UPDATE: ALA presenters, panel participants, and attendees, we want to hear about your sessions! PRaM is seeking brief recaps from you to include in next week’s Library News (especially if you’d like to write a note for your colleagues who may be too shy to submit highlights about themselves). Please use our “Submit an Article” form to send a paragraph about relevant ALA sessions so we can collect as many highlights as possible to include in our round-up. We are so proud that many our colleagues are representing the University Libraries and leading on the largest national stage of the library profession, so please don’t hesitate to submit your recaps to help inform all of us about your work. Thank you!

Karen Estlund, Penn State University Libraries associate dean for technology and digital strategies, was one of six individuals selected as a panelist for the Women in Library Technology Leadership open conversation during the American Library Association’s annual conference being held in Orlando, Fla., through June 28.

The session on Sunday, June 26, included personal journeys into the technology field, visions for the future of libraries, issues around the intersection of gender, libraries, technology, and other topics of interest.

“Question the Status Quo: Challenges for Women in Technology Leadership,” an American Libraries Magazine article which covered the discussion, was published June 26.

Estlund also was a panelist for the Peel Back the Layers of Publishing Opacity: Open Editorial and Peer Review session, which included overall discussions on experiences as authors, publishers, and reviewers in the emerging and transformative models of editorial and peer review.

In addition, three Penn State librarians — Athena Jackson, Matt Ciszek, and Rebecca Miller — who were elected in May by their peers to serve in ALA leadership positions, will begin their ALA service July 1following the Orlando conference’s conclusion.

Jackson, Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair and Head of Special Collections, has been named vice chair/chair-elect of the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS). She will serve three years as vice chair, chair and past chair on the RBMS Executive Committee.

Ciszek, head librarian of the Lartz Memorial Library, Penn State Shenango, was re-elected to a two-year term on the Executive Board of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table as one of three directors-at-large. Ciszek has been involved with the GLBT Round Table since 2007, and had served as membership chair before his election to the Executive Board in 2014.

Rebecca K. Miller, head of Library Learning Services, was elected to a three-year term as a councilor-at-large on the ALA Council. She will serve in that capacity through the close of the 2019 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.

Congratulations to our colleagues representing the University Libraries on a national scale!

You may have noticed that something’s different about our LibGuides—if you did, you would be right! The week of June 20, I-Tech and Library Learning Services rolled out a new look for the PSU Libraries LibGuides. Developed so that the LibGuides style is consistent with the rest of the Libraries’ webpages, the new LibGuides style is sleek and streamlined. Karen Schwentner and Amanda Clossen worked to ensure that text and navigation are both clearer in this newest iteration of PSU Libraries LibGuides, and their hard work has paid off.

This test guide illustrates the style changes made to PSU Libraries LibGuides.

This is just the most recent of many planned improvements for our LibGuides and our LibGuides landing page.  Many different teams, including I-Tech, Library Learning Services, and a LibGuides Content Strategy team, are all hard at work to enhance the usability of and access to LibGuides.

Have additional questions or comments about these or other LibGuides changes?  Don’t hesitate to contact Rebecca Miller, the LibGuides Product Owner, at rkm17@psu.edu.

The Libraries’ Development Department, part of Penn State’s 2015 Giving Tuesday initiative, was among the recipients of the Division of Development and Alumni Relations’ Teamwork and Collaboration Award.

Penn State’s University Libraries Development Department was among the recipients of the 2016 Teamwork and Collaboration Award presented by the Division of Development and Alumni Relations’ (DDAR) at its quarterly meeting in May at the Nittany Lion Inn. Celebrating individuals and units that demonstrated DDAR core values, such as teamwork and fostering a collaborative workspace, the award also recognized the department’s commitment to making the 2015 Giving Tuesday event a philanthropic success.

Jenny Charney (left) and Nicki Hendrix receive the University Libraries Development Department’s Teamwork and Collaboration Award from Rod Kirsch, Penn State senior vice president for Development and Alumni Relations, at the Division of Development and Alumni Relations’ quarterly meeting.

Giving Tuesday, held on December 1, 2015, collectively raised a grand total $296,727 from 1,376 individual gifts with the Libraries receiving $31,807, exceeding its $25,000 goal. The 24-hour global initiative was adapted for Penn State campuses with efforts specifically focused to challenge donors to support critical needs, including the Libraries’ fund for purchasing textbooks, which makes course texts and other required materials available to students through the Libraries.

On Giving Tuesday 2015, Libraries Development staff and Libraries volunteers asked students to sign banners to thank the donors who support their favorite Libraries services and spaces.

A recent Penn State graduate tweeted a message during Giving Tuesday to show appreciation for the program: “Thank you to all who have donated! This program has saved me over $1000 in textbook costs over the past 2 semesters!”

Direct mail, the Lion Line telefund service, and online giving programs were developed to engage donors from across the Commonwealth to give back to Penn State. Using the hashtag #GivingTuesday across social media platforms, the Libraries helped generate awareness for both the Libraries Textbook Fund and the 2015 overall campaign.

Nicki Hendrix, director of development for the University Libraries, and Matt Lamas, development intern, shared a slideshow of images from the Libraries’ Giving Tuesday thanks event in June as part of the event recognizing the Libraries’ Giving Tuesday partners.

The Penn State Bookstore, managed by Barnes and Noble; Shipley Energy; and Penn State University Press matched donor funds for the 2015 Giving Tuesday event. This philanthropic event also was a success thanks in part to several Libraries faculty and staff members involved through volunteer work and supportive efforts as well as Penn State’s Giving Tuesday Planning Team, Annual Giving, Development Communications, Information Systems, Donor & Member Services, Donor Relations, and the other two partner fundraising units, Penn State Athletics and Penn State Mont Alto.

Steve Falke, manager of the Penn State Bookstore, receives the Libraries’ certificate of thanks from Dean Barbara I. Dewey for the Bookstore’s support of the Libraries’ Giving Tuesday fundraising efforts. Funds raised will support the purchase of textbooks on reserve for students’ use.

Dean Barbara I. Dewey presents Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, with a certificate of thanks for the Press’s ongoing financial support of the Libraries.

Funding from Penn State’s first year of participation in the Giving Tuesday event allowed the Libraries to expand its textbook purchases. Given that the Libraries’ textbook purchases increased by 21 percent from 2013-14 to 2014-15, this added funding has immediate and significant impact.

The Giving Tuesday event for 2016 is scheduled for November 29.

The Penn State University Press donates ten percent of the proceeds from orders placed directly on its website, http://www.psupress.org, support the purchase of student textbooks on reserve through the University Libraries.

Nominations for the 2016 I Love My Librarian Award are now open with a deadline of Friday, September 16. An electronic nomination form is now available online at ilovelibraries.org/ilovemylibrarian.

This prestigious award will recognize the service of 10 exceptional public, school, college, community college, or university librarians who have transformed lives and communities through educational opportunities and lifelong learning.

Each winner will receive $5,000 and a $500 travel stipend to attend an award ceremony held in their honor at Carnegie Corporation of New York on November 30, 2016.

The PA Forward Information Literacy Summit, a professional development conference for public, school, and academic librarians across Pennsylvania, will be held on Thursday, July 21, from 8 a.m.-4 p.m. in the Penn State Libraries at University Park. Additional information is available in this PA Forward Information Literacy Summit document.

This year’s theme for the all-day summit is “Library Services by Design: Supporting Future Forward Workplace Competencies” and features a keynote session to discuss information literacy competencies championed by academic, school, and public libraries for librarians, students, and patrons in all stages of life. Breakout opportunities in the afternoon will discuss workplace competencies, tools for teaching digital literacies, ensuring technological readiness, professional collaboration, and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Shenetta Selden, Steve Borrelli, and Ann Thompson with their balloon structure during July 16 Coffee with Carmen event.

On June 16, the second Coffee with Carmen was held in PAMS Library and a good time was had by all. We got to know Steve Borrelli, Lana Munip and learned about the Assessment Department. Did you know that Steve Borrelli, Shenetta Selden, Ann Thompson and John Meier are skiers?

Attendees were divided into teams and tasked with building a free-standing balloon structure with only balloons and scotch tape. Though one of the structures tumbled soon after construction one did remain standing! Thanks to all the attendees! Hope to see you on July 19, 9-10 a.m., for the next Coffee with Carmen in the Engineering Library.

It’s that time of year again! Libraries Cleanup Day will take place August 9 from 10 a.m.-2:30 p.m. in Mann Assembly Room. Unlike previous years, Cleanup Day 2016 will not be held the same day as the Libraries Picnic.

Items may be brought down and picked out throughout the day. Branch Libraries may send in their materials up to two weeks in advance by contacting Verne Neff at van1@psu.edu and Earl Houser at ejh10@psu.edu.

Have an item too big to carry or fit in the mail (furniture, etc.)? Send a photo to Harlan Ritchey at jhr109@psu.edu or the Green Team so we can determine if it meets the guidelines, and don’t forget to contact Facilities to confirm that they can accept your moving request. Please include contact info so your departments can make arrangements for transportation and keep in mind that shipping charges may apply.

We take scrap paper, too. Anything without sensitive information on it is welcome!

This is also a great day to clean up your (virtual) space by deleting old files (especially on shared drives). Whether cleaning up electronic files or paper documents, please be sure to follow University retention schedules.

General Retention Schedule (Formerly Appendix 18)
Financial Record Retention Schedule – University Department Requirements (Formerly Appendix 21)

If you have questions or want help with Records Management, contact Robyn Dyke at rdd3@psu.edu.

As the Libraries move towards a greener tomorrow, use this opportunity to clean out and recycle unwanted items. Participation is voluntary, but encouraged. Nearly all items remaining at the end of the day will be reused or recycled by University Salvage.

Please note: This event is for University property and University use—all items involved are for work only.

 Awards of $1,500 to be used for travel to the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State’s University Park campus, to utilize the Library’s collections for academic research, have been awarded as follows:

Dorothy Foehr Huck Research Travel Award

This award supports researchers using any of the Eberly Family Special Collection Library’s collections.

• Trish Kahle, University of Chicago
  • Dissertation: a novel interpretation of miners’ rebellion across the Appalachian coalfields in the long 1970s by recasting a seemingly well-known story of labor unrest and union democratization as a struggle not only over collective bargaining agreements, but over workers’ place in an uncertain energy future. By examining this key period in the history of American work and capitalism through the lens of energy, this dissertation will show how struggles over democratization, mine safety, and environmental politics helped transform coal miners into energy workers, and it will point to the ways in which energy industry restructuring reshaped coalfield labor relations.
• Ryan Charlton, University of Mississippi
  • Dissertation: Alaska and the Arctic in the U.S. Imaginary, 1867-1905 examines how the Alaska purchase and Arctic expeditions shaped American literature and culture.

Helen F. Faust Women Writers Research Travel Award

This award supports researchers whose work focuses on women writers, and who would benefit from the use of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library’s collections.

• Jillmarie Murphy, Union College
  • Book: Waves of Futurity, Monstrous Attachments: American Literary Representations of Affect, Place and Otherness, 1797-1901 argues that in the literature under consideration the characters’ attachment needs illustrate the important role human-to-human and human-to-place bonding occupies in crafting a national identity. American conceptions of security and freedom underpin my discussion as I investigate how writers in the early American republic constructed modernity by restructuring representations of interpersonal and place attachments, which are subsequently re-imagined, reconfigured, and sometimes even rejected by writers in the long nineteenth century.
• Emrah Atasoy, Visiting Scholar
  • Dissertation: Draws on the significant critical sources in Special Collections in relation to Utopianism, dystopian narratives, feminist Utopianism, women writers of the twentieth century, Utopian narrative, and women’s studies to incorporate the relevant data to my dissertation, which deals with three exemplary speculative novels of 20th-century literature, namely Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), with a specific emphasis on the transition from innocence / ignorance to experience / knowledge.

Through the Flower Research Travel Award

This award supports researchers utilizing the Judy Chicago art education collection, 1970-2011 at the Eberly Family Special Collections Library.

• Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt, Independent Scholar
  • Curriculum & Program Development Project: Incorporating feminist art pedagogy into participatory photography program curriculum with marginalized youth populations on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Research Travel Award

This award supports researchers whose work focuses on the history of dance and dance notation, and who would benefit from using the Malkin collection of early dance, 1531-1804.

• Cory Holding, The University of Pittsburgh
  • Book: Rhetorical Gestures (1644-1806) offers an account of gesture (e.g. hand, arm, and other movements that may or may not accompany speech) as central to the process of rhetorical invention. It does so through an historiographic account of the “elocutionists,” a group of European 18th-century dramatists, physicians and natural philosophers who developed and cataloged techniques for the effective control of communicating bodies.

On Monday, June 20, and  Tuesday, June 21, the Libraries will be migrating The CAT
and WorkFlows to a new operating system (Linux).

Schedule of events and outages
June 20 beginning at approximately 7 a.m.:
The CAT will be in READ ONLY mode.
Searching will be available in The CAT, but features such as My Library Account and I Want It will not be available.
Features within LionSearch that connect to The CAT will be unavailable.
EZBorrow will not be able to check the status of patron’s accounts or search our holdings.

Circulation features within Workflows will not be available for the first few hours Monday morning. Limited functionality will be available the remainder of the day on June 20.
Workflows functions other than circulation (e.g., Cataloging, Acquisitions, etc.) will not be available until Tuesday mid-day (June 21).
Reports will be delayed until Tuesday mid-morning.

Details for Circulation Staff are available here:
https://staff.libraries.psu.edu/server-migration-june-20-21-2016-info-circulation
Contact Chris Holobar (jch4@psu.edu) if you have any questions.

All functionality should be restored no later than mid-day Tuesday.

This is a large, complex project and time estimates are subject to change as the work progresses. We will keep you posted throughout this process.

Interruption scheduled for planned maintenance 

On Monday, June 20, and Tuesday, June 21, the Libraries will be migrating The CAT and WorkFlows to a new operating system (Linux). There will be a planned interruption of service.