Follow Lowell Thomas Travelogue on Twitter

Throughout the month of December the Marist College Archives and Special Collections twitter account @LowellJThomas will have a Lowell Thomas Travelogue Theme, tweeting pictures and quotes from Thomas's famous World War I travelogue series "With Allenby in Palestine and with Lawrence in Arabia".

In 1918 Lowell Thomas went overseas to photograph the allied war effort. After first visiting the western front, it was in Egypt, Palestine and Arabia that Thomas and his photographer Harry Chase took their most spectacular motion pictures and photographs. It is at this time that Thomas also met T.E. Lawrence, whom, through Lowell Thomas's Travelogue, would become legendarily famous. The multimedia show about Lowell Thomas's travels through Palestine and Arabia became a sensation in America and Europe due to the incredible photographs and Thomas's commentary. Follow @LowellJThomas on twitter today to experience it for yourself!

Library help over the break

As the semester draws to a close The James A. Cannavino wishes you all happy holidays.

During the mid-winter break many faculty will be using the time to work on research and prepare classes for the coming semester.  The Library will be open many days during the break.  If you are working from home and have library-related questions, please contact us.

• Day by day Library hours are posted on the Library calendar.
• Phone us at 845-575-3292 when the Library is open.
• Send an email anytime to Ask-A-Librarian@marist.edu.
• ILL  will be available and fully staffed  throughout the break.
• Librarians will be available all days the Library is open to work with you in person or by telephone.

Katy Silberger will be available throughout the break to work with you on iLearn/Library issues.  If you would like help creating an “electronic reserve reading list” or linking to the Library instructional videos, please contact her.  If you would prefer to work from home, she can offer assistance by telephone and email.  Her direct phone number is 845-575-3419.

Collaborate with Students in the Library

Do you ever want to meet with a small group of students in the Library?

 Four collaborative rooms in the Library are available for faculty and staff use from 8:00am to 5:00pm, Monday through Friday.  They are located on the second floor in the Alumni Reading Room area of the Library.

The rooms accommodate between 5 and 8 people and may be reserved for 1 to 3 hours up to a week in advance.

 This space is made available for occasional meetings rather than regularly scheduled activity.

To reserve a room, please contact the Academic Learning Center at 575-3300.

Room #	# Seats	Features
300A	8	Whiteboard
300B	6	Computer
300C	6	Computer
300D	5	Computer

Why doesn't the Library have this journal?

Recently a faculty member asked me why Marist's library doesn't receive two respected journals of Catholic thought: America and First Things, yet does receive the similarly respected Commonweal.  The short answer is, we do get all three, but not in print.

Marist College Library's long-term commitment to build a digital library has enabled us to move from  1200 serial titles in print to more than 55,000 titles accessible digitally.  A complete, searchable list can be found by visiting the Library Catalog and clicking the "Journals" link.

Search tip: use the drop down option for one-word titles, as below.

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Many digital editions lack the glossy, eye-catching covers and stimulating layouts of corresponding print versions.  This is especially true if they are part of a massive library database, and especially troubling if you rely on covers and headlines - catching your eye as you casually browse the library main floor -  to remind you of the valuable content inside.  But one often overlooked advantage of these digital serials, is that they allow any Marist community member to create, essentially, their own personal email subscription.

All of our major content providers offer this service - typically styled "Alert"

Examples below:

WilsonWeb














Ebsco

Once activated, this service will deliver the tables of contents of any journal with links to the full text article, on a schedule you can set.  And for the more adventurous, most can create RSS feeds too.

Of course there are many more valuable features of digital publications, and many challenges in working with them.  Please don't hesitate to contact me (Mark Colvson, 845-575-5218) or any of my colleagues to ask about finding digital serials, building them into your pedagogy, or any other features you nay have wondered about.

Putting the Library in iLearn: Mair Room, Thursday Nov. 17, 1-4 pm.

Come and learn how easy it is to link to the Library’s online articles, books, videos and images this coming Thursday from 1:00 to 4:00 pm. This CTE session will be held in Margaret Mair Room in the James A. Cannavino Library.

This will be a practical hands-on session.  You will learn how to copy article links from library databases and embed those links into iLearn "Resources", "Lessons", "Emails", "Forums", etc.  You will be introduced to the Marist iLearn Library Site which contains written instructions and brief instructional videos created by the Library.

The Library has a strong collection of electronic resources that you can use in iLearn including:

• 5,000+ Online Videos (Documentaries, American History, Counseling & Education)

• 85,000+ e-books

• 55,000+ electronic periodicals

• 1.7 million images (Artstor, etc.)

• Hundreds of electronic reference resources

Register for this session at the Center for Teaching Excellence Workshops: iLearn Training Workshops page.  (Its the last session at the bottom of the page.)

If you are interested in this topic but have a time conflict, please email Kathryn.Silberger@marist.edu and we will arrange to work with you at a more convenient time.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Student Newspaper Archive Now Available On-line

You can now read 40 years’ worth of Marist College Students newspapers on-line. To search across four decades of campus history you can use our new Archives Search, or to browse issues of the Record or the Circle by year please visit our Student Newspaper Webpage.

Help Us Build Marist's Collections

We all know that the Library exists to support Marist's fundamental teaching mission.  But we sometimes forget that faculty may be the first to discover critical gaps in our collections, or hear about important new works we should acquire.  So here's a reminder.  Please regularly submit recommendations, via our Materials Suggestion Form, or by any other reasonable means:

• email book reviews or publication notices;
• circle items on a photocopy of a bibliography page or journal review article; 
• tear out a publishers catalog page, circle your recommendation and send it along (or send the whole catalog!);
• use the "Notes" field in an Inter-Library Loan request to alert  us that an item would make a good addition to the collection.

Rules of Thumb

1. Send suggestions to Judy Diffenderfer (Judy.Diffenderfer@marist.edu), Collection Development Librarian, or your department's Library Liaison.  They can expedite purchases, alert you when items arrive on shelf, and/or advise on collection policy for your discipline.
2. Include your name on everything you send in. 
3. Supply a good citation. Minimally - title, author(s), publisher and year; better -ISBN.  Or try emailing a reference from Worldcat.org (a massive database of over a billion items held in libraries worldwide).

 Of course the Library faces budget and policy constraints.  We won't be able to acquire every recommendation automatically.  But it's highly valuable to know what faculty are looking for.  Even when we cannot fill requests immediately, we do keep them on file for when opportunities arise down the road.

We are very grateful to the many of you who stay involved in library collection building.  For those who haven't, or haven't recently, please give it a try.  You'll be surprised how easy it is to help strengthen Marist's library in the areas that matter most to you.

Sage Journals Online

Our subscription to the Sage journals online, called Sage Premium, has been upgraded to include over 600 journals. The new subscription also includes all new titles launched this year, such as Organizational Psychology Review; Race and Justice; Society and Mental Health; The Neurohospitalist; and Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety. The database is accessible through the library's A-Z database page and many of the subject pages. Check it out at http://online.sagepub.com.online.library.marist.edu/search

New Exhibit in the Lowell Thomas Communication Center

Journey to the Land of Our Past with the Lowell Thomas Travelogues

Journalist, lecturer, author, broadcaster and famous globetrotter,

Lowell Thomas was the foremost raconteur of the twentieth century. His

long and distinguished public career began in the wartime deserts of

the Middle East and was completed here in Dutchess County. His 1919

travelogue, "With Allenby in Palestine, and Lawrence in Arabia" was

the most popular of its kind, became the lens through which the West

perceived the First World War in the Middle East, and popularized T.E.

Lawrence who became famous worldwide as "the Uncrowned King of

Arabia." The exhibit attempts to recreate the experience of Lowell

Thomas's famous travelogues as well as provide a historical survey of

the related events from 1917 to 1919. Displayed are major aspects of

the presentation, relevant documents and advertising, and biographical

sketches of major figures. Visitors learn how Thomas presented the

wartime Middle East in two parts, the land of our constructed past and

the land of the Other - the land of the Bible and that of The Arabian

Nights.

The Lowell Thomas Papers were donated to Marist College by the Thomas

family in 2006. The processing and preservation of the collection was

completed in October of 2009 with the help of a grant from the

National Archives and Record Administration's Historical Publications

and Records Commission (NHPRC). The Lowell Thomas Papers are

housed at the Marist College Archives & Special Collections,

located on the first floor of the James A. Cannavino Library.

Many of the collections images and objects have been digitized through the support of

an additional grant from the NHPRC and are available on-line at

http://library.marist.edu/archives/search/.

The exhibit will be up for the 2011 - 2012 academic year.

Environmental History Collections

The Archives and Special Collections is becoming well known for its rich environmental history collections, which include thousands of books, documents, photographs, audio, and video materials documenting the Scenic Hudson Decision.

The Scenic Hudson Decision was a 17-year (1963-1981) legal dispute which defeated Consolidated Edison's plan to embed the world's largest pumped storage hydroelectric plant into the face of Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall, New York. The lengthy and controversial case had an immense impact on environmental and legal issues affecting the Hudson River Valley as well as the nation. The landmark case set important precedents in environmental law including: the right of citizens to participate in environmental disputes, the emergence of environmental law as a legal specialty, ideas Congress incorporated in the country's first National Environment Policy Act (NEPA), federal and state regulation of the environment, and it is credited with launching the modern environmental movement. Now approximately 1,000 books can be found on the Library catalog and all 17 of our archival collections documenting Scenic Hudson Decision have finding aids available on-line.

The environmental collections' newest addition is the recently published book,  Environmental History of the Hudson River: Human Uses that Changed the Ecology, Ecology that Changed Human Uses (SUNY Press, 2011), which includes Executive Vice President Geoffrey Brackett’s chapter  “Thy Fate and Mine Are Not Repose”: The Hudson and Its Influence.