• LibGuides Update: How should my guide look?
• Tech Tip: Password change required on August 3
• Simmonds to retire on July 31
• Apply now for an Innovation Microgrant
• Events: July 20 and beyond
• Exhibit honors nuclear facility’s 60 years of education, research
• ‘Journey to Inclusion: Voting Rights in America’ on display
• Alexander named to national university press leadership group
• Faculty News
• NASA technical reports added to The CAT
• LHR News: July 20
• ‘Getting to Know You’: Alexa Spigelmyer
• I-Tech celebrates another great year
• Wilkes-Barre librarian awarded Teaching Project grant

Submitted by Russ Hall, John M. Lilley Library, Penn State Erie, the Behrend College

Patience Simmonds will be retiring from Penn State Behrend on July 31, 2015. Simmonds started as a part-time librarian in 1992 back when the library was still in the Reed Union Building. She became a full-time librarian the next year. Simmonds moved to the tenure track in 1999 and was promoted to associate librarian and tenured in 2005. She provided reference service and taught many library instruction sessions for thousands of students over the years.

Simmonds…active supporter of student organizations

Simmonds helped the students establish the Organization of African Students, which later became known as OACS Organization of African and Caribbean Students. This was in addition to her role as a faculty advisor and her close work with Andy Herrera, director of Behrend’s Educational Equity and Diversity Office, to support student organization activities. She also collected books and computers for Africa and organized campus-wide book donation programs. Her plans for retirement are to, “take it one day at a time. Be thankful and be joyful and healthy, and spend time with my children, grandchildren, and family and friends.”

Just two weeks remain to apply to the University Libraries’ Innovation Microgrant Program and I wanted to reach out to everyone within the Penn State Libraries to let you know there is still time to apply for funding (the official deadline for applications this year is August 1).

Innovation can happen anywhere within the Libraries, and I encourage everyone to peruse the details of this program and consider applying: https://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/admin/microgrant-program.html

Any questions you might have can be sent to me directly or to the Innovation Microgrant Program Review Committee at: ul-microgrants@lists.psu.edu — Jason Reuscher, chair, Innovation Microgrant Program Review Committee (2015-2016)

Penn State University Press Director Patrick Alexander has been invited to serve a three-year term on the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) board of directors. Read the full story on Penn State News.

Discovery, access, and preservation — one of the three programmatic areas of the Libraries’ 2014-2019 strategic plan — are impossible in the absence of good, consistent, well-managed metadata. Historically, a library’s catalog housed mostly title-level metadata for books and journals. With the advent of Google and other Web-scale discovery tools, however, users expect to find much more than books and journals when they search the Libraries’ collections: they want articles, presentations, images, audio, video, and more—anything, in fact, related to the topic of their research.

To this end, the Bibload Working Group and Digital Access Team have joined forces to enhance discovery and access by acquiring, transforming, and loading metadata into The CAT for materials previously unfindable via either The CAT or LionSearch.

The most recent example of this forward-thinking collaboration is the NASA Technical Reports collection, considered a “critical component in the worldwide activity of scientific and technical aerospace research and development.” Metadata for items in the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program is harvested using OAI-PMH, transformed into MARC records using an XSLT transformation created by Ken Robinson of the Digital Access Team, and loaded into The CAT. To date, over 20,000 records have been loaded, with the total expected to reach 400,000 within a few months. To see the records, search “NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) Collection” in The CAT.

Submitted by Jeff Edmunds on behalf of the Bibload Working Group and the Digital Access Team

On July 8, staff from the Department for Information Technologies (I-Tech) got together to celebrate another great year. Barbara Dewey and Lisa German attended to help celebrate a total of 278.8 years of service from I-Tech. Awards were presented to employees who achieved milestone years of service this year.

Service award recipients:
Ryan Johnson — 5 years
Sherry Lonsdale — 5 years
Michelle Dzyak — 20 years
Linda Klimczyk — 30 years

Jennie Levine Knies, head librarian at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, and Timothy Sichler, instructor in engineering, Penn State Wilkes-Barre, were recently awarded a $2,037 Teaching Project grant from the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence. The project, Student Engagement with 3D Printing, addresses two main themes. The first is providing undergraduate students in engineering hands-on, practical experience with principles of design. This encompasses the conceptualization of an idea, designing the physical object and then bringing the designed object from the abstraction of a computer-generated object to a physical object. Part of this process is to obtain valuable feedback as to what can be made with 3D technology with regards to parts tolerance and multiple part interoperability. The second issue is to expose the general public to this technology and broaden understanding of how technology works. Commercially-available 3D printers are becoming more common and libraries are purchasing them and encouraging patrons to use them. On one level, use of 3D printers can be simple — a user can upload a schematic drawing into a piece of software and print an object from that drawing. However, use of 3D printers can be much more nuanced. We want to differentiate between students understanding how to use software, and students understanding how technology works. Different 3D printers have different strengths and weaknesses, and a variety of factors, such as speed of printing, types of plastics, and orientation of objects in the design can all influence the final product. For the project, only 3D printers that use open source hardware and software will be used to allow for additional creative and critical thinking in construction and utilization of the technology.

The 3D printers will serve as a mechanism to transform students from passive users of technology into active, critical thinkers about how technology works and how it evolves. At the end of the semester, the printers will be made available for all patrons in the Nesbitt Library. By providing a range of printers and by educating library staff on the nuances of 3D printing technology, the hope is to enhance understanding on the Wilkes-Barre campus about this emerging technology. In the library, the project hopes to broaden the scope of decision-making regarding the purchase of 3D printers, and extend perceptions of how library space can be used. From a teaching and learning standpoint, the project hopes to explore applications in the creation of 3D landscapes and topology models in Surveying, or in the creation of prototypes for a variety of other disciplines, one example being Architecture. Other faculty can use this experience as a model. — Jennie Levine Knies