The Library finally joined Facebook! Become a fan and show your love: add pictures, write on the wall, make a super wall post, or start a discussion. Plus, all Gleeson Gleanings blog posts are imported as notes on the Facebook page. Whoopie!

PolicyArchive, an online archive of public-policy research was recently launched by Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis University Library and the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group that encourages civic engagement.

PolicyArchive now holds more than 12,000 policy documents from about 220 think tanks and research groups. The archive’s developers say it will house up to 20,000 documents by the end of 2008. They want it to become the largest online repository of public-policy research in the world.

The archive documents are freely available, and publishers are encouraged to upload their documents to the site.

From Policy Archive at IUPUI University Library (Indiana University-Purdue University):

PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations.

Problem: American philanthropic foundations spend over $1.5 billion a year on research. Spread out across the nation among diverse libraries, institutions, databases, and websites, this valuable research can be difficult or impossible to identify and obtain once it has been published. Research organizations have no central place to distribute or archive their content, and search engines cannot easily locate much policy research. Research is not optimized to appear at the top of search engine results. Existing policy websites are focused on single issues or available only upon payment of substantial fees.

Solution: PolicyArchive simplifies this complex research landscape by providing a universal, easy-to-use, free, and open digital archive of foundation-funded and other public policy research. The PolicyArchive solution provides public interest organizations a low-cost electronic system for distributing, publicizing, and archiving their research. It allows research users, policy makers, the media, and the public to quickly access the depth and breadth of research in various subject matters. It also provides a direct line of communication between research providers and end-users, thus increasing public awareness of an organization’s work and adding significant value to their research investment. Ultimately, PolicyArchive will indefinitely preserve the life of public policy research, substantially increase its impact, and provide society at large with long-term access to the benefits of that important research.

Howdy!

The USF Book Club is reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd for our next selection. Come join us for some laughs and discussion!

We’re meeting on Tuesday, August 5, 2008

12 noon - 1 pm in the Seminar Room (2nd Fl) of Gleeson Library

Bring your lunch and tell your colleagues! The more the merrier.

This event is limited to USF Faculty and Staff, as it is co-sponsored by the USF Well Life Department.

If you want to get the book through the library’s free service, Link+, click here.

It takes about 4 business days for a book to arrive through Link+.

Hope to see you there!

We had sad news here at Gleeson/Geschke this week. On Sunday, circulation staffer and stacks supervisor Jacquie Horton died. Jacquie had cancer and had been on leave for several months, returning to work briefly for a short period this spring. We miss her.

I work in a different department and so didn’t work with Jacquie much directly, but she was one of those co-workers whose influence goes far beyond day-to-day tasks. These are some of the gifts she gave us:

She had a wicked sense of humor. Jacquie made me laugh when I ran into her in the staff room or when I came to her with a question or needed help with a circulation matter.

She was an attentive and helpful colleague, smart and resourceful — good librarian traits.

She was a crackerjack knitter with a great sense of style. She wore the most beautiful clothes that she made herself. She was modest about it but very generous with help and advice about knitting.

She worked really hard. Pretty much single-handedly Jacquie loaded thousands of books from the stacks onto book trucks last year for a massive and dusty library-wide weeding and shifting project.

We were lucky to have Jacquie with us. We won’t forget her.

Her obituary was published today in the Chronicle.

My sincere condolences go to Jacquie’s family and friends.

When my niece was still a little girl, her infant brother and I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon watching Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on video.  I remember one scene when (– and hey, spoilers here, if you’re about 17 years behind on your animation DVD stack–), the awkward Beast attempts to impress the reticent Belle by opening the doors of his wonderful, personal library.  Neatly arranged, if undusted, books tower inside the cavernous space, and the astonished bookworm, Belle, has that expression on her face that says, “Hey– forget the dancing china, I could get used to this!”  (Or perhaps that was just my reading.)

As they say, ‘He did good.’

My niece, quite the reader at the time, had that equally impressed twinkle in her eye when the castle library doors opened to a lifetime of books without renewals.  She’d already learned, in her young life, the power inside libraries, but, more surprisingly, so did I.  By that time in my own life, I was already a longtime library employee, and had forgotten the wonderful and occasionally untapped treasure that surrounds me daily.  Familiarity breeds.. well, disinterest it seems, and I learned that afternoon that it’s good to be reminded.   I turned to her, and pointed excitedly to the TV.

“I work there!”

This did not impress her.  She gave me the raised eyebrow snarl of a skeptical child.  “Really?”

“Yeah.  I work in a library.”

“Really?  Wow!”

Wow indeed.   To this day, I am still quite dazzled by the wonderful resources and reads in our library, my knowledgeable and esteemed colleagues, and the breadth and depth of our collection.  Just now, for example, the beautiful and brilliant Head of Acquisitions handed me 7 volumes of the acclaimed graphic novel series, Y: The Last Man, to add to our collection…  Guess what I’m checking out next?  Finally, I appreciate the fact that our collection has no cobwebs or backtalking candlesticks anywhere nearby– well, as far as I know, anyway.

I will also admit that I remain continually delighted when I watch a scene of a library in the entertainment media, or hear its reference in a story.  So I was pleased to find that Public Radio International’s current download for their wonderful Selected Shorts series, is a program called, “Loving Libraries,” an hour of commercial-free readings of short stories about libraries, read by truly wonderful reader/performers.  Like most episodes of the series, you can download this program from iTunes (it’s free), and it’s great if you have low-vision, or you’re on MUNI, or washing dishes, and just want to zone out.  But for those of you who prefer to have a classic, timeless, version 1.0, hard copy– for when you do that Belle imitation walking down the street– we do have the stories from the program in Gleeson’s collection.

Italo Calvino’s, “A General in the Library,” appears in his collection, Numbers in the Dark: and Other Stories.  Edith Wharton’s excerpt on Henry James reading poetry in her library, is from her memoir, A Backward Glance, and we have the original, 1934 edition of this book in our collection.  Finally, Ray Bradbury’s short story, “Exchange,” appears, along with other wonderful short stories, in a book called, In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians– which includes a little Borges, a little LeGuin, a little Saki (everything’s good with a little Saki), and many, many more.

So all this brings me to ask, are there any other stories or scenes about libraries that particularly impressed you or someone you love?  We’d love to hear them in the comments section.

Finding the fulltext of government funded research and news just got a lot easier! That’s because Gleeson Library|Geschke Center just added 438 U.S. government periodicals to Journal Finder. Just go to Journal Finder on the library’s homepage, type in the name of the government periodical (e.g., “Peace Watch”), and you’ll get a link to the issues that are available online.

Hi there! The library will be closed on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 for our annual staff retreat.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Guido Brunetti is at it again! Join us to discuss the latest installation of this Venetian policeman’s mystery series. This time Brunetti becomes haunted by the death of a young gypsy girl.

The Girl of His Dreams

by Donna Leon

We will meet on Tuesday July 8, 2008 from 12 noon - 1 pm in the seminar room (2nd floor) of Gleeson Library. Bring your lunch and tell your colleagues! (USF Staff and Faculty only)

If you want to try requesting the book through the library’s free service, Link+, click here. Link+ takes 3-4 business days and is free.

**notice: this book is very popular at the moment, so it may be difficult to get through Link+.
If you purchase it, please consider using Better World Books.

Now available is the Oxford African American Studies Center from Oxford University Press. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the OAASC is a collection of reference works providing more than 8000 articles on the people and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture. Check it out!

We have a new database available from EBSCOhost called Environment Complete. This replaces the LexisNexis Environmental database (which contained the venerable Environment Abstracts). We believe the journal coverage of Environment Complete is broader and deeper (back to the 1940s in some cases), and unlike the LexisNexis product, offers more than 600 journal titles in full-text. What’s not to like?