The USF Book Club will discuss The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls on May 28, 2008 (Wednesday). We will meet in the Seminar Room (2nd Fl) of Gleeson Library | Geschke Resource Center from 12 noon – 1 pm. Bring your lunch! (Faculty and staff only.)
If you want to request this book through the library’s free service Link+, click here. It takes 3-4 business days for a book to arrive.
“I WAS SITTING IN a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster,” begins The Glass Castle. Jeanette Walls’ memoir recounts her bizarre (and traumatic) upbringing by her brilliant alcoholic dad and her free spirit artsy mom, but never verges on sentimental. Click here for reviews via Amazon, or click here for a lengthy (plot spoiling) review from the New York Times.
The University of San Francisco recently hosted the bi-annual Joint Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Library Directors/Chief Information Officers/Educational Technology conference. Close to 100 individuals attended and their reviews of the meeting were excellent. While many timely issues facing academic libraries, IT, and the use of technology in the classroom were discussed, we also reserved time for some great socialization including a dinner cruise on the San Francisco Bay, a trip to the wine country, and a tour of the new 95 million learning commons at Santa Clara University. Mary Lee Sweat and her colleagues created a flickr photo gallery. The meeting represented 10 years of library directors’ meeting outside of the American Library Association’s annual conference. Thanks to Carmen Fernandez-Baybay, Shawn P. Calhoun, Vicki Rosen, Tracy Schroeder, Carol Cook, Richard Soo, John Bansavich, and a host of other Library and IT staff for making this one of the best conferences ever!
The Davies Forum Digital Literacy class invaded the library last night and transformed the space between the Circulation and Reference desks into a reading fort with comfy chairs, library flip books, and their reading favorites along with an annotated list posted on the wall (See the list here), plus space where we’re invited to add our own favorites. Below are photos of parts of the installation.
Here’s Gleeson gleaner Kelci Baughman McDowell perusing a flip book.
There’s even a contest!
The fort provides a cozy place to read.
Class Professor David Silver took excellent pictures of the construction process including the image above.
Alas the fort fell sometime this morning! We’ve been assured that help is on the way. In the meantime here’s how it looks all vanquished. Kelci swears she had nothing to do with it.
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NOON UPDATE: Hooray! The fort is back!
and Prof. David Silver’s Digital Literacy class is helping us celebrate, in part by letting us know what students wish we would do as well as what they appreciate about the library. I’m looking forward to seeing more students’ ideas.
Here’s what National Library Week is all about.
