• Events
• Guides Forum recap
• Nominate colleague for award
• Donate books for African Library Project
• PA library leaders announce digital collections initiative
• LHR News
• Lactation station opens
• ILL: The what, why, how
• LMC minutes
• DPLA working group
• Call for Annexing and Training Bulletin #19
• Book review: Library Services for Multicultural Patrons
• Tech Tip: How to install BOX for Office

Every day our staff and faculty employees do great work to serve our University, faculty and students. Here is your opportunity to recognize and appreciate their amazing efforts.

Each spring, the University Libraries honor staff and faculty members who positively effect the success of the Libraries and the morale of their colleagues. Award recipients are chosen from nominations submitted by you, the Libraries’ faculty and staff members. This gives us a unique chance to express our appreciation of the talent, dedication, and character of our peers.

You can nominate outstanding Library faculty and staff members for:

• The University Libraries Award — recognizes a Libraries faculty or staff member who has contributed significantly to the operations of the University Libraries
• The Margaret Knoll Spangler Oliver Libraries Award — recognizes outstanding service by Libraries’ employees
• The Libraries Diversity Award — recognizes individuals and teams who have made extraordinary contributions to enhancing the environment of mutual respect for differing backgrounds and points of view
• The University Libraries’ Teaching Award — honors an individual who has excelled in teaching and/or created an exemplary and innovative instruction program

All nominations must be completed in full by 5 p.m., on Wednesday, March 25. The deadline will be here before you know it, so start now! The online nomination form will be available soon and a link for our updated website will be sent shortly.

Employees in all areas of the Libraries, including all campuses and the Dickinson School of Law and Hershey School of Medicine are encouraged to participate.

Feel free to contact Shirley Davis at sjd3@psu.edu or Rob Harris at rch20@psu.edu with any questions.

Thank you,

2015 Awards Selection Committee:

Rob Harris, Chair
Anne Behler
Matt Ciszek
Megan Gilpin
Lily Huang
Sue Kellerman
Lauren Reiter
Brent Stump

By Ann Snowman

Back in September we wrote to tell you about the support The Annex is providing the African Library project. This semester Pattee and Paterno Libraries is participating in the collection of books for the project. You will find a box parked outside the Education and Behavioral Sciences Library on 5 Paterno. The project accepts new or gently used children’s books for the K-8 reading level. The students who coordinate this effort will collect the books at the end of the semester, sort them and ship them to help start libraries in Africa.

PALCI Announcement:

Efforts to make digital collections held by Pennsylvania libraries, museums, and related cultural heritage organizations widely and freely available via the web are underway. In August 2014, a state-wide group of library leaders from the Office of Commonwealth Libraries/the State Library, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the University of Scranton, Access Pennsylvania/HSLC, the Keystone Library Network, the Interlibrary Delivery Service of Pennsylvania, Scranton Public Library, and the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium convened to explore opportunities and interest in collaborating to this end. The first step is the appointment of the PA-DPLA Planning Group, which is working to establish a Pennsylvania hub on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

The PA-DPLA Planning Group has just completed a survey of cultural heritage organizations to determine which have digital collections and which are able and ready to participate in the early phases of this effort. With 207 institutions responding thus far, half of the institutions report they have digitization collections and related activities in place where the others do not. More information on the findings from this survey is available here.

Continue reading →

The University Libraries announce the opening of a Lactation Station in W-336 Pattee Library, west. Cosponsored by The Breastfeeding Support Program at Penn State, the room is available to all Penn State students, faculty, staff and their spouses/domestic partners to provide a comfortable, convenient place on campus for breastfeeding or breast-milk pumping. Room furnishings include a sink, refrigerator, and Medela Lactina Select hospital-grade, multi-user breast pump. The Pattee Station will be the eighth lactation room available on the University Park campus and will have the added benefit of accessibility during evening and weekend hours.

The Lactation Station provides a secure, private and restful room, where you may opt to nurse your child or express milk. For milk expression, you may bring your own personal-use breast pump or purchase a pump kit for use with the hospital-grade pump available in the room. A Lactina pump kit can be purchased from The Breastfeeding Support Program, and the kit can also be used as a hand pump whenever you are at home or cannot access a Lactina pump.

Campus Lactation Stations can be reserved for 30-minute blocks. Prior to using the stations, a brief orientation meeting is required to complete enrollment paperwork and review Lactation Station policies and procedures. To schedule an orientation session or request further information about room access, please contact Lauren Lowe, program coordinator for The Breastfeeding Support Program at Penn State, at breastfeeding@psu.edu or 814-867-0776.

More about the program is available online at http://ohr.psu.edu/employee-and-family-resources/breastfeeding-support/lactation-stations/ –

Submitted by Ben Goldman

In September 2014, Patricia Hswe and Ben Goldman attended the Pennsylvania Digital Collections Summit at the Free Library in Philadelphia, which was focused on the possibility of organizing digital collections efforts in Pennsylvania, with the ultimate goal of getting PA digital collections into the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) . This meeting, attended by representatives from libraries across the state, resulted in the formation of a “PA DPLA Founders” group, whose aim is to establish a Pennsylvania Service Hub for onboarding PA digital collections into DPLA. In addition to serving as one of the PA DPLA founders, Penn State University Libraries is also contributing resources for technical development on an aggregator tool that collects metadata from institutions across the state and stages it for DPLA, as well as informing metadata practices. At present, the plan is for Pennsylvania to apply as a service hub in the Summer of 2015, which would likely result in the first complete ingest of statewide assets by the end of 2015.

In order to support the development of the statewide service hub and coordinate the local effort needed to prepare local content for ingest into DPLA, Dean Dewey has formally charged a DPLA Working Group. Chaired by Patricia Hswe and Ben Goldman, the working group includes Mohamed Berray, Linda Ballinger, and Andrew Gearhart. Stakeholders for the group include: Annie Copeland, Sue Kellerman, Brandy Karl, Henry Pisciotta, Tim Pyatt, Linda Klimczyk, Linda Friend and Sabra Statham.

The full charge for this working group can be found at https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/DPLAWG. This wiki will be used by the group to document its work throughout the year, so check back often.

For more information on DPLA efforts at the state level, please see this announcement from PALCI: https://sites.psu.edu/librarynews/2015/02/16/pa-library-leaders-announce-new-initiative-to-increase-access-to-digital-collections/.