Learn about Gleeson Library

Want to learn more about the Gleeson Library | Geschke Center? Join us for a library tour. A library staff person will take you around the library, show you the building, and tell you about some of the library’s services.

The tours last about 30 minutes and meet in the lobby. No need to sign up, just join us!

Tours are being given on:

Friday January 18th at 4:30pm

Saturday January 19th at 1pm

Tuesday January 22nd at 2pm

Wednesday January 23rd at 10am

Thursday January 24th at 12 noon

If you can’t make any of these times, we also give tours on the first Monday of each month at 3pm.

Learn about Gleeson Library

New to USF? Or a current student but you are a little unsure where everything is in the library? Join us for a library tour. The tours last about 30 minutes and a library staff member takes you around the building, shows you where things are located, and discusses some of the library’s services available to you.

We’re giving tours on:

Monday January 23 @ 3pm

Tuesday January 24 @ 12 noon

Wednesday January 25 @ 2 pm

Thursday January 26 @ 10 am

No need to sign up for anything–just meet us in the library’s lobby at those times. Everyone is welcome!

Tours of Gleeson

Want to learn more about Gleeson? Join us for a tour of the library and learn more about what the library has to offer you. The tours meet inside the library, in the lobby, and last about 30 minutes.

There’s no need to sign up, just come and join us!

The tours meet:
Monday, August 22 at 1:30pm
Tuesday, August 23 at 11am
Wednesday, August 24 at 4pm
Thursday, August 25 at 10:30am
Friday, August 26 at 2pm

Spring Library Tours

Curious about the library? Join us for a library tour and learn more about what the library has to offer you. The tours meet inside the library, in the lobby, and last about 30 minutes. There’s no need to sign up, just come and join us!

The tours meet:
Monday, January 24 at 10am
Tuesday, January 25 at 2pm
Wednesday, January 26 at 12:30pm
Thursday, January 27 at 11am
Friday, January 28 at 3pm

Peer Review and the web

The New York Times recently published an interesting article about how the traditional peer review process is being looked at in the context of the democracy of the web. It described an experiment by the journal Shakespeare Quarterly which posted four articles not yet accepted for publication and invited people to submit comments on the articles. They received over 350 comments.

The article talks about how more academic writers are reaching out for feedback from readers while a work is still in progress, using websites like MediaCommons, and what some of the implications these kinds of changes may have for tenure and promotion decisions at universities.

BP and search engines

For the last couple of months, if you search Google and put in words like oil spill or gulf oil spill, at the top of the results list, you will get an ad from BP with the title BP Response. In it, BP gives you their side of the story about the oil disaster in the gulf and how they are responding to it. Unless you look carefully, it is easy to confuse the BP ad with the Google search results.

It is common on search engines that ads respond to your search terms, but this is the first time that I can remember that not only is the ad appearing, but where on the results page it appears is always the same. The real estate of web pages matter. By always placing the ad between the search box and the results list, it can blur the line between ads and search results.

There have been articles in the news about this and sites discussing the ethics of this. And according to some articles, BP has done the same on Yahoo and Bing.

My guess is that this case will be studied for years in business schools and how BP has used search engines to put out their message is an important part of their public relations strategy. There is nothing wrong with ads, of course. Google is able to digitize some amazing things because of their ad income. But we as search engine users need to be aware of how information can be influenced by things like the placement of ads on a results page. And as a librarian, I have to point out the obvious: library databases don’t have ads and so how their results display cannot be influenced like this.

Tours of the Library

New to USF? Or just curious to learn more about the library? Join us for a tour of the Gleeson Library Geschke Center. A library staff person will show you around the library and tell you about our services.

The tours last about 30 minutes and meet inside the lobby, in front of the fountain across from the Circulation Desk.

No need to sign up. Just come and join us!

The tours meet:
Monday, January 25th at 2pm
Tuesday, January 26th at 11am
Wednesday, January 27th at 10am
Thursday, January 28th at 2pm
Friday, January 29th at 3pm

Magazines in Google Books

Google books has begun adding full text magazines. They have digitized almost 100 magazines, from cover to cover, showing us the ads, pictures, articles. Each magazine seems to vary how far back in time they go.

They wrote about adding magazines to google books on their blog a year ago.

They are really interesting and fun to look through, plus they are great historic documents. By digitizing every page, it is almost like going to the Periodicals stacks on the second floor of Gleeson and flipping through them on the shelves.

Obituaries and history

Last week, on World AIDS Day, the GLBT Historical Society and the Bay Area Reporter, the local glbt newspaper, released a database of obituaries of persons who died of AIDS. Looking through it is like looking at a time capsule.

I moved to San Francisco in 1983 and like so many gay men of my generation, I remember throughout the 80′s and 90′s reading the BAR’s obituaries each week, sometimes seeing someone I knew, sometimes just reading about all of these lives intertwined here in San Francisco.

I’m sure many people here at USF will look up people they knew. Two people connected to the USF library I thought of were Brooks Liston, who worked in the Law Library, and Steve Corey, who was the Rare Books Librarian here at Gleeson.

Looking through these obituaries, the database really captures a moment in time and helps us remember so many people whose lives touched ours.

Google Fast Flip

In addition to their usual Google News, Google is trying a new way of presenting news with their Fast Flip. It comes closer to the sensation of standing at a newsstand, just browsing, looking at different articles, different publications. You can click on the arrow on the side of the page to flip through other news stories.

If you want to read more about it, they have an FAQ. It is currently in Google Labs, the part of their website where they have the things they are still experimenting with or developing.

It is an interesting way to present the news–check it out.

Reading newspapers on computers in 1981

With all the talk about printed newspapers dying out, there’s a funny video on YouTube from a 1981 news program on San Francisco’s KRON channel 4. On it, they describe how some people are now able to read the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle using their home computers.

It’s a great reminder of what the early internet looked like before hypertext, before using a mouse, pointing and clicking, etc. They mention at the end of the story that it takes two hours to download the whole paper. It’s amazing how newspapers (and libraries!) have changed so much that the early 1980′s now look like ancient history

The eCard from the San Francisco Public Library – updated

Update: Penny Scott has alerted us that SFPL’s eCard program has been suspended due to electronic vendor licensing agreements. See Penny’s comment #5 below. — Debbie B.

The San Francisco Public Library has introduced a new kind of library card. They call it their eCard and any California resident can register on their website for one. You don’t even have to go to the library to register, you can do it all at your computer.

It gives you access to all of their electronic resources and databases. They have some databases that we don’t subscribe to here at USF, like the San Francisco Chronicle Historical file or the History Resource Center.

So if you are a student, faculty, or staff person, getting an eCard increases your access to more electronic resources!

And thanks to Jerry Dear, an SFPL Librarian, who pointed this new resource out to me.

Spring Library Tours

Want to learn more about the library? Join us for a tour of the Gleeson Library Geschke Center. A library staff member will show you around the building and tell you about our services. We’ll visit areas you may not be as familiar with like Government Documents and the Rare Book Room. Tours meet inside the Library in the lobby, across from the Circulation Desk, and last about 30 minutes.

No need to sign up–just show up at any of these times.

Monday, January 26th at 2 pm
Tuesday, January 27th at 10 am
Wednesday, January 28th at 3pm
Thursday, January 29th at 12:30 pm
Friday, January 30th at 11 am

If you can’t make any of these times, we also give tours of the library on the first Monday of each month at 3pm.

Librarians on the informational picket line

Librarians do lots of different things: we catalog books, digitize documents, search databases, teach people how to evaluate websites, build book collections, to name just a few. This week we did something different: we walked an informational picket line. Students may have seen us and wondered what was going on.

The librarians here at Gleeson are members of the USF Faculty Association. The Faculty Association is a union of the full time faculty and librarians founded in the late 1970′s. For the last 4 months, the Association has been negotiating with the University administration for our contract. Although we have made progress on some issues, we are stuck on the questions of salary and retirement. The goal of the informational picketing was to reach out to the rest of the university and make them aware of our concerns and hopefully move the negotiations forward. We are not on strike but instead are just trying to spread the word. Librarians always believe the more information people have, the better.

The Foghorn just published a front page article about our informational picketing in this week’s issue and they are promising more in depth coverage next week.

Faculty and Librarians on Harney Plaza on Monday

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

There was a recent interesting article in The Atlantic about the web and the impact it may be having on the way we read. Asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” the author, Nicholas Carr, is not some mindless Luddite saying the web is always bad, but he says he can see within himself that he is spending less time doing “deep reading” with books and more time with short pieces of information that he gets from the web. He wonders if our brains could be changing because we are all processing shorter pieces of information. He talks about how technology–the printing press, the typewriter, even mechanical clocks–changed our ways of thinking.

It would be interesting if faculty who have taught over time see this change happening in students–or in themselves as readers. I see it in myself sometimes. I have to consciously choose to stop being on the web and sit and read without distractions. I wonder if students who grew up with the web as part of their lives see any validity in the distinction between “deep reading” and web reading?