Exciting news from Salmon Library; today we are going to start lending iPads!  Please bring your Charger Card to the User Services desk at the library and check one out today! The iPads are available for in-house use only, for 3 hours at a time.  They can be renewed if no one else is waiting for them.

Things to keep in mind:   Only UAHuntsville students, faculty, and staff may check out iPads.  You are responsible for any damage done to the device while it is checked out to you. If the iPad is damaged, lost or stolen while checked out to you, you will be charged replacement cost of $500 plus a $50.00 processing fee.

If you do borrow an iPad from us, please fill out this survey to let us know how you liked the service!

Please note that our Interlibrary Loan system ILLiad will be down for maintenance on Monday, August 19^th in case you needed to submit new requests or view any outstanding requests.  It will be back in business on Tuesday, August 20^th.  Thanks for your patience during this time!  As always, please contact us via email or at 256-824-6529 if you have any questions.

Come by Salmon Library to see what new books we’ve gotten in this year!  On the new books library page, you can see our newest additions available in print format, as well as what has been made available thanks to generous donations from the Humanities Endowment Fund and the Mrs. Edna Trout Franz Fund.  We’re excited to add these items to our collection, and hope you enjoy browsing through our newest additions!

With billions of dollars of past space research at risk of being lost forever, Dr. Charles Lundquist is running a race against technology and time.  Director of the Interactive Projects Office at the UAH Research Institute, the 85-year-old Dr. Lundquist spent 40 years in high-level positions with the U.S. Army, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, NASA, and finally the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Working as a volunteer since retiring in 1999, he spends his time sleuthing for past research from the Army, NASA and private papers, as well as collecting oral histories from NASA retirees and others. All are added to an archive on the ground floor of UAH’s M. Louis Salmon Library, where Anne Coleman is a reference librarian and head of Archives and Special Collections. The archives preserve continued access for future historians, scholars and students.

The race to save past NASA research is a marathon to catch up with today’s information technologies. Some NASA records on everything from rocket designs to space flight data are being lost after being declared surplus. Some drain away because the media on which they are stored gets reused – as when NASA found it had recorded over its original tapes of the first lunar landing. But a lot of information still exists. It’s just that technology has bounded ahead and older storage media are no longer accessible.

“If any university has the obligation, UAH has the obligation to preserve the records of lunar exploration and of all of that era. At UAH, we have an obligation to create this kind of archive and save this information because the university was really formed as a result of Dr. Wernher von Braun and space research coming to Huntsville…As one of the old-timers, I feel obligated to preserve as much as possible of this important period in history when man for the first time left the Earth to explore space.”

The Salmon Library Archives are open to the public from Monday-Friday, 9:00am-4:00pm, or by appointment.