New Current & Popular Titles added to the Leisure Reading Collection

Happy mid-October Monday, everyone. I hope you enjoyed, as I did, the moderate (but encouraging) briskness in the air this morning.

This is just a quick note to communicate some good news. Over the weekend, the Library added about a wheelbarrow’s worth of new popular titles to our Leisure Reading Collection. There’s new  work by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nicole Krauss, Celeste Ng, Jennifer Egan, even a new John Green novel (but of course, it’s already checked out). There are new stories, new memoirs, new essays, new comics…if you’re looking to try and make sense of the 2016 presidential campaign, we have a few new books on that, too.

You’ll find books about politics and race, monsters and spies, outer space and Mobile, Alabama. If you asked us for something in particular, you might even find that. And you’ll find all of them on the bookshelves in the lobby of the Arrendale Library (unless of course they’re checked out, in which case, we’ll be glad to place a hold for you).

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/7311703-piedmont-college-library?shelf=current-and-popular

Click anywhere on the grid above to link to our Goodreads account, where you can browse all additions to the Leisure Reading Collection, both new and...less new. We hope to see you soon!

Introducing the Lillian Smith Book Collection!

Click here to browse the collection.

As part of its efforts to support the Lillian E. Smith Center and celebrate the writer's legacy as a vital social justice and civil rights activist, Piedmont College Libraries is proud to announce the Lillian Smith Book Collection.

This ongoing collection development project will feature books from all across the literary spectrum -- contemporary novels; essays; works of history and historical fiction; memoirs; anthologies; psychological and sociological perspectives on race, class, activism, and privilege -- anything and everything that contributes to our understanding of civil rights in the United States and beyond. While an emphasis will be placed on new work addressing the ongoing struggle against racism in America, the Lillian Smith Book Collection will also confront issues of class, LGBTQ rights, and gender inequality. In short, this collection seeks to represent (and expand upon) the many facets of Lillian Smith's own progressive, inclusive ideology.

This inaugural group of titles features important work both past and present, ranging from established members of the civil rights canon such as Chancellor Williams' The Destruction of Black Civilization, Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro, and Lillian Smith's own Killers of the Dream, to significant contemporary publications which are even now shaping the way we think, speak, and feel about equality and diversity in the 21st century. The collection celebrates the work of highly esteemed modern writers like National Book Critics Circle Award winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and National Book Award winners Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jesmyn Ward, but it also includes lesser-known perspectives, like those of Margo Jefferson (Negroland), Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy), and Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow challenges the dangerous myth that having elected and re-elected our first black president, Americans are now living in a "post-racial" society.

While there are currently no plans to physically shelve these titles together on a permanent basis, we will offer a rotating selection on display in the 3rd floor lobby of the Arrendale Library, and the entire collection will be available for browsing through the MAYFLOWER catalog and at our Goodreads page.

Ebrary Academic Complete Is Now Available!

A new collection of over 132,000 curated academic ebooks is now available to Piedmont College students and faculty. This is made possible thanks to the Library's participation in GALILEO, Georgia's Virtual Library.

The Ebrary Academic Complete collection provides ebooks in all academic disciplines, so links are available on all the Library's subject pages for online resources. Soon, individual records will be available in the MAYFLOWER and in the Search Everything service.

The Ebrary Academic Complete collection includes scholarly ebooks from leading university presses, including the University of Georgia Press and the presses of Duke, Chicago, California, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and North Carolina, to mention only a few. 

It also includes titles from many important academic publishers, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Springer, Teacher's College, Wolters Kluwer, ASCD, National Academies, and Wiley, to name only a few.

There is no significant overlap with our EBSCO Academic Ebook collection, so a researcher's access to ebooks is greatly enriched and enhanced by the addition of Ebrary. Moreover, access to each title is unlimited, so many users can access or download a title simultaneously. And of course, Ebrary is available off-campus with your Ezproxy username and password.

To help keep track of books they are interested in, users can create personal accounts on the Ebrary system and create Bookshelves. Here is a link for further information about the Ebrary Academic Complete collection, and a link to learn more about how to use the collection.

What is Full Text Finder? or, Where's the Find It Button?

    

An important Library service has been updated and improved! The Find It service has been replaced by Full Text Finder.

As you know, the Library provides access to a huge number of full-text articles, e-books, and online reference materials, as well as comprehensive collections of streaming audio and video files. In addition, our researchers have access to an even larger number of citations and abstracts for articles, books, and dissertations that don't include in the full-text.

All of these materials, those available in full-text and those that are not, are provided through a large number of online services from several different providers. Without a central service that links all of this knowledge and information together, it would be very difficult for researchers to work efficiently. A comprehensive search would mean performing the same queries in many different resources, over and over.

Both Find It and Full Text Finder provide these necessary linking services. Both know about all the full-text articles that Piedmont College Library users have access to, as well as precisely which services offer them. This is what allows you, for example, to be working in ProQuest Nursing and Allied Health and have direct access to the full text of an article that's provided in CINAHL Complete, an EBSCOHost service.

We recently made the switch from Find It to Full Text Finder, which we believe allows a much simpler workflow for research. Let's take this citation as an example:

With the Find It service, clicking the icon would lead you to an intermediate screen where you might have to choose from a list of multiple services containing that article.

With Full Text Finder, there is no intermediate screen. You will go directly to a service that contains the article and you can begin reading immediately:

But what if the full text of an article is not available? We all know the frustration of realizing an article we need for our research is inaccessible. Thankfully, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service for journal articles is very fast. Full Text Finder replaces the former hodge-podge of different ILL forms and provides the same interface no matter which service you are using.

Let’s look at different example. Let’s say you really want to read the article represented by this citation:

This is what you’ll see when you click on Full Text Finder:

And if you click on the ILL link, you'll always see this familiar form and you can fill out your contact information, click Submit, and in most cases, receive your article by email within 48-72 hours.

New in Contemporary Poetry!

Among the 90,000 or so books on the shelves of our library are hundreds of volumes of poetry. You can find thousands more in our online collection (did you know you could search Humanities Source and Literature Online for poems?). But the majority of this work was written before any of us were even born. We've all been reading Keats and Poe and Whitman and Ginsberg for years, but what kind of poetry is being written right now? Where is the poetry that speaks to our modern life experiences?

Last month, with the help of English professor Dr. Timothy O'Keefe, the Library began a collection development project to strengthen our holdings in contemporary poetry. Most of these books have trickled in over the last few weeks and they're now ready to hit the shelves. Click the image below to browse the collection at our Goodreads page:

As always, please send any personal requests or suggestions to dgibbs@piedmont.edu. The more, the better!

Thousands of pictures worth millions of words

There are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. 

--Diane Arbus, 1972

From the first horses scrawled roughly on cave walls to the latest Pixar film in 3-D, no art form in history has experienced as rapid an ascent -- or such astonishing evolution -- as photography. Through it all, it has remained a vital tool for self-reflection and a compelling product of human creativity. Silent and omnipresent, photography plays a role in all of our lives, every single day -- many times a day -- and yet never loses its inherent power to teach, delight, comfort, or overwhelm us.

Over the past few months, we at Piedmont College Libraries have been working hard to grow our collection of fine art photography monographs, nearly doubling the number of volumes in Class TR (which is where you'll find them, on the last row of the 4th floor of the Arrendale Library). From a small selection of books dealing mostly in black-and-white fashion and landscape photography from the mid-1900s, our collection has expanded to include the groundbreaking color work of pioneers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, the highly-stylized pop art of David LaChapelle and Gregory Crewdson, and the poignant social critique of Joel Sternfeld and Martin Parr. We've also gone back in time and acquired several masterpieces of the genre that had never sat on our shelves -- peerless classics like Robert Frank's The Americans, Bernd and Hilla Becher's Industrial Landscapes, Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places, Richard Avedon's Performance, William Eggleston's Guide, and Walker Evans' American Photographs. No photography collection is complete without these touchstones, and now they're available to you at the Piedmont College Library.

This project is ongoing. We've already purchased many significant new works, such as Richard Misrach's Petrochemical America -- which inspired the striking visual style of the hit HBO drama True Detective -- and Robert Polidori's After the Flood, which covers the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster...and we will continue to collect these important cultural and artistic documents. You can browse the newest additions by clicking here. As always, we love requests, so please -- if you don't see your favorite photographer in the stacks, let us hear about it!

AAUP Opposes Trigger Warnings

A subcommittee of the American Association of University Professors has drafted and approved a statement opposing the use of trigger warnings in the classroom. The document supports academic freedom and takes the following position:

The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual. It makes comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement and--as the Oberlin list demonstrates--it singles out politically controversial topics like sex, race, class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention. 

Indeed, if such topics are associated with triggers, correctly or not, they are likely to be marginalized if not avoided altogether by faculty who fear complaints for offending or discomforting some of their students. Although all faculty are affected by potential charges of this kind, non-tenured and contingent faculty are particularly at risk. In this way the demand for trigger warnings creates a repressive, “chilly climate” for critical thinking in the classroom.

Read the complete "On Trigger Warnings" (August 2014).