Paws on the Island — A Finals Tradition

As the semester winds down (or up – depending on your course load!) we all start to feel a little stress. Students are getting ready for exams, gathering sources for final papers, and polishing presentations! Faculty members are getting rubrics ready and getting ready for final grades. It can be a time of high energy. We do our best when we’re getting enough sleep, eating right, and taking care of ourselves. Paws on the Island is an amazing opportunity to…

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Come work with us in Special Collections!

You might think working in a library would be boring and all you would do is shelve books. However, modern libraries are bustling centers of traditional collection management and next level technology solutions. Working at Bell Library Special Collections offers something for everyone. Students interested in History can apply their skills researching and describing archival collections while being exposed to data management and networked systems. Students who are more technology oriented can work on digital projects and help develop our…

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Do You Suffer from Library Anxiety?

Yep, it’s a real thing, and you may suffer from it without even knowing it. Library anxiety is a common problem that can prevent people from using the library and its resources effectively, which can hurt your ability to complete coursework or possibly lower your potential grade. So, what exactly is library anxiety? Very basically, library anxiety is a fear of either using the library space, which is often seen as overwhelming and confusing, or the fear of not knowing…

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You Mustn’t Be Afraid to Fail

If you're like me, you have had countless things that you've wanted to try and do in life. I toyed with the idea of learning to do carpentry after watching a house-flipping show. However, something stopped me from pursuing it. Sometime later, after binge watching Project Runway, I convinced myself that I could design and construct my own clothing. But again, something kept preventing me from trying. That invisible road block was fear, a fear of failure. For me, the…

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A Review of The Library Book

I admit it. When I think about sitting down with a good book to read purely for enjoyment, I think of fiction…specifically science fiction or fantasy. So when I checked out The Library Book by Susan Orlean from the Library’s Popular Reading Collection, I was thrilled to discover how enjoyable and engrossing it was. On the surface this book tells the story of the 1986 fire of the Los Angeles Public Library main branch, one of the worst building fires in the…

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Are You Gen X, a Millennial, or Gen Z?: Exploring the Generations

You hear the terms flying around. Maybe they were used in relation to avocado toast, Tide pods, or even Oregon Trail. I’m talkin’ ‘bout my generation (well, not MINE alone, I just couldn’t resist referencing the song by The Who). I’m actually talking about generations X, Y, and Z, more commonly known as Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. According to the Pew Research Center, these three generations (and a few others) are broken down like so: Silent - born 1928-45 (ages 74-91);Boomers -…

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The Islander Family at Bell Library Welcomes Vanessa Claros

Meet Vanessa Claros, one of our newest library staff members, who began her position as Library Specialist II, Cataloging on March 11, 2019, as part of the Resource Management & Discovery Department. Vanessa, her husband and their young daughter, Isabelle, age 20 months, recently set forth on a major move from Lawrenceville, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, all the way to Corpus Christi, Texas. To be exact, we are talking about a distance of well over 1,000 miles, and roughly…

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Ways to Relax in the Library

We here at the Mary and Jeff Bell Library understand that life can be stressful. This is why we offer a variety of ways to help take the edge off of your tense day. We currently offer 38 games of different varieties that you and your friends can use inside the library. These games range from time honored board games like Monopoly and Candyland to games like trivia based on the TV show the Walking Dead. Below you will find…

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Frame of the Day: Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Last Friday, the Dean of the Library, Cate Rudowsky, wrote a blog post discussing the upcoming Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), information literacy, and why it’s all important. I’m going to dig a little bit deeper and talk about the actual concepts as they have been outlined in The Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, the go-to resource on everything you need to know about information literacy, which for the sake of my typin’ fingers, I’m just going to refer to…

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