Friday, December 7, 2012

Holiday Hours for the Library

On Wednesday the 12th, we'll be closing at 8:00 and after that, we'll be on our Holiday Schedule on both campuses. Please refer to the table below to find out when we'll be open!

 
 
Update: The Library has just received word that Piedmont College is closing at 2:00 pm on Friday, the 21st. The Library will therefore be closed as well.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Big Season for the Current & Popular Collection

If you still haven't taken the time to browse our new Current & Popular reading collection, now is the perfect time. Thanks to prolific ordering over the summer months, the collection has doubled in size and is now over 600 titles strong! As always, you'll find every major style and genre represented -- fiction and non-fiction alike -- spread across both Piedmont campuses.







...And more new books will be arriving soon. For a comprehensive list of all the available titles (from both campuses), check out our Goodreads account by clicking this link.. Take special note of the categories (or "bookshelves") we've created. By clicking one of these labels, you can narrow the collection by subject or genre and find only the books you're interested in. Happy browsing!

Thursday, October 11, 2012

China's Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature!

 


From the prize committee press release:
"Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors."
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan.html

For more information, read The New York Times piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/books/nobel-literature-prize.html

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

What constitutes an authoritative source?

An authoritative source is a work known to be reliable because its authority or authenticity is widely recognized by experts in the field. (Reitz, Joan. Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science: Accessed 9/26/2012)

The Library specializes in collecting these types of resources so that students and faculty have the tools they need to research effectively. Rest assured that resources accessed through the Library’s website are always authoritative and appropriate for academic work.

Using Google for research is risky -- same goes for Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines on the web. Free internet resources are sometimes authoritative (especially if they are offered by government agencies or academic institutions), but usually are not. Wikipedia, for example, is not authoritative because there is no way to verify authorship and anyone can edit an entry at any time.

http://libanswers.piedmont.edu/a.php?qid=242337

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Saturday is Free State Parks Day!

This Saturday, September 29, is Free State Parks Day! Free Admission & Parking at any Georgia State Park! Demorest students, take note: there are 6 state parks within a half-hour's drive and 14 within an hour! Visit www.georgiastateparks.org for more information.


Friday, August 31, 2012

New Hours Posted

Fall semester hours for both Piedmont College Library locations have now been posted.

On Monday through Thursday, the Arrendale Library in Demorest is open from 7:45 am to 11:00 pm. On Fridays, we close at 5:00 pm. We also offer weekend hours during the semester: Saturdays from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, and Sundays 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

Please note: the Arrendale Library will be closed throughout the Labor Day weekend. Normal weekend hours will resume September 8.

To take a look at the full semester schedule, including extended hours, closings, and holidays, please click here.

For the Athens Campus Library in Lane Hall, click here.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

The New & Improved Mayflower Online Catalog

Recent visitors to MAYFLOWER, Piedmont College Libraries' online catalog, may have noticed a few developments: the interface has a spiffy new layout and each item record contains a host of new features -- most noticeably, cover illustrations. Full records also now include book synopses, reviews, and other helpful tidbits. Take a look at the record for The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg to see its cover and then click on A Look Inside to learn more about the book, its reviews, summary, table of contents and more. Or look at this search on classroom management to see the new look and new content.

If you have any questions about the new developments, please contact us!

The Yonahian is now online!

Attention students, faculty, & alumni: All volumes of the illustrious Piedmont College Yearbook, The Yonahian, are now available online! Each edition is presented in color and is fully-indexed for keyword searching.



You can find a record for the Yonahian in the MAYFLOWER catalog and link from there. Or you can go directly to the provider’s website, Archive.Org. When you open an individual volume, click "Read Online" to open the issue in an online reader. Once the issue is open, you can page through it or search it. You can also save issues in a variety of formats for reading on your own electronic device. The Library is very grateful to our student assistant Amy Naylor, who provided invaluable assistance in making this concept a reality.

A vital document in the history of Piedmont College, The Yonahian was introduced in 1920 and has been published almost every year since. That's nearly a full century of Piedmont pride, now just a few clicks away.




The first round of Piedmont College Dissertations are now available!


With doctorates come dissertations. Now that Piedmont College is offering Doctor of Education degrees a new and invaluable body of work is being created by our doctoral students. Piedmont College Libraries has partnered with ProQuest Open Access Dissertations & Theses to manage, maintain, and publish this collection for a global readership. (ProQuest Open Access is a service of what used to be known far and wide as Dissertation Abstracts International.)

Once published, all approved Piedmont dissertations become fully indexed online documents, searchable, citable, and open to the public. Piedmont College Libraries is proud to announce that the first round of dissertations is now available. Printed copies will be made available in both library locations soon. You can view the complete current list of our dissertations here and begin reading immediately!

Congratulations to our doctoral students! … and congratulations to the School of Education as we celebrate this fantastic milestone in the life of our College!

Something looks different...


If you notice anything different next time you walk through the doors of the Arrendale Library in Demorest, your eyes are not deceiving you! The layout of the main floor of the library has undergone a significant transformation this summer, and the differences are not likely to escape your notice.


















For starters, most of the reference book stacks are gone. We removed outdated and duplicated reference materials, integrated subject-focused resources into the permanent collection, and condensed the print reference collection to the two remaining book stacks to the right of the lobby. This freed up 75% of the floor space on the dining hall side of the building, and we've used it to house all the public-access computers and create new collaborative workspaces. The former computer lab on the 3rd floor is now a quiet study area. We even carved out a cozy nook near the front of the building (with an excellent view of the Quad) for use as an open classroom. You'll find more seating options than ever before and you'll have more room to breathe, but you'll also be surprised at how much brighter the space has become -- many windows that were once blocked now reveal fantastic views of our beautiful campus.

The Library is very grateful for the work of its student assistants this summer, without whose help this project would have been impossible: Lewis Cassamajor, Amy Naylor, Alexa Quintero, Robby Bailey, Chez Maxwell, Brannon Shedd, Virginia Walton, and Teresa Gulley. In addition, this project involved all the members of the Library’s Demorest staff, in tasks ranging from database maintenance to disassembling bookstacks.


The third floor has come a long way this summer, but it is still evolving. We hope to install even more tables and chairs before the year is out. And then we'll turn our attention to the second and fourth floors. Next time you're in the neighborhood, drop in and see what we've been up to!

Monday, June 25, 2012

New Leisure Books Have Arrived!

And many more are on the way!



 Take a look at our Goodreads page to browse through the new titles.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Summer Hours Posted

From Thursday, May 3, to Monday, May 28, the Arrendale Library in Demorest will be open from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday.

Beginning Tuesday, May 29, the Library will be open 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, Monday through Thursday, and 8:00 am to 5:00 pm on Fridays.

The Library will be closed on weekends for the duration of the summer (which ends Friday, August 18).

For a table compiling this information and more (including holidays and hours for the Athens branch), check out the Hours page.

Monday, April 16, 2012

2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

Among the winners this year was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's The Patriot News, "for courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky," and The Tuscaloosa News, "for its enterprising coverage of a deadly tornado, using social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 50 miles away."



Surprisingly, for the first time since 1977, no award was given in the Fiction category. Three books were nominated, but the jury could not agree on which book should receive the honor. Author Stephen Greenblatt earned the General Nonfiction prize for his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, "a provocative book arguing that an obscure work of philosophy, discovered nearly 600 years ago, changed the course of history by anticipating the science and sensibilities of today."

Check out the rest of the winners at the official Pulitzer website!

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Carter Center speaker to visit Piedmont April 19

DEMOREST - Itonde Kakoma of the Carter Center will present a talk on conflict resolution in Sudan and South Sudan at 2:00, Thursday, April 19, in Stewart Hall Auditorium on the Piedmont College Demorest campus.

Kakoma is the assistant director of the Conflict Resolution Program at The Carter Center and is currently focusing on addressing the threats to humanitarian efforts in South Sudan. Kakoma holds a bachelor's degree in religion from Wartburg College and currently in the ordination process for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Kokoma’s speech is sponsored by the college’s Quality Enhancement Program (QEP) as part of an initiative to develop critical thinking on campus.

“Conflict resolution requires various kinds of critical thinking such as understanding the various perspectives of the different parties involved, evaluating arguments and evidence, analyzing the problems raised and offering solutions acceptable to all sides,” said Teresa Secules, QEP Director. “Our speaker will help us understand the background information and model all of these kinds of thinking in the context of the real problems currently at issue in a war-torn part of the world: Sudan.”

[taken from AccessNorthGa.com: http://www.accessnorthga.com/detail.php?n=247338]

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Calling all Biography Buffs!

As part of our continuing effort to make the new Current & Popular collection more accessible and easier to browse, I've put together a list of all the featured biographical and autobiographical titles. From historical narratives to contemporary memoirs, there should be something for just about everybody. You can browse through all 37 titles by clicking right here.





**And remember, we love taking requests!

Thursday, March 15, 2012

New in Children's Literature

If you have an interest in children's or young adult literature, whether it be for research or pleasure, you may be excited to know that the libraries have recently acquired around 80 new juvenile titles. 


Many of these are newly published titles, including (but not limited to):

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Newbery Honor Book)
The Aviary by Kathleen O'Dell
Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer Holm (Newbery Honor Book)
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen 
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Apothecary by Maile Meloy
The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle
Bumble-Ardy by Maurice Sendak
Swirl by Swirl by Joyce Sidman


Other new titles are modern classics not previously found within our collection, such as:

Math Curse by Jon Scieszka
Frindle by Andrew Clements
The Pigeon Wants a Puppy by Mo Willems
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon
Marshmallow by Clare Turlay Newberry (Caldecott Honor Book)
Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes

Also, at our Athens Library, the children's books have moved out into the main collection in order to give them more room to breathe and grow. Hopefully those who were not aware of this collection in the past will feel inclined to peruse it.

Please come check it out!


Monday, March 12, 2012

We're on Facebook!

And finding us is as easy as clicking the little blue icon at the bottom of our homepage. Take a minute to check out our page -- if you "Like" it, you'll be the first to know about new books, new services, and upcoming events.


Stay tuned for book recommendations, research tips, fun trivia, important announcements, PC news, spotlight reviews from our leisure collection, and more!

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to email me at dgibbs@piedmont.edu.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Chat Reference is Online

This is just a reminder that our new chat reference service is online during the Library's regular service hours*! Just click on the chat box in the bottom-right corner of our webpage, type in a question, and if our status is "available," you should get a reply from one of our librarians very quickly.

(That said, we are still training our staff to use this new software, and to any of you who have had a question go unanswered during the past week or so, we are sorry.)

On a semi-related note, we've had several questions regarding the new location of the GALILEO link. You can find it in one of two places: in the center of the home page under the heading FIND..., or by clicking the Articles & More tab -- you'll find a link in the bottom-right corner of that search box.

*Those hours, by the way, are 8-11 Monday through Thursday, 8-5 Friday, 11-5 Saturday, and 2-10 Sunday.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Athens Leisure Collection

Lest you think that we here in the Athens Library are missing out on the excitement of the new Leisure Reading Collection, here's a photo of our new display case, chock full of exciting new leisure titles guaranteed to help you make it through the winter doldrums:



If you are a Demorest student, faculty, or staff member and see something here that interests you, we'd be more than happy to send it your way, just let us know!

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Our Website, Improved & Redesigned!

The new Piedmont College Libraries website will bring you new features, new services, new networks, and a new streamlined approach to searching and browsing. In this blog post, I'll go over some of the major developments.

First, let's take a look at the website you're accustomed to:


The primary tabbed searching area is in the center of the page, our blog feed is on the right, and an assortment of helpful links are displayed across the top and bottom.

Here is an image of the new page, incorporating the planned changes:


Right away, you'll notice the most significant addition: a new chat reference window in the bottom-right corner. Whenever a librarian is online (which will be most of the time), you'll have instant access to live reference or research assistance. All you have to do is type your question into the box! You'll be able to use this feature during the Library's hours of operation, all week long, on-campus or off.

The blog feed has been moved to the bottom-left corner, the links (and new social networking icons) to the middle, and the primary search menu is right where it was before. You may notice it has undergone some changes of its own. We analyzed usage statistics, consolidated features, trimmed the fat, and took a more streamlined approach. Searching the Mayflower catalog has never been faster -- type a title, author, or subject into the search box and you have immediate access to books, e-books, videos, and online journals. If you are searching for an individual article, use the second tab to browse resources by subject, type, or title. Same resources, same information, fewer clicks.

We hope these changes make the Library's website an even more efficient research tool for students and faculty. If you have any questions about the redesign or the new chat reference service please feel free to email me at dgibbs@piedmont.edu.

Ethics Bowl 2012 is Coming

The event will be held at 6pm on February 20 in the Brookside Dining Hall. Teams must register with Dr. John Misner by February 13 for a chance to win $300 in cash prizes!



Wednesday, January 25, 2012

It's here!

The Current & Popular collection was finally introduced last week and the response has been encouraging! Many students and faculty members have come by to browse the new display and we've already checked out dozens of books. Come have a look if you haven't already -- you too might find something to take home!



And remember: Our Goodreads profile contains a full list of Current & Popular titles!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

The New Books Have Arrived!

It was an eventful holiday break for the Libraries of Piedmont College! The first shipment of new books bound for the Current & Popular leisure reading collection just arrived and we couldn't be more excited!


For the first time in the history of this library, we're providing a selection of books intended exclusively for recreational use. Most of the titles are new; many appeared on awards and bestseller lists in 2011. The collection contains both fiction and nonfiction books representing a variety of genres and interests: mystery, science fiction, horror, sports, history, humor. We even included a number of graphic novels (and more are on the way). These books will be available to students, faculty, and staff for 14-day check-outs with two renewals, and you can take as many as five at a time.

The Current & Popular collection will be officially rolled out in a couple weeks. If you'd like a sneak peek at the featured titles, we've listed them at our new Goodreads page (a site worth checking out for all you book lovers out there). Books held by the Arrendale Library in Demorest are listed here; those held at the Athens branch are listed here. Regardless of location, you may request any of these books through our online Interlibrary Loan service: http://library.piedmont.edu/ill/book_form.html.

If you just want to ogle some photos we took after unboxing them, have at it!

The best part of all? This is only the beginning -- the Current & Popular collection will continue to evolve and expand! We'll be ordering additional titles soon and again we ask for your input. If you request it, we'll do our best to get it!