Do Islanders still read books?

The question In a recent librarians’ meeting, a question came up about the way the library buys books. The Bell Library, like many academic libraries, has traditionally purchased books through two main methods—title-by-title selection, and auto-shipments from a book vendor, based on a profile we set up with them. This second method, called an “approval plan,” would be sort of like setting up your Amazon account to automatically send you any new books that match your interests. The question that…

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Opening the Classroom: Using Open Educational Practices to Reimagine Teaching and Learning

Have you heard of "open educational resources" or "OER"? These are educational materials that are available for free via the Internet which can be used, reused, remixed, and redistributed by anyone who wants to learn or teach.1 We often hear about OER in the context of textbook affordability. Students these days pay a lot of money for the textbooks which are produced by for-profit publishers. Studies have shown that many students are forced to choose between paying for textbooks and…

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My Favorite Room in the Library…

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…

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I-Create Lab New Pricing Structure

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…

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New Library Website!

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…

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The Most Requested Interlibrary Loans: The 2018-2019 Academic Year

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…

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Bell Library reflects on last year and looks forward to next year…

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome everyone to the 2019/20 academic year! The University and the Library have been up to great things, and the excitement is contagious. Bell Library is coming off a year of great change, which included the following projects, among other work. Bell Library opened the I-Create makerspace lab, which we will continue to develop and grow.Be sure to keep an eye out for workshop announcements and opportunities to be involved in collaborative innovative…

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Instruction Junction, what’s your function? What library instruction can do for you

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…

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Copyright, Copywhat?

Many people in an academic setting have heard of copyright, but if asked what it is, what it protects, and who it affects, not too many can fully respond. So, what is copyright and how does it affect our daily lives at TAMU-CC? Simply put, copyright is everywhere. From the materials used in a lecture, to the readings assigned for homework, to the research papers, art projects, and other works created for one’s job or class, copyrighted works are either…

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“A Nightmare of Biblical Proportions”: Review of Christopher Golden’s Ararat

A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and an atheist walk into a cave…no this is not a poorly devised joke, but part of the plot line to Christopher Golden’s Bram Stoker Award winning novel, Ararat. What begins as an exploration of a newly revealed opening in the great Mount Ararat, ends in loss of sanity, the external and internal battle between good and evil, paranoia, death, and so much more. Let’s take a step back and talk a bit about the…

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