UAH Library Blog

If you’ve been inside the library within the past month or so, you may have noticed a lot of construction happening on the first floor.  There are actually three separate projects underway, two of which that will probably be of special interest to UAH students.

The large space to the left of the building after entering is being used as a location for the forthcoming Superteaching demo room, which should be completed later on in the upcoming Fall semester.  The other two projects should be finished a little sooner, hopefully within the earlier part of the Fall semester.  First is the new location for the art gallery.  Construction has been coming along very quickly for this project.

Also nearby is a new coffee shop that will be located on the same floor near the elevator.

These projects are coming along really well, and we hope to have an event or two at the library to celebrate their opening within the next few months.

Many of our students may be taking courses over the summer semester right now, some may be working summer jobs, and some may be taking a deserved break.  If you do find yourself away from our library over the summer or are otherwise doing some research on the web, we’ve come across a few great resources we thought we’d share with you.

Open Library - This project is in the early stages right now, but already has a great wealth of resources available.  The authors of the site are attempting to chronicle every book ever written in web form.  In theory, all books would have an entry page giving basic statistics of the book.  And hopefully, many should be viewable online.  There are other similar projects to this, however Open Library is so far the only one that is offering its procedure and findings via open source.

Text Archive - From the site’s description: “This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.”  Text Archive has collected and chronicled many resources in different categorized collections pertaining to a number of different types of texts.

Project Gutenberg - Similar to the open library, this site provides a great number of free e-books available for online reading.  Different formats are also available to import to your mobile device such as a PDA or Amazon Kindle.

We hope that you’ll find these interesting and helpful over the summer!

We realize that as finals are in session and visits by all to the library become more frequent, parking can quickly become a problem at peak hours throughout the day.  While arriving to campus early to compensate for the crowds on campus during these times of the year is always recommended, we’d also like to suggest alternative parking places that offer quick access to the library.

The first recommended location is just in front of Wilson Hall and the Business Administration Building.  These parking spaces are usually mostly unoccupied in the morning and late afternoon hours and are a relatively short walk away via sidewalks leading to the library.  Also usually available is the parking lot directly in front of Spragins Hall.  This is a bit of a longer walk, but is almost always available.  These spaces are also highly recommended to Nursing students, as the Nursing Building is a much shorter walk from here than from the parking lot in front of the library.

Other spots include the area across Holmes Ave., although traffic can sometimes be a problem during rush hours.  Please use caution when crossing the street from this area.  You might also try the parking lot near Morton Hall and the University Center if you will also be visiting these areas.

Parking should allievieate significantly in the weeks ahead, but be prepared for similar crowds in August as the Fall semester reconvenes.  In the meantime, be sure to take a look at this section of the campus map for a visual listing of each of these locations.

If you’ve visited us lately, you may have noticed a new sculpture in the front of the UAH Library which was installed this past Thursday. The sculpture is called “Geode”, and was once found in Big Spring Park here in Huntsville.

Technicians installing Geode.
Since the sculpture was removed from Big Spring Park in 1995, it was housed Huntsville Public Work Yard. And now nearly thirteen years later, it calls our front yard home! For more information about Geode, read about it from AL.com and take a look at the embedded video on their page.

If you keep up to date with the latest trends in web use, one platform that you may have noticed generating a lot of talk and use lately is Twitter.  If you’ve not heard of it, it is sort of a cross between an instant messaging client and a blog.  We’ve started an account for the library, which we hope to use to give you a quick glance of what is going on.

You can reach it at twitter.com/uahlibrary.  If you are a current Twitter user, be sure to add us as a friend.  Also, feel free to give us a reply concerning any comment or question that you may have and we will do our best to get back with you.

In the past week or so, we’ve heard of a few UAH students and staff who have made way to the Von Braun Research Hall (VBRH) looking for technical assistance relating to CNS. Please remember that, in order to better serve the campus community, the Help Desk has now been relocated within the library. We hope that one of the positive outcomes of this change suits the campus better as the Help Desk is now more centrally located on campus. Especially to our students living in the CCRH, Franz Hall, and NCRH Residence Halls!

If you need more information from the Help Desk, you can reach them at 824-2639, or visit the Help Desk located at the Reference Desk of the library. Their office hours are from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, Monday through Friday. On a related note, we also hope to announce the availability of redesigned and easier to navigate Help Desk and Res Net pages in the near future. Be sure to subscribe to the blog RSS feed or visit this page again soon for more information on that.

Admittedly, we at the library have many different blogs for different subjects, as well as many different RSS feeds. To find all of these sources in one central location, we’re pleased to announce the initial availability of the Library RSS Aggregator. Think of this page as sort of an online newspaper which delivers all of the news to the library to you. Also included are the top news stories from the New York Times as well as local weather for the Huntsville area.

The RSS Aggregator is in somewhat of a “beta” form for now. We may make additions or some tweaks in the near future. If you have any suggestions as to any type of RSS feed that you would like to see on the page, please feel free to let us know by commenting on this post.

After a long holiday break, we’re all ready to get back and are really looking forward to a new semester full of events and changes!

Firstly, work has progressed much in preparing for our new coffee shop that should be open for business during the early part of the Spring ‘08 semester.  Also, we are happy to welcome the CNS Help Desk to its new location within our building, which should hopefully make the library a one stop shop for a number of student needs.  Lastly, we are happy to welcome Super Teaching to the library as well.

Stick with us in the upcoming weeks for more updates on each of these!

This is a reminder that the library will be closed from 5:00pm, Friday December 21st until 8:00am, Wednesday January 2nd. This includes the Ask a Librarian service. Thank you.

On Thursday and Friday of next, the library will be hosting the E-Info Global Symposium. Speakers scheduled to present at the event have prepared presentations based on libraries and their relationship to different areas of technology. If you would like to learn more of the event, please visit its page at einfoglobal.uah.edu.

There’s also still time to sign up if you would like to register as a participant. We’re very excited to host this for the second consecutive year and look forward to meeting everyone there.