Extended Hours for Fall 2012

Original Image from Milner Archives, graphic work by Mike Price

Your campus library will again offer extended hours for students on the week before finals and during final exam week. The extended hours will begin this coming Monday, December 3.

Week Before Finals Extended Hours

December  3-8

Monday, Dec. 3                8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Tuesday, Dec. 4                8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Wednesday, Dec. 5           8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Thursday, Dec. 6               8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Friday. Dec. 7                    8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Saturday, Dec. 8                10:00 a.m – 5:00 p.m.

Finals Week Extended  Hours 

December  9-14

Sunday, Dec. 9th                2:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m.  

Monday, Dec. 10               8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Tuesday, Dec. 11               8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Wednesday Dec. 12           8:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.

Thursday, Dec. 13                8:00 a.m. – 11:00 p.m.

Friday, Dec. 14                   8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Stay tuned to our Facebook Page for updates on how were helping you cope with Finals Week. Good luck, students!

ARTstor Updates

Carmichael Library has a subscription to ARTstor Digital Library, a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research. ARTstor collections are consistently enhanced and new collections are added. See below for a list of the highlights from 2012:

• Collections grew rapidly, with nearly 160,000 new images released from 31 new and expanded collections in the past 12 months, including the first 750 of a projected 7,000 from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; a second release of 4,000 from the permanent collections of French museums from the Réunion des Musées Nationaux; more than 46,000 images of architecture and sites from ART on FILE and the Society of Architectural Historians' SAHARA project; more than 4,000 images of archaeological and ethnographic objects from the Peabody Museum of Natural History; 23,000 historical photographs from the Museum of the City of New York; and much more
• Reached agreements for nearly 30 new collections from contributors such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; Panos Pictures; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Romare Bearden Foundation; the Renaissance Society; and many others. ARTstor has also reached a new agreement with international affiliates of the Artists Rights Society (ARS) covering nearly 10,000 new artists from six countries, substantially expanding the Digital Library's modern and contemporary artworks for subscribers. For a complete list of collections, see artstor.org/collection
• In addition to being accessible on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, ARTstor Mobile is now available on Android-powered devices; the Digital  Library is now supported in Chrome browsers; the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) is now available for OS X 10.7 Lion; ARTstor is now collaborating with the Primo Central Index and other discovery services; and new instructional videos, with subtitles in multiple languages, have been added to ARTstor's YouTube channel.
• ARTstor has launched four Architecture and Design Topics Image Groups, carefully curated to include dozens of images of seminal works taught in introductory-level architecture and design courses. Subjects include "Architecture and the Built Environment," "Architecture to 1900: Plans and Models," "Design and Decorative Arts," and "Gardens and Landscape Architecture." To see the full list, visit the ARTstor Digital Library, and click on Organize > Open Image Groups, then open Global Folders > Featured Groups.

Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year

Oxford University Press announced today that the Word of the Year in the UK is omnishambles.

Originally used in the British political comedy television series The Thick of It, omnishambles has gained momentum throughout 2012 as a word used to describe a comprehensively mismanaged situation, characterized by a shambolic string of blunders.

Check out the OUP blog to learn more about omnishambles and the runner-ups. 

Oxford Dictionaries USA also announced today that the Word of the Year in the United States is GIF. 

GIF  verb to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): he GIFed the highlights of the debate

Check out the Oxford Dictionaries USA blog for more information about the origin, pronunciation, and spelling of GIF.

Geocaching 101 @ Carmichael Library

Photo/graphic arts by Joel Bullock

Learn about geocaching at Carmichael Library! Are you new to geocaching? Heard about it and want to learn more? Tried to find a couple of caches and want to learn some secrets?

Spend an hour or so with other cachers at Carmichael Library at the University of Montevallo to learn the basics and a little bit more. Bobby Hall (known in cacher circles as GameForTravel) will present Geocaching 101 at 7:00 p.m.

Mr. Hall's presentation will cover:

• Basic history of the Global Positioning System
• Description of geocaching
• How to hide and find a cache
• Basics of geocaching.com
• What to take on a cache run
• Types and sizes of caches
• Basic usage of a GPSr
• Logging your activities

This class was created on behalf of the Birmingham Geocachers group on meetup.com. Everyone is invited; regardless of caching experience, membership in the meetup group or any other affiliations! Those with a few (or many) caches under their belt are welcome to contribute their experience, expertise, stories, advice, jokes, techniques, skills, knowledge, and bug bite avoidance strategies.

In addition to the program, the library will provide refreshments. We hope to see you here next Tuesday evening! Let us and your friends know you're coming by connecting with us on Facebook.

Digital Humanities

Several of the library faculty and staff attended THATCamp at Vanderbilt University last week in Nashville.  At the same time the Country Music Awards where given out, scholars in literature and languages, librarians, historians, and even a mathematician gathered at the Vanderbilt Curb Center ready to work together to learn the tools and pedagogy from fellow scholars doing hands-on digital work in the humanities. THATCamps are about Technology and Humanities.  I've learned a lot about digital humanities and met a lot of interesting people in the field. The conversation about the role of the digital humanities continues to provoke interesting discussions. The Los Angeles Review of Books provides some recent insight into the arguments. Stephen Marche's essay Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities is up first but then In Defense of Data: Responses to Stephen Marche's : "Literature is not Data" by Scott Seliseke and Holger S. Syme takes Marche on with a one-two knockout. I hope you take the time to read each essay. Comments are welcome.