Daily Archives: March 19, 2018

Events: March 19

Spring 2018
Academic calendar information for all campuses is available online.

"What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales" exhibition, image from "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault," illustration by Harry Clarke

Jan. 16–May 13, “What Big Eyes You Have! Looking at the Wolf in Fairy Tales”exhibition, Eberly Family Special Collections Library Exhibition Room, 104 Paterno Library.

Depth of Field exhibit poster

 

 

Feb. 18-Aug. 13, “Depth of Field” exhibit, Diversity Studies Room, 203 Pattee Library, seeks to highlight the intersections of war in the Middle East with the history of war photography.

 

Wednesday, Mar. 21: Software in the Humanities and Social Sciences Workshop – Pandoc,  convert documents from one file type to another and back again, all from the command line, with Grant Wythoff. Bring a bag lunch; noon-1 p.m., 403 Paterno Library and via Zoom at https://psu.zoom.us/j/914950827.

Wednesday, Mar. 21: Poetry Without Borders – A multicultural night of poetry hosted by the Dept. of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature; 6-7 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library. Reception following in Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library.

Thursday, Mar. 22: Mann Lecture: The Art of Being a WolfDebra Mitts-Smith, children’s and young adult literature expert and author of “Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature,” will offer the 2018 Charles W. Mann Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts; 4:30 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, and  online via Mediasite Live.

Monday, Apr. 2: Edible Book Festival – compete in or help judge a book-themed cake decorating contest. Sign up at http://tinyurl.com/psulibsediblebook, noon- 1p.m., Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library.

Tuesday, Apr. 3: Grant Writing Workshop, Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library, 1-2:30 p.m.

Tuesday, Apr. 3: Jillian Cantor to read as part of the Mary E Rolling Reading Series, Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library, 7:30-9 p.m.

Wednesday, Apr. 4: Software in the Humanities and Social Sciences Workshop – IIIF, with Karen Estlund. Bring a bag lunch; noon-1 p.m. 403 Paterno Library and via Zoom at https://psu.zoom.us/j/914950827.

Thursday, Apr. 5: Lecture by Professor Leo Bersani, “Force in Progress”, 5-7 p.m., Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library.

Friday, Apr. 6: Art+Feminism Wiki-edit-a-thon – An editing free-for-all to improve content on feminism, gender, and the arts on Wikipedia, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library. Remote participation is also encouraged; This year’s meetup page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/University_Park/ArtAndFeminism_2018/The_Pennsylvania_State_University.

Wednesday, Apr. 11: Software in the Humanities and Social Sciences Workshop – OpenRefine, a free and open-source resource for cleaning, regularizing, and organizing complex data, with Jose Guerrero. Bring a bag lunch; noon-1 p.m. 403 Paterno Library and via Zoom at https://psu.zoom.us/j/914950827.

Sunday, Apr. 22: International Write-In. Two sessions, 3:30-7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.-midnight. Mann Assembly Room, 103 Paterno Library. Interested writers can sign up today at: http://tinyurl.com/psuwritein

Monday, Apr. 23: Working with International Students Workshop: Resources and Inclusive Strategies, 1-4 p.m., 221 Chambers Building, Krause Learning Space.

 

Please submit event information — and all Library News submissions — to Public Relations and Marketing via the Library News submission form. *Please note: The content submissions process may be changing soon; please stay tuned for updates.*

Creating a Data Services Model

By: John Meier, Physical and Mathematical Sciences Library

One of the key objectives of our Strategic Plan is to develop and implement programs to promote discovery, access, and preservation.  In the 2017-2018 Action Plan, this includes developing a library data warehouse.  A data warehouse is a central system for gathering and storing data collected from all parts of an organization (example Google BigQuery).  The methods and formats of data the University Libraries collects are extremely diverse but the overall goal is to use the data we gather.  A data warehouse would allow us to easily keep track of the data we gather, and to give staff access to the data they need to work more effectively.  To better understand the need for a data warehouse and how it is being developed at the University Libraries, I sat down with Rob Olendorf, the Prystowsky Early Career Science Librarian.  Rob came to Penn State with a background in software and system, supports research data management in the Eberly College of Science, and is the product owner for ScholarSphere.  The Data Warehouse Steering Committee includes Steve Borelli, Sherry Lonsdale, Julia Proctor, and Matt Ciszek.

The team interviewed staff from around the Libraries and developed user personas for the various ways we use and gather data.  They attempted to find all data sources within our organization, including: Desk Tracker, circulation, gate counts, ILLIAD, teaching, and more.  For each data source, they need to develop a data dictionary for interpreting each unique source and later development.  This can take quite a while as some systems only allow a few users to access the data.  Even in the information gathering process, the team has already made some recommendations for data cleanup or streamlining our gathering to create more usable data.  They have also given feedback to different units in the University Libraries to help improve data entry.

You can follow their work in progress on their GitHub website.  It is setting goals and defining what needs to be developed over the next few years to make the data warehouse a reality.  This includes policies about what data can be added, some manually, some automatically.  It is also important to sketch out how open the data can be and determine the levels of access for staff to parts of the collection.  The design has to be open and flexible to operate with other application programming interfaces (APIs).  One example might be a data dashboard, which visualizes data from the warehouse.  This will also leave it open to new data inputs, such as an app for counting patrons that also indicates where they are in our spaces.

We can look forward to exciting new ways to gather data and to use the data we are currently gathering in visual, high-impact forms.  While the full data warehouse is still a few years away, stakeholders from around the University Libraries and Penn State can help build it.

25Live is here!

By: Ann Thompson

Here we go….
Library spaces continue to migrate to CollegeNET’s scheduling product 25Live. The most recent space to migrate to 25Live is Foster Auditorium as announced by Emma Davidson in an email on March 7th, Foster Auditorium is now being scheduled using 25Live (CollegeNET). See Below.
If you’ve never used 25Live, please take the follow steps:

1. Login to CollegeNET
By visiting the above link and selecting “Reserve Space in 25Live…” an account will automatically be created for you. Please note: It will take about 24-hours for your account to be verified. However, you will not be notified when this is complete. You can simply login once the waiting period is over.

2. Schedule all future Foster events via CollegeNET
Please discontinue your use of UCS and/or emailing me to reserve Foster. Your requests will now be submitted to me via CollegeNET.

If this is your first time using CollegeNET, the Registrar’s website has some great training materials. Please note that a new policy and best practices guide are forthcoming. For most, this change will have little to no impact, but for those who schedule library spaces or sit at the Libraries Welcome Desks, they will notice the change on the Rooms Spaces webpage, where the Foster Auditorium schedule can be seen at a glance. This display will continue to have modifications as other library spaces are migrated to 25Live for scheduling, including the
Libraries instruction spaces.

Training sessions will be held throughout the remainder of the semester. Exact times will be announced via the University Park listserv and the Library Blog. There will also be an overview of 25Live at an upcoming Tech Update. Stay tuned.

 

Tech Tip: What is phishing and how to report it?

Phishing graphic

Phishing is the act of attempting to deceive a user into divulging personal or confidential information such as login credentials, credit card information, etc., to gain access to resources that enable them to steal your identity.

Phishing scams usually come in the form of email messages and false websites. Cyber criminals use social engineering to learn about their targets and then use that information to try and gather your personal information.

Things to look for to identify that you may be targeted include:

  • Spelling and bad grammar: Phishing emails are commonly plagued with spelling and grammatical errors.
  • Links in emails: Links in emails may appear as though they are taking you to a legitimate website however they can be disguised. Hover over (DO NOT CLICK)  links and see if you are being re-routed to some other page.
  • Threats: Some emails contain threats to include legal action, time sensitive materials, etc. These are designed to convince you to make a hasty decision and click a malicious link or open an unsafe attachment.
  • Spoofing a legitimate website or company: Some emails will appear to come from a legitimate company. However that is far from the case. Again, attackers will try to make everything appear to be legitimate but things such as suspicious URL’s (pages with names not associated with the website or company), or outdated information can be tell-tale signs something is not right.

If you believe you have been sent a phishing scam, forward the original phish as an attachment in a new message addressed to phishing@psu.edu.

For more information on how to report a Phish or view recently reported phishes, please visit here.

Customer Service Tip: Problem solving and troubleshooting (Lynda.com)

Customer service care costs organizations billions of dollars each year. As a result, it’s critical that employees are equipped with the skills needed to handle a variety of different customer
service problems.

In this course, learn critical problem-solving and troubleshooting processes for common sense customer service in a wide variety of applications. Discover how to effectively deal with issues, while maintaining a positive relationship with your customers (and your own sanity). Plus, learn how to identify and resolve larger systemic issues within your company.

Topics include:
Responding to valid and invalid complaints
Diagnosing a problem before you prescribe a fix
Disarming and redirecting unhappy customers
Delivering bad news
Remaining calm, cool, and collected while dealing with customers

Watch the class here:
https://www.lynda.com/Business-tutorials/Welcome/616661/687378-4.html