Hi. I'm Ed Warga. I'm the digital collections librarian and subject liaison to the life science and physical science programs at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. I thought I might tell you all about my favorite room in the library. Bell Library has many great spaces. There's a nice little nook tucked away on the second floor with study space under one of the three banks of windows in the library. I like this space because of the natural light and flexible…
This semester marks the first time since the opening of the I-Create Lab that we will begin charging to use the equipment in the makerspace. There are several materials that must be maintained in order to keep the equipment in running order, such as cleaning cartridges for the large format printer, filters for the laser cutter, painters’ tape for the 3D printers, router bits and screws for the CNC router. These are just a few items needed for maintenance, and this doesn’t…
We’re excited to announce the launch of our new and refreshed website. Just a few days before the beginning of the Fall semester, Bell Library launched an improved website with all new content and organization. If you’ve visited the library home page recently, you might not have noticed much change. We kept the same look and feel for the home page that was launched in January 2018. You’ll find most of the major changes by poking around in the menu…
In the 2018-2019 Academic Year, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) filled just shy of 10,000 requests! To put this in perspective, this is almost double the number of requests filled just 5 years ago in 2013-2014. And we did it all with less staff! That said, we thought it would be fun to share with you the year's most borrowed journals and books, as requested by TAMU-CC students, faculty, and staff, then follow up with a few observations. Top 11 most borrowed…
Maybe you have heard this one before…books are the gateway to learning and knowledge. Ultra-successful people are the perfect example of this. Warren Buffett believes the key to success is reading. Bill Gates reads about 50 books a year. Elon Musk says he learned to build rockets by reading books. Books can not only help us gain knowledge about our field of study, but, and maybe equally important, they can also be a gateway to improving ourselves. Many different types of books…
Have you ever started doing a spring or summer or fall or winter or some other time cleaning and come across books you haven’t seen or used in years? Have you ever wondered what to do with books you no longer want or need? Believe it or not, there are several wonderful options available for these books if they are in good condition, i.e. all the pages are there and readable, no mold or mildew, and the binding is…
Hey Faculty Friends! Have you ever seen a big group of students leaving a library computer lab and thought to yourself, “I wonder where all of those intelligent, curious, beautiful people came from?” The answer, my friend, is library instruction. Usually when people think of library instruction they think of a 50-minute class session during which a librarian demonstrates how to use certain databases or the library catalog. While there’s not really anything wrong with this image, it’s not exactly…
As the Student Coordinator for Access Services (or as many know it as the Circulation Desk), I typically work with 12–13 students assistants every semester. Throughout the semester, a student assistant may need to resign, and it is up to me to fill this position. So, has it ever crossed your mind what one (or myself) looks for in a student employee? What qualities should one have?What experience should one have? If you are one who has wondered about these…
We’ve done it, friends. We’ve reached the final frame in the ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education: Searching as Strategic Exploration. Thanks for sticking with me! “Searching as Strategic Exploration” addresses the part of information literacy that we think of as “Research.” It deals with the actual task of searching for information, and the word “Exploration” is a really good word to use because it’s evocative of the kind of struggle we sometimes feel when we approach research.…
Have you ever been interested in doing archival research, but you’re not sure where to start? Unlike most other library resources, archival collections are generally unique materials which only exist in one place. This is why they can be so valuable to research, since the information and perspective they contain often can’t be found anywhere else. But it also presents a problem: How to locate the collections which might be useful to you. Here are some tips and tricks on…