.

Finally, visit the JSTOR workspace to save, describe, and organize materials for your research or courses. Collect images and text materials into folders, which can be exported as a .zip file or power point presentation.

Web Archives

Amanda has been developing Trinity College’s web archive in Archive-It, a product of the Internet Archive, since 2022 in order to capture Trinity’s web presence with a primary focus on blogs, online-only publications, and scholarship. If you don’t see something, it may already be found in the Wayback Machine (such as the library’s website, which has been captured many times since the 1990s).

For those looking to archive their own web pages or projects, Conifer is free and easy to use!

Collaboration

This summer, students participated in hands-on digitization and learned about cataloging cultural heritage materials as part the second iteration of RELG-321, taught by Professor Susanne Kerekes. Under the guidance of Amanda Matava, students utilized the department’s overhead camera to photograph their amulets and then uploaded them to the JSTOR Forum cataloging platform, where they learned how to enter metadata for their objects. Amanda also assisted Public Humanities Collaborative students this summer in photographing cultural heritage materials from China and Puerto Rico which included textiles and pottery/stoneware. The students used the department’s overhead camera in order to capture high-resolution overall views of the materials.

Students research and practice cataloging in JSTOR Forum

Students photograph amulets. One student (left) assisted with positioning the object and raising/lowering the camera while a second (right) operated the camera shutter.

Professional Development

Amanda and Benny have been working on various professional development opportunities. Benny recently attended the IDEAL Conference in Toronto and NEA (New England Archivists), of which they are actively engaged in interest circles and the organization’s newsletter. Benny is also active in organizing library food drives throughout the academic year.

This past year, Amanda has spoken at several conferences with Christina Bleyer including the Visual Resource Association (Fall 2023) and Boston Library Consortium (Spring 2024) on The Watkinson’s post-custodial archiving project with the Lloyd Best Institute of the Caribbean. Amanda and Christina also spoke in Trinidad and Tobago at the opening of the digital archive. Our article for the VRA Bulletin on the project describes our work in greater depth and detail. Amanda also began pursuing the Digital Archives Specialist Certification (DAS) from the Society of American Archivists and has completed about half the requirements.

Stanford University Press Ebooks Trial

November 10, 2021 / krinaldo

Through January 31, 2022 the library is offering trial access to Stanford University Press ebooks hosted on the De Gruyter platform. The trial contents can be browsed here and includes books on architecture, arts, economics, cultural studies, geosciences, history, religious studies, law, life sciences, linguistics, literary studies, medicine, philosophy, physics, and social sciences.

Please send feedback on this trial to library.feedback@trincoll.edu

Textbooks at the Library

September 23, 2021 / krinaldo

In recognition of prodigious textbook costs that can create a barrier to student learning, the library has purchased over forty texts assigned this semester and placed them on permanent physical reserve! We encourage everyone to review the list below and use any of the available titles.

Thanks to an extremely generous donation made by the Trinity Student Government Association the library was able to purchase all required textbooks costing more than $50.00 to rent or buy from the Trinity bookstore that do not include a unique electronic access code to additional materials and that the library does not already own. To see if the library already owns a copy of an assigned textbook you can search for the title in our electronic catalog, OneSearch. Any book located in Trinity Library Course Reserves can be checked out and used in the library for 3 hours at a time. A replacement fee equivalent to the cost of the textbook will be charged for books checked out and not returned.

If faculty have additional titles they would like the library to make available for print or electronic reserve please let us know as soon as possible! Library staff are working hard to process course reserve requests as they come in. Instructions for placing a course reserves and digital media request can be found here.

New Textbooks on Reserve	Edition	Publication Date
A concise introduction to logic	13th ed.	2018
A writer’s reference	10th ed.	2021
Abnormal psychology	10th ed.	2018
Abstract algebra	3rd ed.	1999
Adolescence	12th ed.	2020
American constitutionalism : powers, rights, and liberties		2015
An economic history of development in sub-Saharan Africa : economic transformations and political changes		2019
Animal physiology	4th ed.	2016
Biochemistry : the molecular basis of life	6th ed.	2016
Campbell biology	12th ed.	2021
Cinéphile : intermediate French language and culture through film	3rd ed.	2018
Corporate finance (Global edition, may not match assigned textbook exactly)	5th ed.	2020
Database system concepts	7th ed.	2020
Differential equations	4th ed.	2010
Economics	11th ed.	2020
Engineering mechanics.	14th ed.	2016
Engineering mechanics.	14th ed.	2016
Essential Soil Science		2013
Film art : an introduction	12th ed.	2020
Foundations of behavioral neuroscience	10th ed.	2020
Introduction to robotics : mechanics and control	4th ed.	2018
Introductory econometrics : a modern approach	7th ed.	2020
Introductory statistics for the behavioral sciences	7th ed.	2012
Judicial process in America	11th ed.	2020
Linear algebra and its applications	5th ed.	2016
Macroeconomics	8th ed.	2021
Microelectronic circuits	7th ed.	2015
Nuovo Espresso 1 : libro dello studente e esercizi : corso di italiano A1		2014
Philosophy of sport : critical readings, crucial issues		2002
Physics for scientists and engineers : a strategic approach with modern physics	4th ed.	2017
Political science research methods	8th ed.	2016
Psychology	13th ed.	2019
Psychopharmacology : drugs, the brain, and behavior	3rd ed.	2019
Public finance and public policy	6th ed.	2019
Soil Sciences Simplified 5th edition		2013
Soils and Geomorphology 3rd Ed		2013
Soils Genesis and Geomorphology		2013
The Oxford history of Western music	2nd ed.	2019
The study of law : a critical thinking approach	5th ed.	2020
Vertebrate life	10th ed.	2019
Voces de Hispanoamérica : antología literaria	5th ed.	2016

Seniors: Upload your thesis or capstone project to the Digital Repository

April 23, 2021 / Amy Harrell

Preserve and share your hard work!

Upload your thesis or senior project
The Digital Repository is Trinity’s online archive and can accept theses, multimedia projects, images, posters, and more.
Share with others
Your thesis or project will be discovered by Google and other research tools, and you’ll get statistics on who is reading your work. A permanent link can be included on applications, resumes, LinkedIn, etc.
Retain copyright
When you submit your work to the Repository you retain all copyrights and you choose what to share and under what conditions. You can restrict download access to the Trinity campus if desired.
Get started
Go to the Digital Repository and read our submission guidelines to get started. Please contact Amy Harrell (amy.harrell@trincoll.edu) with any questions.

In Case You Missed It: 1960’s Activism, Archives and the Now: A Talk by Paul Lauter

April 21, 2021 / kbauer

Our Sixties, by Paul Lauter

The Trinity College and Watkinson Libraries were honored on April 20, 2020 to host (virtually via Zoom) Paul Lauter, Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at Trinity College. To put it mildly, Paul led an interesting life in the 1960’s, when he was “fired, busted, published, and tenured .”As many have requested, we are happy to provide a link to his talk. Listening to Paul talk about how literature and archives influenced his thinking about civil rights, while simultaneously hearing the Chauvin verdict in the murder of George Floyd, was a moment that many of us will not forget.

We have prepared a guide where you will find material related to the talk, especially about Paul’s archives at the Watkinson.

Paul Lauter’s book, Our Sixties, An Activists History, was published by the University of Rochester Press in October 2020.

Trinity Library Now Part of JStor’s new Open Community Collections!

March 9, 2021 / nsmith1

Driver Training, Hartford, 1957

Trinity Library is excited to partner with JStor and a select few institutions in an initiative for sharing local digitized collections. The new JStor Open Community Collections platform now hosts a growing number of Trinity College digitized image and text collections sourced from Trinity College Archives and Libraries. Totaling over 20,000 items and spanning more than a century, it includes Ivy yearbooks, Tripod newspapers, archival photos, postcards, playbills, prints, manuscripts, and more. The collections which are public may be accessed directly on our Trinity College portal in JStor, but Trinity users may choose to authenticate for access also to other JStor content. Searches of our collections can be conducted from the Trinity portal or from the JStor database, with search capabilities to expand in future.

Browse more Open Community Collections or read the JStor blog post celebrating 350 collections and highlighting among them our Watkinson Library’s Book of Hours and British Theater Playbills collections.

Carnival, Trinidad: Young Girls in Costume, ca. 1998.

Tripod Jan.31, 1930.

Interlibrary Loan COVID-19 Initiative

February 4, 2021 / bshulda

In April 2020, the ILL staff opted to join an emergency COVID-19 initiative that our resource sharing partner, Rapid ILL, had set up. This initiative was to help support libraries across the world that may not have the same funding or access to resources as we do. Collectively, this helped to support the resource sharing efforts of over 200 libraries in 30 countries. These libraries were able to obtain materials for their users that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain otherwise. At the end of the project, nearly 35,000 requests were filled for non-Rapid ILL libraries. Trinity alone was able to process 233 of these requests between April and August on top of our own normal request load. Much of this effort is attributed to the work done by our ILL staff members: Marcelino Velez, Jose Pena, and Josef Riccio. Thank you to everyone involved in this effort!