Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Sony E-Reader Store Closed - now Kobo Books

We have 1 Sony E-Reader that is pre-loaded with about 40 titles, including The Hunger Games books, a couple Steig Larson titles, and some other best sellers from a few years ago. The catalog record lists the titles.  I just realized that the Sony store closed last March and they have transferred their services to Kobo.

Because the college does not issue the library a credit card, in the past we purchased gift cards for the Sony store and used them to purchase titles to the e-reader. Those gift cards are now defunct so at this time, there is no way for us to add additional titles to the e-reader. However, the existing titles are still available on the device, and for now, many of them are still popular so it will remain in the collection.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Using Libguides for Interactive Instruction

This is a great 10 minute presentation about how you can embed free online tools into a libguide to create an interactive guide that can be used during a class session.

http://buzz.springshare.com/videohighlights/acrl-emilie

She describes using Wordle (not as impressive), Google Forms, and Padlet for student interaction. I'm particularly interested in how she used a Google Form that generates an automatic email so that students could basically create their research guide and email it to themselves. For example, if our English Comp I handout were recreated as a Google Form, it could be embedded in a libguide, the students could fill it out throughout the session, and then it could be emailed to them at the end.

I'm definitely going to play around with this. If you try it and are successful, let us all know! Or if you can think of other tools that can be embedded in a libguide to make a class session more interactive for students, please share!

Video on publishing process

The graphics are corny but this is one of the best videos I've seen to describe how scholarly articles get published and end up in library databases. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/tutorials/idea_library/ . It's nice and short and could easily be shown in an English I class.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Talking Book & Braille Center

The RVCC Disability Services office is registered with the State Library's Talking Book & Braille Center.  Students with visual impairments can use their resources by visiting the Disability Services Office. 

Using Print-Friendly to print webpages


Bookmark and ShareRecently when students ask for help printing "clean" webpages without ads, images, and awkward formatting, I've been recommending they use the Print Friendly and PDF tool at https://www.printfriendly.com/. It presents a printer friendly version of a webpage by removing ads and any unnecessary formatting and spacing, allows the removal of portions of text, and also offers an option to save the webpage content as a pdf.