Shantel Agnew, LaVerne Gray, and Mark Puente recently joined the faculty of the UT Libraries as Minority Librarian Residents. The residency program, which began in 2003, was created to attract recent library school graduates from underrepresented groups to a career in academic librarianship.

As part of the program, residents will spend the next two years working closely with librarians to develop skills and career paths, cultivate collegial relationships with faculty outside the library, participate in committees, and become involved in professional associations. In the first year, residents will do professional rotations within the libraries; in the second year, they will focus on one area and complete a specialized project.

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A Synthesis of Research and Technology Resources is Now Available in One Location

It’s every student’s worst nightmare: you have a problem, but you’ll spend hours wandering around campus trying to find a solution. Perhaps your NetID login isn’t working. Or that new wireless card you bought makes your laptop do funky things. Or maybe you’ve been slammed with a research project that’s due in a couple of days, and you don’t know where to begin. The last thing you want to do is be shuffled all over campus, from office to office, feeling foolish and spending half a day trying to get your problems solved.

Now, thanks to a collaboration between the UT Libraries and the Office of Information Technology (OIT), some of the most frequently used library and technology resources are available in one location, called the Commons, located on the second floor of Hodges Library.

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A Synthesis of Research and Technology Resources is Now Available in One Location

It’s every student’s worst nightmare: you have a problem, but you’ll spend hours wandering around campus trying to find a solution. Perhaps your NetID login isn’t working. Or that new wireless card you bought makes your laptop do funky things. Or maybe you’ve been slammed with a research project that’s due in a couple of days, and you don’t know where to begin. The last thing you want to do is be shuffled all over campus, from office to office, feeling foolish and spending half a day trying to get your problems solved.

Now, thanks to a collaboration between the UT Libraries and the Office of Information Technology (OIT), some of the most frequently used library and technology resources are available in one location, called the Commons, located on the second floor of Hodges Library.

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Get ahead this semester by taking a Hodges Library tour before classes start.

Tours are held:

Thursday August 18 at 4 p.m.
Friday, August 19 at 3 p.m.
Saturday, August 20 at 2 p.m.
Monday, August 22 at 3 p.m.
Tuesday, August 23 at 11 a.m.

Joining a tour is easy. Meet at the Hodges Library Melrose Avenue entrance (2nd floor, at the Welcome Center near the main circulation desk and before Starbuks) right at tour time. The tour is just 45 minutes long and will provide an overview of library services.

Get ahead this semester by taking a Hodges Library tour before classes start.

Tours are held:

Thursday August 18 at 4 p.m.
Friday, August 19 at 3 p.m.
Saturday, August 20 at 2 p.m.
Monday, August 22 at 3 p.m.
Tuesday, August 23 at 11 a.m.

Joining a tour is easy. Meet at the Hodges Library Melrose Avenue entrance (2nd floor, at the Welcome Center near the main circulation desk and before Starbuks) right at tour time. The tour is just 45 minutes long and will provide an overview of library services.

Scientific and technological research is crucial to the advancement and betterment of society; however there is a shortage of librarians trained to work specifically with scientists. Thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the University of Tennessee hopes to solve that problem with a new librarian training program called Science Links.

IMLS awarded the University of Tennessee a $632,249 grant as part of their Librarians for the 21st Century initiative, created to help recruit and educate the next generation of librarians. Bill Robinson, Associate Professor in UT

A recent study has ranked the University of Tennessee Libraries among the top research libraries in the nation.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) ranked UT Libraries third in the Southeastern Conference, 27th out of 68 public research university libraries in the U.S. and Canada, and 45th among all 113 ARL-affiliated research institutions.

This is a significant rise for UT from the year before, when UT was 32nd among public research institutions and 53rd overall.

The report also noted that UT had the fifth largest increase in total expenditures, about 55 percent since the 1998-99 academic year.

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Barbara Dewey, Dean of Libraries at the University of Tennessee since 2000, will represent academic libraries in the Southeastern U.S. and the Carribean and assist with improving access to the world’s information.

Dewey was among those elected to the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET) delegation to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Members Council at SOLINET’s Annual Membership Meeting this May in Atlanta. SOLINET is a network of 2,600 libraries that works to strengthen libraries and the communities they support. OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to information worldwide and reducing information costs.

In explaining the significance of the SOLINET delegation to the OCLC Members Council, Dewey said, “SOLINET has some of the most innovative libraries in the world, and we play an instrumental role in guiding OCLC towards the most effective programs to support our faculty, students, patrons, and staff as we make dramatic changes in the way we acquire and access information resources.” Dewey is Chair of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Diversity Committee, President of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), and member of the Board of the New Media Consortium.

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Digital course catalogs help university to better serve students

A recent yearlong collaboration among the Office of the University Registrar, the University of Tennessee Libraries and the Office of Creative Services made an essential publication for the UT community easily accessible, and has yielded a notable campus accolade – the UT Employee Team Excellence Award.

“Providing this service to our users is yet another way we strive to carry out our Service Philosophy – ‘providing the highest quality service to all patrons, and equitable access to information in print and electronic resources,’” Barbara Dewey, Dean of University Libraries, said. “This award is truly an honor to our team members and our libraries.”

The project to digitize the UT undergraduate and graduate college catalogs began in mid-2003 and took a year to complete, from the first steps of determining the ownership of the catalogs to the final posting of the documents. The key aspect of the project was devising a method of converting existing catalogs into PDFs, which can be viewed online with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Now, all users of the catalog can access any undergraduate or graduate catalog from 1994 to the present. The team plans to digitize all catalogs published and is currently in the process of doing so.

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